Presidential Election of 2020

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      Why Millions Think It Is Trump Who Cannot Tell a Lie

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      Why is Donald Trump’s “big lie” so hard to discredit?This has been a live question for more than a year, but inside it lies another: Do Republican officials and voters actually believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election by corrupting ballots — the same ballots that put so many Republicans in office — and if they do believe it what are their motives?A December 2021 University of Massachusetts-Amherst survey found striking linkages between attitudes on race and immigration on one hand and disbelief in the integrity of the 2020 election on the other.According to the poll, two-thirds of Republicans, 66 percent, agreed that “the growth of the number of immigrants to the U.S. means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity” and the same percentage of Republicans are convinced that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate with voters from poorer countries around the world.”Following up on the UMass survey, four political scientists — Jesse Rhodes, Raymond La Raja, Tatishe Nteta and Alexander Theodoridis — wrote in an essay posted on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage:Divisions over racial equality were closely related to perceptions of the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack. For example, among those who agreed that White people in the United States have advantages based on the color of their skin, 87 percent believed that Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate; among neutrals, 44 percent believed it was legitimate; and among those who disagreed, only 21 percent believed it was legitimate. Seventy percent of people who agreed that White people enjoy advantages considered the events of Jan. 6 to be an insurrection; 26 percent of neutrals described it that way; and only 10 percent who disagreed did so, while 80 percent of this last group called it a protest. And while 70 percent of those who agreed that White people enjoy advantages blamed Trump for the events of Jan. 6, only 34 percent of neutrals did, and a mere 9 percent of those who disagreed did.According to experts I asked, Republican elected officials who either affirm Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was corrupt, or refuse to call Trump out, base their stance on a sequence of rationales.Mike McCurry, President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, sees the origin of one rationale in demographic trends:I believe much of the polarization and discord in national politics comes from changing demographics. Robert Jones of P.R.R.I. writes about this in “The End of White Christian America” and I think this is a source of many politico-cultural divisions and plays out in electoral politics. There is an America (“American dream”) that many whites were privileged to know growing up and it now seems to be evaporating or at least becoming subservient to other cultural ideals and norms. So that spurs anxiety and it is translated to the language and posture of politics.McCurry went on:I think otherwise well-meaning G.O.P. senators who flinch when it comes to common sense and serving the common good do so because they have no vocabulary or perspective which allows them to deal with the underlying changes in society. They feel the changes, they know constituents whom they otherwise like who feel the changes, but they cannot figure out how to lower the level of angst.Some maintain that another rationale underpinning submission to the lie is that it is signals loyalty to the larger conservative cause.Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia, pointed out in an email that acceptance of Trump’s false claims gives Republican politicians a way of bridging the gap between a powerful network of donors and elites who back free trade capitalism and the crucial bloc of white working-class voters seeking trade protectionism and continued government funding of Social Security and Medicare:Embracing the Big Lie is an empty approach to populism for a lot of these politicians. It allows them to cast their rivals, and the system itself, as corrupt — to cash in on that widespread sentiment — and to cast themselves as exceptions to the rule. It allows them to portray themselves as allies of “the people,” but without actually changing anything in terms of the policies they advocate for, in terms of how they do business.For those Republicans leaders, al-Gharbi continued, “who are the swamp, or could be reasonably construed as such, it is important to create an apparent distance from ‘the establishment.’ Flirting with the Big Lie is a good way of doing so.”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Brookings, noted in an email that “fear of electoral retribution from Trump — and from Republican voters — drives Senate G.O.P. reluctance to break with Trump.”The former president, she continued,has succeeded in reshaping the G.O.P. as “his” party. This electoral dynamic applies in spades to Republicans’ unwillingness to challenge Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection — or like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell to back down from their initial criticisms. It seems as if fealty to Trump’s alternative version of the events of Jan. 6 is the litmus test for Republicans.The underlying policy agreements between Republican incumbents and Trump reinforces these straightforward concerns over re-election, in Binder’s view:For all of Trump’s nativist immigration, trade, and “America First” views, he was lock step with Republicans on cutting taxes and regulations and stacking the courts with young conservatives. In that light, certainly while Trump was in office, Senate Republicans held their noses on any anti-democratic behavior and stuck with Trump to secure the policies they craved.Along similar lines, Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, observes that Republican elected officials make their calculations based on the goal of political survival:What perhaps looks like collective derangement to many outside the party ranks is really just raw political calculation. The best strategy for regaining Congressional control is to keep Trump and his supporters inside the party tent, and the only way to do that is to go along with his myths in order to get along with him.This approach, Cain continued, “is the path of least political resistance. Trump in 2016 demonstrated that he could win the presidency” while rejecting calls to reach out to minorities, by targeting a constituency that is “predominantly white and 80 percent conservative.” Because of its homogeneity, Cain continued, “the Republican Party is much more unified than the Democrats at the moment.”While there was considerable agreement among the scholars and strategists whom I contacted that Republican politicians consciously develop strategies to deal with what many privately recognize is a lie, there is less agreement on the thinking of Republican voters.Lane Cuthbert, along with his UMass colleague Alex Theodoridis, asked in an op-ed in The Washington Post:How could the “Big Lie” campaign convince so many Republicans that Trump won an election he so clearly lost? Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of “expressive responding,” a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief.In their own analysis of poll data, Cuthbert and Theodoridis concluded that most Republicans are true believers in Trump’s lie:Apparently, Republicans are reporting a genuine belief that Biden’s election was illegitimate. If anything, a few Republicans may, for social desirability reasons, be using the “I’m not sure” option to hide their true belief that the election was stolen.Al-Gharbi sharply disputes this conclusion:Most Republican voters likely don’t believe in the Big Lie. But many would nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys, and would support politicians who make similar professions, because these professions serve as a sign of defiance against the prevailing elites, they serve as signs of group solidarity and commitment.Poll respondents, he continued,often give the factually wrong answer about empirical matters, not because they don’t know the empirically correct answer, but because they don’t want to give political fodder to their opponents with respect to their preferred policies. And when one takes down the temperature on these political stakes, again, often the differences on ‘the facts’ also disappear.One way to test how much people actually believe something, al-Gharbi wrote, “is to look out for yawning gaps between rhetoric and behaviors.” The fact that roughly 2,500 people participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection suggests that the overwhelming majority of Republicans do not believe the election was stolen no matter what they tell pollsters, in al-Gharbi’s view:If huge shares of the country, 68 percent of G.O.P. voters, plus fair numbers of Independents and nonvoters, literally believed that we were in a moment of existential crisis, and the election had been stolen, and the future was at stake — why is it that only a couple thousand could muster the enthusiasm to show up and protest at the Capitol? In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (i.e. more than 50 million people, roughly 1 out of every 5 adults in the U.S.) