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      Status Anxiety Is Blowing Wind Into Trump’s Sails

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      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

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      Michael Flynn Is Still at War

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      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

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      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

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      Hillary Clinton Reads Discarded Victory Speech From 2016 Election

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      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

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      Discredited Steele Dossier Doesn't Undercut Russia Inquiry

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      Donald J. Trump and his backers say revelations about the Steele dossier show the Russia investigation was a “hoax.” That is not what the facts indicate.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources.Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a “hoax.”But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts.What was the Steele dossier?It was a series of memos about purported Trump-Russia links written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent, during the 2016 campaign.It cited unnamed sources who claimed there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that Russia had a blackmail tape of Mr. Trump with prostitutes. In addition to giving his memos to his client, Mr. Steele gave some to the F.B.I. and reporters. Buzzfeed published 35 pages in January 2017.Many things that were not immediately apparent about the dossier have since become clearer. It grew out of a political opposition research effort to dig up information about Mr. Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party. Their law firm, Perkins Coie, contracted with a research firm called Fusion GPS, which subcontracted research about Trump business dealings in Russia to Mr. Steele. Mr. Steele in turn hired Igor Danchenko, the recently indicted researcher, to canvass for information from people he knew, including in Europe and Russia.What was the Russia investigation?It was a counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into the Russian operation to manipulate the 2016 presidential election by hacking and anonymously dumping Democratic emails and by spreading propaganda using fake accounts on American social media platforms. The scrutiny of Russia’s activities included examining the nature of links between Trump campaign associates and Russians to see if there was any coordination.The F.B.I. launched the investigation in July 2016, and a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, eventually took over. His March 2019 report detailed “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” and established that “the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” He did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy.Was the dossier a reliable source of information?No. It has become clear over time that its sourcing was thin and sketchy.No corroborating evidence has emerged in intervening years to support many of the specific claims in the dossier, and government investigators determined that one key allegation — that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had met with Russian officials in Prague during the campaign — was false.When the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Danchenko in 2017, he told the bureau that he thought the tenor of the dossier was more conclusive than was justified; for example, Mr. Danchenko portrayed the blackmail tape story as rumors and speculation that he was not able to confirm. He also said a key source had called him without identifying himself, and that he had guessed at the source’s identity. The indictment accuses Mr. Danchenko of lying about that call and of concealing that a Democratic Party-linked public relations executive was his source for a claim about Trump campaign office politics.Did the F.B.I. open the investigation because of the dossier?No. Mr. Trump and his allies have insinuated that the F.B.I. based the Russia investigation on the dossier. But when counterintelligence agents launched the effort on July 30, 2016, they did not yet know about the dossier. An inspector general report established that Mr. Steele’s reports reached that counterintelligence team on Sept. 19, 2016.The basis for the investigation was instead that WikiLeaks had disrupted the Democratic National Convention by releasing Democratic emails believed to have been stolen by Russian hackers, and that an Australian diplomat said a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser had bragged to him about apparent outreach from Russia involving an offer to help the campaign by anonymously releasing information damaging to Mrs. Clinton.Did the F.B.I. take any investigative step based on the dossier?Yes. The F.B.I. took the dossier seriously based on Mr. Steele’s reputation, and used some of it — without independent verification — for a narrow purpose that led to a dead end and became a political debacle. It included several claims from Mr. Steele’s memos in applications to wiretap Carter A. Page, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser with ties to Russia. In 2019, the Justice Department’s inspector general sharply criticized the F.B.I. for numerous flaws in those wiretap applications.While the dossier-tainted wiretap of Mr. Page has received significant attention, it was a small part of the overall investigation, which issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communications records, made 13 requests to foreign governments under mutual legal assistance treaties, and interviewed about 500 witnesses. Mr. Page was not charged with a crime, and only a handful of the 448 pages in the Mueller report focus on him.Did investigators rely on the dossier for their findings?No. The Mueller report does not present claims from the dossier as evidence, and many of the issues focused on by investigators did not come up in the dossier.The dossier makes no mention, for example, of a July 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russians and senior campaign officials including Donald Trump Jr., who eagerly accepted the request for a meeting after being told they were bringing dirt on Mrs. Clinton.Nor does the dossier mention that in August 2016, Konstantin V. Kilimnik — described in the 2019 Mueller report as having “ties to Russian intelligence” and in a partly declassified, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in 2020 as a “Russian intelligence officer” with possible ties to Russia’s election interference operations — flew to the United States to meet with Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.Investigators established that the two had discussed whether Mr. Trump, if elected, would bless a peace plan effectively allowing Russia to control eastern Ukraine, and that Mr. Manafort had shared internal polling data and campaign strategy information with Mr. Kilimnik, which the Treasury Department later said he passed on to a Russian spy agency. (The government has not declassified evidence for its escalating accusations about Mr. Kilimnik.)The Senate report said Mr. Manafort’s “willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services” represented a “grave counterintelligence threat.”Did Mueller rely on the dossier for any criminal charges?No. The special counsel investigation led to indictments of 34 people and three companies. Many of those indicted — like Mr. Kilimnik — reside abroad and have not faced trial. Mr. Mueller obtained nine guilty pleas or jury convictions, including half a dozen close Trump associates. None of those indictments cited the dossier as evidence.The fact that Mr. Mueller did not obtain sufficient evidence to charge Trump associates with conspiracy is subject to disputed interpretations that overlap with the debate over the dossier’s significance. Trump supporters frame the lack of conspiracy charges as proof there was no collusion. By combining this with the false premise that there would not have been any Russia investigation without the Steele dossier, they portray Mr. Trump as a victim of a hoax.Beyond pointing out that there is a range of cooperation and coordination that falls short of the legal definition of “conspiracy,” Trump skeptics argue that Mr. Mueller never definitively got to the bottom of what happened in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to impede the investigation — like dangling a pardon before Mr. Manafort to keep him from cooperating.What was the main impact of the dossier?Beyond its narrow role in facilitating the F.B.I.’s wiretap of Mr. Page, the dossier’s publication had the broader consequence of amplifying an atmosphere of suspicion about Mr. Trump.Still, the dossier did not create this atmosphere of suspicion. Mr. Trump’s relationship with Russia had been a topic of significant discussion dating back to the campaign, including before the first report that Russia had hacked Democrats and before Mr. Steele drafted his reports and gave some to reporters.Among the reasons: Mr. Trump had said flattering things about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, kept bringing on advisers with ties to Russia, had financial ties to Russia, publicly encouraged Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton, and at his nominating convention, the party dropped a plank that called for arming Ukraine against Russian-backed rebels. In March 2017, the F.B.I. publicly acknowledged that it was investigating links between Russia and Trump campaign associates. More

