Presidential Election of 2020

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      The Debate Over How Dangerous Trump Rages On

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      “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections,” Adam Przeworski, a political scientist at N.Y.U., wrote in 1991 — a definition that would prove prescient in the wake of the 2020 election.“Outcomes of the democratic process are uncertain, indeterminate ex ante,” Przeworski continued. “There is competition, organized by rules. And there are periodic winners and losers.”Presumably, Donald Trump has no idea who Adam Przeworski is, but Trump refused to accept the Przeworski dictum in the aftermath of his 2020 defeat, claiming victory despite all evidence to the contrary.Trump’s success in persuading a majority of Republicans of the legitimacy of his palpably false claims has revealed the vulnerability of American institutions to a subversion of democratic norms. That much is well known.These questions were gaining salience even before the 2020 election. As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, explains in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity”:The election of Trump is the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines. As the parties have grown racially, religiously, and socially distant from one another, a new kind of social discord has been growing. The increasing political divide has allowed political, public, electoral, and national norms to be broken with little to no consequence. The norms of racial, religious, and cultural respect have deteriorated. Partisan battles have helped organize Americans’ distrust for “the other” in politically powerful ways. In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of “us versus them” and “winning versus losing” is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.Most recently, these questions have been pushed to the fore by two political scientists at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who published “Tyranny of the Minority” a month ago.Their thesis:By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy — one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world. But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all.This authoritarian backlash, Levitsky and Ziblatt write, “leads us to another unsettling truth. Part of the problem we face today lies in something many of us venerate: our Constitution.”Flaws in the Constitution, they argue,now imperil our democracy. Designed in a pre-democratic era, the U.S. Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely thwart majorities, and sometimes even govern them. Institutions that empower partisan minorities can become instruments of minority rule. And they are especially dangerous when they are in the hands of extremist or antidemocratic partisan minorities.The Levitsky and Ziblatt thesis has both strong supporters and strong critics.In an essay published this month, “Vetocracy and the Decline of American Global Power: Minority Rule Is the Order in American Politics Today,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argues:America has become a vetocracy, or rule by veto. Its political system spreads power out very broadly, in ways that give many individual players the power to stop things. By contrast it provides few mechanisms to force collective decisions reflecting the will of the majority.When combined with the extreme degree of polarization in the underlying society, Fukuyama goes on, “this leads to total gridlock where basic functions of government like deliberating on and passing yearly budgets become nearly impossible.”Fukuyama cites the ongoing struggle of House Republicans to elect a speaker — with the far-right faction dead set against a centrist choice — as a case study of vetocracy at work:The ability of a single extremist member of the House to topple the speaker and shut down Congress’ ability to legislate is not the only manifestation of vetocracy on display in 2023. The Senate has a rule that gives any individual senator the right to in effect block any executive branch appointment for any reason.In addition, the Senate requires “a supermajority of 60 votes to call the question, making routine legislating very difficult.”I asked Fukuyama whether America’s current problems stem, to some extent, from the constitutional protection of the interests of minority factions (meant here the way it’s used in Federalist 10).He replied by email: “The large numbers of checks and balances built into our system did not present insuperable obstacles to governance until the deepening of polarization in the mid-1990s.”Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, makes a different argument: “I think that our current problems are directly traceable to deficiencies in the formal structures of the American political system as set out in 1787 and too infrequently amended thereafter.”In his 2008 book, “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” Levinson writes, “I have become ever more despondent about many structural provisions of the Constitution that place almost insurmountable barriers in the way of any acceptable notion of democracy.”In support of his thesis, Levinson asks readers to respond to a series of questions “by way of preparing yourself to scrutinize the adequacy of today’s Constitution”:Do you support giving Wyoming the same number of votes in the Senate as California which has roughly seventy times the population? Are you comfortable with an Electoral College that has regularly placed in the White House candidates who did not get a majority and, in at least two — now three — cases over the past 50 years did not even come in first? Are you concerned that the president might have too much power, whether to spy on Americans without any congressional or judicial authorization or to frustrate the will of the majority of both houses of Congress by vetoing legislation with which he disagrees on political ground?Pessimistic assessments of the capacity of the American political system to withstand extremist challenge are by no means ubiquitous among the nation’s scholars; many point to the strength of the judiciary in rejecting the Trump campaign’s claims of election fraud and to the 2022 defeat of prominent proponents of “the big lie.” In this view, the system of checks and balances is still working.Kurt Weyland, a political scientist at the University of Texas-Austin, is the author of the forthcoming book “Democracy’s Resilience to Populism’s Threat.” Weyland contended by email that instead of treating the “United States’ counter-majoritarian institutions as a big problem, firm checks and balances have served as a safeguard against the very real threats posed by Trump’s populism.”Weyland continued:Without independent and powerful courts; without independent state and city governments; without federalism, which precluded central-gov’t interference in the electoral system; and without a bicameral congress, in which even Republicans slowed down Trump by dragging their feet; without all these aspects of US counter-majoritarianism, Trump could have done significantly more damage to U.S. democracy.Polarization, Wayland argued, is a double-edged sword:In a counter-majoritarian system, it brings stalemate and gridlock that allows a populist leader like Trump to claim, “Only I can do it,” namely cut through this Gordian knot, with “highly problematic” miracle cures like “Build the Wall.’ ”But at the same time, Weyland continued,Polarization has one — unexpected — beneficial effect, namely, to severely limit the popular support that Trump could ever win: Very few Democrats would ever support him! Thus, whereas other undemocratic populists like Peru’s Fujimori, Venezuela’s Chavez, or now El Salvador’s Bukele won overwhelming mass support — 70-90 percent approval — and used it to push aside liberal obstacles to their insatiable power hunger, Trump never even reached 50 percent. A populist who’s not very popular simply cannot do that much damage to democracy.Along similar lines, Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, argues in a 2019 paper, “Populism and the American Party System: Opportunities and Constraints,” that compared with most other democracies, “the U.S. system offers much less opportunity for organized populist parties but more opportunity for populist candidacies.”The two major parties, Lee continues, are more “vulnerable to populist insurgency than at other points in U.S. history because of (1) changes in communications technology, (2) the unpopularity of mainstream parties and party leaders and (3) representation gaps created by an increasingly racialized party system.”At the same time, according to Lee, “the U.S. constitutional system impedes authoritarian populism, just as it obstructs party power generally. But the vulnerability of the major parties to populist insurgency poses a threat to liberal democratic norms in the United States, just as it does elsewhere.”American public opinion, in Lee’s view, “cannot be relied on as a bulwark of liberal rights capable of resisting populism’s tendencies toward authoritarianism and anti-pluralism.”While the U.S. electoral system “has long been unfavorable to insurgent or third parties, including populist parties,” Lee writes, the avenue to political power lies in the primary nomination process:The American system of nominations subjects the major parties to radically open internal competition through primary elections. The combined result of these electoral rules is that populists win more favorable outcomes in intraparty competition than in interparty competition.In one area of agreement with Levitsky and Ziblatt, Lee makes the case that the diminishing — that is, veiled — emphasis of previous generations of Republican leaders on divisive issues of race, ethnicity and immigration provided a crucial opening for Trump.“Before 2016, the national leadership of the Republican and Democratic Parties had been trending toward closer convergence on policy issues relating to race and ethnicity, both in terms of party positions and rhetoric,” she writes, adding that “before 2016, the two parties also did not offer clear alternatives on immigration.”This shift to a covert rather than an overt approach to racial issues created an opening for Trump to run as a broadly “anti-elite” candidate representing the views of the white working class.“Willing to violate norms against the use of racialized rhetoric, Trump was able to offer primary voters a product that other Republican elites refused to supply,” Lee writes. “Those appeals strengthened his populist, anti-elite credentials and probably contributed to his success in winning the nomination.”There is a third line of analysis that places a strong emphasis on the economic upheaval produced by the transition from a manufacturing economy to a technologically based knowledge economy.In their June 2023 article “The Revival of U.S. Populism: How 39 Years of Manufacturing Losses and Educational Gains Reshaped the Electoral Map,” Scott Abrahams and Frank Levy, economists at Louisiana State University and M.I.T., make the case that polarization and institutional gridlock have roots dating back more than four decades:The current revival of right-wing populism in the United States reaches back to 1980, a year that marked a broad shift in national production and the demand for labor. In that year, manufacturing employment began a long decline and the wage gap between college and high school graduates began a long expansion.The result, Abrahams and Levy contend:was a growing geographic alignment of income, educational attainment and, increasingly, cultural values. The alignment reinforced urban/rural and coastal/interior distinctions and contributed to both the politicization of a four-year college degree and the perception of educated “elites” or “coastal elites” — central parts of today’s populist rhetoric.Abrahams and Levy conclude: “If our argument is correct, it has taken almost 40 years to reach our current level of polarization. If history is a guide, it won’t quickly disappear.”Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, argued in an email that the strains on the American political system grow out of the interaction between divisive economic and cultural trends and the empowerment of racial and ethnic minorities: “The inevitable emerging socio-economic divisions in the transition to knowledge societies — propelled by capitalist creative destruction — and the sociocultural kinship divisions develop a politically explosive stew due to the nature of U.S. political institutions.”On one side, Kitschelt wrote, “Technological innovation and economic demand patterns have led to a substitution of humans in routine tasks jobs by ‘code’ and machines — whether in manufacturing or services/white collar occupations. These precipitate wage stagnation and decline.”On the other side, “There is a revolution of kinship relations that got underway with the access of women to higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. This has led to a questioning of traditional paternalistic family relations and triggered a reframing of gender conceptions and relations, as well as the nature and significance of procreation and socialization of the next generation.”The interaction, Kitschelt continued, “of socio-economic anxiety-promoting decline amplified by rapid demographic erosion of the share of white Anglo-Saxon ethnics, and cultural stress due to challenges of paternalist kinship relations and advances of secularization have given rise to the toxic amalgam of white Christian nationalism. It has become a backbone and transmission belt of right-wing populism in the U.S.”At the same time, Kitschelt acknowledged, “Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that it is the circumstances of enslavement at the founding moment of U.S. independence and democracy that created a system of governance that enable a determined minority (the enslavers) to maintain a status quo of domination, exploitation, and dehumanization of a whole tier of members of society which could not be undone within the locked-in web of institutional rules.”To support his argument, Kitschelt cited “the process in which Trump was chosen as U.S. president”:Roughly 10 percent of registered voters nationwide participated in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. The plurality primary winner, Donald Trump, rallied just 3-5 percent of U.S. registered voters to endorse his candidacy and thereby sail on to the Republican Party nomination. These 3-5 percent of the U.S. registered voters — or 2-4 percent of the U.S. adult residential population — then made it possible for Trump to lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College majority.All of which gets us back to the Przeworski dictum with which I began this column, that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”Przeworski’s claim, Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, writes in an essay published last month, “inspired a lot of political scientists to use game theory to determine the conditions under which democracy was ‘self-enforcing’: that is, how everyone’s beliefs and actions might line up to make democracy a self-fulfilling prophecy.”At the same time, Farrell continues, “his argument powerfully suggests a theory of democratic fragility, too.” What happens when “some powerful organized force, such as a political party, may look to overturn democratic outcomes” or “such a force may look to ‘drastically reduce the confidence of other actors in democratic institutions’”?At that point, as the two parties react to each other, Farrell suggests, “democracy can become self-unraveling rather than self-enforcing”:If you (as say the leader of the Republican Party) look to overturn an election result through encouraging your supporters to invade the U.S. Capitol, and claim that the election was a con, then I (as a Democratic Party leader) am plausibly going to guess that my chances of ever getting elected again will shrivel into nonexistence if you gain political power again and are able to rig the system. That may lead me to be less willing to play by the rules, leading to further collapse of confidence on your part and so on, in a downward spiral.In other words, with a majority of Republicans aligned with an authoritarian leader, Democrats will be the group to watch if Trump wins re-election in November 2024, especially so if Republicans win control of both the House and Senate.While such a turn of events would replicate the 2016 election results, Democrats now know much more about what an across-the-board Republican victory would mean as Trump and his allies have more or less announced their plans for 2025 if they win in 2024: the empowerment of a party determined to politicize the civil service, a party committed to use the Department of Justice and other agencies to punish Democrats, a party prepared to change the rules of elections to guarantee the retention of its majorities.In a report last month, “24 for ’24: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics and Tech for Fair and Legitimate 2024 U.S. Elections,” an ad hoc committee convened by the Safeguarding Democracy Project and U.C.L.A. Law School warned:“The 2020 elections confirmed that confidence in the fairness and legitimacy of the election system in the United States can no longer be taken for granted. Without the losing side accepting the results of a fair election as legitimate, the social fabric that holds democracy together can fray or tear.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold

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      No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics.Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jordan had “become part of the solution, not part of the problem” with regard to the chaos among House Republicans and dismissed Jordan’s contempt for the law and attempt to overturn the presidential election as non-issues. “If I held that grudge, I wouldn’t have friends in the conference,” Crenshaw said. “I was on an island there.”Crenshaw isn’t the only supposedly reasonable Republican member of Congress willing to look past the fact that the leading candidate for speaker of the House was an active participant in a scheme to subvert the Constitution and install a defeated president in office for a second term.“Even some of the Republicans who have vowed, publicly and privately, to fight him at every turn are beginning to get weak knees about supporting him, fearing that collective will is dwindling as their numbers decrease,” Politico reports. Jordan’s allies have also expressed their view that the opposition to his bid for speaker will melt away as the actual vote on the floor comes near.Once again, Republicans are confronted with a deeply transgressive figure with open contempt for the institutions of American democracy, flawed as they may be. Once again, Republicans swear they’ll resist his ascent. Once again, Republicans cave, more fearful of losing a primary — or coming in for criticism from conservative media — than they are of virtually anything else.And each time they cave, these more moderate or mainstream Republicans make the situation a little worse, for themselves and for the country. Kevin McCarthy bowed to expediency and pressure when he voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the House of Representatives. He did the same when he empowered the most gleeful insurrectionists in his attempt to gain the speaker’s gavel. Now he’s out, and Jim Jordan is on the rise.If he wins, Jordan may not last in the position. The kind of speaker who must twist arms and make threats using conservative media to win the job is, in the modern House, not the kind of speaker who survives long beyond the next election cycle, even if his party holds its majority.Who will replace Jim Jordan if and when he falls? It could well be someone worse. And it will probably be someone worse, because there is nothing happening inside the Republican Party right now that can keep it from falling even farther into the abyss.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Oprah Floated a 2020 Presidential Ticket With Mitt Romney, Book Says

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      Ms. Winfrey wanted to form the independent ticket to stop Donald J. Trump, according to a forthcoming book. Mr. Romney listened to the pitch but passed on the idea, the biography says.Concerned that the Democratic field wasn’t up to the task of stopping President Donald J. Trump in 2020, Oprah Winfrey pitched Mitt Romney on the idea of running for president as an independent, with her as his running mate, according to a forthcoming biography of the Republican senator from Utah.Ms. Winfrey floated the unusual ticket in a phone call she placed to Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann Romney, in November 2019, according to an excerpt from the book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” that was shared with The New York Times.Mr. Romney at least listened to the idea. (It was Oprah calling, after all.) He “heard the pitch, and told her he was flattered, but that he’d have to pass,” the author, McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, writes.Liz Johnson, an aide to Mr. Romney, declined to comment on Monday. A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey said in a statement that she had urged Mr. Romney to run, but not with her.“In November 2019, Ms. Winfrey called Senator Romney to encourage him to run on an independent ticket,” the statement said. “She was not calling to be part of the ticket and was never considering running herself.”Mr. Coppins’s book was based on hours of interviews with Mr. Romney, as well as emails, texts and journals that the senator had been saving to potentially write a memoir. Realizing he could not be objective about himself, Mr. Romney has said he chose to have a journalist write about him instead.Ms. Winfrey’s interest in forming an independent ticket with Mr. Romney, which was reported on Monday by Axios, is among several dishy items from the book, which is to be released on Oct. 24.She has known the Romneys since 2012, when she interviewed them at their lakeside home in New Hampshire as Mr. Romney was running for president. Ms. Winfrey had also seen Ms. Romney at various social events, and was “especially fond” of her, according to the book.On the phone with Ms. Romney, Ms. Winfrey explained that Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, was preparing to enter the race and had approached her about joining his ticket. Before she decided, she wanted to gauge Mr. Romney’s interest.She doubted that Joseph R. Biden Jr. or Pete Buttigieg could beat Mr. Trump and was “certain” that Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts could not, according to the book.Ms. Romney responded that her husband would not run for president in 2020, either as a Republican or as an independent, Mr. Coppins writes. Mr. Romney also politely batted down the idea, according to the book.An aide to Mr. Bloomberg declined to comment.Ms. Winfrey has at times been mentioned as a potential presidential candidate herself.In 2018, after she delivered a rousing speech at the Golden Globes, some were clamoring for her to run. But she told “60 Minutes Overtime” that she would not become a candidate in 2020 even though “I had a lot of wealthy men calling, telling me that they would run my campaign and raise $1 billion for me.”“I am actually humbled by the fact that people think that I could be a leader of the free world, but it’s just not in my spirit,” she said. “It’s not in my DNA.”Mr. Romney, 76, recently announced that he would not seek re-election in 2024, saying he wanted to make way for a “new generation of leaders.” He strongly suggested that Mr. Trump and President Biden should also bow out, arguing that neither was effectively leading his party to confront the “critical challenges” the nation faces. More

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      The Plot Trump Lost

