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    F.E.C. Dismisses Case Against Democrats Over Outreach to Ukraine

    The Federal Election Commission voted 4 to 2 not to pursue accusations that Democrats in 2016 sought help from Ukraine to damage Donald J. Trump’s campaign.The Federal Election Commission has dismissed a complaint by an ally of President Donald J. Trump accusing the Democratic Party and one of its former consultants of violating campaign finance laws by working with Ukraine to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign by damaging Mr. Trump’s.An unusual bipartisan combination of members of the commission voted against pursuing a complaint filed in 2017 by Matthew G. Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor and staunch defender of Mr. Trump who was later appointed acting attorney general.He filed the complaint after Mr. Trump and his White House began publicly calling for investigations of the matter in an effort to deflect attention from revelations that Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign advisers met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign.Mr. Whitaker claimed in his complaint that the Democratic National Committee and a consultant who had worked for it, Alexandra Chalupa, violated a prohibition on foreign donations by soliciting damaging information and statements from Ukrainian government officials about Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time.The commission — which is composed of three members selected by each party — voted 4 to 2 in April that there was not probable cause to believe that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee broke the law, according to documents released Wednesday.The four commissioners voted against a recommendation by the commission’s general counsel to find probable cause that Ms. Chalupa and the Democratic National Committee violated the foreign donation ban by trying to arrange an interview in which Petro O. Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president at the time, might say something critical about Mr. Manafort.While the four commissioners issued statements disputing the general counsel’s characterization that Ms. Chalupa’s communications with the embassy prompted the ban, they also offered very different ideological concerns.The three Republican commissioners said in a statement accompanying the decision that they had “grave constitutional and prudential concerns” about the general counsel’s reading of the law, which they cast as an overreach. Ms. Chalupa’s communication with the embassy, they wrote, “did not ask that Ukrainian officials convey a thing of value within the meaning of a ‘contribution’ to the D.N.C.”The Republicans were joined in voting against probable cause by Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democratic commissioner since 2002, who cited concerns about Russian disinformation as a basis for her vote.Bipartisan votes have become more rare in commission enforcement matters in recent years, as Democratic commissioners who tend to favor stricter campaign finance rules have sometimes found themselves at loggerheads with their Republican colleagues, who tend to oppose campaign finance restrictions as burdensome infringements on free speech.The result has been deadlocked votes that effectively block the pursuit of cases.The dismissal of the complaint by Mr. Whitaker came amid a flurry of deadlock votes as the commission works its way through a backlog of matters related to the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Whitaker’s complaint, which was filed in his capacity as the executive director of a conservative watchdog group called the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, asserted that the Trump Tower meeting presented “comparable circumstances” to the Ukrainian matter.The complaint was based on an article in Politico revealing that Ms. Chalupa had discussions with officials in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington about Mr. Manafort’s work for Russia-aligned Ukrainian politicians.Mr. Trump and his allies seized on the report, with the president suggesting on Twitter that his attorney general should investigate the matter, and his press secretary telling reporters, “If you’re looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with a foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the D.N.C., who actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian Embassy.”Andrii Telizhenko, a former official at the embassy who was quoted in the article discussing Ms. Chalupa, was penalized in January by the Treasury Department for being part of what it called “a Russia-linked foreign influence network” that spread “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations” about President Biden during the 2020 campaign.While the Treasury Department did not accuse Mr. Telizhenko of spreading disinformation during the 2016 campaign, Ms. Weintraub said in a statement that the assertions by the Treasury Department and others “completely undermined the credibility of the complaint” based on his claims.Mr. Telizhenko, who provided testimony to commission staff, said in an interview that he stood by his claims, and rejected claims of connections to the Russian influence network cited by the Treasury Department.Nonetheless, the F.E.C.’s handling of the matter is something of a repudiation to Mr. Trump, particularly given that Republican commissioners he nominated voted that there was not probable cause to believe a violation had been committed.Ms. Chalupa, the Democratic National Committee and the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust did not respond to requests for comment. 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    The D.N.C. Didn’t Get Hacked in 2020. Here’s Why.