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      After Time in U.S. Prisons, Maria Butina Now Sits in Russia's Parliament

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      Maria Butina, convicted of serving as an unregistered foreign agent before and after the 2016 election, insists she “wasn’t a spy” and that her Duma seat is “not a reward.” Her critics call her a Kremlin “trophy.”MOSCOW — When Russia’s lower house of Parliament, or Duma, assembled last month for the first time following elections in September, one of its newest members was a name more familiar in the United States than in her home country.Maria V. Butina made headlines across America when she was convicted three years ago of operating as an unregistered foreign agent trying to infiltrate influential conservative political circles before and after the 2016 election.She is now focused on playing a prominent role in Russia’s political system — through legal means this time, and with the support of President Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia party.Ms. Butina, 33, who returned to Russia in October 2019 after spending 15 months in several U.S. penitentiaries, including four months in solitary confinement, now represents the impoverished Kirov region in the Duma.Her critics have characterized her rapid political rise as a thank you from the Kremlin, a claim she rejects.“It’s not a reward,” Ms. Butina said in an interview at a cafe in central Moscow near where she lives. “I wasn’t a spy. I wasn’t working for the government. I was just a civilian.”But in December 2018, Ms. Butina pleaded guilty to conspiring, under the direction of a Russian official, to “establish unofficial lines of communication” with high-level Republicans on behalf of Russia’s government from 2015 to 2017.Prosecutors said she had tried to broker a meeting between then-candidate Donald J. Trump and Mr. Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign, and the judge at her sentencing hearing noted she had been sending political reports to Russia at the same time Russian intelligence operatives were trying to sway the election.Since coming home, Ms. Butina has used her experiences with Washington insiders — and the time she spent in prison — to cast herself as an expert on both America and penal systems.That was evident in April when she ambushed Russia’s most famous political prisoner, the opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, on a surprise visit to the penal colony where he is held and which is notorious for harsh treatment.Granted access as part of a civilian monitoring program, Ms. Butina favorably compared Mr. Navalny’s conditions to the U.S. prisons where she had served time.In a widely seen video broadcast by the state-owned Rossiya-24 television network, she said she was impressed by the facility’s food and medical services. Then she confronted Mr. Navalny, who at the time of her visit was one week into a 24-day hunger strike declared because he had been denied medical treatment for severe pain in his back and right leg.“You can walk normally,” Ms. Butina tells Mr. Navalny, who did not consent to be filmed.Mr. Navalny repeated to her that he was being denied access to his doctor, and walked off.“I don’t judge Navalny. I said in that video what I saw,” Ms. Butina said in her interview.Since coming home, Ms. Butina has used her experiences with Washington insiders — and the time she spent in prison — to cast herself as an expert on both America and penal system.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMaria Pevchikh, who heads the investigative unit of Mr. Navalny’s organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation, said she believed Ms. Butina’s Duma seat was a gift not for her activities in the United States, but for her harassment of Mr. Navalny. He had embarrassed Mr. Putin by exposing the government’s plot to kill him, and revealing the luxurious nature of a Black Sea palace believed to be purpose built for the Russian president.“If anything, this was a reward for what she did by visiting Navalny in prison, and that TV episode, which was highly embarrassing and disgusting,” Ms. Pevchikh said. “Not many people would agree to do that. And she did.”In the United States, Ms. Butina’s case was treated like the plot of a Cold War thriller, and her love life — including a relationship with a Republican operative, Paul Erickson, whom she met in Russia in 2013 and who would later be convicted of financial crimes and pardoned by Mr. Trump — was dissected in lurid detail on cable news.In Russia, however, the pro-government media portrayed her story as a miscarriage of justice. Ms. Butina was seen as a scapegoat for Democrats’ failure to come to grips with Mr. Trump’s victory. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it exemplified America’s rampant “Russophobia.” Over a caviar-laden meal at a restaurant featuring cuisine from her native Siberia, Ms. Butina insisted that she wanted to use her new status as a national lawmaker to improve relations between Washington and Moscow.