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      Ted Cruz’s Communications Director Resigns

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutliveLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeVisual TimelineNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyCapitol Riot Fallout: F.B.I. Warned of Violence Before Siege; More Arrests MadeSenator Cruz’s communications director resigns.Jan. 12, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETJan. 12, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETMaggie Astor, Catie Edmondson and Senator Ted Cruz last week formally challenged President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania.Credit…Jonathan Ernst/ReutersSenator Ted Cruz’s communications director, Lauren Blair Bianchi, has resigned in response to Mr. Cruz’s efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election.Mr. Cruz’s office confirmed Ms. Bianchi’s resignation, which was first reported by Punchbowl News.“Senator Cruz and Lauren agreed that it would be best to part ways,” the office said in a statement. “He thanks her for her service and wishes her the best.”A person familiar with Ms. Bianchi’s decision said she had made it because of Mr. Cruz’s actions last week, when he and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri formally challenged President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania, promoting false claims of election fraud even as a pro-Trump mob motivated by those claims stormed the Capitol.Ms. Bianchi, who did not respond to an email seeking comment on Tuesday, “was unhappy with the direction the office had taken,” the person familiar with her decision said.The events of last week sent a shudder through Mr. Cruz’s and Mr. Hawley’s offices, with many staff members, especially junior aides, discussing whether their bosses’ behavior should compel them to quit, according to several aides close to both offices.So far, Mr. Hawley, who has sought to reassure his aides, has not suffered any defections. The atmosphere is more tense in the office of Mr. Cruz, who is known to cycle through staffers even during calmer times.At least one prominent former supporter of Mr. Cruz — the chairman of his 2016 presidential campaign, Chad Sweet — has also broken with him since the attack on the Capitol, and he and Mr. Hawley have become increasingly isolated even within the Senate Republican caucus.“Donald Trump and those who aided and abetted him in his relentless undermining of our democracy — including Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz — must be denounced,” Mr. Sweet wrote in a statement on Friday. “In particular, I made it clear to Senator Cruz, whom I have known for years, before the joint session of Congress, that if he proceeded to object to the electoral count of the legitimate slates of delegates certified by the states, I could no longer support him.”In the House, a senior Republican aide on the Armed Services Committee also resigned, calling out lawmakers on the panel who had voted to overturn the election on Wednesday hours after the rioters stormed the Capitol.“Anyone who watched those horrible hours unfold should have been galvanized to rebuke these insurrectionists in the strongest terms,” the aide, Jason Schmid, wrote in a searing resignation letter. “Instead, some members whom I believed to be leaders in the defense of the nation chose to put political theater ahead of the defense of the Constitution and the Republic.”He called the Republicans who objected to the election results “congressional enablers of this mob” who had “made future foreign conflict more likely, not less.” The letter, sent to committee staff members and obtained by The New York Times, was first reported by Politico.Mr. Schmid reported to Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, the highest-ranking Republican on the committee, who voted to reject the election results. He had also worked closely with Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising Republican star who also voted to overturn the results and was removed on Tuesday from a Harvard political advisory committee.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      La historia de un radical: trabajé con uno de los asaltantes del Capitolio

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeVisual TimelineNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Media EquationLa historia de un radical: trabajé con uno de los asaltantes del CapitolioEn BuzzFeed, nos enfocábamos en realizar contenidos virales para las redes sociales. Un joven empleado aprendió esa noción y la aplicó a la extrema derecha.Simpatizantes del presidente Trump en el Capitolio, en Washington, D. C., el miércoles 6 de enero.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA vía Shutterstock12 de enero de 2021 a las 05:00 ETRead in EnglishEncajaba tan bien como cualquier otro empleado en nuestro estudio de Los Ángeles, un lugar lleno de inadaptados ambiciosos con dones inusuales. Sabían cómo crear los videos que la gente quería ver en internet.Su verdadero nombre era Anthime Joseph Gionet, aunque prefería otros. Su valor para BuzzFeed era claro: hacía cualquier cosa por Vine, la plataforma de videos cortos que tuvo un breve auge cultural antes de ser aplastada por Instagram y Snapchat en 2017.Una vez se echó un galón de leche en la cara y el video atrajo millones de visitas, cuando la mayoría de las acrobacias inofensivas divertían a millones de espectadores estadounidenses en esa plataforma.En ese sentido, era natural que estuviera en BuzzFeed cuando llegó en la primavera de 2015, donde yo era el editor en jefe y me encargaba de supervisar el sitio web. Gionet fue contratado para manejar la cuenta de Vine de nuestra sección de videos, y su trabajo consistía principalmente en editar videos tontos y divertidos de hasta seis segundos que producían sus colegas. Al cabo de unos meses, también se hizo cargo de una cuenta de Twitter de BuzzFeed, en la que aprovechó su intuición sobre qué tipo de video compartiría la gente.En esos días, éramos mejores que nadie en la creación de contenido para las redes sociales, sobre todo listas, concursos y videos cortos, pero ocasionalmente también hacíamos espectaculares transmisiones en vivo, la más famosa fue una en la que dos de mis colegas hicieron estallar una sandía llenándola de ligas una por una.Así que el lenguaje que escuché de Gionet, ahora de 33 años, en su “transmisión en vivo” el miércoles pasado me resultó familiar. “Tenemos más de 10.000 personas en vivo que nos observan. ¡Vamos!”, dijo con entusiasmo. “Presionen el botón de seguir. Les agradezco, chicos”.Gionet se encontraba dentro