    A devastating email breach of the D.N.C. roiled Democrats in the final months of 2016. An unassuming security official made it his mission to prevent a recurrence.As the country learns more about a broad Russian hijacking of American federal agencies and private companies and now another Russian hack, which was revealed on Thursday, it can look to the Democratic National Committee for a more positive development in the effort to prevent cyberattacks: Unlike four years ago, the committee did not get hacked in 2020.It’s worth remembering the D.N.C.’s outsized role in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, when a spearphishing email roiled the Democratic Party in the final months of the campaign.That March, Russian hackers broke into the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, unlocking a decade’s worth of emails, before dribbling them out to the public with glee. The D.N.C. chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, resigned after emails appeared to show her favoring Mrs. Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.A simultaneous Russian hack of the D.N.C.’s sister organization, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tainted congressional candidates with accusations of scandal in a dozen other races.By the time Donald J. Trump was in the White House in January 2017, “The D.N.C.’s house was ablaze,” Sam Cornale, the committee’s executive director, said in an interview this week.That month, Bob Lord, an unassuming, bespectacled chief security officer at Yahoo, was still mopping up the largest Russian hacks in history: a 2013 breach of more than three billion Yahoo accounts and a second breach in 2014 of 500 million Yahoo accounts. Mr. Lord, who discovered the breaches when he took over the job, helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation identify the assailants. A courtroom sketch of Karim Baratov, one of the hackers in the Yahoo case, still hangs on his wall.Mr. Lord left the team Yahoo affectionately calls “The Paranoids,” took a six-figure pay cut and headed to Washington in January 2017 to become the D.N.C.’s first chief information security officer.The way he saw it, the D.N.C.’s 2016 breach wasn’t so much a cybersecurity issue as it was a problem of workflow and corporate culture.Mr. Podesta’s aide, for instance, had asked a staff member to vet whether the infamous Russian spearphishing email was safe, and the aide responded that the email was “legitimate.” It was a typo; he later said he had meant to write “illegitimate.” By the time anyone realized what was happening, Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipes, and excerpts from Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, were being dissected online by the news media and conspiracy theorists.“After that, few would even pick up a flier, let alone a hose to help in 2017,” Mr. Cornale said. “Bob showed up with five fire trucks while putting on his suspenders, and ran in to the house.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Lord told his staff on Friday that he was leaving, clearing the way for the D.N.C. to get a replacement to get ahead of whatever adversaries may have planned for the midterms.Over the past four years, Mr. Lord has been a persistent and pervasive presence, speaking at every all-hands meeting, reminding employees that staving off the next cyber threat would come down to individual accountability: not reusing passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, running software updates. He urged them to use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to lock down their Venmo accounts; he also advised them to avoid clicking on suspicious links.A “Bobmoji”— a digital caricature of Mr. Lord — hangs above the men’s urinal and adorns the walls of the women’s restroom, reminding staff members of the checklist.Mr. Lord has had significantly smaller security budgets than he did at Yahoo, or that of any government agency and technology companies that Russia breached over the past year. And so he became something of a digital Marie Kondo — the Japanese tidying expert — decluttering the D.N.C.’s networks, excising old software and canceling extraneous vendor contracts, then took those extra discretionary funds and put them towards cybersecurity. But he knew cybersecurity technologies can go only so far. “If adding security technologies could fix our cybersecurity problems, we would have fixed things 25 years ago,” he said in an interview.His real legacy, D.N.C. staff members said, is that he single-handedly changed a culture.“To survive in Bob’s role, you have to drive people a little crazy,” Nellwyn Thomas, chief technology officer at the D.N.C., said.When the committee sent out an innocuous email asking staff members to enter their T-shirt size and address for some free swag, not a single employee complied, employees said.Mr. Lord had proudly turned them paranoid. More

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    Prosecutors Investigating Whether Ukrainians Meddled in 2020 Election

    The Brooklyn federal inquiry has examined whether former and current Ukrainian officials tried to interfere in the election, including funneling misleading information through Rudolph W. Giuliani.Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have been investigating whether several Ukrainian officials helped orchestrate a wide-ranging plan to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to spread their misleading claims about President Biden and tilt the election in Donald J. Trump’s favor, according to people with knowledge of the matter. More

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    F.E.C. Drops Case Reviewing Trump Hush-Money Payments to Women

    The case had examined whether Donald Trump violated election law with a $130,000 payment shortly before the 2016 election to a pornographic-film actress by his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.The Federal Election Commission said on Thursday that it had formally dropped a case looking into whether former President Donald J. Trump violated election law with a payment of $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to a pornographic-film actress by his personal lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen.The payment was never reported on Mr. Trump’s campaign filings. Mr. Cohen would go on to say that Mr. Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women during the 2016 race, and would apologize for his involvement in a hush-money scandal. Mr. Cohen was sentenced to prison for breaking campaign finance laws, tax evasion and lying to Congress.“It was my own weakness and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light,” Mr. Cohen said of Mr. Trump in court in 2018.While Mr. Cohen has served time in prison, Mr. Trump has not faced legal consequences for the payment.