“I believed in the friendship between the two nations, and I still do believe in it,” said Ms Butina. “We can be friends, we must be.”Yet in her frequent TV appearances and on social media, she has been outspoken in her criticisms of America, especially when it comes to meddling in the affairs of other countries and race relations.“She is quite a good trophy” for the ruling party, Ms. Pevchikh said. “Just talking nonstop about how bad things in America are.”Ahead of the recent Duma elections, she published a post about U.S. interference in foreign elections during the Cold War on Telegram, the social-media platform. “Their logic is that the U.S. can intervene in the elections of other countries, but Russia cannot,” she wrote.Ms. Butina, who worked before joining the Duma for RT, a government-backed television channel, frequently comments on systemic racism in America, as pro-Kremlin figures have done for decades.In October 2020, Ms. Butina published a memoir, “Prison Diaries,” which discusses how her imprisonment affected her political views.While her time in prison did not make her any less of a gun-rights advocate — she said losing her lifetime N.R.A. membership particularly stung — it did diminish her affinity for the Republican Party, she said, as she witnessed America’s structural inequality first hand.Much of the book explores her experiences with Black inmates, and she said her time in prison had broken down a lot of stereotypes she had once held — and showed her how racist the views were of many of those American influencers she had been close to.Ms. Butina wants to use her new Duma platform to help Russians imprisoned abroad, saying she was eager to campaign against solitary confinement and torture. But when she was asked about a recent leaked cache of graphic videos that purported to show torture and rape in Russian prisons, Ms. Butina hesitated to comment, saying they needed to be verified.Some of the Russian figures she has publicly supported include the convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout, known as the “Merchant of Death.”In October 2020, Ms. Butina published a memoir, “Prison Diaries,” in which she detailed her four months in solitary confinement.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesMs. Butina, who during her time in the United States earned a master’s degree in international relations, with a focus on cybersecurity, from American University in Washington, continues to be highly active on social media. That was certainly the case in the United States, too, before she attracted the attention of F.B.I. investigators with her photographs with prominent Republicans like Donald Trump Jr., Rick Santorum and Scott Walker, as well as the N.R.A.’s leader, Wayne LaPierre.Her connection to Russian government figures predates both her time in the Duma, and the United States. She arrived in Moscow from her native Siberian city of Barnaul in 2011 and soon after was hired as special assistant by a Russian senator, Aleksandr P. Torshin, an influential member of United Russia who later would become deputy governor of Russia’s Central Bank.Still, in Russia, she is not a well-known personality, said Andrei Pertsev, a political journalist with the independent news outlet Meduza.“The broad masses do not know her,” he said.Ms. Butina was now just one among many “propagandists” in the 450-member Duma, Mr. Pertsev said, adding that in his view her elevation to the body — her seat was given to her by the governor of the Kirov region — was a way for the government to imbue her statements against America with more heft.With her new job, “it is as if the speaker’s status rises, and these things, they sound more weighty,” said Mr. Pertsev, who shares something unwelcome in common with Ms. Butina.His media outlet, Meduza, was designated a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities earlier this year, a charge that echoes the one against Ms. Butina, who failed to register her activities with the Justice Department as required by U.S. law.But in Russia, the foreign agent label is primarily wielded against Russian citizens engaged in independent journalism or human rights work, and it has been increasingly applied to organizations and individuals whose work displeases the Kremlin.“Don’t compare our law with your law,” Ms. Butina said, adding that she found the Russian law less onerous in its requirements than the American one.As part of her U.S. plea deal, Ms. Butina had to admit to being part of an organized effort, backed by Russian officials, to persuade powerful conservatives that Russia should be counted as friend, not foe.During her defense, her American lawyers argued in court that Ms. Butina’s efforts had been well-intentioned and stressed that she had never tried to hide what she called her “diplomacy project.” Back in Russia, she denies ever having been part of a broader plot and insists she acted on her own.“If I had known that I have to register to build peace between the two nations by my own initiative,” she said, “I would have loved to.”Alina Lobzina contributed reporting. 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      What the Steele Dossier Reveals About the FBI