de la oficina del senador por Oregón Jeff Merkley, que estaba en ruinas, transmitiendo desde una de las pocas plataformas que aún no lo habían suspendido, junto con otros simpatizantes de Trump que jugaban con el auricular del teléfono y se subían a los muebles. Parecía una conclusión apropiada para su reciente carrera que algunos podrían considerar como troleo o bromas por internet, pero que probablemente se describe mejor como violencia performativa.Anthime Joseph Gionet en una escena de su transmisión en vivo, el miércoles pasado.Credit…LiveLeakDespués de ver a Gionet, llamé a algunos de mis antiguos colegas, que lo recordaron con una mezcla de perplejidad y repulsión. Era sensible y casi se mostraba desesperado por ser aceptado, dijeron. Una vez se molestó mucho cuando alguien se burló de su bigote grueso rubio y su corte de cabello en mullet. En ese entonces, dos de sus amigos más cercanos de la oficina tenían orígenes étnicos e identidades de género diferentes a la suya, y a veces se unían por un sentimiento de ser marginados. Uno de esos amigos lo recordaba como un personaje triste que no expresaba realmente sus opiniones políticas más allá de la cultura ampliamente adolescente e insensible de Vine, y me dijo que estaba obsesionado con su infancia solitaria en Alaska. Según tres de ellos, parecía que le faltaba algo, que estaba vacío por dentro.A medida que avanzaban las elecciones de 2016, empezó a coquetear con una personalidad política. Primero puso un retrato de Bernie Sanders en su escritorio, dijeron dos excolegas. Luego comenzó a usar gorras de MAGA en la oficina, lo que sorprendió a sus compañeros de trabajo más progresistas, aunque eran bastante apolíticos. En ese entonces algunas personas todavía pensaban que la extrema derecha podría ser “irónica”.Cuando, meses después, dejó BuzzFeed para trabajar como el “coordinador de las giras políticas” de Milo Yiannopoulos, un favorito de la “extrema derecha” racista y antisemita, sus colegas se impresionaron momentáneamente. Luego, revisaron la cuenta de Twitter de Gionet, donde sus declaraciones cada vez más viles le estaban consiguiendo retuits de figuras de la extrema derecha, y se dieron cuenta de que no deberían haberse sorprendido.Sin embargo, no está claro en qué es lo que cree Gionet, si es que cree algo. Y realmente, no estoy seguro de que me importe.Este no es un perfil compasivo de un joven que se ha equivocado. No puedo tener mucha compasión por un tipo que, antes de atacar su Capitolio, pasaba el rato disparando algún tipo de sustancia irritante embotellada (lo llamaba “espray de contenido”) a los ojos de gente inocente para obtener vistas en YouTube y gritándoles a los dependientes de las tiendas que le pedían que usara cubrebocas.Para mí, esta historia es sobre algo diferente, una especie de poder de las redes sociales que ayudamos a afinar en BuzzFeed y que puede ejercer una atracción gravitacional casi irresistible.Si no has tenido la experiencia de publicar algo en las redes sociales que se vuelve verdaderamente viral, es posible que no entiendas su profunda atracción emocional. De repente eres el centro de un universo digital y recibes más atención de más gente que nunca. A veces, el impulso de afirmación es vertiginoso y adictivo. Y, si tienes poco a lo que aferrarte, puedes perderte en todo eso.Incluso cuando buscábamos hacer que nuestro trabajo se difundiera en BuzzFeed, nos enfrentábamos a limitaciones; debíamos decir la verdad en nuestra división de noticias y apegarnos a un conjunto de valores claramente positivos en nuestra rama de entretenimiento. Sin embargo, Gionet finalmente rompió esos límites, pues parecía seguir las señales que encontraba en las redes sociales sin ningún escrúpulo. La única línea que atravesaba era su deseo de construir una audiencia. Apoyaba a Sanders antes de lanzar consignas antisemitas en Charlottesville, Virginia; luego se retractó de manera temporal de esas opiniones extremas y más tarde cometió delitos violentos para obtener vistas en YouTube. Consiguió una audiencia entre los negacionistas del coronavirus y más tarde, cuando aparentemente contrajo la enfermedad, publicó la captura de pantalla de su propia prueba positiva en Instagram con un emoticono de llanto. Semanas después, se unió al levantamiento a favor de Trump en el Capitolio.“Su política se ha guiado por las métricas de la plataforma”, reflexionó Andrew Gauthier, quien fue uno de los principales productores de video de BuzzFeed y quien más tarde trabajó para la campaña presidencial de Joe Biden. “Siempre piensas que el mal vendrá de la maldad del villano de las películas, y entonces piensas: ‘Ay, no, el mal puede empezar con chistes malos y un comportamiento nihilista que es alimentado por el refuerzo positivo en varias plataformas’”.Así que la historia de Gionet no es tan familiar como la de un joven solitario en su dormitorio que empieza a ver videos que envenenan su visión del mundo. Es la historia de un hombre que es recompensado por ser nacionalista blanco violento y que recibe la atención y la afirmación que aparentemente está desesperado por obtener.Pasamos mucho tiempo en BuzzFeed pensando en cómo optimizar nuestro contenido para una audiencia en línea; él se optimizó a sí mismo.Según un informe policial, cuando fue arrestado en Scottsdale, Arizona, el mes pasado por rociar una solución de gas lacrimógeno a un guardia, un oficial informó que Gionet le dijo que era una personalidad influyente y tenía muchos seguidores en las redes sociales. Fue puesto en libertad bajo palabra, dijo un portavoz de la policía de Scottsdale, y está a la espera de ser juzgado. Sin embargo, en el Capitolio, gritó “ACAF”, All Cops Are Friends (“Todos los policías son amigos”, aunque el significado original del acrónimo es menos amistoso).Su historia deja preguntándome qué responsabilidad tenemos quienes fuimos pioneros en el uso de las redes sociales para ofrecer información. ¿Nosotros, junto con los creadores de esas plataformas, ayudamos a abrir la caja de Pandora?No trabajé directamente con Gionet. Pero, en 2012, contraté a un escritor llamado Benny Johnson que estaba cultivando una voz que mezclaba el conocimiento de las redes sociales y la política de derecha. En ese momento pensé, erróneamente, que su visión política era simplemente conservadora. Y lo imaginé prosperando, como lo han hecho los escritores conservadores durante generaciones en las principales salas de redacción, donde cultivaban el mismo interés de sus colegas en encontrar hechos compartidos.Tardé en darme cuenta de que sus intereses no eran periodísticos, ni siquiera ideológicos, sino estéticos, emocionados por las imágenes del poder puro. En