Presidential Election of 2020

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      Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First

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      In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Most of the West, across traditional partisan lines, was aghast at the crackdown that killed at least hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed.“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Donald J. Trump said in an interview with Playboy magazine the year after the massacre. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”It was a throwaway line in a wide-ranging interview, delivered to a journalist profiling a 43-year-old celebrity businessman who was not then a player in national politics or world affairs. But in light of what Mr. Trump has gone on to become, his exaltation of the ruthless crushing of democratic protesters is steeped in foreshadowing.Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.As he runs for president again facing four criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump may seem more angry, desperate and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term. But the throughline that emerges is far more long-running: He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., brought one of the sets of indictments that Mr. Trump faces.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAs a presidential candidate in July 2016, he praised the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as having been “so good” at killing terrorists. Months after being inaugurated, he told the strongman leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, that his brutal campaign of thousands of extrajudicial killings in the name of fighting drugs was “an unbelievable job.” And throughout his four years in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump blew through boundaries and violated democratic norms.What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.A Radical AgendaTo be sure, some of what Mr. Trump and his allies are planning is in line with what any standard-issue Republican president would most likely do. For example, Mr. Trump would very likely roll back many of President Biden’s policies to curb carbon emissions and hasten the transition to electric cars. Such a reversal of various rules and policies would significantly weaken environmental protections, but much of the changes reflect routine and longstanding conservative skepticism of environmental regulations.Other parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, however, are aberrational. No U.S. president before him had toyed with withdrawing from NATO, the United States’ military alliance with Western democracies. He has said he would fundamentally re-evaluate “NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission” in a second term.He has said he would order the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, which would violate international law unless its government consented. It most likely would not.He would also use the military on domestic soil. While it is generally illegal to use troops for domestic law enforcement, the Insurrection Act allows exceptions. After some demonstrations against police violence in 2020 became riots, Mr. Trump had an order drafted to use troops to crack down on protesters in Washington, D.C., but didn’t sign it. He suggested at a rally in Iowa this year that he intends to unilaterally send troops into Democratic-run cities to enforce public order in general.“You look at any Democrat-run state, and it’s just not the same — it doesn’t work,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, calling cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco crime dens. “We cannot let it happen any longer. And one of the other things I’ll do — because you’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting.”Mr. Trump’s plans to purge undocumented immigrants include sweeping raids, huge detention camps, deportations on the scale of millions per year, stopping asylum, trying to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents and invoking the Insurrection Act near the southern border to also use troops as immigration agents.Mr. Trump has sweeping plans to deal with undocumented immigrants.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesMr. Trump would seek to expand presidential power in myriad ways — concentrating greater authority over the executive branch in the White House, ending the independence of agencies Congress set up to operate outside of presidential control and reducing civil service protections to make it easier to fire and replace tens of thousands of government workers.More than anything else, Mr. Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values. Building on how he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.In all these efforts, Mr. Trump would be backed in a second term by a well-funded outside infrastructure. In 2016, conservative think tanks were bastions of George W. Bush-style Republicanism. But new ones run by Trump administration veterans have sprung up, and the venerable Heritage Foundation has refashioned itself to stay in step with Trumpism.A coalition has been drawing up America First-style policy plans, nicknamed Project 2025. (Mr. Trump’s campaign has expressed appreciation but said only plans announced by him or his campaign count.) While some proposals under development in such places would advance longstanding Republican megadonor goals, such as curbing regulations on businesses, others are more tuned to Mr. Trump’s personal interests.The Center for Renewing America, for example, has published a paper titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent.” The paper was written by Jeffrey Clark, whom Mr. Trump nearly made acting attorney general to aid his attempt to subvert the election and is facing criminal charges in Georgia in connection with that effort.Asked for comment, a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not address specifics but instead criticized The New York Times while calling Mr. Trump “strong on crime.”Weakened GuardrailsEven running in 2016, Mr. Trump flouted democratic norms.He falsely portrayed his loss in the Iowa caucuses as fraud and suggested he would treat the results of the general election as legitimate only if he won. He threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton, smeared Mexican immigrants as rapists and promised to bar Muslims from entering the United States. He offered to pay the legal bills of any supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies and stoked hatred against reporters covering his events.In office, Mr. Trump refused to divest from his businesses, and people courting his favor booked expensive blocks of rooms in his hotels. Despite an anti-nepotism law, he gave White House jobs to his daughter and son-in-law. He used emergency power to spend more on a border wall than Congress authorized. His lawyers floated a pardon at his campaign chairman, whom Mr. Trump praised for not “flipping” as prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to get him to cooperate as a witness in the Russia inquiry; Mr. Trump later did pardon him.Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, received White House posts despite an anti-nepotism law.Al Drago for The New York TimesBut some of the most potentially serious of his violations of norms fell short of fruition.Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries. The Justice Department opened several criminal investigations, from the scrutiny of former Secretary of State John Kerry and of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. to the attempt by a special counsel, John Durham, to find a basis to charge Obama-era national security officials or Mrs. Clinton with crimes connected to the origins of the Russia investigation. But to Mr. Trump’s fury, prosecutors decided against bringing such charges.And neither effort for which he was impeached succeeded. Mr. Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into Mr. Biden by withholding military aid, but it did not cooperate. Mr. Trump sought to subvert his 2020 election loss and stoked the Capitol riot, but Vice President Mike Pence and congressional majorities rejected his attempt to stay in power.There is reason to believe various obstacles and bulwarks that limited Mr. Trump in his first term would be absent in a second one.Some of what Mr. Trump tried to do was thwarted by incompetence and dysfunction among his initial team. But over four years, those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. After courts blocked his first, haphazardly crafted travel ban, for example, his team developed a version that the Supreme Court allowed to take effect.Four years of his appointments created an entrenched Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court that most likely would now side with him on some cases that he lost, such as the 5-to-4 decision in June 2020 that blocked him from ending a program that shields from deportation certain undocumented people who had been brought as children and grew up as Americans.Republicans in Congress were often partners and enablers — working with him to confirm judges and cut corporate taxes, while performing scant oversight. But a few key congressional Republicans occasionally denounced his rhetoric or checked his more disruptive proposals.In 2017, then-Senator Bob Corker rebuked Mr. Trump for making reckless threats toward North Korea on Twitter, and then-Senator John McCain provided the decisive vote against Mr. Trump’s push to rescind, with no replacement plan, a law that makes health insurance coverage widely available.It is likely that Republicans in Congress would be even more pliable in any second Trump term. The party has become more inured to and even enthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s willingness to cross lines. And Mr. Trump has worn down, outlasted, intimidated into submission or driven out leading Republican lawmakers who have independent standing and demonstrated occasional willingness to oppose him.Mr. McCain, who was the 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee, died in 2018. Former Representative Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and helped lead the committee that investigated those events, lost her seat to a pro-Trump primary challenger. Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and the only G.O.P. senator who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial, is retiring.Representative Liz Cheney, center right, helped lead the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and later lost a primary challenge to a pro-Trump candidate.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFear of violence by Trump supporters also enforces control. In recent books, both Mr. Romney and Ms. Cheney said that Republican colleagues, whom they did not name, told them they wanted to vote against Mr. Trump in the Jan. 6-related impeachment proceedings but did not do so out of fear for their and their families’ safety.Personnel Is PolicyPerhaps the most important check on Mr. Trump’s presidency was internal administration resistance to some of his more extreme demands. A parade of his own former high-level appointees has since warned that he is unfit to be president, including a former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly; former defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper; the former national security adviser John R. Bolton; former Attorney General William P. Barr; and others.Mr. Trump in turn has denounced them all as weak, stupid and disloyal. He has privately told those close to him that his biggest mistakes concerned the people he appointed, in particular his choices for attorney general. The advisers who have stuck with him are determined that if he wins a new term, there will be no officials who intentionally stymie his agenda.In addition to developing policy papers, the coalition of think tanks run by people aligned with Mr. Trump has been compiling a database of thousands of vetted potential recruits to hand to a transition team if he wins the election. Similar efforts are underway by former senior Trump administration officials to prepare to stock the government with lawyers likely to find ways to bless radical White House ideas rather than raising legal objections.Such staffing efforts would build on a shift in his final year as president. In 2020, Mr. Trump replaced advisers who had sought to check him and installed a young aide, John McEntee, to root out further officials deemed insufficiently loyal.Depending on Senate elections, confirming particularly contentious nominees to important positions might be challenging. But another norm violation Mr. Trump gradually developed was making aggressive use of his power to temporarily fill vacancies with “acting” heads for positions that are supposed to undergo Senate confirmation.In 2020, for example, Mr. Trump made Richard Grenell — a combative Trump ally and former ambassador to Germany — acting director of national intelligence. Two prior Trump-era intelligence leaders had angered Mr. Trump by defending an assessment that Russia had covertly tried to help his 2016 campaign and by informing Democratic leaders it was doing so again in 2020. Mr. Grenell instead won Mr. Trump’s praise by using the role to declassify sensitive materials that Republicans used to portray the Russia investigation as suspicious.Richard Grenell was one of the acting heads named by Mr. Trump for positions that are supposed to undergo Senate confirmation. He became acting director of national intelligence.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAfter Mr. Trump left office, there were many proposals to codify into law democratic norms he violated. Ideas included tightening limits on presidents’ use of emergency powers, requiring disclosure of their taxes, giving teeth to a constitutional ban on outside payments and making it harder to abuse their pardon power and authority over prosecutors.In December 2021, when Democrats still controlled the House, it passed many such proposals as the Protecting Our Democracy Act. Every Republican but one — then-Representative Adam Kinzinger, who was retiring after having voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 riot — voted against the bill, which died in the Senate.The debate on the House floor largely played out on a premise that reduced its urgency: Mr. Trump was gone. Democrats argued for viewing the reforms as being about future presidents, while Republicans dismissed it as an unnecessary swipe at Mr. Trump.“Donald Trump is — unfortunately — no longer president,” said Representative Rick Crawford, Republican of Arkansas. “Time to stop living in the past.” More