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump for longer than 30 seconds? Longer than a clip sailing by in a tweet or a TikTok or packaged on the evening news? Lovers and haters alike seem filled to the brim with information about this man, unable to take in any more or alter their view of him.If you haven’t lately, he talks about the 2020 election a lot, still, but in ways that are a little different from before.Onstage, sometimes he refers to it with a certain subversive lightness, like another thing he’s not supposed to repeat but does, like a punchline. “You speak up a little bit about the election — ‘He’s an insurrectionist,’” he said in Waterloo, Iowa, this month, to laughs.But sometimes the 2020 election as Mr. Trump describes it sounds like a crisis he cannot move beyond. “Had the election not … turned out the way it did — I’ll try to be nice,” he began in Iowa. “Had it not turned out the way it did — you know when I say that, I mean,” he said, then with more emphasis, “had the election not been rigged.”What if, what if. He was in an open-air warehouse on a windy, 51-degree Saturday and would return to the hypothetical again that day — had the election not been rigged, if the election hadn’t been rigged. The enthused crowd sat; eight Secret Service agents stood, flanking an elevated Mr. Trump and staring off into crisscrossing directions under an arched ceiling. The overall effect of the event — standing security detail, a big American flag against a cinder-block wall, “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys playing and at least eight people in T-shirts with the Trump mug shot on them — was like a concentrate of a Trump rally. We’ve been doing this so long as a country, he and we have become more abstract, operating in shorthand and fragments of the past.Onstage, he seamlessly moved between prepared text to talking about whatever was on his mind, then back in disorienting intimations, suggestions, asides and loops. “Household incomes rose by a record $6,000 a year under Trump, right? I love that mug shot. I love that beautiful woman right there with the mug shot,” he said at another event that afternoon, in a hotel convention center in Cedar Rapids.He’ll talk about how the day he stopped calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” was a good one for her, she celebrated that night, now he calls her beautiful, because she’s a great beauty — then with no variation or substantive transition beyond the word “but,” he goes back to prepared stuff about how the 30-year mortgage rate recently hit a 23-year high. A long riff about what prosecutors aren’t doing to the radical left, straight back into “but we delivered record increases in real family income.”Amid these digressions and jokes and tales about negotiations with foreign leaders, he’ll bring back a menacing clarity of voice so that each precise word about the indictments against him is all you can hear or think: “People realize that they’re fake and phony and they’re political.”As he used to say, he once had a nice life, which he gave up for this. But Mr. Trump said it the other night in West Palm Beach with the added dimension that “instead, I sit it in courtrooms.” He talks about how all the cases against him are connected and how they’re really after you, the voter, and he’s just standing in the way — though each time he said this in Iowa, his heart didn’t seem quite in it.He brings a lot more emotion to tracing everything going wrong in the world back to: What if they hadn’t rigged the election? Then, in the dream sequences that pepper Mr. Trump’s speeches, there would be no inflation, no war in Ukraine, no bad Afghanistan withdrawal. Forget what we’ll do now or what we should have done then.The broad themes Mr. Trump is working with right now are that Mr. Biden picked economic policies that are crazy and because the Afghanistan withdrawal was so bad, the world has fallen apart — but with 2020 always lurking nearby. “All these things wouldn’t have happened if the election weren’t rigged,” he said in Cedar Rapids. “If the election weren’t rigged, you wouldn’t have Ukraine, you wouldn’t have had any of it. It’s so sad what they’ve done. There’s plenty of evidence. It’s all there. You know it.” In Florida last week, he added one to the mix: Hamas would never have attacked Israel. “You’re in a different world,” he said in West Palm Beach, “and it’s getting worse.”Being assigned to one of the juries in these pending Trump cases would change someone’s life — a dividing line between the past and future. “Don’t use your real names with each other,” the judge told jurors at the beginning of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial. “My advice to you is not to identify yourselves, not now and not for a long time,” he told them on the last day.“When I would get in my car, I was like, ‘I just left that, and I have to just go do my job now?’” one member of the Fulton County special grand jury told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I just know things that are hard to know.’”If people seem to be unable to take in more information about Mr. Trump and if the election is shaping up to be a familiar repeat, the year ahead will not be. He views the world as one of perception, to be worked over and over again until it bends. To serve as a juror in this random selected position of authority, tasked with assessing what happened, for it to be your responsibility to step outside yourself and whatever you think about Mr. Trump and make decisions about him and the law is a weight that only a few dozen people will know. The rest of us will be outside in the chaos of perception, trying to make sense of it.And he’ll be inside and outside, perhaps still revisiting the decisive moment of his defeat and linking it with anything that’s gone wrong. “We would have had a deal with Iran. We would have had no inflation. Russia would have never ever in a million years gone into Ukraine,” he said in Waterloo. His sense of what if, what if, can draw a listener back further, to think about how much “what if” still shapes politics.The entire Republican Party has, for nearly a decade now, operated on a dream sequence of the possibility of passive collapse. What if he just went away? When Joe Biden ran in 2020, his campaign looked to correct the decisive mistake of the past: Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. That was not, Mr. Biden often suggested, who we were. The implicit promise was the restoration of morality and normality. What if the 2020 election could be a reset?It’s easy to follow all these dream sequences into another: What if Mr. Trump could just return to New York, had never run for president, were no longer talking in loops? What if the country didn’t have to live through a remix of the 2020 election or change people’s lives by putting them on juries or live in the unknown we have not yet really reckoned with of what it will be like to live through the trials of our former president?This election seems like the one before only on the surface. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and the rest of us keep getting older; everything and everyone seems a little fried. Eight years in, there’s nothing that weird about seeing people wearing T-shirts with his mug shot staring back at him while a Backstreet Boys song from 1999 plays, the entire Republican field sounding like echoes of Mr. Trump as he talks about Mrs. Clinton, moving in and out of the present and back in time sonically.Mr. Trump remembers what things used to be like. “A normal politician gets indicted, and we’ve seen it hundreds of times over the years,” he said in Iowa, though he’s done versions of this elsewhere, too.He described that guy’s approach after getting “the pink slip” and dropped his voice into a washed monotone. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce that I am going home to my family. I will fight, I will fight, fight, fight for the rest of my life.’”“Do you understand? This is standard,” he said. “With me, it’s different.”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump’s Remarks on Hezbollah and Netanyahu Prompt Bipartisan Outcry

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      Republican rivals and the White House were among those to roundly condemn the former president for his characterization of the Lebanese militant group.Former President Donald J. Trump drew scorn from both sides of the political aisle on Thursday for remarks that he made one day earlier criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and referring to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militant group, as “very smart.”During a speech to his supporters in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Wednesday, he weighed in on the Hamas attacks on Israel, the worst experienced by America’s closest Middle East ally in half a century.Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group, has clashed with Israeli forces in the days after Hamas fighters from Gaza attacked border areas in southern Israel, intensifying concerns that the country could be drawn into a conflict on a second front.“You know, Hezbollah is very smart,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re all very smart.”He took swipes at Mr. Netanyahu on the “Brian Kilmeade Show,” a Fox News Radio show, broadcast on Thursday, arguing that intelligence lapses by Israel had left it vulnerable to the sweeping attack, kidnappings and slaughter of civilians leading to the war.A broad spectrum of political rivals condemned Mr. Trump on Thursday, including the White House and several of his Republican primary opponents.“Statements like this are dangerous and unhinged,” Andrew Bates, the deputy White House press secretary, said in a statement. “It’s completely lost on us why any American would ever praise an Iran-backed terrorist organization as ‘smart.’ Or have any objection to the United States warning terrorists not to attack Israel.”While filing paperwork on Thursday to appear on the Republican primary ballot in New Hampshire, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in national polls, also admonished his main rival.“You’re not going to find me throwing verbal grenades at Israeli leadership,” said Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign shared a clip Wednesday night of Mr. Trump’s Hezbollah remarks on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.Former Vice President Mike Pence similarly objected to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, saying that his former boss was sending the wrong message.“Well look, this is no time for the former president or any other American leader to be sending any other message than America stands with Israel,” Mr. Pence said during a radio interview with “New Hampshire Today.”Mr. Pence disputed Mr. Trump’s characterization of Hezbollah and pointed out that Mr. Trump’s compliments to a brutal figure were not new: Mr. Trump referred to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a “genius” and “very savvy” after Russia invaded Ukraine last year. And as president, Mr. Trump praised Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, as “very honorable.”“Look, Hezbollah are not smart,” Mr. Pence said on Thursday. “They’re evil, OK.”Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat who is a national advisory board member for President Biden’s re-election campaign, slammed Mr. Trump in a statement on Thursday.“No true friend of Israel, the Jewish people or of peace would praise Hezbollah just days after what President Biden and Jewish leaders have called the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust,” Mr. Pritzker said.In a statement on Thursday, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, defended Mr. Trump’s comments. He accused the Biden administration of telegraphing its concerns about the potential for a Hezbollah offensive in northern Israel, and he cited a background briefing that a senior defense official gave to the media on Monday.But the Israeli Army had already been engaged in clashes with armed militants along the country’s volatile northern frontier for several days. On Sunday, the day before the briefing, The Associated Press reported that Hezbollah had fired dozens of rockets and shells at three Israeli positions in a disputed area along Lebanon’s border with the Golan Heights.“Hezbollah has operated there for decades,” Mr. Bates said. “And the United States’ words of deterrence have been welcomed across the board in Israel — unlike some other words that come to mind.”Mr. Trump, who has frequently sought to cast himself as a champion for Israel, maligned Mr. Netanyahu on multiple occasions in recent days.On Wednesday in Florida he said that Israel had in 2020 opted out of participating in the U.S. drone strike that killed Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who the Pentagon said had been planning attacks on Americans across the region — despite its coordination on the plan.“But I’ll never forget,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing.”In the “Brian Kilmeade Show” interview, the former president criticized Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence as being poorly prepared for the attacks by Hamas on Saturday.“Thousands of people knew about it, and they let this slip by,” he said. “That was not a good thing for him or for anybody.”Mr. DeSantis said that Mr. Trump had crossed the line with his attack on Mr. Netanyahu.“We all need to be on the same page,” he said. “Now is not the time to air personal grievances about an Israeli prime minister. Now is the time to support their right to defend themselves to the hilt.”Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who are also challenging Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination, condemned his remarks as well.“Shame on you, Donald,” Mr. Hutchinson wrote on X. “Your constant compliments to dictators, terrorist groups, and evil-doers are beneath the office you seek and not reflective of the American character.”Speaking to reporters in New Hampshire, Mr. Burgum said that “smart” was not how he would describe Hezbollah or Hamas.“I’d call them barbaric,” he said. “I’d call them inhumane. I’d call it unthinkable. But what Hezbollah and Hamas have done, but I don’t think I’d characterize them in any positive fashion — not when you see this incredible ability to conduct the atrocities that most of us would find as unthinkable and unimaginable.”In an interview on CNN on Thursday, Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, told the anchor Wolf Blitzer: “Only a fool would make those kinds of comments. Only a fool would give comments that could give aid and comfort to Israel’s adversary in this situation.”While campaigning in New Hampshire on Thursday, Nikki Haley criticized Mr. Trump in response to a question from a voter during a town hall. “I don’t want him hitting Netanyahu,” she said, adding: “Who cares what he thinks about Netanyahu? This is not about that. This is about the people of Israel.”Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Prosecutors Ask if Trump Will Blame His Lawyers as Defense in Election Case