“The hush money payment was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement to The New York Times. “Like me, Trump should have been found guilty. How the F.E.C. committee could rule any other way is confounding.”In December 2020, the F.E.C. issued an internal report from its Office of General Counsel on how to proceed in its review in December 2020. The office said it had found “reason to believe” violations of campaign finance law were made “knowingly and willfully” by the Trump campaign.But the election commission — split evenly between three Republicans and three Democratic-aligned commissioners — declined to proceed in a closed-door meeting in February. Two Republican commissioners voted to dismiss the case while two Democratic commissioners voted to move forward. There was one absence and one Republican recusal.That decision was announced on Thursday.Two of the Democratic commissioners on the F.E.C., Shana Broussard, the current chairwoman, and Ellen Weintraub, objected to not pursuing the case after the agency’s staff had recommended further investigation.“To conclude that a payment, made 13 days before Election Day to hush up a suddenly newsworthy 10-year-old story, was not campaign-related, without so much as conducting an investigation, defies reality,” they wrote in a letter.The Republican commissioners who voted not to proceed with an investigation, Trey Trainor and Sean Cooksey, said that pursuing the case was “not the best use of agency resources,” that “the public record is complete” already and that Mr. Cohen had already been punished.“We voted to dismiss these matters as an exercise of our prosecutorial discretion,” Mr. Cooksey and Mr. Trainor wrote.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Cohen case captured the public’s attention in 2018 after the F.B.I. raided his office, apartment and hotel room, hauling off boxes of documents, cellphones and computers. Months later, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to, among other charges, campaign finance violations.He said in court that he had arranged payments — including $130,000 to the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”The payment was far in excess of the legal limit for individual contributions for president, which was then $2,700.Mr. Cohen further said he had arranged for a $150,000 payment by American Media Inc. to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate, earlier in 2016.Mr. Cohen would later turn on Mr. Trump and write his own book about serving as the former president’s enforcer while he was a businessman. The book was called “Disloyal: A Memoir.” More

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    Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

    Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working and middle class voters — many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant — to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved to white men: African-Americans, women’s rights activists, proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.These voters became the shock troops of the Reagan Revolution; they now dominate Trump’s Republican Party.Liberal onlookers exploring the rise of right-wing populism accuse their adversaries of racism and sexism. There is plenty of truth to this view, but it’s not the whole story.In “The Bitter Heartland,” an essay in American Purpose, William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at Brookings, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of Trump’s most loyal backers:Resentment is one of the most powerful forces in human life. Unleashing it is like splitting the atom; it creates enormous energy, which can lead to more honest discussions and long-delayed redress of grievances. It can also undermine personal relationships — and political regimes. Because its destructive potential is so great, it must be faced.Recent decades, Galston continues, “have witnessed the growth of a potent new locus of right-wing resentment at the intersection of race, culture, class, and geography” — difficult for “those outside its orbit to understand.”They — “social conservatives and white Christians” — have what Galston calls a “bill of particulars” against political and cultural liberalism. I am going to quote from it at length because Galston’s rendering of this bill of particulars is on target.“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”“They believe we have a powerful desire for moral coercion. We tell them how to behave — and, worse, how to think. When they complain, we accuse them of racism and xenophobia. How, they ask, did standing up for the traditional family become racism? When did transgender bathrooms become a civil right?”“They believe we hold them in contempt.”“Finally, they think we are hypocrites. We claim to support free speech — until someone says something we don’t like. We claim to oppose violence — unless it serves a cause we approve of. We claim to defend the Constitution — except for the Second Amendment. We support tolerance, inclusion, and social justice — except for people like them.”Galston has grasped a genuine phenomenon. But white men are not the only victims of deindustrialization. We are now entering upon an era in which vast swaths of the population are potentially vulnerable to the threat — or promise — of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.This revolution is driven by unprecedented levels of technological innovation as artificial intelligence joins forces with automation and takes aim not only at employment in what remains of the nation’s manufacturing heartland, but increasingly at the white collar, managerial and professional occupational structure.Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., described in an email the most likely trends as companies increasingly adopt A.I. technologies.A.I. is in its infancy. It can be used for many things, some of them very complementary to humans. But right now it is going more and more in the direction of displacing humans, like a classic automation technology. Put differently, the current business model of leading tech companies is pushing A.I. in a predominantly automation direction.As a result, Acemoglu continued, “we are at a tipping point, and we are likely to see much more of the same types of disruptions we have seen over the last decades.”In an essay published in Boston Review last month, Acemoglu looked at the issue over a longer period. Initially, in the first four decades after World War II, advances in automation complemented labor, expanding the job market and improving productivity.But, he continued, “a very different technological tableau began in the 1980s — a lot more automation and a lot less of everything else.” In the process, “automation acted as the handmaiden of inequality.”Automation has pushed the job market