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      Trump’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? Accuse Biden of It

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      Indicted over a plot to overturn an election and campaigning on promises to shatter democratic norms in a second term, Donald Trump wants voters to see Joe Biden as the bigger threat.Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been indicted by federal prosecutors for conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with a plot to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly claimed to supporters in Iowa on Saturday that it was President Biden who posed a severe threat to American democracy.While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency and has faced voter concerns that he would do so again in a second term, the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive “all-out war” on America.”Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy,” he said. “Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”Mr. Trump has made similar attacks on Mr. Biden a staple of his speeches in Iowa and elsewhere. He frequently accuses the president broadly of corruption and of weaponizing the Justice Department to influence the 2024 election.But in his second of two Iowa speeches on Saturday, held at a community college gym in Cedar Rapids, Mr. Trump sharpened that line of attack, suggesting a more concerted effort by his campaign to defend against accusations that Mr. Trump has an anti-democratic bent — by going on offense.Polls have shown that significant percentages of voters in both parties are concerned about threats to democracy. During the midterm elections, candidates who embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him were defeated, even in races in which voters did not rank “democracy” as a top concern.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has frequently attacked Mr. Trump along those lines. In recent weeks, Biden aides and allies have called attention to news reports about plans being made by Mr. Trump and his allies that would undermine central elements of American democracy, governing and the rule of law.Mr. Trump and his campaign have sought to dismiss such concerns as a concoction to scare voters. But on Saturday, they tried to turn the Biden campaign’s arguments back against the president.At the Cedar Rapids event, aides and volunteers left placards with bold black-and-white lettering reading “Biden attacks democracy” on the seats and bleachers. At the start of Mr. Trump’s speech, that message was broadcast on a screen above the stage.Mr. Trump has a history of accusing his opponents of behavior that he himself is guilty of, the political equivalent of a “No, you are” playground retort. In a 2016 debate, when Hillary Clinton accused Mr. Trump of being a Russian puppet, Mr. Trump fired back with “You’re the puppet,” a comment he never explained.Mr. Trump’s accusations against Mr. Biden, which he referenced repeatedly throughout his speech, veered toward the conspiratorial. He claimed the president and his allies were seeking to control Americans’ speech, their behavior on social media and their purchases of cars and dishwashers.Without evidence, he accused Mr. Biden of being behind a nationwide effort to get Mr. Trump removed from the ballot in several states. And, as he has before, he claimed, again without evidence, that Mr. Biden was the mastermind behind the four criminal cases against him.Here, too, Mr. Trump conjured a nefarious-sounding presidential conspiracy, one with dark ramifications for ordinary Americans, not just for the former president being prosecuted. Mr. Biden and his allies “think they can do whatever they want,” Mr. Trump said — “break any law, tell any lie, ruin any life, trash any norm, and get away with anything they want. Anything they want.”Democrats suggested that the former president was projecting again.“Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where the government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement. “You don’t have to take our word for it — Trump has admitted it himself.”Even as he was insisting that Mr. Biden threatens democracy, Mr. Trump underscored his most antidemocratic campaign themes.Having said that he would use the Justice Department to “go after” the Biden family, on Saturday, he swore that he would “investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”Mr. Trump has frequently decried the cases brought him against by Black prosecutors in New York and Atlanta as racist. (He does not apply that charge to the white special counsel in his two federal criminal cases, who he instead calls “deranged.”)Yet Mr. Trump himself has a history of racist statements.At an earlier event on Saturday, where he sought to undermine confidence in election integrity well before the 2024 election, he urged supporters in Ankeny, a predominantly white suburb of Des Moines, to take a closer look at election results next year in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, three cities with large Black populations in swing states that he lost in 2020.“You should go into some of these places, and we’ve got to watch those votes when they come in,” Mr. Trump said. “When they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor and everyone’s saying, ‘What’s going on?’“We’re like a third-world nation,” he added.Mr. Trump’s speeches on Saturday reflected how sharply he is focused on the general election rather than the Republican primary contest, in which he holds a commanding lead.With just over six weeks until the Iowa caucus, Mr. Trump dismissed his Republican rivals, mocking them for polling well behind him and denouncing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as disloyal for deciding to run against him.He also attacked Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for endorsing Mr. DeSantis and suggested her popularity had tumbled after she had spurned Mr. Trump.“You know, with your governor we had an issue,” Mr. Trump said, prompting a chorus of boos.Ann Hinga Klein More