la tradición de los propagandistas autoritarios, le asombraban los edificios neoclásicos, las armas y, más tarde, las multitudes de Donald Trump. Y, después de que lo despedimos por plagio en 2014, pasó a liderar la sección de contenido del ala juvenil de Trump, Turning Point USA, y presenta un programa en Newsmax. La semana pasada, animó los intentos de revocar las elecciones (aunque se retractó cuando comenzó la violencia y luego culpó a los izquierdistas por eso). También está vendiendo sus habilidades en la “narración política viral” en la que trabajamos juntos en BuzzFeed a una generación de nuevas figuras de derecha, como la representante Lauren Boebert, quien ha llamado la atención por jurar que lleva su pistola al Congreso. (Ni Gionet ni Johnson respondieron a las consultas por correo electrónico).Mientras refinábamos la nueva práctica de las redes sociales en BuzzFeed, tardamos en darnos cuenta de que la extrema derecha nos observaba de cerca y finalmente nos imitaba. Jonah Peretti, quien fundó The Huffington Post y BuzzFeed, se sorprendió cuando Steve Bannon, quien dirigía Breitbart, le recordó a un escritor que había tomado prestadas tácticas de Peretti para su estrategia en el periodo previo a las elecciones de 2016. Bannon me dijo antes de esas elecciones, en una entrevista en la Trump Tower, que estaba sorprendido de que no hubiéramos convertido a BuzzFeed en un bastión de apoyo para Bernie Sanders, como Breitbart lo hizo con Trump. Notó, quizá de manera correcta, que el tráfico de un medio de propaganda a favor de Sanders habría excedido enormemente lo que obtuvimos por nuestra cobertura justa de las primarias demócratas.“Algunas de las cosas innovadoras que hicimos desde el principio, en la comprensión de las redes sociales y los medios digitales, han sido tomadas por los grupos de extrema derecha, los grupos racistas, los grupos MAGA”, me dijo mi exjefe, Peretti, durante una entrevista la semana pasada. No obstante, Peretti, un eterno optimista, señaló que algunos de los mismos mecanismos sociales que Gionet aprovechó también fueron cruciales para los movimientos sociales progresistas de los últimos años, desde Black Lives Matter hasta #MeToo. “La historia no ha terminado y hay una oportunidad de luchar por un buen internet”, comentó. (Nota: no doy cobertura a BuzzFeed extensamente en esta columna, más allá de apoyarme en lo que aprendí durante mi tiempo allí, y The New York Times ha exigido que no lo haga hasta que me deshaga de mis opciones de compra de acciones en la empresa).Ya estoy escuchando lo que parecen ser dos explicaciones que compiten entre sí por lo que pasó en Washington la semana pasada: que la multitud abrumadoramente blanca, a veces abiertamente racista, encarnaba la vieja y profunda maldad estadounidense; o que las redes sociales transformaron las identidades vacías de algunos estadounidenses para convertirlas en algo radical.Sin embargo, la historia de Gionet muestra cómo esas explicaciones no entran en conflicto. Un hombre que sus colegas consideraban vacío y sin rumbo convirtió su identidad en una especie de espejo de ese viejo mal estadounidense, y se ha convertido en lo que muchos estadounidenses le dijeron que querían que fuera.En un momento de la transmisión en vivo de Gionet durante el asedio al Capitolio, una voz invisible fuera de cámara advierte que Trump “se molestaría mucho” con las payasadas de los alborotadores.“No, estará contento”, respondió Gionet. “Estamos luchando por Trump”.Ben Smith es el columnista de medios. Se unió al Times en 2020, después de ocho años como editor jefe fundador de BuzzFeed News. Antes de eso, cubrió política para Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer y The New York Sun. Correo electrónico: ben.smith@nytimes.com @benytAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Republican Party Could Break

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow the Republican Party Could BreakAfter the Capitol Hill riot, the divide between reality and fantasy may become too wide to bridge.Opinion ColumnistJan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Stefani Reynolds/Getty ImagesFor a long time, people have predicted the crackup of American conservatism, the end of a Republican Party dominated by the conservative movement as one of the major powers in our politics. Demographic trends were supposed to permanently marginalize the right. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was supposed to signal conservatism’s eclipse. The rise of Donald Trump was supposed to shatter Republican politics the way that slavery once broke the Whigs.Conservatism survived all these prophecies, always clawing back to claim a share of power, maintaining unity and loyalty by offering a bulwark against liberal ambition even as its own agenda became more and more threadbare.So it would be a foolhardy prophet indeed who looked at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and assumed that this time, under this pressure, the conservative coalition will finally break apart, sending the Republican Party deep into the wilderness and reshaping American ideological debates along new lines.But breaking points do come, and the violent endgame of the Trump presidency has exposed a new divide in the conservative coalition — not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.At the same time, it has cast the key weakness of conservatism into even sharper relief: the growing distance between right-wing politics and almost every nonpolitical power center in America, from the media and culture industries to the old-line corporate suites to the communications empires of Silicon Valley.The Republican Party has succeeded in the past decade, despite its decadence and growing provincialism, by providing a harbor for voters who want to cast a vote, for all kinds of different reasons, against consolidated liberal power. And it has found new support in unexpected places: first the Obama-Trump voters of the Midwest in 2016, then the immigrant neighborhoods that trended rightward in 2020.But the implicit bargain of the Trump era required traditional Republicans — from upper-middle-class suburbanites to the elites of the Federalist Society — to live with a lot of craziness from their leader, and a lot of even crazier ideas from the very-online portions of his base, in return for denying Democrats the White House. And it’s not clear that this bargain can survive the irruption of all that crazy into the halls of the Capitol, and the QAnon-ification of the right that made the riot possible.Even before Jan. 6, the difficulty of balancing normal Republican politics with an insistence that Mike Pence