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of Jan. 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.Whatever the motivation, Isabel V. Sawhill, a Brookings senior fellow, warned that Republican leaders and voters could be caught in a vicious cycle:There may be a dynamic at work here in which an opportunistic strategy to please the Trump base has solidified that base, making it all the more difficult to take a stance in opposition to “whatever-Trump-wants.” It’s a Catch-22. To change the direction of the country requires staying in power but staying in power requires satisfying a public, a large share of whom has lost faith in our institutions, including the mainstream media and the democratic process.Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, noted in an email that the “big lie” fits into a larger Republican strategy: “In an economically unequal society, it is important for the conservative economic party to use culture war politics to win elections because they are unlikely to win based on their economic agenda.”“There are a number of reasons why some Republican elites who were once anti-Trump became loyal to Trump,” Grumbach continued:First is the threat of being primaried for failing to sufficiently oppose immigration or the Democratic Party, a process that ramped up first in the Gingrich era and then more so during the Tea Party era of the early 2010s. Second is that Republican elites who were once anti-Trump learned that the Republican-aligned network of interest groups and donors — Fox News, titans of extractive and low wage industry, the NRA, evangelical organizations, etc. — would mostly remain intact despite sometimes initially signaling that they would withhold campaign contributions or leave the coalition in opposition to Trump.Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, took a different tack, arguing that Republican members of Congress, especially those in the Senate, would like nothing better that to have the “big lie” excised from the contemporary political landscape:I disagree with the premise that many senators buy into the “big lie.” Congressional Republicans’ stance toward the events of Jan. 6 is to move on beyond them. They do not spend time rebuking activists who question the 2020 outcome, but they also do not endorse such views, either. With rare exception, congressional Republicans do not give floor speeches questioning the 2020 elections. They do not demand hearings to investigate election fraud.Instead, Lee argued, “Many Republican voters still support and love Donald Trump, and Republican elected officials want to be able to continue to represent these voters in Washington.” The bottom line, she continued, is thatRepublican elected officials want and need to hold the Republican Party together. In the U.S. two-party system, they see the Republican Party as the only realistic vehicle for contesting Democrats’ control of political offices and for opposing the Biden agenda. They see a focus on the 2020 elections as a distraction from the most important issues of the present: fighting Democrats’ “tax and spend” initiatives and winning back Republican control of Congress in the 2022 midterms.Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist, argues thatTrump lives by Machiavelli’s famous maxim that fear is a better foundation for loyalty than love. G.O.P. senators don’t fear Trump personally; they fear his followers. Republican politicians are so cowed by Trump’s supporters you can almost hear them moo.Trumpism, Begala wrote in an email, “is more of a cult of personality, which makes fealty to the Dear Leader even more important. How else do you explain 16 G.O.P. senators who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, all refusing to even allow it to be debated in 2022?”Begala compares Senator Mitch McConnell’s views of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 — “America’s history is a story of ever-increasing freedom, hope and opportunity for all. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 represents one of this country’s greatest steps forward in that story. Today I am pleased the Senate reaffirmed that our country must continue its progress towards becoming a society in which every person, of every background, can realize the American dream” — to McConnell’s stance now: “This is not a federal issue; it ought to be left to the states.”Republican politicians, in Begala’s assessment,have deluded themselves into thinking that Trump and the Big Lie can work for them. The reality is the opposite: Republican politicians work for Trump and the Big Lie. And they may be powerless to stop it if and when Trump uses it to undermine the 2024 presidential results.It is at this point, Begala continued, “where leadership matters. Trump stokes bigotry, he sows division, his promotes racism, and when other G.O.P. politicians fail to disavow Trump’s divisiveness, they abet it. What a contrast to other Republican leaders in my lifetime.”Like Begala, Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at M.I.T., was blunt in his analysis:There’s generally a lack of nuance in considering why Republican senators fail to abandon Trump. Whereas Reagan spoke of the 11th Commandment, Trump destroyed it, along with many of the first 10. He is mean and vindictive and speaks to a set of supporters who are willing to take their energy and animus to the polling place in the primaries — or at least, that’s the worry. They are also motivated by racial animus and by Christian millennialism.These voters, according to Stewart,are not a majority of the Republican Party, but they are motivated by fear, and fear is the greatest motivator. Even if a senator doesn’t share those views — and I don’t think most do — they feel they can’t alienate these folks without stoking a fight. Why stoke a fight? Few politicians enter politics looking to be a martyr. Mainstream Republican senators may be overestimating their ability to keep the extremist genie in the bottle, but they have no choice right now, if they intend to continue in office.Philip Bobbitt, a professor of law at Columbia and the University of Texas, argued in an email that Republican acceptance of Trump’s falsehoods is a reflection of the power Trump has over members of the party:It’s the very fact that they know Trump’s claims are ludicrous — that is the point: like other bullies, he amuses himself and solidifies his authority by humiliating people and what can be more humiliating than compelling people to publicly announce their endorsements of something they know and everyone else knows to be false?Thomas Mann, a Brookings senior fellow, made the case in an email that Trump has transformed the Republican Party so that membership now precludes having “a moral sense: honesty, empathy, respect for one’s colleagues, wisdom, institutional loyalty, a willingness to put country ahead of party on existential matters, an openness to changing conditions.”Instead, Mann wrote:The current, Trump-led Republican Party allows no room for such considerations. Representative Liz Cheney’s honest patriotism would be no more welcome among Senate Republicans than House Republicans. Even those current Republican senators whose earlier careers indicated a moral sense — Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski, Robert Portman, Ben Sasse, Richard Shelby — have felt obliged to pull their punches in the face of the Big Lie and attempted coup.Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump’s relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to curry favor, to feign populist sympathies — is as or more consequential than actually believing the lie.If Republican officials and their voters are willing to swallow an enormous and highly consequential untruth for political gain, they have taken a first step toward becoming willing allies in the corrupt manipulation of future elections.In that sense, the “big lie” is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade ago seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting up even worse possibilities than what we’ve lived through so far.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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      Rudy Giuliani and 3 Others Subpoenaed by Jan. 6 Committee