in two opposing directions. Trends can be adverse for those (of all races and ethnicities) without higher education, but trends can also be positive for those with more education:New technologies primarily automated the more routine tasks in clerical occupations and on factory floors. This meant the demand and wages of workers specializing in blue-collar jobs and some clerical functions declined. Meanwhile professionals in managerial, engineering, finance, consulting, and design occupations flourished — both because they were essential to the success of new technologies and because they benefited from the automation of tasks that complemented their own work. As automation gathered pace, wage gaps between the top and the bottom of the income distribution magnified.Technological advancement has been one of the key factors in the growth of inequality based levels of educational attainment, as the accompanying graphic shows:Falling BehindThe change in weekly earnings among working age adults since 1963. Those with more education are climbing ever higher, while those with less education — especially men — are falling further behind. More

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    Why Trump Is Still Their Guy

    You don’t hear his name as much. But as far as the G.O.P. is concerned, the former president rules.His exile in Mar-a-Lago notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s authority over the Republican Party remains vast. You can see it in Republican reluctance to back a bipartisan inquiry into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in the widespread denunciation of party members who refused to overturn election results and who voted for Trump’s second impeachment, and in poll data showing continuing repudiation among loyal Republicans of the 2020 election results.Trump’s centrality guarantees that large numbers of resentful, truth-denying, conspiracy-minded, anti-democratic, overwhelmingly white voters will continue to find aid and comfort in the Republican Party.Ed Rogers, a top political aide in the Reagan White House who describes himself as “a committed Republican,” responded by email to my query about the degree of Trump’s command: “Trump is the most powerful person in the Republican Party — his endorsement can make the difference in a lot of primaries and sometimes in a general election.”Trump, Rogers continued, “would win the Republican nomination for president if the race were today. He looks unstoppable in the G.O.P. I don’t know who could challenge him.” Anyone opposing Trump for the nomination “would be mocked, mimicked and generally harassed for months. Who needs that?”Rogers captured his party’s current predicament: “For the G.O.P., Trump is like a fire, too close and you get burned, too far away and you are out in the cold.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Trump appointee as ambassador to the United Nations recently proved Rogers’s point.After the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Haley was sharply critical of Trump, telling Tim Alberta of Politico:We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.Haley went on:Never did I think he would spiral out like this. … I don’t feel like I know who he is anymore. … The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.But Haley, ambitious herself to be president, quickly backtracked. And just last week, at a news conference on April 12 in Orangeburg, S.C., she was asked if she would support Trump if he ran in 2024. “Yes,” she said, before pointedly adding, “I would not run if President Trump ran.”A key pillar of Trump’s strength is his success in turning the Republican Party into the explicit defender of white hegemony.As my news side colleague Peter Baker wrote in September 2020:After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans.Not in generations, Baker continued, “has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America.”The result, as William Saletan of State wrote earlier in April this year, is that “three months after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Republican Party still won’t fully renounce it.”In recent weeks, Saletan continued:Republican lawmakers have belittled the attack, defended the mob that precipitated it (Sen. Ron Johnson called them “people that love this country”), voted against a resolution condemning it, or accused liberals of overreacting to it. In February, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, speakers blamed a “rigged election” for provoking the rioters. But the sickness goes deeper. The Republican base is thoroughly infected with sympathies for the insurrection.The depth of party loyalty to Trump and to the men and women who have his back has even found expression in the flow of campaign contributions.As Luke Broadwater, Catie Edmondson and Rachel Shorey of The Times reported on April 17:Republicans who were the most vocal in urging their followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 to try to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s loss, pushing to overturn the election and stoking the grievances that prompted the deadly Capitol riot, have profited handsomely in its aftermath.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the first term Georgia Representative, perhaps the most extreme of Trump’s allies, has raised $3.2 million, they wrote, “more than the individual campaign of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and nearly every other member of House leadership.”What are the sources of Trump’s continued ability to not only maintain the loyalty of millions of voters, but to keep them persuaded of the conspiratorial notion that the 2020 presidential election was rigged?There is an ongoing debate among scholars and political analysts regarding the bond between Trump and his loyalists, his preternatural ability to mobilize white resentment into grievance-based social-movement action. Where does it come from?Before we delve into competing interpretations, Johanna Ray Vollhardt, a professor of psychology at Clark University, makes a crucial point:The psychology of collective victimhood among groups that were objectively targeted and harmed by collective violence and historical oppression is quite different from the psychology of grievance or imagined victimhood among dominant group members, who are driven by a sense of status loss and entitlement as well as resentment of minority groups that are viewed as a threat.Because of this difference, Vollhardt wrote by email, she would not use the word ‘victims’ to described Trump supporters: “I would perhaps simply say ‘grievances’ or ‘imagined victimhood’ to refer to the kinds of ideas that have fueled Trump’s and other right-wing White Americans’ rhetoric and appeals.”This distinction is explicit in “Resentment and Redemption: On the Mobilization of Dominant Group