could magically overturn a clear election outcome helped cost the party two Senate seats in Georgia. Even before the riot, finding post-Trump leaders who could bridge the internal divide, bringing along his base but also broadening the party, was going to be an extraordinary challenge.But the Republican Party that lost Georgia a week ago still looked competitive enough to count on holding, say, 47 Senate seats even in a tough election cycle. A week later, it seems the party could easily break harder, and fall further.Here’s how it could happen. First, the party’s non-Trumpist faction — embodied by senators like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, various purple- and blue-state governors and most of the remaining Acela corridor conservatives, from lawyers and judges to lobbyists and staffers — pushes for a full repudiation of Trump and all his works, extending beyond impeachment to encompass support for social-media bans, F.B.I. surveillance of the MAGA universe and more.At the same time, precisely those measures further radicalize portions of the party’s base, offering apparent proof that Trump was right — that the system isn’t merely consolidating against but actively persecuting them. With this sense of persecution in the background and the Trump family posturing as party leaders, the voter-fraud mythology becomes a litmus test in many congressional elections, and baroque conspiracy theories pervade primary campaigns.In this scenario, what remains of the center-right suburban vote and the G.O.P. establishment becomes at least as NeverTrump as Romney, if not the Lincoln Project; meanwhile, the core of Trump’s support becomes as paranoid as Q devotees. Maybe this leads to more empty acts of violence, further radicalizing the center right against the right, or maybe it just leads to Republican primaries producing a lot more candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to the point where a big chunk of the House G.O.P. occupies not just a different tactical reality from the party’s elite but a completely different universe.Either way, under these conditions that party could really collapse or really break. The collapse would happen if Trumpists with a dolchstoss narrative and a strong Q vibe start winning nominations for Senate seats and governorships in states that right now only lean Republican. A party made insane and radioactive by conspiracy theories could keep on winning deep-red districts, but if its corporate support bailed, its remaining technocrats jumped ship and suburban professionals regarded it as the party of insurrection, it could easily become a consistent loser in 30 states or more.Alternatively, a party dominated by the Trump family at the grassroots level, with Greene-like figures as its foot soldiers, could become genuinely untenable as a home for centrist and non-Trumpist politicians. So after the renomination of Trump himself or the nomination of Don Jr. in 2024, a cluster of figures (senators like Romney and Susan Collins, blue-state governors like Maryland’s Larry Hogan) might simply jump ship to form an independent mini-party, leaving the G.O.P. as a 35 percent proposition, a heartland rump.None of this is a prediction. In American politics, reversion to the gridlocked mean has been a safe bet for many years — in which case you’d expect the MAGA extremes to return to their fantasy world, the threat of violence to ebb, Trump to fade without his Twitter feed and the combination of Biden-administration liberalism and Big Tech overreach to bring the right’s blocking coalition back together in time for 2022.But if Biden governs carefully, if Trump doesn’t go quietly, if MAGA fantasies become right-wing orthodoxies, then the stresses on the Republican Party and conservatism could become too great to bear.I woke up last Wednesday thinking that the G.O.P. had survived the Trump era, its power reduced but relatively stable, with some faint chance to redeem itself — by carefully shepherding it supporters back toward reality, while integrating elements of populism into the reality-based conservatism that our misgoverned country needs.A week later, that hope seems like as much of a fantasy as QAnon. Instead, it feels as if the Republican Party survived Trump’s presidency, but maybe not his disastrous and deadly leaving of it.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Congress Should Bar Trump From Ever Holding Office

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentliveLatest UpdatesHouse Introduces ChargeHow Impeachment Might Work25th Amendment ExplainedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyImpeachment Isn’t the Only Option Against TrumpCongress can invoke its constitutional power to bar the president from holding office again.Deepak Gupta and Mr. Gupta is the founder of an appellate litigation law firm in Washington, D.C. Mr. Beutler is the editor in chief of Crooked Media.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York TimesCongress should use its constitutional power to prohibit instigators and perpetrators of last week’s violent siege of the Capitol, including President Trump, from holding public office ever again.On Monday, House leaders introduced an article of impeachment against the president for “inciting violence against the government of the United States,” an obligatory action, given the gravity of the president’s transgression. But this is not the only route for ensuring accountability. The Constitution has another provision that is tailor-made for the unthinkable, traitorous events of Jan. 6 that goes beyond what impeachment can accomplish.Emerging from the wreckage of the Civil War, Congress was deeply concerned that former leaders of the Confederacy would take over state and federal offices to once again subvert the constitutional order. To prevent that from happening, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which in Section 3 bars public officials and certain others who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution from serving in public office. Although little known today, Section 3 was used in the post-Civil War era to disqualify former rebels from taking office. And, in the wake of perhaps the boldest domestic attack on our nation’s democracy since the Civil War, Section 3 can once again serve as a critical tool to protect our constitutional order.The 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce Section 3 through legislation. So Congress can immediately pass a law declaring that any person who has ever sworn to defend the Constitution — from Mr. Trump to others — and who incited, directed, or participated in the Jan. 6 assault “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” and is therefore constitutionally disqualified from holding office in the future.Congress can also decide how this legislation will be enforced by election officials and the courts, based on all the facts as they come out. The Constitution prohibits Congress from enacting so-called bills of attainder, which single out individuals for guilt. But, in addition to the legislation we suggest, Congress could also pass nonbinding sense-of-Congress resolutions that specify whom they intend to disqualify. This would provide a road map for election officials and judges, should any people named in those resolutions seek to run for or hold public office. And Congress can do this by a simple majority — far less of a hurdle than the two-thirds majority in the Senate that removing the president requires.We believe legislators of conscience should brandish this option not as a substitute for impeachment but as a complement to it. Senators shouldn’t be allowed to escape or indefinitely delay a vote on Mr. Trump’s conduct simply by running out the clock on his term. (The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has suggested no trial will happen before the inauguration.) Republicans should be on notice that whether or not they face a vote on conviction and removal of Mr. Trump, they will at the very least be compelled to vote by a Democratic-controlled Congress on barring Mr. Trump from ever holding public office again.This option also has power that the impeachment process lacks. As we learn more in the coming months about who is culpable for the siege, the ranks of those disqualified from office will likely swell. The legislation we envision would allow future courts and decision makers to apply the law after the investigations are complete. Eventually, we should have a 9/11 Commission-style report on what led to these events; the facts marshaled there can be deployed under the legislation we propose.We don’t suggest this course of action lightly. It would not have applied to a peaceful protest on the Capitol grounds — even one made to make lawmakers feel uncomfortable as they attended to their ministerial duties. It still would not have applied if the Jan. 6 protests had culminated only in street violence, as several other pro-Trump gatherings in recent months did. The First Amendment protects unruly dissent.But this was a unique event in American history: an obstruction by force of a constitutional process, at the very seat of our government. Parading the Confederate battle flag through the halls of Congress, the insurrectionists interrupted the certification of the election results for several hours and cemented this presidential transition as one marked by deadly violence. Washington’s mayor and congressional leaders concluded that it was necessary to call in the National Guard to quell the insurrection. Had a single additional layer of security failed, many elected officials, including the vice president and the speaker of the House — both of whom are constitutional officers — might have been killed. All to the end of preventing the winner of the 2020 election from taking power.Make no mistake: This was an insurrection. The 14th Amendment disqualifies its instigators from public office, whether the president is convicted in a Senate trial or not.Deepak Gupta is the founder of the appellate litigation firm Gupta Wessler in Washington and a lecturer at Harvard Law School. Brian Beutler is the editor in chief of Crooked Media, which covers politics and culture. He previously was an editor at The New Republic.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Bogusness of Anti-Impeachment Republicans

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Bogusness of Anti-Impeachment RepublicansSuddenly they like “unity” and fear “divisiveness.” Where was that spirit when election results were being counted?Opinion ColumnistJan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETPolice caution tape blocking a stairwell inside the U.S Capitol Building on Jan. 9.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesThe Republican Party has devised its response to the push to impeach the president over his role in the attack on the Capitol last week, and it is so cynical as to shock the conscience.“Now the Democrats are going to try to remove the president from office just seven days before he is set to leave anyway,” said Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who voted with 146 other Republicans in Congress not to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. “I do not see how this unifies the country.”The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also said that impeaching the president “will only divide our country more.”“As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people,” McCarthy said in a statement given two days after he also voted not to accept the results of a free and fair election in which his favored candidate lost.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas helped lead the Senate attempt to object to Joe Biden’s victory. “My view is Congress should fulfill our responsibility under the Constitution to consider serious claims of voter fraud,” he said last Monday. Now, he too wants unity. “The attack at the Capitol was a despicable act of terrorism and a shocking assault on our democratic system,” he said in the aftermath of the violence, as calls to impeach the president grew louder and louder. “We must come together and put this anger and division behind us.”I’m reminded, here, of one particular passage from Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 address at Cooper Union in Manhattan, in which he criticized the political brinkmanship of Southern elites who blamed their Northern opponents for their own threats to break the union over slavery.But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”There are a handful of Senate Republicans, like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who are open to impeachment. But much of the Republican response is exactly this kind of threat: If you hold President Trump accountable for his actions, then we won’t help you unify the country.Or, as another Republican, Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, said on Twitter,Those calling for impeachment or invoking the 25th Amendment in response to President Trump’s rhetoric this week are themselves engaging in intemperate and inflammatory language and calling for action that is equally irresponsible and could well incite further violence.These cries of divisiveness aren’t just the crocodile tears of bad-faith actors. They serve a purpose, which