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      The House committee investigating the Capitol riot called for documents and testimony from Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of President Donald J. Trump’s legal team.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday subpoenaed Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of the legal team that pursued a set of conspiracy-filled lawsuits on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump in which they made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.In addition to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and a ringleader of the group, the panel subpoenaed three others who played central roles in his effort to use the courts, state legislatures and Congress to try to overturn his defeat.Jenna Ellis drafted a memo on how Mr. Trump could invalidate the election results by exploiting an obscure law. Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked on many of the lawsuits with Mr. Giuliani, ran an organization that raised millions of dollars based on false claims that election machines were rigged. Boris Epshteyn pursued allegations of election fraud in Nevada and Arizona and is said to have participated in a call with Mr. Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, “during which options were discussed to delay the certification of election results,” the committee said.“The four individuals we’ve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results or were in direct contact with the former president about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement.The subpoena to Mr. Giuliani, obtained by The New York Times, seeks all documents he has detailing the pressure campaign he and other Trump allies initiated targeting state officials; the seizure of voting machines; contact with members of Congress; any evidence to support the bizarre conspiracy theories pushed; and any arrangements for his attorney’s fees.The panel instructed the four witnesses to turn over documents and submit to an interview in February.The latest subpoenas came as the committee, which has interviewed nearly 400 witnesses, has issued a wide range of demands for records, including to banks and phone companies. On Tuesday, CNN reported that the committee had also obtained logs of phone calls and text messages belonging to the former president’s son Eric Trump and to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of another son, Donald Trump Jr. The logs do not reveal the content of the messages.A committee spokesman declined to comment on that report.For weeks after the election, Mr. Giuliani and his team — which Ms. Ellis described as an “elite strike force” — promoted baseless claims of voter fraud through failed lawsuits, news conferences, media appearances and meetings with lawmakers.The committee said in a letter to Mr. Giuliani that its investigation had revealed “credible evidence” that he participated in attempts to “disrupt or delay the certification of the election results,” persuade state legislators to “take steps to overturn the election results” and urge Mr. Trump to order the seizure of voting machines.Mr. Giuliani claimed fraud at a series of unofficial state legislative hearings, and even argued one election fraud case himself, in federal court in Philadelphia, where he suffered a decisive defeat.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president,” the court declared at one point.On Jan. 6, speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters before the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Later, as the building was under siege, he called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.“Senator Tuberville, or I should say Coach Tuberville, this is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer,” Mr. Giuliani said in a voice mail message intended for Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, but mistakenly left on the phone of Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. “I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down.”Ms. Ellis, the committee said, “prepared and circulated” two memos analyzing the constitutional authority for former Vice President Mike Pence to reject or delay counting electoral votes from states where Mr. Trump’s allies had attempted to arrange for the submission of an alternate slate of electors. In the memos, obtained by Politico, Ms. Ellis advised that Mr. Pence had the authority to not count electoral votes from six states in which the Trump campaign falsely alleged there was widespread fraud.Ms. Powell was among the leading promoters of some of the most far-fetched and fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud, including a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging a vast plot by China, Venezuela and the financier George Soros to hack into Dominion Voting Systems machines to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.She, too, urged Mr. Trump to seize voting machines, according to the committee.In December, Mr. Trump considered naming Ms. Powell to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, even after his campaign had sought to distance itself from her as she aired wild and baseless claims about Dominion voting machines.Her organization, Defending the Republic, raised $14.9 million between December 2020 and July. Ms. Powell’s group has more than $9.3 million in funds on hand, according to an independent audit filed with Florida, which investigated the organization and alleged multiple violations of state law.Mr. Epshteyn reportedly attended planning meetings at the Willard Hotel in the days leading up to Jan. 6, the committee said. The panel, citing reporting from The Guardian, said he also participated in a call with Mr. Trump the morning of Jan. 6 that included a discussion of Mr. Pence’s “unwillingness to deny or delay the certification.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 14The House investigation. More

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      Are Trump’s Followers Too Gullible?

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      More from our inbox:The Illogic of the Big LieSalary Negotiations for WomenThe Costs of Homelessness for Society  Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“An Assault on the Truth,” by Rebecca Solnit (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 9), masks the political reality our country faces. I object to Ms. Solnit’s focus on gullibility as a factor in the right’s disavowal of facts.Donald Trump does not change people’s minds. The beliefs of people on the right are immutable. They are the opposite of gullible.Mr. Trump and others simply create convenient tales readily acceptable to an existing psyche. It’s easy enough to do. Focus on white privilege and the demonization of “others,” and espouse individual rights to the exclusion of all else. You will then have a very serviceable electorate at the ready to hand you power.Any thought that the right’s psyche is in any way malleable needs to be abandoned. Outvoting the right is the only way forward to preserve democracy — and, of course, that may not be enough.Ned GardnerApex, N.C.To the Editor:Rebecca Solnit does not discuss the role of the media in spreading lies among Republicans. There is Fox News, which has become a propaganda front for Donald Trump, before, during and since his presidency. And there is the plethora of right-wing internet sites, whose most outrageous lies are often repeated and brought into the mainstream of political opinion by Republican office holders.The stream of misinformation is pervasive. Democrats have participated in this, too, even if not to the extent that Republicans have. It takes motivation and effort to sort fact from fiction, and for many people that is too hard.Michael E. MahlerLos AngelesTo the Editor:As a clinical therapist who worked in addiction treatment facilities, I was reminded each day of the basic human need for approval and acceptance. We all seek to feel a part of our community, our family and our country. This promotes interdependence and solidarity, and generally strengthens our social bonds.The need for approval, however, can be so great (even desperate) that we surrender ourselves to the group in exchange for the validation it offers. The group embrace is very reassuring — particularly if one’s self-image is a little shaky — and eliminates the need for the thought and self-reflection that take time and effort, and insist that, sometimes, we stand alone in our ideals and beliefs.An integral part of the addictive personality, the need for approval further explains the gullibility and cynicism that Rebecca Solnit describes so accurately.Gary GolioBriarcliff Manor, N.Y.To the Editor:I thought this was an excellent opinion piece, along with other similar pieces you have published. At this point, however, the point has been more than adequately made. The logical next question: What do we do about it? I for one would welcome some commentary on that issue.I am myself completely flummoxed. How do you reason with, and reach out to, someone who believes only what they want to believe, no matter how cuckoo?Douglas ReevesRaleigh, N.C.The Illogic of the Big LieTo the Editor:The gaping hole in Big Lie logic is this: If Democrats were sufficiently corrupt and crafty to throw the election to Joe Biden, why didn’t they “steal” four or five additional Senate seats? Or House seats? Were they too dumb to see that there were other boxes to check below the one for president?The answer, plainly, is that they didn’t because there was no fraud, there was no organized conspiracy. (To true believers: Where are the incriminating emails or evidence of phone calls between corrupt parties?)Republicans, long the party of personal responsibility, have turned into petulant sore losers.Michael H. HodgesAnn Arbor, Mich.Salary Negotiations for WomenJordan Sale’s company aims to help job candidates navigate salary negotiations.