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      The special counsel asked a judge to require the former president to disclose whether he would blame poor legal advice for his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Tuesday to force former President Donald J. Trump to tell them months before he goes to trial on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election whether he intends to defend himself by blaming the stable of lawyers around him at the time for giving him poor legal advice.In a motion filed to the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, the prosecutors sought an order that would compel Mr. Trump to tell them by Dec. 18 if he plans to pursue the blame-the-lawyers strategy — known as an advice of counsel defense — at his federal election interference trial, which is now set to begin in March in Federal District Court in Washington.Both Mr. Trump and his current team of lawyers have “repeatedly and publicly announced” that they were going to use such arguments as “a central component of his defense,” prosecutors told Judge Chutkan in their filing. They said they wanted a formal order forcing Mr. Trump to tell them his plans by mid-December “to prevent disruption of the pretrial schedule and delay of the trial.”The early notification could also give prosecutors a tactical edge in the case. Defendants who pursue advice of counsel arguments waive the shield of attorney-client privilege that would normally protect their dealings with their lawyers. And, as prosecutors reminded Judge Chutkan, if Mr. Trump heads in this direction, he would have to give them not only all of the “communications or evidence” concerning the lawyers he plans to use as part of his defense, but also any “otherwise-privileged communications” that might be used to undermine his claims.Lawyers have been at the heart of the election interference case almost from the moment prosecutors first began issuing grand jury subpoenas to witnesses in the spring of 2022. Many of the subpoenas sought information about lawyers like John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, who entered Mr. Trump’s orbit around the time of the election and were instrumental in advising him about a scheme to create false slates of electors that declared him the winner of key swing states that had actually been won by his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr.The subpoenas also sought information about other lawyers, like Jenna Ellis and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had not only advised Mr. Trump on the false elector plan, but had helped him advance claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud.Moreover, lawyers from both Mr. Trump’s administration and his presidential campaign proved to be key witnesses in the investigation that began under the Justice Department and then was handed off to prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith.And when charges were finally filed against Mr. Trump, accusing him of three overlapping conspiracies to remain in power despite the will of the voters, the indictment identified six unnamed co-conspirators — most, if not all, of whom were lawyers as well.In their motion to Judge Chutkan, prosecutors noted that at least 25 witnesses in their sprawling investigation had withheld information based on assertions of attorney-client privilege. Those people, the prosecutors said, included Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators, some of his former campaign employees, some “outside attorneys” and “even a family member of the defendant,” who was not further identified.While prosecutors acknowledged that they were not entirely sure if Mr. Trump intended to raise an advice of counsel defense — or whether he was even legally entitled to do so — they did take note of the public statements that he and his current legal team have made suggesting that such arguments might be used at trial.The prosecutors pointed out that three days after Mr. Trump was arraigned in the case, one of his lawyers, John F. Lauro, made the rounds of the Sunday TV news shows, describing how Mr. Trump had been charged for “following legal advice” from Mr. Eastman, whom he described as “an esteemed scholar.”Weeks later, in an online interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, prosecutors said, Mr. Trump himself made similar claims. In their filing, they wrote that Mr. Trump claimed he had “some lawyers” who had advised him “that a particular course of action described in the indictment was appropriate.”In a separate filing on Tuesday, prosecutors sought to get a jump on what is certain to be the difficult process of picking a jury for the trial.Citing Mr. Trump’s “continued use of social media as a weapon of intimidation” — an issue that has come up in the government’s request for a gag order to be placed on the former president — the prosecutors asked Judge Chutkan to impose restrictions on information about potential jurors and those who are ultimately picked to serve.The prosecutors asked that no one involved in the case be allowed to publicly disclose information about the jurors gleaned during the selection process, in order to protect them “from intimidation and fear.”They also asked Judge Chutkan to consider arranging “for jurors to gain discreet entry into and out of the courthouse” once the trial begins. 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      In Search of Kamala Harris

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      All the conditions seemed right for a chance to reset the narrative.At the Munich Security Conference in February, amid rising international angst about Russia’s war in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris led a delegation of Americans, including around 50 lawmakers from both parties. She spent her first day in Germany in seclusion, preparing for the next 48 hours: meetings with European leaders the first day and a keynote speech the next in the ornate ballroom of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof. When she emerged, head high and shoulders back, Harris exuded what her staff members have argued is a particular comfort with her role on the international stage. There, they say, she is respected.“I spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor,” Harris said in her speech, in which she announced that the United States had formally concluded that Russia had committed crimes against humanity. “I know firsthand the importance of gathering facts and holding them up against the law.”As I scanned the crowd from a balcony in the ballroom, its makeup was a visual reminder of the shattered glass ceilings in Harris’s wake. They were nearly all men; she’s a woman. They were nearly all white; she’s Black and South Asian, a first-generation American from the Bay Area.In 2017, when Harris arrived in Washington as a senator from California, these contrasts were supposed to make her the Next Face of the Party, the rising star with an inside track to be the next Democratic presidential nominee. But after a disappointing 2020 campaign, and the reputational sting that has lasted ever since, Harris has often been a politician in search of a moment, rather than a leader defining this one.In Munich, it was another case of what could have been. Harris’s stilted delivery of her speech caused the international audience to miss certain applause lines. Her chief of staff, seated in the front row, tried to start some clapping herself, but the members of the Biden administration in the audience only tepidly joined her efforts. Harris returned to Washington a day earlier than originally scheduled. Later, the reason for the switch became clear: President Biden was secretly traveling to Kyiv. The impact on the vice president was all too familiar. Her three-day trip to Munich, intended to be a showcase, would be largely ignored.Biden and Harris should — theoretically — be entering the 2024 contest riding high. Democrats staved off a “red wave” in the 2022 midterms and continue to perform well in special elections and on ballot referendums, driven by a backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, poll after poll shows Biden, who will be 81 in November, locked in a close race with his most likely opponent, Donald Trump, and hounded by voter concerns about his advanced age and his ability to complete a second four-year term.But if Biden’s age is the Democrats’ explicit electoral challenge, Harris, 59 this month, is the unspoken one. Three years after she and Biden were presented as a package deal, a two-for-one special that included a younger, nonwhite candidate to counterbalance Biden’s shortcomings, Democrats have not embraced the president in waiting. In interviews with more than 75 people in the vice president’s orbit, there is little agreement about Harris at all, except an acknowledgment that she has a public perception problem, a self-fulfilling spiral of bad press and bad polls, compounded by the realities of racism and sexism. This year, an NBC News poll found that 49 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of Harris, with the lowest net-negative rating for a vice president since the poll began in 1989.Vice President Kamala Harris and President Biden during a recent meeting with the presidential advisory board on historically Black colleges and universities.Susan Walsh/Associated PressRepublican presidential candidates like former Ambassador Nikki Haley have already argued that a vote for Biden next November is a vote for a President Kamala Harris. Trump recently gave an interview to the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he mocked Harris’s speaking style and also said aloud what many people seem to be whispering: that the closer Harris gets to the presidency, the further she has become from convincing the country that she is presidential.“This is not a president of the United States’ future,” Trump said in a preview of Republican attacks against her in the coming election. “And I think they probably have some kind of a primary and other people will get involved.”Trump isn’t the only one floating a Harris-replacement scenario. In September, New York Magazine published “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris,” and a Washington Post column argued that “Biden could encourage a more open vice-presidential selection process that could produce a stronger running mate.” In the same week, two Democratic House members — Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party titan and fellow Bay Area native who has known Harris for decades, though the two are not particularly close — evaded saying on CNN whether they thought Harris remained the strongest running mate for Biden in 2024. (Raskin, after receiving backlash, later went on a different network to clarify his support).Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the progressive who ran against Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary, demurred early this year when asked by a local radio station if Biden should keep Harris as his running mate in 2024, saying, “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team.” (Warren later called Harris twice to apologize. Harris initially ignored the calls, CNN reported at the time.)The doubts have prompted a public-relations blitz. Harris was featured 13 times in a video announcing Biden’s re-election bid. White House senior advisers have exhorted Democrats to stop criticizing Harris to the press, on the record or off, telling them that it’s harmful to the overall ticket. Emily’s List, the liberal advocacy group that supports Democratic female candidates who champion abortion rights, pledged to spend “tens of millions” of dollars in 2024 specifically to support Harris. The communications department of the Democratic National Committee has made a point to blast out announcements of her public events.And the people closest to Harris, the tight-knit group of Black women in national Democratic politics who helped make her Biden’s choice for vice president, are increasingly becoming incensed with how she’s being treated. Their disgust is as close as you’ll get to hearing it from Harris herself.Laphonza Butler, a former adviser of the vice president and the president of Emily’s List until Gov. Gavin Newsom of California appointed her to the U.S. Senate after the death of Dianne Feinstein, said the Harris naysayers in her party need to “cut the bullshit.” “It’s disrespectful,” Butler told me in an interview before her Senate appointment. “And the thing that makes it more disrespectful is that we’re talking about a historic V.P. who has been a high-quality partner and asset to the country at a time when everything is at stake. Right now is the time to respect what she’s done and what she brings.”LaTosha Brown, a founder of Black Voters Matter, went a step further. She said she’s convinced that some in the party — and in the White House — do not want Harris to succeed. “I think there have been saboteurs within the administration,” she said. “I think that they are worried about the age contrast. And they are worried about Kamala outshining Biden.”Over eight months of reporting this article, I conducted interviews with Harris’s former staff members, advisers, childhood friends, family members, senior figures in the Democratic Party and key players in the White House and Biden’s re-election campaign — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing the vice president and the White House.I called top Democratic pollsters to gauge whether a Harris-led party kept them up at night. I talked with members of Biden’s vice-presidential selection committee to ask the question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to: Was Kamala Harris really chosen as a running mate because she had the right identity at the right time, the highest-profile diversity hire in America?In nearly three years in office, Harris has stood dutifully by Biden’s side. But in terms of her own political profile, she has remained a vacuum of negative space, a vessel for supporters and detractors to fill as they choose, not least because she refuses to do so herself.“My career, for the most part, has not been one of being focused on giving lovely speeches or trying to pass a bill,” Harris said to me in an interview in Chicago after an event for Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group that has endorsed Biden and Harris for re-election. “And so that’s how I approach public policy. I’m probably oriented to think about, What does this actually mean, as opposed to how does this just sound?”Harris has leaned on this sentiment for years, even as lovely speeches are considered core to the job of president. It reflects a figure who is fundamentally uncomfortable with having to make an affirmative case for herself to the public — and feels she shouldn’t have to. Since 2019, the year I first covered Harris for The Times, I have often asked her variations of the same questions about her vision for the future and where it fits within the Democratic Party. Sometimes I can sense the frustrations of an elected official who clearly is skeptical of the press — a career prosecutor who is more comfortable asking pressing questions than giving straightforward answers.In Chicago, I directly placed in front of her the question others had only insinuated.“When someone asks, ‘What does Vice President Kamala Harris bring to the ticket?’ what is that clear answer?” I asked. Her team made clear it would be my final question. “Were you in this room of 2,000 people?” she asked. I nodded.“Did you see them cheering and standing?”“Yes.”“That’s what I say.”She stood up and walked out of the room.The unofficial end to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign came four months before she formally dropped out. In late July 2019, at a Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, the California senator faced an unexpected attack from Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who has since left Congress — and the party.“The bottom line is, Senator Harris, when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives, you did not,” Gabbard said to Harris, arguing that the former prosecutor, who had criticized Biden for creating policies that contributed to mass incarceration, was also part of the problem. ‘‘She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.’’ The left-wing critique that “Kamala is a cop” had been raging on social media for months, complete with a meme that depicted Harris handcuffing a child, a viral interview where she laughed about smoking marijuana and a photo in which Harris donned a police jacket during her time as California’s attorney general. But Harris was rarely forced to answer it directly, and not in such a public setting, from a candidate she considered beneath her. “I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor but actually doing the work,” Harris said onstage, broadly defending her record, citing the re-entry program she started as attorney general. Gabbard came back at her: “People who suffered under your reign as prosecutor — you owe them an apology.” After the debate, Harris was more dismissive. “This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I’m a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I’d be on the stage and take some hits tonight,” she said on CNN. “When people are at 0 or 1 percent or whatever she might be at.”Biden and Harris during a Democratic presidential primary debate in July 2019.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesHer response did little to quell the line of criticism, but it did expose a fundamental fact about Harris: In the last five years, as social movements have shifted the Democrats’ message on criminal justice and public safety leftward, the figure whose career seems to speak the most to that conversation has refused to lead it.In 2019, when Harris was running for president, she released a criminal-justice plan six months into her campaign, after rivals like Biden, Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey had already done so, setting the terms of the debate. Advisers privy to campaign details said the delay was caused by the candidate’s tendency to get pulled in multiple directions from outside voices, even on the issue to which she had dedicated her career. Some of this spilled into public view, including when Harris was asked in April 2019 whether convicted felons should be able to vote from prison.“I think we should have that conversation,” she said on CNN, only to back off the next day.The episode was an outward expression of an inner conflict. Unlike Biden, who also faced questions about his tough-on-crime past during the 2020 presidential primary, Harris craved the approval of the party’s left wing, particularly the class of liberal, college-educated women who had grown more interested in Warren’s unabashed progressivism. Brown, of Black Voters Matter, said Harris is “absolutely a progressive.” Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino and a longtime political ally in California, said Harris is neither a moderate nor a progressive, but “ideologically pragmatic.” Jamal Simmons, who served as Harris’s communications director before leaving the role at the beginning of this year, suggested that her identity lies elsewhere. “She’s a Christian, but strength is her religion.”In September 2019, Harris told me in an interview that the criticism of her record had taken an emotional toll. It feels “awful,” she said. “I understand it intellectually. Emotionally, it’s hurtful,” Harris said at the time. “I know what motivated me to become a prosecutor, I know what motivated me to do the kind of work we did, and I know that it was groundbreaking work.”The problem is, outside her record in law enforcement, Harris does not have much of a legislative history to be judged on — even Barack Obama served eight years in the Illinois Statehouse. She was elected to the Senate on the same night in 2016 that Trump beat Hillary Clinton. After just two years in the Senate, she was already a presidential candidate — pitching herself as a bridge between the party’s progressive and moderate wings. In her current role as vice president, Harris is a professional support act, in a position that has both made her more visible and given her less of a distinctive voice.“I love my job,” Harris told me in Chicago. “There are certain opportunities that come only with a position like being vice president of the United States to uplift the voices of the people in a way that I think matters and makes a difference.”When Harris’s name was first introduced on the national political stage in 2009, it was accompanied by a set of sky-high expectations. The week before Obama was inaugurated as president, the PBS journalist Gwen Ifill name-checked Harris during an appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman,” adding rocket fuel for Harris’s political ambitions. Ifill said Harris, who was the San Francisco district attorney at the time, was “brilliant” and “tough.” Then she went further: “They call her the ‘female Barack Obama.’”But that label, and the expectations that came with it, would also have a downside. Harris was not the “female Obama,” nor was she the mixed-race Hillary Clinton, the only other woman who has come this close to the presidency. Without a clear ideological brand, and because she has avoided the issue with which she has firsthand expertise, the historic nature of Harris’s role seems to have boxed her in. A year away from the election and a heartbeat away from the presidency, Harris is an avatar for the idea of representation itself, a litmus test for its political power and its inherent limits.Harris in 2004, when she was the San Francisco district attorney.Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesTo that end, the facts of her life — born to immigrant parents who met as activists in Berkeley, raised in the Bay Area amid the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, studied at Howard University, one of the country’s premier historically Black institutions — help explain why this vice president not only looks different, but is different too.She wears her self-belief with pride. And she always has, according to family members who attend her Sunday dinners, childhood friends who grew up with her in Oakland and Harris herself. “I grew up when Aretha Franklin was telling me I was young, gifted and Black,” Harris told me. “I will tell you this, and maybe it’s a radical notion. I have never believed that I don’t belong somewhere, and I was raised to believe that I belong anywhere that I choose to go.”Harris, in this way, is the antithesis of Obama. While he was defined by a sense of alienation growing up among his mother’s white family and found refuge in Black communities as an adult in Chicago, Harris’s journey bears no such resemblance. Her Bay Area childhood was rooted in Black affirmation and community, even as her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, remained close to her family in India and kept Hindu traditions in the home. If anything, Harris’s childhood stands out for its insulation from whiteness, more multiracial and multiethnic than strictly Black and white. “I remember we were in middle school just sitting on the bed, and she walked me through her name, K-a-m-a-l-a D-e-v-i H-a-r-r-i-s,” says Cynthia Bagby, a childhood friend from Oakland. “She was very clear about her heritage, where her mother was from and what it meant. She’s always been one of those people that’s like, ‘This is who I am. Deal with it.’”But Harris is also conscious of being “ghettoized” — which is how one close Biden adviser described her fear of being put into a box that was solely ascribed to her race or gender. Throughout the majority of her career, the substance was never in question: She was a prosecutor, a similar early career track as other Democratic women in the Senate, including Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. But Harris always came with an air of star power — Ifill’s label, a network of Bay Area donors and her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” which introduced her to a national audience by highlighting her criminal-justice philosophy.“I came up with the phrase,” Harris proudly reminded me during our interview in Chicago. “I proposed we should ask, Are we smart on crime? And in asking that question, measure our effectiveness similar to how the private sector does,” she said. I told Harris that I read the book and came away struck by how differently she — and Democrats — talk about criminal justice now, 14 years later. And like Gabbard, I decided to ask her how I should think about the changes in her philosophy. Were they “an evolution based on new evidence? Or is that a kind of tacit admission that the view from 20 years ago might have been incorrect?” I asked.“Why don’t we break it down to which part you’re talking about, and then I can tell you,” she said, leaning forward.I mentioned the elimination of cash bail, which Harris embraced during her run for president but never during her time in California.“I think it depends on what kind of crime you’re talking about, to be honest,” she said.I tried to ask another way.