is to pre-emptively blame Democrats for the Republican partisan rancor that will follow after Joe Biden is inaugurated next week. It is another way of saying that they, meaning Democrats, shot first, so we, meaning Republicans, are absolved of any responsibility for our actions. If Democrats want some semblance of normalcy — if they want to be able to govern — then the price for Republicans is impunity for Trump.House Democrats have already introduced their resolution to impeach the president, formally charging President Trump with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the attack on the Capitol. There is still a ways to go in this process, but it is a stronger start than I expected. But there may still be some hesitation about taking the most aggressive stance, as evidenced by Majority Whip James Clyburn’s proposal to hold off on a trial until after the first 100 days of the Biden administration.This would be a mistake.There is no way past this crisis — and yes, we are living through a crisis — except through it. The best way to push forward is as aggressively as possible. Anything less sends the signal that this moment isn’t as urgent as it actually is. And as we move closer to consequences for those responsible, we should continue to ignore the cries that accountability is “divisive.” Not because they’re false, but because they’re true.Accountability is divisive. That’s the point. If there is a faction of the Republican Party that sees democracy itself as a threat to its power and influence, then it has to be cut off from the body politic. It needs to be divided from the rest of us, lest it threaten the integrity of the American republic more than it already has. Marginalizing that faction — casting Trump and Trumpism into the ash heap of history — will be divisive, but it is the only choice we have.This does not mean we must cast out the 74 million Americans who voted for the president, but it does mean we must repudiate the lies, cruelty and cult of personality on which Trump built his movement. It means Republicans have to acknowledge the truth — that Joe Biden won in a free and fair election — and apologize to their voters and to the country for helping to stoke the madness that struck at the Capitol.The alternative is a false unity that leaves the wound of last Wednesday to fester until the infection gets even worse than it already is.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      If It’s Still Trump Party, Many Republicans Like Me Will Leave

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyIf It’s Still Trump Party, Many Republicans Like Me Will LeaveI need to believe that if I stick with the G.O.P., I will have a fighting chance at changing its direction.Ms. Mair is a Republican strategist.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETJustin Amash of Michigan, who as a House member left the Republican Party in 2019 and declined to run for re-election. Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesThe remaining days in the presidency of Donald Trump now number in the single digits. That should also be the number of days until the Republican Party begins the post-Trump era, and Trump-disdaining Republicans like me can fully re-engage with it.But it isn’t. Instead, we face a situation in which Mr. Trump clearly lost the 2020 election — and yet the pressure for us to ditch the party is even more intense than it was before Nov. 3. He has behaved horribly since the election, which is no surprise, and hit an abject low point last week. Despite his role in the sacking of the Capitol, he has (also not surprisingly) refused to resign from office — but what is shocking is that so many Republicans in Congress have expressed downright hostility against forcing him out.So many of us — who would otherwise consider ourselves Republicans — increasingly feel that either Mr. Trump goes, or we go. If he remains, we will be left with no choice but to leave the party, even though right now might otherwise be the exact time to double down, not ditch, and reassert conservative principles. The costs of people like me leaving could be grave, not just for the party but for American politics.Many former Republicans who deeply dislike Mr. Trump have already done so. Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, announced last year that he was becoming a Democrat. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan left the Republican Party in 2019 and has urged others to ditch it for a third party (perhaps the Libertarian Party). Evan McMullin, who ran for president as an independent in 2016, has urged fellow NeverTrumpers to “further develop an intellectual and political home” that is “outside of any party,” and told them that “if the Republican Party continues on its current path, launch a party to challenge it directly.”And yet, there are real pragmatic and practical reasons for Trump-loathing Republicans not to take a walk and in fact to step up our involvement with the party.For starters, if Mr. Trump’s elevation to head of the Republican Party showed anything, it demonstrated that it is far easier to influence its direction when you are part of it. Before 2016, the party was for free trade, legal immigration and, above all, a strong national defense, hawkish on Russia and in favor of global defense alliances. In a relatively short amount of time, with Mr. Trump as leader, the party drastically changed its position on those issues.But people forget that as pronounced as the mutation of the party under Mr. Trump was, it was not without precedent. In my lifetime, since the mid-1970s, the party has endorsed presidential candidates who often emphasized different views of conservatism. Each of them — from Gerald Ford to Donald Trump — changed the character of the Republican Party, some more, like Ronald Reagan, and some less, like George H.W. Bush.Sure, they were all generally less tax-happy than their Democratic rivals and favored more conservative judges. But they — and their respective power bases — also didn’t agree on everything, and sometimes disagreed on a lot. Frequently, they were battling one another to attain dominance within the party. But they all achieved a period of power and control because they stayed and engaged in those battles.This is what Republicans like Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Mitt Romney of Utah understand — and they were all on the ballot during the Trump years and won handily.If you leave, the people you abhor stay and get to run the whole show. If you stay, you can at least ask questions, offer criticisms, block some objectionable actions and fly the flag for people like