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What Do You Think You Should Be Paid?” (Sunday Business, Jan. 2):Massachusetts was the first state to prohibit prospective employers from asking about applicants’ compensation history before making a job offer. In response, we began asking possible employees about compensation expectations. We were initially surprised that this created new problems.Some women voiced lower expectations than men for the same job. Others proposed salaries lower than average market value and awkwardly tried to revise them later. But declining to engage in salary discussions is also not an optimal strategy, as prospective employers want to make offers that are likely to be accepted and match relatively closely to expectations.First, be prepared for this question. If you are caught by surprise, there are several options: Applicants can ask the salary range of the position, defer until they have completed their research or cite the market percentile they are aiming for.For equal pay legislation to have the desired effect, education and resources are also required to help women learn how to expect and deftly handle these salary conversations.Alexa B. KimballBostonThe writer is president and chief executive of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School.The Costs of Homelessness for SocietyLori Teresa Yearwood’s journey into homelessness was traumatic and incredibly expensive.Niki Chan Wylie for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000,” by Lori Teresa Yearwood (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 2):Yes, homelessness causes profound problems for homeless people with regard to trauma, debt, mental health and so much more. But the costs are not limited to the homeless. Society pays a huge amount for homelessness.According to the Innovation for Justice Program at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, the cost of homelessness to Pima County (where Tucson is located) in 2018 was $64,740,105 for 9,984 families evicted that year. The costs of homelessness include increased child welfare cases, medical and emergency room visits, shelter fees, involvement in the juvenile and adult criminal justice system, mental health crises and more.Clearly, assisting the homeless with housing, work and clearing debt so that they can be productive and happier members of society is far cheaper. It is time for all of us to work toward ending this scourge.Nancy Fahey SmithTucson, Ariz.The writer works on social justice issues for Pima County Interfaith, a nonprofit. More

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      This Presidency Isn’t Turning Out as Planned

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      Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. His Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, was Obama’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve. The director of Biden’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, was deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. His chief of staff, Ron Klain, was his chief of staff for the first two years of the Obama administration and then Obama’s top Ebola adviser. And so on.The familiar names and faces can obscure how different the new administration, in practice, has become. The problems Biden is facing are an almost perfect inversion of the problems Obama faced. The Obama administration was bedeviled by crises of demand. The Biden administration is struggling with crises of supply.For years, every conversation I had with Obama administration economists was about how to persuade employers to hire and consumers to spend. The 2009 stimulus was too small, and while we avoided a second Great Depression, we sank into an achingly slow recovery. Democrats carried those lessons into the Covid pandemic. They met the crisis with overwhelming fiscal force, joining with the Trump administration to pass the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and then adding the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and the assorted Build Back Better proposals on top. They made clear that they preferred the risks of a hot economy, like inflation, to the threat of mass joblessness.“We want to get something economists call full employment,” Biden said in May. “Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employers to compete with each other to attract work.”That they have largely succeeded feels like the best-kept secret in Washington. A year ago, forecasters expected unemployment to be nearly 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020. Instead, it fell to 3.9 percent in December, driven by the largest one-year drop in unemployment in American history. Wages are high, new businesses are forming at record rates, and poverty has fallen below its prepandemic levels. Since March 2020, Americans saved at least $2 trillion more than expected. And that’s not just a function of the rich getting richer: a JPMorgan Chase analysis found the median household’s checking account balance was 50 percent higher in July 2021 than in the months before the pandemic.It is easy to imagine the wan recovery we could’ve had if the mistakes of 2009 and 2010 had been repeated. Instead, we met the pandemic with tremendous, perhaps excessive, fiscal force. We fought the recession and won. The problems we do have shouldn’t obscure the problems we don’t.But we do have problems. Year-on-year inflation is running at 7 percent, its highest rate in decades, and Omicron has shown that the Biden administration wasted months of possible preparation. It is not to blame for the new variant, but it is to blame for the paucity of tests, effective masks and ventilation upgrades.The conversations I have with the Biden administration’s economists are very different from the conversations I had with the Obama administration’s economists, even when they’re the same people. Now the discussion is all about what the economy can produce and how fast it can be shipped. They need companies to make more goods and make them faster. They need more chips so there can be more cars and computers. They need ports to clear more shipments and Pfizer to make more antiviral pills and shipping companies to hire more truckers and schools to upgrade their ventilation systems.Some of these problems reflect the Biden administration’s successes. (Read my colleague Paul Krugman for more on this.) For all the talk of supply chain crises, many of the delays and shortages reflect unexpectedly strong demand, not a pandemic-induced breakdown in production. Supply chains are built to produce the goods that companies think will be consumed in the future. Expectations were off for 2021, in part because forecasters thought demand would slacken as people lost work and wages, in part because the fiscal response was massively larger than anyone anticipated and in part because when people couldn’t go out for meals and movies, they bought things instead. Overall spending is more or less on its prepandemic trend, but the composition of spending has changed: Americans purchased 18 percent more physical goods in September 2021 than in February 2020.Now the Biden administration fears that its supply problems will wipe out its demand successes. In recent remarks, Biden took aim at those who would lower prices by breaking the buying power of the working class. “If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions,” Biden said. “You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer. That’s the choice. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of people in the second camp.”He’s right, but this is a practical fight, not just an ideological one, and the Biden administration is making its own mistakes. His administration is suffering right now from directly mismanaging Covid supplies. It did an extraordinary job in its first months, flooding the country with vaccines. Today, any adult who wants one, or three, can get the shots. But vaccines aren’t the only public health tool that matters, and there was every reason to believe the Biden administration knew it. The American Rescue Plan had about $20 billion for vaccine distribution, but it had $50 billion to expand testing and even more than that to retrofit classrooms so teachers and children alike would feel safe. Where did that money go?Getting the pandemic supply chain right would help ease every other supply chain, too. If Americans could move about their lives more confidently, they could buy services instead of things, and if companies could test and protect their work forces more effectively, they could produce and ship more goods.But the Biden administration hasn’t fully embraced its role as an economic planner. When Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, was asked about testing shortages in December, she shot back, “Should we just send one to every American?”Psaki’s snark soon became Biden’s policy. The administration is launching a website where any family can request four free tests. That’s a start, but no more than that. For rapid testing to work, people need to be able to do it constantly. But because the administration didn’t create the supply of tests it needed months ago, there aren’t enough tests for it or anyone else to buy now. Part of this reflects the ongoing failure of the Food and Drug Administration to approve many of the tests already being sold in Europe.The same is true, I’d argue, about masks. There’s simply no reason every American can’t pick up an unlimited supply of N95s and KN95s at every post office, library and D.M.V. Instead, people are buying counterfeit N95s on Amazon and wearing cloth masks that do far less to arrest spread. Now the Biden administration is moving toward supplying masks. But more needs to be done: How about ventilation? How about building the vaccine production capacity needed to vaccinate the world and prevent future strains from emerging? How about building capacity to produce more antiviral pills so that the next effective treatment can ramp up more quickly?For decades, Democrats and Republican administrations alike believed the market would manage supply. We live in the wreckage of that worldview. But it held for so long that the U.S. government has lost both the muscle and the confidence needed to manage supply, at least when it comes to anything other than military spending. So Biden’s task now is clear: to build a government that can create supply, not just demand.This may not be the presidency Biden prepared for, but it’s the one he got.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 and the Democratic Party Failed Us Badly on Voting Rights

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      It has been less than a week since President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris came to Atlanta and gave speeches supporting federal legislation to protect and ensure voting rights. Now the legislation is as good as dead. It happened that quickly, but many of us in Georgia saw it coming a long way off.African Americans, and most specifically faith leaders, have cried out during the last year, challenging various racist anti-voting bills — and we have heard virtually nothing from the White House or the Democratic Party.This lack of response, especially at the local level, has created concern within the Black community, as well as political apathy: In November’s governor’s race in Virginia, for instance, Black voters made up 16 percent of the electorate, compared with 20 percent four years earlier. In recent months, Georgia’s AME churches and other denominations have held virtual town halls of thousands of local faith leaders to discuss what is happening in Georgia. What we hear from our communities is clear: The late-to-the-game D.C.-focused strategy allowed extremists to march state to state and change our local election laws. It has been far too passive and does not represent the “good trouble” John Lewis preached.After all, it has been 10 long months since Georgia Republicans — following the historic victories of Joe Biden and Senate Democrats in the state — passed the “Election Integrity Act,” which will make it harder for many African Americans and people of color to vote. Among other things, it limits the ability to request absentee ballots and minimizes other voting opportunities. Last week, in their speeches, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris strongly and passionately denounced the law. But as they spoke, I kept asking myself where had that strength and passion been during the past 10 months? We saw the administration’s strong commitment on behalf of the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act, but not on voting rights. The White House slept on voting rights — and now our very democracy is at risk.Being a native Delawarean, I know Mr. Biden and worked on several of his campaigns for the U.S. Senate. No one should ever question his commitment to civil rights or the African American community. He is a genuine and great public servant.However, Mr. Biden, having been a member of the Senate for 36 years, wrongly thought the solution to ensuring voting rights lay in Washington, D.C. He expected elected officials would work across the aisle to pass meaningful legislation, as they often did when he was a senator. But, as so many of us have witnessed in recent years, Joe Biden’s Senate simply does not exist anymore. Instead, extremist Trump loyalists, desperate to keep their power, began an efficient and well-funded campaign to minimize Black and brown voters, first in Georgia, and then, in a domino effect, in state legislatures across the country.So what do we do now?First, President Biden must show his strength as a leader. The American people have little respect or patience for a weak leader, but they will support and stand with a strong one. Extreme Trump loyalists have been gutting voting rights with an ax, while Democrats have tried to defend them with a butter knife.It’s time for Mr. Biden to show the 50 senators who reliably back the Democratic agenda that the nation did not elect 51 presidents. He needs to use his powers as president to show that opposing him comes with consequences, not unlike how President Johnson played hardball during negotiations on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Neither friendships nor history with the Senate has worked, and inaction is unacceptable, so Mr. Biden must now draw a line in the sand. Our elected officials in Washington need the president to sign their bills, approve funding for their local projects, and secure their nominations for appointments. If senators are not going to support this top priority of the Biden administration, then the president needs to make clear that democracy will come first, before their own special projects, interests and priorities.Second, the White House and the Democratic Party need to create a massive education campaign on the changes that have been made to our local voting rights laws. The reality is that most people still do not know what’s happening. Building this narrative cannot be done with one trip to Georgia or with one speech, nor will it be done with overzealous rhetoric. This fight must be about educating and informing people, not politics as usual. Mr. Biden and his administration need to consistently share with the American people what these new pieces of anti-voting legislation across the country are doing to our democracy and to our people. He must share the stories of those who will now struggle to exercise their democratic right. The facts must be showcased until every American understands what has occurred over the past year.Third, the president needs to move the conversation on voting rights away from the failed Senate Democratic caucus and toward an energized voter registration effort that builds on what was achieved in Georgia, Arizona and other states in 2020. While there never is going to be a quick fix for what extremists have done to our democracy over the last year, we have to organize to counter the new roadblocks. Mr. Biden’s legislative efforts must transition to a nationwide campaign to register voters and help people make plans to vote. Unlike what happened during the last year, there needs to be much more consistent communication, coordination, engagement and support between the White House and those promoting and defending our democracy at the local level.Our collective history prepares Black and brown voters for potential voting battles on Election Day, and it’s imperative that our communities take on even greater responsibility in 2022. It is incumbent that African Americans not allow the events of the last year to create apathy in 2022. But the historic challenge we now face must also be extended to President Biden.As we observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday on Monday, let us remember his words, “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Mr. President, at this historic moment, I have great confidence that you are strong enough, passionate enough and love this country enough to lead this army. But we need you to lead this fight as our president, not as a senator. This must not be the end of our fight; it needs to be our beginning. And to paraphrase King once again, please, listen to your conscience, and do what you know to be right. Lead us in the fight to save our great democracy — and we will follow.Bishop Reginald T. Jackson is presiding prelate of the 6th Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which comprises 534 Georgia churches, totaling more than 90,000 parishioners. He also directed Georgia’s “Operation Voter Turnout,” a nonpartisan, multi-faith coalition to support voting rights during the 2020 general and runoff elections.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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      What Will Marianne Williamson Do Next?