Victimhood,” by Stephen Reicher and Yasemin Ulusahin, both at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, in a chapter of “The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood.”Reicher and Ulusahin contend that “dominant group victimhood” emerges when groups experience a feelingof actual or potential loss of dominance, a sense of resentment at this loss which is bound up with issues of entitlement — the undeserving are taking what we deserve — and hence provides a moral dimension to restitutive actions, and finally the prospect of redemption — of restoring the rightful order of things — through action.These feelings of “undeserved” displacement, the authors write, “are not unmediated perceptions of reality. Rather, they are narratives offered by leaders with the aim of mobilizing people around the leader as representative and savior of the group.”To conclude, the two authors write,Our argument is not simply about victimhood as it applies to “objectively” privileged groups. It is ultimately about the toxicity of a particular construction of victimhood: One which transforms eliminationist violence into the restitution of a rightful moral order. For it is when we believe ourselves to be acting for the moral good that the most appalling acts can be committed.Other scholars point to the political manipulation of the emotions of shame and humiliation.In their March 2021 article “Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narratives,” Alexandra Homolar and Georg Löfflmann, both member of the politics and international studies department at the University of Warwick in Britain, make the case that Trump is a master of “populist humiliation discourse.”In this political and rhetorical strategy,The country of the present is described as a fundamentally weakened nation, systematically disadvantaged through “bad deals” negotiated by the establishment and exploited by allies and enemies alike. Treasured pasts of national greatness are represented through romanticized images that reduce the present to a demeaning experience.Members of the target audience, Homolar and Löfflmann continue, “are constructed as an idealized community of shared origin and destiny, the ‘pure people,’ who have been betrayed and humiliated because what is represented as their way of life and righteous place in the world has been lost.”In September 2016, Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterization of Trump voters was an open invitation to Trump’s counterattack:You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.In a Sept. 12, 2016 speech in Baltimore, Trump shot back:Hillary Clinton made these comments at one of her high-dollar fund-raisers in Wall Street. She and her wealthy donors all had a good laugh. They were laughing at the very people who pave the roads she drives on, paint the buildings she speaks in, and keep the lights on in her auditorium.In a direct play on the humiliation theme, Trump declared:She spoke with contempt for the people who thanklessly follow the rules, pay their taxes, and scratch out a living for their families. She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her to rule over.In a separate article, “The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security,” Homolar and Ronny Scholz, a project manager at the University of Warwick’s center for applied linguistics, argued that Trump’s “leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose.” These stories serve a twofold purpose, instilling “insecurity among the American public” while simultaneously transforming “their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality.’ ”The authors studied Trump’s 2016 campaign speeches to identify the words he used most often, and then grouped them “together with the words with which they predominantly co-occur.” They demonstrate that the word clusters Trump habitually deployed “surrounding ‘American’ and ‘country’ centrally featured the interrelated themes of crime and violence, killing jobs, and poverty, as well as illegal immigration and drugs, Islamic terrorism, trade and infrastructure.”At the heart of what the authors call “Trump-speak” is apolitics of reassurance, which relies upon a threefold rhetorical strategy: it tells audiences what is wrong with the current state of affairs; it identifies the political agents that are responsible for putting individuals and the country in a state of loss and crisis; and it offers an abstract pathway through which people can restore past greatness by opting for a high-risk outsider candidate.Once an audience is under Trump’s spell, Homolar and Scholz write:Rational arguments or detailed policy proposals pale in comparison with the emotive pull and self-affirmation of an us-versus-them crisis narrative, which creates a cognitive feedback loop between individuals’ ontological insecurity, their preferences for restorative policy, and strongmen candidate options. In short, “Trumpspeak” relies on creating the very ontological insecurity that it promises to eradicate for political gain.The authors describe “ontological security” as “having a sense of presence in the world, describing such a person as a ‘real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person,’ ” citing R.D. Laing, the author of “The Divided Self.” Being ontologically secure, they continue, “allows us to ‘encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological’ with a firm sense of both our own and others’ reality and identity. However, ontological security only prevails in the absence of anxiety and danger.”Miles T. Armaly and Adam M. Enders, political scientists at the University of Mississippi and the University of Louisville, argue that Trump appeals to voters experiencing what they call “egocentric victimhood” as opposed to those who see themselves as “systemic” victims.In their January 2021 paper, “‘Why Me?’ The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics,” Armaly and Enders argue that:A systemic victim looks externally to understand her individual victimhood. Egocentric victimhood, on the other hand, is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the ‘oppressor,’ nor the attribution of blame, are very specific. Both expressions of victimhood require some level of entitlement, but egocentric victims feel particularly strongly that they, personally, have a harder go at life than others.There were substantial differences between the way these two groups voted, according to Armaly and Enders:Those exhibiting higher levels of egocentric victimhood are more likely to have voted for, and continue to support, Donald Trump. However, those who exhibit systemic victimhood are less supportive and were less likely to vote for Trump.The same pattern emerged in the case of racial resentment and support for or opposition to government aid to African-Americans, for building a wall on the Mexican border and for political correctness: egocentric victims, the authors report, tilted strongly in a conservative direction, systemic victims in a liberal direction.In an effort to better understand how competing left and right strategies differ, I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple, a series of questions. The first was:How would you describe the differences between the mobilizing strategies of the civil rights movement and Trump’s appeals to discontented whites? Arceneaux’s answer:The civil rights movement was about mobilizing an oppressed minority to fight for their rights, against the likelihood of state-sanctioned violence, while Trump’s appeals are about harnessing the power of the state to maintain white dominance. Trump’s appeals to discontented whites are reactionary in nature. They promise to go back to a time when whites were unquestionably at the top of the social hierarchy. These appeals are about keying into anger and fear, as opposed to hope, and they are about moving backward and not forward.What role has the sense of victimhood played in the delusional character of so many Trump supporters who continue to believe the election was stolen? Arceneaux again:Their sense of victimhood motivates the very idea that some evil force could be so powerful that it can successfully collude to steal an election. It fits the narrative that everyone is out to get them.Looking toward the elections of 2022 and 2024, Trump not only remains at the heart of the Republican Party, he embodies the party’s predicament: candidates running for House and Senate need him to turn out the party’s populist base, but his presence at the top of the ticket could put Congress and the White House out of reach.Still, Arceneaux argues that without Trump, “I do believe that the Republicans will struggle to turn out non-college educated whites at the same rate.”Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, observes that turning out working class voters in 2024 will most likely not be enough for Trump to win: “There are a large number of Republican voters (around 40 percent), who were either reluctant Trump voters or non-supportive voters, who make a Trump win in the general election look very undoable.”Ed Rogers, the Republican lobbyist I mentioned at the beginning of this column, argues that if Trump runs in 2024 — despite the clout he wields today — he is liable to take the party down to defeat:I don’t think Trump can win a two person race in a general election. He can’t get a majority. He pulled a rabbit out of the hat in 2016 and he got beat bad by an uninspiring candidate in 2020. 2024 is a long way away but I don’t know what might happen to make Trump have broader appeal or more advantages than he did in 2020.Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant who is a harsh critic of Trump, emailed me to say that “Trump is the Republican Party” and as a result:We are in uncharted waters. For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president. The effect of this is profound and difficult to predict. But millions of Americans believe the American experiment is ending.What is driving the Republican Party? Stevens’s answer is that is the threat of a nonwhite majority:The coordinated effort to reduce voter access for those who are nonwhite is because Republicans know they are racing the demographic clock. The degree to which they are successful will determine if a Republican has a shot to win. It’s all about white grievance.Paul Begala, a Democratic consultant, described what may be Trump’s most lasting imprint on his party:Many prospective presidential candidates, including Josh Hawley, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, “seem to me to be embracing the growing nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-diversity fire Trump lit.”In the 28 years since the 1992 election, Begala continued by email, there has been “more diminution in white voting power than in the previous 208 years” dating back to the nation’s first presidential election.For the Republican Party, Begala wrote, “as white power diminishes, white supremacy intensifies.”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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    Biden Administration Says Russian Intelligence Obtained Trump Campaign Data

    A Treasury Department document shed more light on links between the campaign and Russian spies.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration revealed on Thursday that a business associate of Trump campaign officials in 2016 provided campaign polling data to Russian intelligence services, the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign.The revelation, made public in a Treasury Department document announcing new sanctions against Russia, established for the first time that private meetings and communications between the campaign officials, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, and their business associate were a direct pipeline from the campaign to Russian spies at a time when the Kremlin was engaged in a covert effort to sabotage the 2016 presidential election.Previous government investigations have identified the Trump aides’ associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, as a Russian intelligence operative, and Mr. Manafort’s decision to provide him with internal polling data was one of the mysteries that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, sought to unravel during his two-year investigation into Russia’s election meddling.“During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, Kilimnik provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy,” the Treasury Department said in a news release. “Additionally, Kilimnik sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”The Biden administration provided no supporting evidence to bolster the assessment that the Russian intelligence services obtained the polling data and campaign information. And the release shed no light on why Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates gave polling data to Mr. Kilimnik, although previous government reports have indicated that Mr. Manafort thought Trump campaign strategy information could be a valuable commodity for future business deals with Kremlin-connected oligarchs.Having the polling data would have allowed Russia to better understand the Trump campaign strategy — including where the campaign was focusing resources — at a time when the Russian government was carrying out its own efforts to undermine Donald J. Trump’s opponent.Mr. Gates said in a statement on Thursday that the Treasury Department had failed to provide any evidence to back up its claim, adding that “the polling data passed periodically to Kilimnik at Paul Manafort’s direction was simplistic and outdated, never in real time.”