you. And things will change — perhaps not immediately for the better, but inevitably.Still, right now, a lot of us are feeling more like Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who seems to be exploring the view that if Mr. Trump does not resign and Republicans don’t help to eject him, she cannot exist as a Republican anymore. As the conservative blogger and my friend Ed Morrissey, who after the Capitol incursion chose to “disaffiliate” from the party, wrote, “It’s impossible to act as though Republicans are republican, especially while its leadership makes clear that it doesn’t care one whit about the party’s own foundational principles.”That may be where many of us — those of us who were explicitly NeverTrump, and even those who were willing to cut the president a lot more slack — wind up.One problem is that, eventually, voters will want change. And when Democrats have been in charge of too many things for too long, even a Republican Party that has moved in a direction that many would describe as, well, deplorable will prove electable.This is what we saw some of in California and Florida last year. California is dominated by Democrats and has been seen to be moving in an ever increasingly liberal direction. But in November, voters there reinstalled Republicans in a bunch of swing congressional districts.In Florida, some Hispanic voters decided that if it was a choice between an authoritarian-inclined Republican Party or a Democratic Party with several high-profile, media-attention-grabbing members willing to proclaim themselves as socialists, they’d take the authoritarians.I don’t want to leave the Republican Party. But I need to believe that if people like me stay, we will have a fighting chance at changing the direction of the party.So elected Republicans need to force Mr. Trump out of office, one way or another, to avoid further attrition in the ranks and the risk that the party devolves into something even worse than what we have seen over the last week.Liz Mair (@LizMair), a strategist for campaigns by Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry, is the founder and president of Mair Strategies, which consulted for Georgia United Victory before the runoff elections. She also served as the Republican National Committee’s online communications director in 2008.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism

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      Supporters of President Trump storm the United States Capitol building.Credit…Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesSkip to contentSkip to site indexHow White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump ExtremismA potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war.Supporters of President Trump storm the United States Capitol building.Credit…Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesSupported byContinue reading the main storyElizabeth Dias and Jan. 11, 2021Updated 10:10 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Before self-proclaimed members of the far-right group the Proud Boys marched toward the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, they stopped to kneel in the street and prayed in the name of Jesus. The group, whose participants have espoused misogynistic and anti-immigrant views, prayed for God to bring “reformation and revival.” They gave thanks for “the wonderful nation we’ve all been blessed to be in.” They asked God for the restoration of their “value systems,” and for the “courage and strength to both represent you and represent our culture well.” And they invoked the divine protection for what was to come.Then they rose. Their leader declared into a bullhorn that the media must “get the hell out of my way.” And then they moved toward the Capitol.The presence of Christian rituals, symbols and language was unmistakable on Wednesday in Washington. There was a mock campaign banner, “Jesus 2020,” in blue and red; an “Armor of God” patch on a man’s fatigues; a white cross declaring “Trump won” in all capitals. All of this was interspersed with allusions to QAnon conspiracy theories, Confederate flags and anti-Semitic T-shirts.The blend of cultural references, and the people who brought them, made clear a phenomenon that has been brewing for years now: that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America. Rather than completely separate strands of support, these groups have become increasingly blended together.This potent mix of grievance and religious fervor has turbocharged the support among a wide swath of Trump loyalists, many of whom describe themselves as participants in a kind of holy war, according to interviews. And many, who are swimming in falsehoods about the presidential election and now the riot itself, said the aftermath of Wednesday’s event has only fueled a deeper sense of victimhood and being misunderstood.Lindsay French, 40, an evangelical Christian from Texas, flew to Washington after she had received what she called a “burning bush” sign from God to participate following her pastor urging congregants to “stop the steal.” “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.“We are tired of being made out to be these horrible people,” she said, acknowledging there was some violence but insisting on the falsehood that Antifa was behind it. Trump supporters gathered near the Capitol during a “Stop the Steal” rally last week in Washington, D.C.Credit…Selcuk Acar/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesTrump supporters invoked God last week as they surged on the U.S. Capitol.Credit…Stephanie Keith/ReutersLike many Republicans in Congress, some evangelical leaders who have been most supportive of Mr. Trump distanced themselves and their faith from the rioters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, called the violence “anarchy.” The siege on the Capitol “has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity,” he said. “Our support of President Trump was based on his policies.” But critics said it was too late to try to separate the white conservative Christian culture that helped push Mr. Trump to power from last week’s violence in Washington.