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      This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as he once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Democratic Socialists Have a Long Road to Electoral Victory

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      In my political circles, the socialist and activist left, the recent defeat of India Walton, a democratic socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, seemed all too familiar, even if she lost in an unusual way to the incumbent Democratic mayor, Byron Brown. Ms. Walton prevailed against Mr. Brown in the Democratic primary, but for the general election, he ran a write-in campaign to retain his position.That outcome saddens and disappoints me. Like many admirers of Ms. Walton, I believe she was terribly mistreated by the New York Democratic Party, which largely fell in line behind Mr. Brown, even though he was not running as a Democrat. It’s not fair that Ms. Walton had to run against him twice, with the weight of a lot of centrist Democrats and Republicans behind him in the general election, and that he enjoyed the support of several prominent labor unions and much of the city’s and state’s larger party infrastructure. (Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand did endorse Ms. Walton.)Nevertheless, I am willing to say something far too few leftists seem willing to: Not only did Mr. Brown win, but he won resoundingly (the race is not officially over but stands at roughly 59 percent for Mr. Brown to 41 percent for Ms. Walton); it’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.They frequently claim that Americans want socialist policies and socialist politicians but are prevented from voting for them by the system. Or they argue that most American voters have no deeply held economic beliefs at all and are ready to be rallied to the socialist cause by a charismatic candidate.This attitude toward Ms. Walton’s defeat specifically and toward the political landscape more broadly is part and parcel of a problem that has deepened in the past five years: So many on the radical left whom I know have convinced themselves that their politics and policies are in fact quite popular on a national level, despite the mounting evidence otherwise.As New York magazine’s Sarah Jones put it over the summer, “Should Democrats mount a cohesive critique of capitalism, they’ll meet many Americans where they are.” We are held back, the thinking frequently goes, not by the popularity of our ideas but by the forces of reaction marshaled against us.But the only way for the left to overcome our institutional disadvantages is to compel more voters to vote for us. Bernie Sanders’s two noble failures in Democratic presidential primaries galvanized young progressives and helped create political structures that have pulled the party left. They also helped convince many of a socialist bent that only dirty tricks can defeat us. In the 2016 primary, the superdelegate system demonstrated how undemocratic the Democratic Party can be. Mr. Sanders won every county in West Virginia, for example, but the system at the time ensured that Mr. Sanders did not receive superdelegates in proportion to his vote totals (many superdelegates defied the wishes of the voters and supported Mrs. Clinton). In 2020, it was widely reported that after Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada, former President Barack Obama had an indirect role as the minor candidates in the primary rallied behind Joe Biden to defeat the socialist threat. There is little doubt that the establishment worked overtime to prevent a Sanders nomination.But the inconvenient fact is that Mr. Sanders received far fewer primary votes than Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020. He failed to make major inroads among the moderate Black voters whom many see as the heart of the Democratic Party. What’s more, he failed to turn out the youth vote in the way that his supporters insisted he would.Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves.The idea that most Americans quietly agree with our positions is dangerous, because it leads to the kind of complacency that has dogged Democrats since the “emerging Democratic majority” myth became mainstream. Socialists can take some heart in public polling that shows Americans warming to the abstract idea of socialism. But “socialism” is an abstraction that means little without a winning candidate. And too much of this energy seems to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.Fredrik deBoer is the author of “The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice” and publishes a daily newsletter.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