“When you think about what changed from then to now, is there anything you look back and say, I wish we did differently?”“You have to be more specific,” Harris said.By this point, the vice president would not break eye contact, and suddenly I had more in common with Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh than I ever expected. Just as in those Senate confirmation hearings, Harris’s tone was perfectly pitched, firm but not menacing — confrontational but not abrasive, just enough for you to know she thought these questions were a waste of her time.I asked her where she would define herself politically on a spectrum of moderate to progressive.Harris during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation process in 2018, when she served in the Senate.Damon Winter/The New York Times“Why don’t you define each one for me, and then I can tell you where I fit,” she responded. “If you want to say, for example, that believing that working people should receive a fair wage and be treated with dignity and that there is dignity in all work, well then, I don’t know what label do you give that one. If you believe that parents should have affordable child care? I’m not sure what the label is for that.”“The labels are used as kind of proxies for kind of root-cause conversations,” I said. “Progressives believe that structural inequality is such that it has to be upended. Liberals are thinking more about working within a system.”“Well, name the issue and then I’ll tell you,” she said.“OK, inequality,” I proposed.“Let’s just take the African American experience from slavery on. And we don’t have to even go back that far to to understand where the inequality came from,” she said, listing redlining, the Tulsa riots, the G.I. Bill. “There were issues that were about policy and practice that excluded, purposely, people based on their race.”“But one of the quotes I most remember from your presidential run was you saying, when asked what you believe in, that you weren’t trying to restructure society. How do you solve those kind of deep systemic inequalities?”“I think you have to be more specific,” she parried, “because I’m not really into labels.”The words had barely left Joe Biden’s mouth before Representative Maxine Waters picked up the phone. “What are we going to do?” she asked Leah Daughtry, a longtime operative at the Democratic National Committee and, more important, one of the chief conveners of the party’s informal network of influential Black women. It was March 2020, during the final Democratic presidential debate between Biden and Bernie Sanders, in which Biden tried to wrap up the nomination with an explicit appeal to the party’s base. “Biden just said he was going to pick a woman to be his running mate,” Waters informed her, before repeating her question. “What are we going to do?”The phone call was the origin point of a two-pronged plan, Daughtry told me, recounting their conversation for the first time for this article. They didn’t want just any woman — they wanted a Black woman — and they were determined to make the case on multiple fronts. To the Biden campaign directly, in the kind of back-room jockeying among political insiders that has long defined the vice-presidential sweepstakes, but also to the public, hoping to create a political environment in which the Biden campaign felt it had no other option.Their work would culminate in the most public lobbying effort for a vice-presidential selection in modern American history. There were public letters, planted news stories, cable-news segments and statements of support from celebrities like Sean (Diddy) Combs and Ty Dolla $ign. ‘‘As soon as it sounded like it was something that could really happen, we definitely wanted to weigh in,” said Melanie Campbell, an activist whom Daughtry turned to for help and who organized the first open letter calling for a Black woman on the ticket.For a while, the Biden campaign kept its distance. Advisers held a phone call in early May with some activists who signed onto Campbell’s letter — but they also dispatched allies to make clear that Biden was also considering white candidates, like Warren, Klobuchar and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.But between Biden’s initial pledge to select a woman and when it was time to announce his choice, ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August, the world had effectively turned on its head. Suddenly, amid the coronavirus pandemic and travel restrictions, there was no campaign trail, and most of the meetings to discuss selecting the vice president were happening on Zoom. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that May would spark nationwide protests calling for racial justice. And in the absence of in-person politicking, social media took on more importance, helping push the conversation about Biden’s running mate to explicitly racial terms.Biden’s vice-presidential selection committee would eventually contact a smaller group of Black women — including Campbell, Daughtry, the former Democratic Party chairwoman Donna Brazile and the longtime Democratic strategist Minyon Moore — with a more specific request: The next time they met, Biden’s team wanted to hear a case for one individual candidate, not a general call for a Black woman.At the time, after Harris ended her own presidential campaign the previous December, she was experiencing a spate of good will with many of the same activists who once preferred other candidates. Brown, of Black Voters Matter, for example, publicly endorsed Warren in the primary but told me she felt that she had misjudged Harris and that championing her as Biden’s running mate was a kind of spiritual mea culpa. Others held Harris up as a victim of Democratic racism and sexism, particularly when what had begun as a historically diverse field winnowed to Biden and Sanders, two white men over age 75.But not everyone who had Biden’s ear agreed with the public efforts, including the dean of Black Democratic politics in Washington. Representative James E. Clyburn, the influential lawmaker whose well-timed endorsement of Biden helped him win the South Carolina primary, and in turn, the Democratic nomination, told me that he always told Biden that selecting a Black woman as a running mate “was a plus, not a must.”But by the time Biden was in the final stages of his selection, even more traditional party figures were telling the campaign to heed calls to choose a Black woman. Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate and party chairman, said he would have preferred for Biden to select a Black woman as his running mate without a public pledge at the debate, because “when you start picking people by category, it’s important to talk about qualifications first,” he told me.Dean, however, compared the summer of 2020 and the moment Biden was in to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, when protests over the Vietnam War forced the party to reckon with its relationship to an emerging generation of voters. Biden needed to show that Democrats value the party’s Black base, Dean said, whichever way he could. Selecting a Black running mate “became a way of healing the country — of saying, ‘White Democrats don’t have a good record on this issue, and I mean business,’” he said.Inside Biden’s camp, represented by longtime aides like Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain and Jen O’Malley Dillon, multiple discussions were happening. The traditional vetting process, led by the search committee, eventually narrowed a broader short list of 11 down to four finalists: Harris, Warren, Whitmer and Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser and is also a Black woman. Biden, who is known to dial up trusted voices and ask for input, the more the better, was leading his own line of inquiry.After Whitmer impressed Biden during an in-person meeting in the veepstakes’ final stages, one question rose to the top: Could two white Democrats win?Campaign research said yes — Biden could win with any of the four. Klain argued for Harris specifically. Obama played the role of sounding board, weighing the pros and cons of Biden’s options rather than backing anyone, including Harris, according to a person familiar with the conversation. But Harris was the only candidate who had the full complement of qualifications: She had won statewide, was a familiar name with voters because of her presidential run and enjoyed a personal connection with the Biden family, having been a close working partner of Biden’s son, Beau, when he served as attorney general of Delaware.And she was Black, meaning the announcement would be met with enthusiasm rather than controversy. On Aug. 11, the day the campaign announced Harris as the running mate, it raised $26 million in 24 hours.Biden’s advisers say he selected who he felt would be the best governing partner, independent of race, gender or future political considerations. Because of Biden’s age, however, and his promise to be “a bridge’’ to ‘‘an entire generation of leaders,” Harris’s selection was immediately interpreted as a sign that a nominee who might serve only one term was already setting up his successor. “By choosing her as his political partner, Mr. Biden, if he wins, may well be anointing her as the de facto leader of the party in four or eight years,” read the Times article that announced her selection in August. But that was not the campaign’s thinking, Biden advisers told me, arguing that he chose Harris as a running mate for 2020 and a governing partner for his first term — not necessarily as a future president.“It was a governing decision,” Dunn said to me during an interview. “Who can be president, if necessary? But really, Who can be a good partner for me in terms of governing and bringing this country back from the precipice?”Two days after the announcement, another Times article quoted Harry Reid, the retired Democratic Senate leader from Nevada, who said approvingly that Biden selected Harris because “he came to the conclusion that he should pick a Black woman.”“I think that the Black women of America deserved a Black vice-presidential candidate,” Reid said.For years, Moore, Daughtry, Brazile and Yolanda Caraway, a political strategist, have formed what is colloquially called the Colored Girls, a group of Black female insiders in Democratic politics. Brazile said that when Biden selected Harris, the group “committed themselves to helping him get elected, but we also committed ourselves to her.”Harris greeting supporters at a celebratory rally in Wilmington, Del., after the 2020 presidential election was called in the Democrats’ favor.Robert Deutsch/EPA, via ShutterstockTheir investment in Harris speaks to why the diversity-hire framing is too simplistic. There is power in being the first, even if there are limits in being the only. Brown dismissed the idea that the public lobbying efforts for Harris’s selection created the impression of an affirmative-action hire: “When don’t white people think that?” she asked.During our interview in Chicago, I tried to ask Harris whether quotes like Reid’s bothered her, reducing her selection to her identity rather than her record.“I don’t think I understand your question,” Harris said.“I’m saying, does it matter — that kind of narrative around Biden needing to choose a Black woman as running mate still exists and that has hovered over your selection?”