“You can’t understand what happened today without wrestling with Christian Nationalism,” Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said on Wednesday, adding that white evangelical movements have long at least tolerated far-right extremism, well before Mr. Trump. “They provided the political and theological underpinnings of this, and it has allowed anarchy to reign.”In a Facebook video shot in Washington on Monday night, Tennessee pastor Greg Locke referred to himself as part of the “black robe regiment,” a reference to American clergy who were active in the American Revolution. At a rally the next night, Mr. Locke preached to a crowd of Trump supporters in Freedom Plaza, predicting “not just a Great Awakening, but the greatest awakening that we have ever seen.” The riot on Wednesday, carried out by a largely white crowd, also illustrated the racial divide in American Christianity. Hours before the attack on the Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta had been elected to the U.S. Senate after many conservative white Christians tried to paint him as a dangerous radical, even as his campaign was rooted in the traditional moral vision of the Black church. And for years many Black Christians have warned white believers that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on race was going to end badly. “Our cries go unheeded,” Jemar Tisby, the president of a Black Christian collective called the Witness, said. “This is authentic white American Christianity on display,” he said of Wednesday’s event. “The challenge for white Christian America is to examine what they have wrought religiously.”Inside the Capitol, senators who objected to the election results were among the most prominent conservative Christians in their party, including Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Cindy Hyde-Smith. The fruits of the alliance between far-right groups — Christian and otherwise — were clear on Wednesday, before the rioting began, as thousands of Trump supporters gathered to protest the certification of the presidential election results, with Joseph R. Biden Jr. definitively defeating Mr. Trump, even after attempts to discredit the election. Many in attendance were white evangelicals who felt called to travel hundreds of miles from home to Washington.Oren Orr, 31, an arborist from Robbinsville, N.C., where he goes to Santeetlah Baptist Church, rented a car to drive to Washington. He carried his American flag right up below the officers on the bleachers, and his wife had a Christian flag. Mr. Trump could be the last president to believe in Jesus, he said. (Mr. Biden speaks often about his lifelong Catholic faith, and unlike Mr. Trump, attends church services frequently.) Mr. Orr said he brought a baton and a Taser to Washington but did not get them out. “I know the Lord has my back no matter what happens,” he said.As for the ample evidence that many in the crowd were racist, Mr. Orr said, “We get called white supremacists and all this. I have plenty of colored friends. Some of my best friends are from Mexico.”The spread of falsehoods about the integrity of the election — and now the roots of Wednesday’s rioting — have deeply infiltrated conservative Christian circles. Apocalyptic evangelical beliefs about the end of the world and the coming divine judgment blur with QAnon conspiracy theories that falsely assert the country is dominated by deep-state bureaucrats and pedophiles. Abigail Spaulding, a stay-at-home mother of 15 who traveled to the rally with friends from her church in South Carolina, broke down in tears as she spoke about her fears for her children under a Biden administration. She said her husband had explained to their children that when Mr. Biden is sworn in as president, “they can take the Bible and call it hate speech and throw it out.” And she had other worries about Mr. Biden, drawn from Facebook and Twitter — all of which were false. Religion was on the minds of many who gathered in Washington last week to support President Trump.Credit…Kenny Holston for The New York TimesIn Kalamazoo, Mich., Laura Kloosterman, 34, attended mass on Wednesday and prayed that Congress would decline to certify Mr. Biden’s victory. She had read claims online about flawed voting machines undercounting votes for Mr. Trump — there is no evidence for these claims, which Mr. Trump and right-wing voices online have promoted.Ms. Kloosterman follows the evangelical writer and radio host Eric Metaxas, who has repeatedly claimed the election results were fraudulent. Mr. Metaxas, who punched a protester outside the White House last summer, told Mr. Trump in an interview in late November that he would “be happy to die in this fight,” in a conversation about attempts to overturn the election results. “God is with us,” he added.Other supporters of the president have spent months sowing doubts among Christians about fraud. These false beliefs have forged even stronger connections between white evangelicals and other conservative figures. A group called the Jericho March, which has led a series of demonstrations for “election integrity,” held five days of events in Washington that culminated on Wednesday. Last month the group, which included speakers like Mr. Metaxas and Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, marched around the Capitol seven times, modeling their protest on a biblical battle in which the Israelites marched around the city of Jericho until its walls crumbled, letting their armies take the city.Earlier this week, when Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested in Washington on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a historic Black church, his supporters raised more than $100,000 for his legal defense on a Christian fund-raising platform called GiveSendGo. “Many people disagree with GiveSendGo allowing campaigns for people or causes that they personally disagree with, much like people disagreed with the way Jesus showed love to the ‘sinners of society,’” the platform’s co-founder, Jacob Wells, said. “We choose not to side at all and that causes a lot of both sides to hate us.”Since the riot, many who were sympathetic to its cause said they were enraged at the removal of Mr. Trump and others from social media platforms like Twitter, and the deplatforming of the upstart conservative social-media site Parler. They viewed it as part of a broader conspiracy to silence Christianity. And they are looking ahead to make sure that their voices are heard.Adam Phillips, 44, a dry wall contractor from Robbinsville, N.C., had work and couldn’t come to Washington on Wednesday — “The Lord just didn’t see it fit,” he said — but he came to two demonstrations since November, the Stop the Steal march and the Million MAGA March.“It has been obvious for a while that Christians are under suppression, they are under scrutiny by everyone,” he said. “All of the things the country was founded on are under attack, they are trying to get the name of God out of everything, especially the name of Jesus.”Elizabeth Dias reported from Washington and Ruth Graham from New Hampshire.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More