“It was from both public and internal sources,” Mr. Gates said. “It was not massive binders full of demographics or deep research. It was ‘topline’ numbers and did not contain any strategic plans.”The new sanctions against Russia are in response to the Kremlin’s election interference, efforts to hack American government agencies and companies, and other acts of aggression against the United States.The sanctions now make it extremely difficult for Mr. Kilimnik, who was indicted by the Justice Department in 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice, to engage in financial transactions that may involve the United States.It is unclear how long American spy agencies have held the conclusion about Mr. Kilimnik. Senior Trump administration officials, fearing Mr. Trump’s wrath, repeatedly tried to keep from the public any information that seemed to show Mr. Trump’s affinity for Russia or its president, Vladimir V. Putin.Mr. Kilimnik had been a longtime business partner during Mr. Manafort’s time as a political consultant in Ukraine. In 2018, prosecutors for Mr. Mueller’s office announced that Mr. Kilimnik had “ties to Russian intelligence” and that Mr. Manafort had instructed Mr. Gates to pass the polling and campaign information to Mr. Kilimnik.The Senate Intelligence Committee went further last August in its bipartisan report that scrutinized the links between the Trump campaign and Russia — calling Mr. Kilimnik a “Russian intelligence officer.”The report contained several significant redactions that appeared related to Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik but said that Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share the information with him “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”The report called the relationship between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kilimnik “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”The Senate report portrayed a Trump campaign stacked with businessmen and other advisers who had little government experience and “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”A New York Times article in 2017 said that there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the election. F.B.I. officials had disputed the report, but both the Senate report and the Treasury Department document confirm the article’s findings.The assertion that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that sought to disrupt the 2016 election has long been both a Kremlin talking point and a claim by Mr. Trump that foreign actors tried to help his opponent, Hillary Clinton, rather than him.Mr. Trump’s obsession over Ukraine’s supposed role in the election was the impetus for a 2019 phone call with the Ukrainian president that was central to the first impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump.Mr. Manafort was brought into the Trump campaign in March 2016, at a time when Mr. Trump had largely sewn up the Republican presidential nomination.Mr. Manafort and his longtime business associate, Mr. Gates, joined the Trump campaign after years of doing political consulting work in Ukraine, where they met Mr. Kilimnik, a Russian Army-trained linguist.The two men met with Mr. Kilimnik several times after joining the campaign, and in June 2016, Mr. Manafort became the Trump campaign chairman.Details about Mr. Manafort’s relationship with Mr. Kilimnik were revealed in 2018 as the government prosecuted Mr. Manafort and charged Mr. Kilimnik with obstruction of justice for trying to coach potential witnesses in the investigation.Mr. Kilimnik never came to the United States to face charges. He is wanted by the F.B.I., and the bureau is offering $250,000 for information that could lead to his arrest. More

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    Shades of 2016: Republicans Stay Silent on Trump, Hoping He Fades Away

    Just like when Donald J. Trump was a candidate in 2016, rival Republicans are trying to avoid becoming the target of his attacks or directly confronting him, while hoping someone else will.It was a familiar scene on Sunday when Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, tried to avoid giving a direct answer about the caustic behavior of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump had called Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, “dumb” and used a coarse phrase to underscore it while speaking to hundreds of Republican National Committee donors on Saturday night. When Mr. Thune was asked by Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” to comment, he chuckled and tried to sidestep the question.“I think a lot of that rhetoric is — you know, it’s part of the style and tone that comes with the former president,” Mr. Thune said, before moving on to say Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell shared the goal of reclaiming congressional majorities in 2022.Mr. Thune was not the only Republican straining to stay on the right side of the former president. The day before Mr. Trump delivered his broadsides against Mr. McConnell, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, presented Mr. Trump with a newly created award for his leadership.And Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump who enraged him when she criticized his actions in connection to the Jan. 6 riot, and indicated the party needs to move on, has also been trying a delicate dance to work back into a more neutral territory.This week, she told The Associated Press that she would not run if Mr. Trump did, a display of deference that underscored the complications the former president represents to Republicans.Like many Republicans, Mr. Thune, Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley were navigating the impulses of a former president who talks privately about running again in 2024, and who is trying to bend the rest of the party to his will, even after the deadly riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He retains a firm hold on a devoted group of Republican voters, and party leaders have discussed the need to continue appealing to the new voters Mr. Trump attracted over the past five years.To some extent, their posture recalls the waning days of Mr. Trump’s first primary candidacy, in 2015 and 2016. While Mr. McConnell and a few other Republicans have been directly critical of Mr. Trump’s conduct following the Capitol riot, most are trying to avoid alienating the former president, knowing he will set his sights on them for withering attacks, and hoping that someone or something else intervenes to hobble him.Even as Mr. Trump makes clear he will not leave the public stage, many Republicans have privately said they hope he will fade away, after a tenure in which the party lost both houses of Congress and the White House.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, was critical of Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot in January.