“He chose a Black woman. That woman is me,” Harris said. “So I don’t know that anything lingers about what he should choose. He has chosen.”The Biden-Harris administration never got to enjoy a honeymoon period. Amid the pandemic, the attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election and the shock of Jan. 6, Kamala Harris the presidential candidate didn’t get much of a chance to reintroduce herself to the country as Kamala Harris the vice president.Just when she was most in need of trusted counsel, becoming Joe Biden’s No. 2 had the effect of cutting Harris off from the political operation that had most closely guided her to that point. Almost none of Harris’s top advisers from California joined her in the Biden campaign or in the vice president’s office, planting the seeds of isolation. Harris has often cycled through senior staff at a far greater clip than her contemporaries (her policy director, Carmel Martin, left the role last month). And while Biden’s senior staff includes fixtures like Donilon, who has worked with him since 1981, few of Harris’s senior staff members date back to her time in California — or even her presidential campaign.By June of her first year in office, Politico had already declared that Harris’s office was “rife with dissent” and quoted an anonymous source claiming it was “an abusive environment.” A slew of staff departures fed a stream of headlines that only seemed to confirm the waywardness that had defined her presidential campaign. Her initial communications director, Ashley Etienne, left in less than a year. Simmons, her successor, stayed only a year and is now a commentator for CNN. The New York Post published a tally of Harris’s staff departures — 13 within 13 months. They included members of the advance team, her longtime policy adviser, her first chief of staff and her high-profile press secretary, Symone Sanders-Townsend, who now hosts a show on MSNBC. (Harris has yet to appear.)In June 2021, Harris would compound her problems with a widely panned interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which he repeatedly asked her why she had not been to the border. “And I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris said. “And I mean, I don’t understand the point you’re making.”The Holt interview would publicly set the tone for Harris’s first two years. The flood of criticism stung Harris deeply, and she mused in private conversations about worrying that she had let down Biden and the White House. Over the following year, Harris traveled less often, and she mostly avoided further media interviews, preferring friendly settings like “The View” and a show on Comedy Central hosted by Charlamagne tha God. Harris’s staff argues that she had to carefully schedule her travel during this period because she often served as the tiebreaking vote in the Senate, with the chamber split 50-50 at the time. In private conversations, however, some Democrats close to Biden say that they encouraged her to stay visible and that it was Harris’s decision alone to step back, over the advice of her chief of staff and Biden’s senior advisers.Her public absence would not go unnoticed. In November of that year, The Los Angeles Times ran a column declaring Harris “the incredible disappearing vice president.” In January 2022, on the anniversary of her ascent to the office, the BBC ran an article that painted a dire picture of a flailing politician with the headline: “Kamala Harris one year: Where did it go wrong for her?”In that first year, she also had the opportunity to select several issues to fill out her policy portfolio, a chance for a vice president to own a signature policy lane. According to several people familiar with the discussions, though, Harris had no interest in taking on criminal-justice reform and policing, her area of career expertise.Instead, Harris insisted that she would take on voting rights after consulting with Black leaders in the party, including the team of Stacey Abrams of Georgia, who had previously made no secret of her desire to be Biden’s vice president, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The issue bears a civil rights legacy and is embraced by all sides of the party. One Biden adviser, however, said they made clear to Harris at the time that there was little chance that meaningful legislation could pass on the issue given the deadlocked Senate.Within a year, the prediction would come true. After Biden made an 11th-hour trip to Atlanta to give a speech exhorting the Senate to pass the administration’s expansive bills on voting rights and election reform — a speech some activists and even Abrams chose not to attend — it would be clear that the legislation would not go forward.Harris touring a Customs and Border Protection processing center in El Paso in June 2021, after facing criticism for not having visited the Southern border.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP, via Getty ImagesHarris also received an assignment she didn’t want, according to White House officials familiar with the discussions. The president charged her with addressing the root causes of migration in Central America — coordinating public and private funds that could support people in their home countries before they tried to flee for the United States. Some of that nuance was lost in June 2021, however, during the same international trip when she sat for the interview with Holt.In Guatemala, Harris warned migrants “do not come” to America, repeating the phrase for emphasis at a news conference alongside President Alejandro Giammattei. While the message wasn’t unique — other administration officials had communicated a similar stance — the messenger was, and it earned Harris the ire of some pro-immigration groups and progressive lawmakers.“This is disappointing to see,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote in response on Twitter. “The US spent decades contributing to regime change and destabilization in Latin America. We can’t help set someone’s house on fire and then blame them for fleeing.”Republicans also seized on the controversy, depicting Harris as the Biden administration’s unofficial “border czar,” overseeing a constant stream of migrants bringing fentanyl to the United States. Representative Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor closely aligned with Trump, has twice introduced legislation that would remove Harris from a role she doesn’t have.This month, the Biden administration authorized the construction of up to 20 miles of wall along the Southern border, highlighting its failure to curtail migrant crossings into the United States. The issue is sure to be a centerpiece of the 2024 election — particularly as Republicans say Democrats can’t address a crisis they refuse to acknowledge.In our interview, Harris made the case that the money that has been invested would be an important stopgap in the absence of congressional action. “We have raised over $4.2 billion dealing with issues like what we can do to support agriculture, which is a main facet of the economy of a lot of these countries,” Harris said.“I get the roadblocks in Congress, and I get that your root-cause work is long-term,” I responded. “I’m saying, if you’re a voter in the short term who is saying, ‘Is our border secure?’ And what is this administration’s answer to that? What’s that answer?”“The answer is that we are absolutely making it secure and putting resources into it to do that work,” Harris said.When Harris speaks in an interview or to an audience, it can sound as if she’s editing in real time, searching for the right calibration of talking points rather than displaying confidence in her message. It has contributed to a reputation as a politician who delivers “word salads,” but Simmons — her former communications director — argued that it’s a consequence of her career as a prosecutor and attorney general, law-enforcement roles that did not ask Harris to communicate with the press and the public in the same way. Even in Harris’s presidential race, staff members had to push her to share details about her life, family and career motivations. It was not always successful.“Often in the White House, national leaders have to base their arguments on emotion and gut — and as a prosecutor that’s not the job,” Simmons told me. “So she’s getting more comfortable speaking about herself, her beliefs and the president’s beliefs — answering the ‘why’ question of what they do, not just what the policy is.”But Harris has not been a prosecutor since 2016, and many of her rhetorical quirks extend beyond policy — the unbridled laugh (Harris has become the face of a new internet term, IJBOL, for “I just burst out laughing”); her passion for Venn diagrams (she mentions them so much that the G.O.P. has made a one-minute compilation video); and even her dance moves have become punchlines, shrinking Kamala Harris the vice president to Kamala Harris the meme.The internet caricature comes as Harris has sought to recast herself as a consequential force within the party and the administration. When the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion rights in June 2022, Harris and the White House saw an opportunity for the vice president to speak authoritatively on an issue that has proved critical to Democratic voter turnout. This year, Harris has made protecting abortion rights a central tenet of her campaign message, her stump speech and her Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour.Jennifer Palmieri, the former Obama White House communications director, says she believes that the issue has given Harris an area of focus at a critical time and that the press coverage of Harris is too focused on previous missteps and not what lies ahead. This summer, after a different Washington Post op-ed praised Harris as an electoral asset, Palmieri phoned senior members of Harris’s team to offer congratulations, confident that they had turned a narrative corner.Now, even after open speculation about dropping Harris from the ticket, Palmieri is adamant that Harris is “the most valuable running mate for a ticket in recent history.’’“Nothing that has happened to her has surprised me,” Palmieri told me. “I knew, like, this is going to be a very hard road, no matter how talented you are. It is not a situation that’s set up to fail. But it is not a situation where you will be set up to succeed.”This month, in a swearing-in ceremony conducted by Harris, Laphonza Butler became only the third Black woman ever to serve in the United States Senate, following in the footsteps of her ally and mentor. Newsom’s decision to appoint the Emily’s List leader surprised many Democrats, but it shouldn’t have — in addition to her activism, Butler was a former partner in Ace Smith and Sean Clegg’s consulting group, which has close ties to the governor and the vice president.Newsom, like Biden, was also under significant pressure to appoint a Black woman in the role after he made a public pledge to do so in 2021, amid speculation about Feinstein’s possible retirement. Such pledges have become more common in liberal politics, a way to signal solidarity with an increasingly diverse electorate, and a go-to move for white male Democrats in particular.Harris swearing in her longtime friend Laphonza Butler to the U.S. Senate this month.Anna Rose Layden/Getty ImagesDunn, the president’s senior adviser, said Biden’s pledge to pick a woman as his running mate was born of a desire “to be very clear with people that he felt it was time.” And while Dunn acknowledged some initial difficulties for Harris during the first two years in office, she also said the vice president “has found her voice, and she’s found her role,” as issues like abortion rights and gun safety have given her a clearer message heading into 2024.Dunn’s confidence reflects that of the administration at large and serve as a reminder that the Harris-replacement scenarios amount to political wish-casting. Even off the record, Biden’s senior advisers say that there’s no desire to oust her and that the idea was never floated. One person in Biden’s inner circle suggested that the president would be personally offended by the suggestion: Obama’s campaign conducted polling on replacing Biden ahead of the 2012 election, and the subject stings the former vice president to this day.“This administration has never polled it,” Dunn said to me unequivocally. “Never thought about it. Never discussed it.” Jeff Zients, Biden’s chief of staff, said that Harris and Biden enjoy a close relationship and that she is often the last to leave the Oval Office after a meeting, just as Biden was during his time as Obama’s No. 2. “She has an uncanny ability to really drill down to what matters, clear out what doesn’t matter and hold people accountable for results,” he told me.“She can prosecute a case extremely well,” Dunn confirmed. “In a meeting, she will say, ‘But no, really, is that going to work?’ Or, ‘Oh, really, explain this,’ and she’s very effective. And it’s interesting to watch them together. Because sometimes it’s almost like, she’ll ask something, and he will look at her like, That’s exactly what I would have said.”But the confidence of the White House sets up an inevitable collision course. Even if Biden wins the election, he will only get older — and the concerns of the American public about his age and the prospect of Harris’s stepping in as president will most likely persist. Allies like James Clyburn believe that sentiment will shift if the Washington whisper machine were to pull back and decide to appreciate Kamala Harris for who she is, rather than deride her for what she is not. Clyburn said Harris’s “problem” is simple: Her race and gender have made her a Washington outsider. “Her only problem right now is what she looked like when she was born,” he said to me. “That’s what these people are holding against her.”Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial-justice advocacy group Color of Change, who traveled with Harris this year to Africa — a trip that included stops in Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia and face time with prominent Black celebrities and activists, including the director Spike Lee and actors like Sheryl Lee Ralph and Idris Elba — said he feels that American media outlets refuse to cover her success, including the images from that trip. “When we arrived to Black Star Square in Ghana, there were upwards of 10,000 people who were excited to see her,” Robinson said. “And I thought, What’s the other vice president that could get that type of crowd outside the United States — or even inside the United States?”But not everyone agrees with these supporters, including a number of Democrats — when granted anonymity to speak freely. A top Democratic consultant said that “she has a little Ron DeSantis in her,” in terms of the disconnect between political talent and expectations. One major donor said there’s an agreement among the party’s heavy hitters that having Harris as vice president to Biden “is not ideal, but there’s a hope she can rise to the occasion.” Sometimes the arguments against her feel more petty: A member of Harris’s staff remarked on the amount of down time the vice president schedules on trips, which includes an inordinate amount of time dedicated to hair care.Harris is largely absent from the post-Biden jockeying that is already taking place among prospective candidates and donors. One major donor told me: “I’ve gotten invites from people like Whitmer and Booker. And even people like Buttigieg and Ro Khanna are cultivating meetings and donors. It’s radio silence from Kamala and Kamala World. They’re not keeping alive the network of people that supported her.”This summer and fall, Harris has sought to answer critics with a travel-heavy schedule that highlights her connection to key blocs in the Democratic coalition. She inaugurated her Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour at Hampton University, the historically Black college in coastal Virginia; the tour also includes lesser-known schools with large Latino student populations, like Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania.It was easy to see Harris as an underappreciated electoral asset for Biden at a gathering of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Orlando this August. In a crowd numbering thousands of older, predominantly Southern Black churchgoers, there was palpable pride in Harris, evident from the hundreds who lined up for pictures or the group of senior bishops who privately prayed for her.In a speech, Harris took direct aim at new statewide education standards restricting how race and Black history could be taught. “Right here in Florida,” Harris said, her voice rising in outrage, “they plan to teach students that enslaved people benefited from slavery.”The members of the audience rose to their feet in anticipation of what they sensed was coming next: a smackdown of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had sent a public letter that week challenging Harris to a debate. “Well, I’m here in Florida,” she said defiantly, “and I will tell you, there is no round table, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.”The roar of approval served as an audible reminder — to DeSantis, the Republican Party, the Beltway press corps and even some Democrats too: Writing off Kamala Harris is a mistake, as overly simplistic and premature as the “female Barack Obama” label that once followed her.“When you are the first, serving at the national level, it is a significant responsibility and weight on your shoulder,” the Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Campbell, said at the annual N.A.A.C.P. convention this summer. She made it a point to stress that Harris, with whom she was in conversation at the event, was “our” vice president — implying Black people specifically. Campbell continued: “We were remarking, you know, ‘They’re coming for us.’ And what that means is that you have to sustain yourself. Of course, be protected, but also do the work.”She then asked the audience to rise, a manufactured standing ovation with a clear message: Harris needs your support.“As we go into this round of applause for our vice president, really thinking about what elected officials, particularly people of color, are going through in this moment in time,” Campbell said, “I ask everyone to just stand up — I’m going to do the same — and give our vice president a round of applause for the work she does every single day.”Harris and Biden in the White House Rose Garden in May.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe crowd rose to its feet — but it felt more like an act of politeness. Unlike in Orlando, where the audience was at rapt attention, the version of Harris in Boston more resembled the version I saw in Munich. It served as a reminder that Black communities are not a monolith and that their assumed kinship to Harris — or to the Democratic Party — cannot be taken for granted.During our interview in Chicago, which was supposed to be the first of two, I asked Harris about the party’s relationship with Black Americans and the policy priorities that matter most to them. I asked whether the administration’s ineffectiveness on voting rights was indicative of a broader pattern on things considered to be “Black issues” — lots of promises during the election season and lots of excuses during the time in office.“Has there been enough substance that the administration has put on its inequality agenda?” I asked, pointing out that Black turnout had softened for Democrats in the 2022 midterms. “Has that promise made to Black communities been kept?”Harris launched into a recitation of talking points: the amount of money the administration has invested in historically Black colleges and universities; how the capped price on insulin would help Black seniors; the new federal restrictions on no-knock entries and chokeholds by the police; Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge’s work on affordable housing. Her answer spoke to a fundamental tension facing Democrats ahead of next year’s election: No matter the administration’s policy accomplishments, which are real but often incremental rather than sweeping, they are not yet galvanizing the voters they most need.By this point in the interview, the window that was slightly open when Harris sat down felt as though it had been firmly shut. Over the weeks that followed, the vice president’s aides would repeatedly postpone the second interview that had been agreed to for this article. But here, while I still had the chance, I wanted to try once more to get at this important question: Maybe people are yearning for something policy can’t provide — not just a fancy speech, but a more forcefully declared vision.“What’s the disconnect then, between all that and it translating to more Black votes?” I asked, pressing further.Harris refused to entertain the scenario. Instead, she had a question for me.“Why don’t you talk to me after 2024?” More

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      Mike Lindell’s Lawyers Say He Owes ‘Millions’ in Fees

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      The disclosure, made in a court filing this week, is a sign that the pillow magnate and leading supporter of the election denial movement is facing financial stress.For nearly three years, the pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell has been one of the leading financial supporters of the election denial movement, a tireless promoter of false claims that Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election and of efforts to change how Americans vote.But recent public records, as well as interviews with Mr. Lindell and others, suggest that he is facing financial troubles.Lawyers defending Mr. Lindell in several defamation lawsuits this week filed to withdraw from the cases, citing “millions” of dollars in unpaid fees. The withdrawal would leave Mr. Lindell without a lawyer in lawsuits where plaintiffs are seeking more than $1 billion in damages.In an interview, Mr. Lindell said he didn’t blame his lawyers for dropping him. “They have to feed their families,” he said. He said that his activism related to the 2020 election had contributed to his financial woes.In a filing late on Friday, Smartmatic, one of the firms suing Mr. Lindell for defamation, said it did not object to the withdrawal of lawyers but expressed concern that he was using the news “as an opportunity to fund-raise for his election fraud campaign.” The voting equipment firm noted that Mr. Lindell had already sent out a fund-raising email seeking $200,000 from supporters that invoked his lawyers’ motion.Since 2021, Mr. Lindell, the chief executive of the bedding company MyPillow and a Trump associate, has financed conferences, legal efforts and even his own digital media venture to further unproven or debunked conspiracy theories regarding the use of voting machines to steal the 2020 election.He has worked with state-level groups across the country, and continues to speak with activists on weekly conference calls. And he has used MyPillow advertising to support a range of conservative and right-wing media, including many outlets that amplify his claims.Mr. Lindell says he has directly spent as much as $60 million on his political endeavors.Days after Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Lindell was photographed entering a brief meeting at the White House with Mr. Trump, carrying notes on which the phrase “martial law if necessary” was visible. That month, MyPillow lost brick-and-mortar distribution contracts with major big-box retailers. (The stores offered a variety of explanations unrelated to Mr. Lindell’s politics.) Last year, after Walmart pulled the company’s products from its stores, it recorded a loss of $7 million, according to Mr. Lindell. MyPillow is a private company, and these figures could not be independently verified.Property records show that one of the two residences he owns through a limited-liability corporation is under an Internal Revenue Service lien for $4.6 million in unpaid taxes from 2020. Mr. Lindell said the lien was related to an ongoing negotiation over a tax write-off for an investment in a pharmaceutical company.In April, an arbitration panel ordered Mr. Lindell to pay $5 million to a software engineer who took up Mr. Lindell’s challenge to debunk data he claims proves that the 2020 election was hacked. Mr. Lindell has refused to pay the engineer, Robert Zeidman, and both men have filed lawsuits over the matter.In August, Mr. Lindell said, American Express cut his line of credit to $100,000 from $1 million, effectively ending his ability to pay his lawyers in the defamation suits. The decision, he said, was an “absolute hit job” related to his political activities, though he said the company had not said as much.American Express did not comment on Mr. Lindell’s credit, but said in a statement that it “does not make customer decisions based on personal views or political affiliations. Our risk and underwriting models take into account a number of financial factors, including business inflows and outflows, and credit history.”On Thursday, Andrew Parker, a lawyer at the Minneapolis firm Parker Daniels Kibort who has represented Mr. Lindell in many of his recent legal battles, filed motions to withdraw from the defamation suits filed by Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic, and Eric Coomer, the former director of product strategy and security at Dominion.Mr. Parker did not respond to requests for comment. In court filings, he stated that Mr. Lindell started falling behind on payments early this year, and on Oct. 2, Mr. Lindell informed the firm that he and his company were “not able to get caught up or make any payment” on the “millions of dollars” owed to the firm.Dominion also sued Fox News on similar grounds, and this April it reached a $787.5 million settlement with the media company. Asked if he had considered settling his own suit, Mr. Lindell said, “Absolutely not.”It remains to be seen how Mr. Lindell’s finances will affect the broader election denial movement or the conservative news media, which he had helped finance on multiple fronts.In emails and interviews, several influential activists said that Mr. Lindell continued to be an important figure in the movement, though some noted that their financial support came from other backers. Other donors contributed about one-third the cost of a conference Mr. Lindell hosted in Missouri in August, Mr. Lindell and other participating activists said.MyPillow’s advertising and revenue-sharing agreements with conservative media have been a major source of support for right-wing figures, such as Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser who has a revenue-sharing agreement to promote MyPillow on his “War Room” podcast. Such promotions have increased slightly in the last year, according to the analytics companies iSpot.tv, which covers television advertising, and Magellan.ai, which covers podcasts.Mr. Bannon has been highlighting Mr. Lindell’s financial woes on his show, portraying Mr. Lindell as the victim of corporate and government overreach and imploring viewers to buy more pillows to support him, which boosts sales. He is planning to host his show from Mr. Lindell’s Minnesota factory in the coming weeks, he said.Susan Beachy More