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      Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim Alberta

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      In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security.” Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.”Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism | More

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      Appeals Court Says Jan. 6 Suits Against Trump Can Proceed for Now

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      The court left open the possibility that the former president could still prevail in his effort to claim immunity from civil cases seeking to hold him accountable for the violence.A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that civil lawsuits seeking to hold former President Donald J. Trump accountable for the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can move forward for now, rejecting a broad assertion of immunity that Mr. Trump’s legal team had invoked to try to get the cases dismissed.But the decision, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, left open the possibility that Mr. Trump could still prevail in his immunity claims after he makes further arguments as to why his fiery speech to supporters near the White House on Jan. 6 should be considered an official presidential act, rather than part of his re-election campaign.The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution gives presidents immunity from being sued over actions taken as part of their official duties, but not from suits based on private, unofficial acts. The civil cases brought against Mr. Trump have raised the question of which role he was playing at the rally he staged on Jan. 6, when he told supporters to “fight like hell” and urged them to march to the Capitol.Essentially, the appeals court ruled that at this stage of the case, that question has yet to be definitively answered. It said Mr. Trump must be given an opportunity to present factual evidence to rebut the plaintiffs’ claims that the rally was a campaign event — scrutinizing issues like whether campaign officials had organized it and campaign funds were used to pay for it.“Because our decision is not necessarily even the final word on the issue of presidential immunity, we of course express no view on the ultimate merits of the claims against President Trump,” Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote for the panel.He added: “In the proceedings ahead in the district court, President Trump will have the opportunity to show that his alleged actions in the run-up to and on Jan. 6 were taken in his official capacity as president rather than in his unofficial capacity as presidential candidate.”The panel’s decision to allow the three civil cases to proceed for now in Federal District Court in Washington adds to the array of legal woes that Mr. Trump is facing as he runs again for president.The ruling comes as the former president has mounted a parallel effort to get the criminal indictment he faces on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election dismissed based on a similar claim of immunity. The federal judge overseeing that case rejected those claims on Friday night.After the Capitol attack, a number of plaintiffs, including members of Congress and police officers who were caught up in or injured during the riot, filed lawsuits against Mr. Trump, blaming him for inciting the mob on Jan. 6 with the speech he gave that day.Mr. Trump sought to have the cases dismissed at the outset for several reasons, including a claim that his act of speaking to the public about a matter of public concern was an official action, so he was immune from being sued over it. The plaintiffs, by contrast, maintained that the rally and speech were campaign events.When considering a motion to dismiss, judges decide whether a lawsuit should be thrown out even if they assume that everything plaintiffs claim is true. In February 2022, the trial judge, Amit P. Mehta, rejected Mr. Trump’s arguments and allowed the case to proceed. Mr. Trump then appealed Judge Mehta’s ruling.The appeals court acknowledged that legal precedents have long protected a president from being sued for actions undertaken as part of his job. But it rejected Mr. Trump’s categorical view that any time a president is speaking about matters of public concern, it should be considered an official act.“When a first-term president opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act,” Judge Srinivasan wrote. “The office of the presidency as an institution is agnostic about who will occupy it next. And campaigning to gain that office is not an official act of the office.”Kristy Parker, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, which is helping to represent two Capitol Police officers who sued Mr. Trump, praised the decision. “This decision is a significant step forward in establishing that no one is above the law, including a sitting president,” she said.Joe Sellers, who represented the congressional plaintiffs, said the ruling was “a crucial step closer to holding the former president accountable for the harm brought on members of Congress and on our democracy itself.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the court’s decision was “limited, narrow and procedural,” adding that “the facts fully show that on Jan. 6 President Trump was acting on behalf of the American people, carrying out his duties as president of the United States.”The appellate panel that issued the decision included two appointees of Democratic presidents, Judge Srinivasan, who wrote the main 54-page opinion, and Judge Judith W. Rogers, who filed a narrower concurring opinion. She agreed with most of the main opinion, but thought a section that instructed Judge Mehta about how to evaluate whatever additional facts arise was unnecessary.The third member was Judge Gregory G. Katsas, who was appointed by Mr. Trump. He also filed a shorter concurring opinion, stressing that courts should try to sort through the ambiguity by looking at objective factors, like whether White House or campaign resources were used to organize and pay for the rally, rather than trying to parse Mr. Trump’s motives.The issue of presidential immunity is also an important aspect of Mr. Trump’s attempts to invalidate the election interference indictment filed against him in Washington by the special counsel, Jack Smith.The Justice Department has long maintained a policy that sitting presidents cannot be charged. But Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss the criminal case on grounds that his actions were official ones was a remarkable attempt to extend the protections afforded to the presidency in his favor.Mr. Trump’s lawyers essentially claimed that all of the steps he took to subvert the election he lost to President Biden were not crimes, but rather examples of performing his presidential duties to ensure the integrity of a race he believed had been stolen from him.Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the criminal case, had little patience for such arguments in her ruling on Friday, saying that neither the Constitution nor American history supported the contention that a former president enjoyed total immunity from prosecution.If Mr. Trump’s lawyers challenge her decision, as expected, they will most likely have to make a detailed finding to the appeals court that his efforts to overturn the outcome in 2020 were not undertaken as part of his re-election campaign but rather in his official role as chief executive.Win or lose, the lawyers are hoping that a protracted appeal will require moving the election trial — now set to start in March — until after the 2024 election is decided. More

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      Georgia County Signs Up to Use Voter Database Backed by Election Deniers