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times“It is Groundhog Day,” said Tim Miller, a former adviser to Jeb Bush, the only candidate to repeatedly challenge Mr. Trump during the early stages of the Republican presidential primaries in 2016.“I always thought that was like a rational choice in 2015,” Mr. Miller said, referring to the instinct to lay back and let someone else take on Mr. Trump. “But after we all saw how the strategy fails of just hoping and wishing for him to go away, nobody learned from it.”Throughout that campaign, one candidate after another in the crowded field tried to position themselves to be the last man standing on the assumption that Mr. Trump would self-destruct before making it to the finish line.It was wishful thinking. Mr. Trump attacked not only Mr. Bush but several other candidates in deeply personal terms, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Only Mr. Bush sustained a response, though he eventually left the race after failing to gain traction; Mr. Cruz, in particular, told donors during a private meeting in late 2015 that he was going to give Mr. Trump a “big bear hug” in order to hold onto his voters.They all tried to avoid being the target of his insults, while hoping that external events and news media coverage would ultimately lead to his downfall. Instead, Mr. Trump solidified his position as primary voting began.“He intimidates people because he will attack viciously and relentlessly, much more than any other politician, yet somehow people crave his approval,” said Mike DuHaime, who advised former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in that primary race. Mr. DuHaime recalled Mr. Trump attacking Mr. Bush’s wife in one debate, only for Mr. Bush to reciprocate when Mr. Trump offered a hand-slap later in that same debate.“Trump did self-destruct eventually, after four years in office,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But he can still make or break others, and that makes him powerful and relevant.”Even John Boehner, the former speaker of the House whose criticisms of Mr. Trump in his memoir, “On the House,” have garnered national headlines, told Time magazine this week that he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — well after the former president had spent months falsely suggesting the election would be corrupt.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has said she will not run for president in 2024 if Mr. Trump does.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressIn his speech before R.N.C. donors on Saturday night, Mr. Trump, in addition to attacking Mr. McConnell, also criticized a host of perceived enemies from both parties; among them was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was in danger on Jan. 6 because he was in the Capitol to certify the electoral votes. Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. Pence, who recently signed a book deal, should have had “the courage” to send the electoral vote tallies back to the states, despite the fact that the vice president had made clear that he did not think he had the authority to do so.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, disagreed with the comparison to 2015, saying that Mr. Trump had more dominance over the base of the Republican Party now than he did then, according to public polling, and a greater number of senior Republican officials speaking out against him five years ago.“In 2021, there are no candidates trying to take out President Trump, just some occasional sniping from menthol-infused nitwits like John Boehner,” he said.Still, Mr. Trump does not have the complete control over the party that he did during four years in office. His critics include leading Republicans like Mr. McConnell and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House. Asked on Fox News on Tuesday if she would vote for Mr. Trump if he ran in 2024 Ms. Cheney replied “I would not.’Ms. Cheney, whom Mr. Trump has threatened as a target of his anger, also said her fellow Republicans shouldn’t “embrace insurrection.”And not all Republicans think that ignoring Mr. Trump is a mistake. One senior party member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to engage in a lengthy back and forth with Mr. Trump, said that with the former president out of office and off Twitter, his reach is limited.The Republican said there had been anecdotal evidence from members of Congress during the recess that Mr. Trump was less omnipresent for voters in their districts than he had previously been.While Mr. Trump was ascendant in 2015 and 2016, said an adviser to another Republican who may run in 2024, that wasn’t the case now. And if party leaders fight with him publicly or try to take him on, it could only strengthen him, the Republican argued, giving him more prominence.What’s more, the first senior Republican argued, Republican lawmakers have found common cause not just in battling President Biden’s policies but in the backlash to the Georgia voting rights law. Those fights have continued without Mr. Trump, and will accelerate, the Republican said, without being driven by the cult of personality around the former president.Other Republicans are privately hopeful that the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s business by the New York district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., will result in charges that hobble him from running again or even being a major figure within the party. People who have spoken with Mr. Trump say that he is agitated about the investigation.While all of that may represent just a slow turn away from Mr. Trump, those Republicans believe the turn has begun.David Kochel, a Republican strategist and supporter of Mr. Bush during the 2016 campaign, sounded less optimistic.He noted that even the horror of Jan. 6 did not break the hold Mr. Trump has on other elected officials, and that several anchors on Fox News — the largest conservative news outlet — had consistently downplayed the attack on air, numbing viewers to what took place as time passes.In an interview on Fox News with the host Laura Ingraham late last month, when asked about the security around the Capitol, Mr. Trump said: “It was zero threat right from the start. It was zero threat.”He added: “Some of them went in and there they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards. You know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in and then they walked in and they walked out.”Mr. Kochel said Jan. 6 was “being stuffed down the memory hole” with the help of Fox News, noting that the strategy of waiting out Mr. Trump and hoping he fades away has had a less-than-perfect history of being effective.“We’ve seen this movie before — a bunch of G.O.P. leaders all looking at each other, waiting to see who’s going to try and down Trump,” he said. More