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      Marianne Williamson was invoking Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy and Thoreau, barefoot in a brownstone in Brooklyn. “If everything you’re doing is making everybody happy, you’re not doing the right stuff yet,” she said to a room of about 30 people.That September day, Ms. Williamson, the author, spiritual teacher and erstwhile presidential candidate, was wearing dramatic draping sleeves like a wizard’s. The attendees were mostly writers, including the playwright Leah Nanako Winkler and Derek Simonds, the showrunner of “The Sinner,” and were there by private invitation.What drew this crowd was the same thing that has pulled audiences toward Ms. Williamson for almost 40 years. It was the first time she had spoken at an in-person event since the pandemic began, a radical change for a person whose career is tied to public speaking. What Ms. Williamson ultimately advised, knowing her audience, was this: that each of us should sit down and pray, “Dear God, let me write one true sentence.”Ms. Williamson, 69, presents with the same fire that has fueled her career from the beginning, when she made a reputation for herself speaking around Los Angeles in the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis hit. (“In a very real way, gay men in Los Angeles gave me my career,” she said in an interview.)After ending her presidential campaign in January 2020, Ms. Williamson moved from New York to Washington, D.C. (by way of Iowa), where she has continued her speaking career on Zoom and churned out a virtual tsunami of content, including a daily newsletter, a morning meditation and a podcast with a political focus.But it was her presidential run that raised her profile, and earning potential, exponentially. Many Americans encountered her for the first time, via the persona — the parody version — that quickly enveloped her, that of a crystal-worshiping, anti-vaccine (this was pre-Covid vaccines), new-age weirdo who would dare talk about love in a political debate. Who would dare to make love the very center of her platform, in fact.Ms. Williamson announcing her presidential campaign at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, Calif.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThinking BigI first met Ms. Williamson in Los Angeles, late in the fall of 2017, at a conference called Summit, hosted by four tech entrepreneurs. Ms. Williamson was scheduled to give a speech.Before it began, I was looking for a seat when a woman introduced herself to me as a friend of Ms. Williamson’s. Earlier that day, she said, Marianne had broken her toe, so she was likely to speak sitting down, rather than pace the stage as usual. Yet a few minutes later, there was Ms. Williamson, pacing back and forth in stunningly high heels. She stayed on her feet the whole time, as if nothing were the matter at all.Ms. Williamson became famous at 40, when she published her first book, “A Return to Love,” and Oprah Winfrey, pre-book club, had her on the show. The book was inspired by and based on “A Course in Miracles,” by Helen Schucman, which Ms. Williamson credits with saving her from a rootless youth of cabaret singing and “bad boys and good dope,” as she writes in the book. (No more than what others of her age were doing, she is quick to clarify now.)But though she began by writing about miracles and is now preparing to write a book about Jesus — “for people who do not necessarily relate to the dogma or the doctrine of the Christian religion” — she is very direct about one point. “I’m a Jew,” she said. “You’re born a Jew, you die a Jew.” Her spirituality is intended as ecumenical, and she has been building and refining it for decades. She sees her effort to branch out into politics — running for a California congressional seat in 2014, then for president in 2020 — as a natural extension of her earlier work.“Spirituality isn’t some lane off to the side somewhere,” she said. “It’s an understanding of the dynamics that underlie everything. This isn’t a matter of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if America decided to change?’ It’s a matter of ‘We must change, or we will lose it all.’”Diagnosis: ‘Kooky’One of Ms. Williamson’s top Google hits to this day is from The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts humor column, in which she is fictionally quoted as saying, “I’d like to reallocate the government money that we’re spending on vaccinating children to something useful, like taking mediums underwater to ask eldritch spirits, ‘Who are we? Why are we all here?’”Ms. Williamson has never been easy to categorize, and she believes there are deeper reasons for her ridicule. “Those who were invested in calling me kooky didn’t do it because they thought what I was saying was silly,” Ms. Williamson said. “Making me appear ridiculous was the chosen way to marginalize my message.”It was one week after her Brooklyn salon, and we were in the dining room of the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. There was extra security in the lobby and temporary metal detectors — it was rumored the Israeli prime minister was in the hotel — but Ms. Williamson had entered casually, having shown her required proof of vaccination.On that subject, by the way, she said that her views on vaccination are an example of the ways in which she has been misrepresented. During her campaign, before the coronavirus had entered the picture, Ms. Williamson called mandatory vaccinations “draconian” and “Orwellian,” but then walked her position back on Twitter the next day: “I am sorry I made comments which sounded as though I question the validity of life-saving vaccines. That is not my feeling and I realize that I misspoke.”Now, she told me, “it was one of several areas where the truth of who I am was deeply mischaracterized.” She also acknowledges, however, that she has questioned the pharmaceutical industry in the past, including the safety of some vaccines. In 2012, as Andrew Kaczynski reported on CNN.com, “Williamson said she ‘agonized’ as a mother over the decision to vaccinate her children and that she could see ‘both sides’ of the issue.”More recently, Ms. Williamson alluded to this background when she said to me: “What big pharma does, if you make any statement questioning the safety of vaccines, they call you anti-vax.”And don’t get her started on the crystals. “In all of my books, and in thousands of my online lectures and seminars,” she said, “you will never find the word ‘crystal.’” (On this point, I’ll have to take her word for it, such is the volume of output.)The Outsider OnstageThroughout her presidential campaign, she was dogged by criticisms that went beyond crystals: that she had been controlling and temperamental at organizations she created in the 1990s to provide free services to AIDS patients; that in her spiritual teachings, she had made some of her followers feel they should have been able to will away their disease; that her book on weight loss was anti-fat. And, more generally, and perhaps more fatally, that with her lack of political experience and her emotion-based language, she simply did not belong on that stage.Nothing could have highlighted her outsider status more than the optics of the first Democratic debate, in Miami, in the summer of 2019. In contrast to the unbroken line of candidates in dark blues and blacks, she wore a sea foam green suit and stood on the very edge of the stage. She did not speak at all until minute 14 of the broadcast, when she could be heard saying, faintly, “I’m sorry,” in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the discourse about student loan debt.Ms. Williamson at the first Democratic presidential debate in Miami in 2019, with fellow candidates John Hickenlooper and Andrew Yang.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut it wasn’t until Minute 27, well after a cringe-worthy intervention by Kirsten Gillibrand on Ms. Williamson’s behalf, that Ms. Williamson was finally granted the floor. This was when she was able to make her larger point: that the Democrats weren’t going to beat Donald Trump with a “shallow” health care plan. “Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t have a health care system in the United States,” she said. “We have a sickness care system in the United States.” Her first answer of the night earned rousing applause.Many of Ms. Williamson’s admirers are drawn to her progressive positions and the refreshing and unapologetic way in which she expresses them. She is against the “military industrial complex.” She has called for reparations for Black Americans since 1998 when her book “Healing the Soul of America” was published.“I do not believe the average American is racist, but I believe the average American does not truly realize how tilted our public resources are away from American black citizens and in the direction of America’s richer white citizens,” she writes in that book. “We do not have in America today a consensus that there is even a debt to be paid. What is this in our national temperament? Why is it that we resist the recognition of the tremendous moral debt we owe to a people brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries?”She was asked about reparations in the second Democratic debate. “It’s not $500 billion in ‘financial assistance,’” she said, echoing the moderator’s phrasing. “It’s 200 to 500 billion dollars of payment of a debt that is owed.” Around the time of the debate, she told me, she had been acutely aware that “race in America was about to blow.”Sipping an Arnold Palmer at the Regency, Ms. Williamson recalled that running for president was both inspiring and scorching. She was exhilarated by the primary state voters and their commitment to their role in American politics, but at the same time, “it is such a brutal and brutalizing experience to run, and in my case even more so,” she said.