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      The decision ignores warnings from voting rights groups and some election experts.A suburban county in Georgia agreed on Friday to use a new voter information database endorsed by the election denial movement, a move that defied warnings from voting rights groups, election security experts and state election officials.Columbia County, a heavily Republican county outside Augusta, is the first in the country known to have agreed to use the platform, called EagleAI. Its supporters claim the system will make it easier to purge the rolls of ineligible voters.Among the leading backers for this new system is Cleta Mitchell, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the leader of the Election Integrity Network, a national coalition of activists built around the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Mitchell and others have billed EagleAI as an alternative to the Election Registration Information Center, a widely used interstate system that made it easier for officials to track address changes and deaths as they maintain the voter rolls. That system, known as ERIC, has become the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation that prompted nine states to withdraw with few backup plans.Ms. Mitchell declined to answer questions about the county’s decision.At an election board meeting Friday, around 40 people packed a room, with all speakers favoring the new system, according to Larry Wiggins, a Democratic member of the board who said he voted in favor.Mr. Wiggins said he was hopeful the tool would help the county handle an expected influx of voter eligibility challenges next year. A 2021 law made it easier for individuals to challenge large numbers of other voters’ registrations at once. Those challenges have often come from the same community of Republican activists now helping to push the EagleAI software.EagleAI was developed by a retired doctor in Columbia County, John Richards Jr., who did not response to a request for comment.Georgia state officials, who reviewed the EagleAI presentations, have found them riddled with errors and said the tools were unnecessary, according to documents provided by the groups American Oversight and Documented.In May, William S. Duffey Jr., the chairman of the State Election Board in Georgia, sent a letter to the county board of elections warning that EagleAI’s software might violate state privacy laws and state election statutes.The county responded in November that it would not allow access to private voter information and that the use of the tools would be limited.In a statement, the Georgia secretary of state’s office noted that the state still belonged to the Election Registration Information Center and that counties needed to follow state laws.Election experts have labeled the new system unnecessary and flawed.“EagleAI cannot be trusted to provide reliable information regarding who on the voter rolls is not eligible to remain there,” wrote seven voting rights and election organizations in a letter to Columbia County commissioners. It continued: “It will point you towards false positives and waste your staff’s time.”But Mr. Wiggins said the board wasn’t convinced. “We don’t put much faith in letters from outside groups,” Mr. Wiggins said. “We pay more attention to local individuals.” More

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      Trump Lawyer Tells Judge a Georgia Trial Would Be ‘Election Interference’

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      Arguments in court on Friday offered clues to Donald J. Trump’s legal strategy in fighting state charges of conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election.A lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued in an Atlanta courtroom on Friday that putting his client on trial in the final stages of the 2024 presidential contest would be “the most effective election interference in the history of the United States.”Steven H. Sadow, Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer in Georgia, also asserted that if his client were to win the election, Georgia could not try him in the case until after he left the White House again. He cited the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.Whether a president would in fact be shielded from prosecution while in office is not a settled legal matter.Mr. Sadow’s comments, which were challenged by prosecutors, came during a hearing in the election interference case against Mr. Trump and 14 co-defendants that was brought in August