“I was the most Googled person in 49 states after the second debate, and clearly someone very high up said get that woman off the stage. If I had been in the third debate, I think I might have been an inconvenience to a few people.” Along with other candidates, she didn’t qualify because her campaign did not meet certain finance requirements.Ms. Williamson ended her candidacy on Jan. 10, 2020. By then, rumors of an infectious new virus were growing more insistent every day. She had run out of money, and most of the infrastructure of her campaign was gone.But Ms. Williamson now says she regrets stepping down when she did. At the very end, when she was deciding whether to quit, she noticed that it was her female friends who urged her to be done with it already and her male friends who urged her to keep going, often with sports analogies, like “you still have time on the clock.” Which amused her, because she knows next to nothing about sports. “I didn’t enter the race with the a tough enough skin,” she told me.“When people lie about you and create false narratives about you and misrepresent you, is that bruising? Yes. However, what is that compared to the fact that the Taliban has announced they are going to start public executions and cutting peoples’ hands off again? I have perspective.”And yet. “It took me a year to forgive myself and others,” she said.Molly Matalon for The New York Times‘Car Mechanics’ of WashingtonThe next time I saw Ms. Williamson, she seemed more guarded, more vulnerable, and a touch more exasperated than she had in New York. We met in her home in Washington, a modern glass-walled apartment less than a mile from the White House. She moved into it soon after ending her candidacy, she said, so she could “keep an ear to the ground.”To her, Washington is still essentially business as usual. “D.C. has a lot of good political car mechanics,” she said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is that the car is on the wrong road. The car is heading towards a cliff.”The week before, the Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel had tweeted a photo of Ms. Williamson and Andrew Yang, onstage at an event for Mr. Yang’s new book. Mr. Weigel quoted Ms. Williamson saying, “We don’t want to be Jill Steins, but in any other country, any other advanced democracy, they have multiple political parties.” The tweet predictably triggered speculation about what, exactly, Ms. Williamson intends to do next.She may not want to be Jill Stein — the Green Party candidate whose presidential run is often cited as a reason Mr. Trump won — but she also doesn’t want to dismiss Jill Stein. After all, Ms. Williamson said, “we need a viable other. I support any third-party effort that makes a thoughtful, articulate critique of the fundamental flaws in contemporary capitalism and its effects on people and the planet” When she ran for Congress in California, in 2014, it was as an independent.Ms. Williamson sees the two-party system of today as blighted and controlled by corporate interests. “Republican policies represent a nosedive for our democracy,” she said. “And Democratic policies represent a managed decline.” And yet she also believes that this is the year it will change. “The status quo is unsustainable,” she said. “There is too much human despair out there.”She is not willing to say whether she’ll run again, and dodged the question over the course of our many conversations. About two weeks ago, when Politico published an article suggesting that President Biden would face a primary challenge from a progressive candidate, “such as former Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner, 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson or millionaire and $18-an-hour minimum wage advocate Joe Sanberg,” Ms. Williamson declined to comment.James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, is skeptical. “She ran before and she didn’t get a lot of votes,” he said. “She’s kind of an interesting person to say the least, but I don’t think politics is her calling. She always struck me as a new age Bernie Bro.”In some ways, Ms. Williamson is like a Rorschach test: Many thrill to her message, while others doubt her sincerity and believe she is feeding into the speculation about a second presidential run only in order to linger on the stage.Ms. Williamson campaigning in New Hampshire in 2019. She is not willing to say whether she’ll run again.Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesThe night Mr. Trump was elected, Ms. Williamson was speaking at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, as she did every Tuesday. A childhood friend, Geri Roper, was in the audience. Afterward, “sad and shocked,” the two women drank Lillet and Perrier cocktails at the bar at the NoMad Hotel, Ms. Roper recalled. “You should run for president,” Ms. Roper told her friend.There are a lot of things, big and small, that Ms. Williamson does not want in the public discourse. She is particularly private on the subject of her daughter. A single mother, Ms. Williamson has never revealed who her daughter’s father is, and is in fact a bit touchy on the subject — on the grounds of, this is 2022, why should she or any woman have to explain?Her daughter, India Williamson, 31, is newly married and is working toward a Ph.D. in history in London. She watched her mother’s campaign closely, and the two were in constant contact. She called the characterization of her mother as a woo woo new-age type in some of the media coverage of her as “so off the mark that it was humorous.”“She’s not crystal fuzzy,” she said, describing her mother as a fearless businesswoman. “The thought of her as the crystal lady is just not the woman I’ve known since the day I was born.”Though Marianne is guarded about her personal life, an accidental “we” slipped out when I asked her where she was on Jan. 6, as in “we watched it on TV like everyone else.” She may not reveal much about her intimate life, but she lights up when she talks about her father, the late Houston immigration lawyer Sam Williamson, whose politics still reverberate throughout her own.A favorite story of Ms. Williamson’s is from 1965, when American involvement in the Vietnam War was rapidly expanding. “I came home from school in the seventh grade, and I told my parents that my social studies teacher had said that if we didn’t fight on the shores of Vietnam, we would be fighting on the shores of Hawaii,” she said. “And I proceeded to explain to them the domino theory. My father’s face turned so white and he stood up, and said to my mother, ‘Dammit Sophie Ann, get them visas, we’re going to Saigon.’”The family flew to Vietnam, where Ms. Williamson remembered that her father “explained to us that the war was wrong. And he explained to us about the military industrial complex. And he explained to us about American imperialism.” Afterward, her mother said: “Sam, now that the children are adequately informed about the military industrial complex, can we please stop in Paris on the way home?”Ms. Williamson’s childhood friend Carrie Shoemake wasn’t particularly surprised when Marianne’s father took his family to Vietnam to witness the war. “The spirit of right and wrong moved more strongly in their family than in any other family I’d ever hung out with,” Ms. Shoemake said.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesThe ‘Horse Race’Ms. Williamson was resistant to providing a lot of details about how her campaign had affected her, perhaps because she didn’t want to sound self-pitying.Only after several repeated questions did she tell a story about the day when she was in her hotel room in Los Angeles and she turned on the news and there, Joe Lockhart, a former presidential press secretary, was saying she was “dangerous and crazy.”“I just sat there with my jaw dropped open,” she said. Later, she DM’d him. He replied, Ms. Williamson, said: “The difference between you and me is that my politics are based on logic and yours are based on feelings.”“I thought: This man knows nothing about my politics.” Ms. Williamson paused. “But that’s just part of politics.” More important to her, she said, were experiences on the other end of the spectrum. Like the woman who sent $10 to support her campaign and wrote, “When I get paid next week, I’ll send another ten.”In New York, Ms. Williamson had told me: “I’m not at an age where I can take any more five- or 10-year detours. I’m at an age where, whatever the last chapter is, it has to be deliberate, intentional and well done.”Asked again, this week, if she was ready to announce that she intends to run for president, she just laughed and declined to answer. Later she sent a text. “The media is always interested in the horse race, but to me that’s not what matters most,” it read. “What matters most is not just the who but the what. The ‘what’ is that we have someone, both as a candidate and as a president, who stands for a fundamental course correction.”So, that means … what, exactly? The text ended with this: “Whatever role I can best play in that is the role I’d like to play.” More

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      Democrats Face a Dilemma on Voting: Compromise or Keep Pressing?