by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga.Ms. Willis wants the defendants to go on trial in August, but the presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, did not set a date on Friday. Mr. Trump is seeking to delay the trial, while another defendant, John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after he lost the 2020 presidential election, is seeking to speed it up.Judge McAfee scheduled the hearing to address motions not just from Mr. Trump, but also from a number of his co-defendants. He did not make any rulings from the bench, and gave few clues as to what he thought of the various arguments.All 15 defendants in the case face conspiracy charges related to attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results and subvert the will of voters. Four other defendants have pleaded guilty in the case and have agreed to cooperate with the government.The arguments from Mr. Sadow, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer, were the main event at the hourslong hearing on Friday, offering some of the first hints about Mr. Trump’s legal strategy in the case.“Can you imagine the notion of the Republican nominee for president not being able to campaign for the presidency because he is in some form or fashion in a courtroom defending himself?” Mr. Sadow asked during the proceeding.That led Judge McAfee to ask what the prosecution thought of the idea “that having this trial on Election Day would constitute election interference?”Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor in the case, rejected it.“This is moving forward with the business of Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t think that it in any way impedes defendant Trump’s ability to campaign.”Mr. Sadow also argued that to have a fair trial on state charges in Georgia, Mr. Trump needed access to lists of the government’s evidence in a related federal case against him.Last month, Mr. Sadow sent an email to members of the former president’s legal team who are handling the federal election interference case. In the email, Mr. Sadow said he wanted an inventory of “relevant material” that is “common to both of our cases” — specifically, F.B.I. reports and federal grand jury transcripts.The F.B.I. reports and federal grand jury transcripts stem from the separate federal investigation into election interference following the 2020 election.It is not unusual for a lawyer to ask for broader access to evidence, but Mr. Sadow’s motion is complicated by the fact that it seeks material from a different jurisdiction. The motion is being interpreted by many legal analysts as an effort by Mr. Trump to delay the Georgia proceedings.In response to Mr. Sadow’s email, the lawyers in the federal case pointed to a protective order that “appears to restrict our ability to share information with others.” Mr. Sadow then filed a motion seeking Judge McAfee’s assistance.The federal case is being brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. It relates to Mr. Trump’s broader efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election despite losing to Joseph R. Biden Jr.On Friday, Mr. Sadow told Judge McAfee that there was “remarkable overlap” between the Georgia case and Mr. Trump’s election interference case in Washington. He said that if he were unable to get his hands on the federal discovery, “the remedy is dismissal of the case.”One possibility, Mr. Sadow said, would be for the Georgia court to wait until the Washington case was “completely over,” at which point, presumably, the information would be free for him to request. Or, he said, he could prepare a subpoena.A solution to the conundrum, he said, “is going to take some time.”For the bulk of the hearing, defense lawyers, including Mr. Sadow, argued motions challenging many of the charges in the 98-page indictment. A lawyer for Robert Cheeley, a defendant and pro-Trump lawyer, argued that the indictment was an assault on the First Amendment rights of the defendants to engage in political speech.The lawyer, Chris Anulewicz, said that defendants’ statements challenging the 2020 election result had been rebutted “by a ton of counter-speech” in the public sphere and in the courts, a sufficient remedy in itself.Will Wooten, a deputy district attorney for Fulton County, said that some of the crimes listed in the indictment pertained to expression and speech, but that others did not.For example, he said, conspiracy to commit racketeering — the central crime that all the defendants are charged with — was not about speech, but rather “a crime involving a corrupt agreement.” More