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      With their broad voting rights push nearing a dead end, Democrats must soon decide whether to embrace a far narrower bipartisan effort to protect vote counting and administration.WASHINGTON — With their drive to secure far-reaching voting rights legislation nearing a dead end, Senate Democrats face a decision they had hoped to avoid: Should they embrace a much narrower, bipartisan effort to safeguard the vote-counting process, or continue what increasingly looks like a doomed push to protect access to the ballot box?A growing group of Senate Republicans and centrist Democrats is working on legislation to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century law that former President Donald J. Trump sought to exploit to overturn the 2020 presidential election. That effort is expanding to include other measures aimed at preventing interference in election administration, such as barring the removal of nonpartisan election officials without cause and creating federal penalties for the harassment or intimidation of election officials.Democratic leaders say they regard the effort as a trap — or at least a diversion from the central issue of voter suppression that their legislation aims to address. They argue that the narrower measures are woefully inadequate given that Republicans have enacted a wave of voting restrictions in states around the country that are geared toward disenfranchising Democratic voters, particularly people of color.Still, even if there is no consensus to be found on a bill addressing how votes are cast, proponents say there is a growing sentiment in favor of ensuring that those that are cast are fairly counted.“There is a lot of interest, a lot of interest,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who is leading one effort with Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, both centrist Democrats, and Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Joni Ernst of Iowa, all Republicans.Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, are part of a group working on a narrower bill to ensure votes are fairly counted.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesSenator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, also listened in on a call on the matter this month but remains noncommittal.“I’m not saying this is going to be easy,” Ms. Collins added, “but I’m optimistic.”A separate group — including two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Senator Angus King, a left-of-center independent from Maine — is looking at changing how Congress formalizes the election results to head off another attempt like the one Mr. Trump made to have allies on Capitol Hill try to toss out state electoral votes.But most Democrats are reluctant even to discuss the matter until after the far more comprehensive voting rights bill they call the Freedom to Vote Act is put to rest next week, a near certainty after Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin said this week that they would not vote to change Senate rules on the filibuster to enable their party to push it through unilaterally.“There are two issues going on right now in the country. One is voter suppression — these subtle laws that make it harder for people to vote,” Mr. King said. “The other piece is voting administration, where you get into substituting partisan people for nonpartisan administrators, purging voter election boards, allowing election boards to eliminate polling places and also the whole mechanics of counting.”He added, “There’s a reasonable opportunity here for a bipartisan bill, but my concern is that it will be viewed as a substitute for the Freedom to Vote Act, and that’s just not the case.”Members of both parties are concerned about the counting and certification of ballots after they have been cast. President Biden was emphatic on the point when he emerged Thursday from a fruitless lunch with Senate Democrats, pleading with them to change the filibuster rules around voting.“The state legislative bodies continue to change the law not as to who can vote, but who gets to count the vote, count the vote, count the vote,” he said, his voice rising in anger. “It’s about election subversion.”And some academic experts say protecting election administration and vote counting, at this moment, is actually more critical than battling restrictions on early and absentee voting and ballot drop boxes.“I’ve been saying this for the last year: The No. 1 priority should be ensuring we have a fair vote count,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has drafted his own prescriptions for safeguarding elections after Election Day. “We are in a new level of crisis. I never expected in the contemporary United States that we would have to have legislation around a fair vote count, but we have to have it now.”Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has opened the door a crack to changing the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his legal advisers speciously claimed gave the vice president the power to unilaterally reject the electors from states deemed contested.“It obviously has some flaws. And I think it should be discussed,” Mr. McConnell told reporters on Tuesday. “That is a totally separate issue from what they’re peddling on the Democratic side.”Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has opened the door to a narrower effort by saying the Electoral Count Act has flaws.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesDemocrats are leery. They fear Republicans want to reassure Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema that if, as promised, they reject their party’s efforts to do away with the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, they will have the bipartisan alternative they crave.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has said not only would that alternative be wholly insufficient, but it also would probably not materialize.In 2019, as Democrats were pushing for gun safety legislation after a pair of mass shootings, Republican leaders who opposed the bill raised the prospect of narrower legislation to help law enforcement take guns from those who pose an imminent danger. Once the Democratic bills failed, the more modest one did, too.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit

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      The panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is demanding information from Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism. The committee said it had been investigating how the companies “contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.”“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” said the panel’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work. A committee aide said investigators were in various stages of negotiations with the other companies.In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times. Many of those employees criticized Facebook leadership’s inaction when it came to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy group, which they said also contributed to the attack.Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.Critics say that other platforms also played an instrumental role in the spread of misinformation while contributing to the events of Jan. 6.In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.Representatives for the tech companies have been in discussions with the investigating committee, though how much in the way of evidence or user records the firms have handed over remains unclear.The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.“To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spread misinformation about the election,” Mr. Thompson wrote.The panel said Facebook and other Metaplatforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”Public accounts about Facebook’s civic integrity team indicate that Facebook has documents that are critical to the select committee’s investigation, the panel said.“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More