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      Trump, Milei, Wilders — Do We All Secretly Love Strongmen?

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicStrongmen are making a comeback. The hyperlibertarian Javier Milei in Argentina and the anti-immigration Geert Wilders in the Netherlands are among a growing group of recently elected leaders who promise to break a few rules, shake up democratic institutions and spread a populist message.Is it a reaction against the failures of liberal democracies? Or is there something else behind the appeal of these misbehaving men with wild hair?This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts debate where the urge to turn to strongmen is coming from and whether it’s such a bad thing after all. Plus, young listeners share their formative political moments, even in the middle of class.(A transcript of this episode can be found in the center of the audio player above.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by David Yeazell/USA Today Sports, via Reuters ConMentioned in this episode:“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra,” a podcast from MSNBC“This Country Seemed Immune to Far-Right Politics. Then Came a Corruption Scandal.” by Alexander C. Kaufman on HuffPost“The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” by Martin GurriThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

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      Trump’s Georgia Lawyer, Steven Sadow, May Soon Drop His Quiet Strategy

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      Steven Sadow’s minimalist approach in the racketeering case against his client has created some dramatic tension, but his silence may be coming to an end.Steven H. Sadow, the lead lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump in his Georgia criminal case, has been praised by the Atlanta rapper T.I. — one of Mr. Sadow’s former clients — as “probably the best criminal defense attorney of his time,” a man with “a slight hint of genius.”If so, much of that genius has remained bottled up since Mr. Trump’s indictment in Georgia over the summer. Mr. Sadow, a heavyweight in the Atlanta legal world who specializes in representing what he calls “high profile individuals,” has so far kept a low profile in the state election interference case, largely piggybacking on briefings from other lawyers representing Mr. Trump’s co-defendants.Mr. Sadow has only rarely spoken publicly about the case. And at a number of related court hearings, he has shown up alone, in his trademark cowboy boots, observing the proceedings from the courtroom gallery.His minimalist approach stands in marked contrast to those of other, more voluble lawyers that Mr. Trump has retained around the country to deal with his legal problems. It has also lent a certain dramatic tension to the Georgia case. He is like a featured soloist in a band who has yet to really play.The quiet period may soon be coming to an end. This week, Mr. Sadow filed a motion arguing that before any trial, the Georgia courts should weigh whether the 13 felony charges against Mr. Trump should be thrown out because his claims about voting fraud after he lost the 2020 election were protected by the First Amendment.And on Friday, Mr. Sadow is expected to make his first significant court appearance in the case, to argue that Mr. Trump should be granted access to evidence gathered by federal prosecutors in his separate election interference case in Washington.The hearing could provide early hints of Mr. Sadow’s long-game strategy, and how he might incorporate lessons learned over decades of defending a colorful roster of clients including rappers and the occasional tabloid demi-celebrity.“This is an enormously creative guy who will design a defense based on all the tools at his disposal,” said Arthur W. Leach, a former assistant U.S. attorney who has faced off against Mr. Sadow.Like Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his other pending criminal cases, Mr. Sadow is trying not only to win exoneration for his client, but also to delay. Prosecutors have proposed an August start date for the Georgia trial, but Mr. Trump would probably prefer that it be pushed beyond next fall’s presidential election, in which he is a candidate.The indictment accuses the former president and 14 allies of conspiring to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia; four other defendants have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.Mr. Sadow, 69, declined an interview request. He has previously let it be known that he is not a Trump supporter. He took over as Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer on the day of the former president’s voluntary surrender in August, replacing Drew Findling, known as the Billion Dollar Lawyer for his work defending prominent hip-hop artists.Mr. Sadow’s friends say that he most likely took the case for the challenge, as well as for the money. Mr. Findling’s firm was paid at least $816,000 for about a year’s worth of work, according to public records.Legal experts say that Mr. Sadow’s understated approach is a calculated strategy.Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court at a hearing for Harrison Floyd, part of the Georgia election indictments. Pool photo by Dennis ByronHe has probably been watching the moves of other defendants’ lawyers to see which approaches fare best with Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, who is relatively new to the bench. Mr. Sadow has occasionally joked to reporters that there was no reason he should write his own briefs when other lawyers who happen to be great writers have already done good work.Mr. Sadow may be trying not to put anything on paper that could inadvertently help Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the separate federal election interference case against Mr. Trump, which is scheduled to go to trial in Washington in March.“I don’t think anybody on Trump’s legal team in Georgia wants to do anything that will remotely rock the boat in D.C.,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.In courtrooms in Atlanta and beyond, Mr. Sadow has shown an aptitude for aggressive cross-examination and thinking on his feet.Christian Fletcher, a client of Mr. Sadow’s who was acquitted in a major health care fraud case in March, said Mr. Sadow’s real strength was his feel for people, and for how jurors think. “It’s like he downloads who you are as a person,” he said, “and what moves you.”In an online interview with his client T.I., the rapper, Mr. Sadow said he did his own legal research because “I don’t think anybody else can do it better than me.” He also said he had been called to the profession to curb the excesses of government power.“People need to be looked after and protected,” he told the performer. “They’ve got to be protected against the government” — because, he said, the government does not care about most people.In addition to T.I., who was pleased with the plea deal and the one-year prison sentence that Mr. Sadow helped him secure when he faced a federal gun charge, he has represented the rappers Gunna and Rick Ross, who occasionally name-drops Mr. Sadow in his lyric.The rapper T.I. has praised Mr. Sadow, who arranged a plea deal for him on a federal gun charge.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“Indictment on the way, got Sadow on the case,” he rapped on his 2019 song “Turnpike Ike.”In 2000, Mr. Sadow obtained an acquittal for Joseph Sweeting, who had been charged in the stabbing deaths of two men after a Super Bowl party in Atlanta. The case earned national attention because Ray Lewis, the Baltimore Ravens football star, had also been charged; Mr. Lewis reached a plea agreement with prosecutors.Mr. Sadow also represented Steven E. Kaplan, the owner of a notorious Atlanta strip club called the Gold Club, which was targeted by federal prosectors who claimed it had mob connections and allowed prostitution. Mr. Sadow called it a “very good deal” when Mr. Kaplan, who had been facing decades in prison, pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge in 2001, receiving a 16-month sentence and a $5 million fine.What those successes will bring to bear on Mr. Trump’s case is hard to say. Mr. Sadow faces the uphill task of winning over a jury in Fulton County, where President Biden won 73 percent of the vote in 2020. A number of legal experts following the case expect Mr. Sadow to file a motion soon arguing that Mr. Trump should be immune from the Georgia charges because he was the president. Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the Washington case have filed a similar motion that many experts say is unlikely to succeed.Mr. Sadow grew up in Ohio and moved to Atlanta in the 1970s to attend Emory Law School. Even back then, said Martin Salzman, a lawyer and a former classmate, he excelled at thinking up alternate theories for a case.“I said, ‘You just think like a criminal — that’s why you like criminal law,’” Mr. Salzman recalled, chuckling. “He really comes up with theories that most other people just don’t, in order to bring up a reasonable doubt.” More