Presidential Election of 2020

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      A Bipartisan Plan to Limit Big Tech

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      More from our inbox:DeSantis Admits the Inconvenient Truth: Trump LostScenarios for a Trump Trial and the Election‘Thank You, Mr. Trump’Mushroom CloudsMacho C.E.O.s Erik Isakson/DigitalVision, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “We Have a Way for Congress to Rein In Big Tech,” by Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren (Opinion guest essay, July 27):The most heartening thing about the proposal for a Digital Consumer Protection Commission is its authorship.After years of zero-sum legislative gridlock, to see Senators Warren and Graham collaborating is a ray of hope that governing may someday return to the time when opposing parties were not enemies, when each party brought valid perspectives to the table and House-Senate conference committees forged legislation encompassing the best of both perspectives.David SadkinBradenton, Fla.To the Editor:Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren propose a new federal mega-regulator for the digital economy that threatens to undermine America’s global technology standing.A new “licensing and policing” authority would stall the continued growth of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence in America, leaving China and others to claw back crucial geopolitical strategic ground.America’s digital technology sector enjoyed remarkable success over the past quarter-century — and provided vast investment and job growth — because the U.S. rejected the heavy-handed regulatory model of the analog era, which stifled innovation and competition.The tech companies that Senators Graham and Warren cite (along with countless others) came about over the past quarter-century because we opened markets and rejected the monopoly-preserving regulatory regimes that had been captured by old players.The U.S. has plenty of federal bureaucracies, and many already oversee the issues that the senators want addressed. Their new technocratic digital regulator would do nothing but hobble America as we prepare for the next great global technological revolution.Adam ThiererWashingtonThe writer is a senior fellow in technology policy at the free-market R Street Institute.To the Editor:The regulation of social media, rapidly emerging A.I. and the internet in general is long overdue. Like the telephone more than a century earlier, as any new technology evolves from novelty to convenience to ubiquitous necessity used by billions of people, so must its regulation for the common good.Jay P. MaillePleasanton, Calif.DeSantis Admits the Inconvenient Truth: Trump Lost Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s Defeat: ‘Of Course He Lost’” (news article, Aug. 8):It is sad to see a politician turn toward the hard truth only in desperation, but that is what the failing and flailing Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has done.Mr. DeSantis is not stupid. He has known all along that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, but until now, he hedged when asked about it, hoping not to alienate supporters of Donald Trump.Now Mr. DeSantis says: “Of course he lost. Joe Biden is the president.”In today’s Republican Party, telling the inconvenient truth will diminish a candidate’s support from the die-hard individuals who make up the party’s base.We have reached a sad point in the history of our country when we have come to feel that a politician who tells the truth is doing something extraordinary and laudable.Oren SpieglerPeters Township, Pa.Scenarios for a Trump Trial and the Election Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Layered Case in Indictment Reduces Risk” (news analysis, front page, Aug. 6):It may well be that the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, has fashioned an indictment ideally suited for achieving a conviction of Donald Trump. However, even in the event that the trial comes before the election, there is little reason to believe that it will relieve us of the scourge of Mr. Trump’s influence on American life.First, there is the possibility of a hung jury, even in Washington, D.C. Such an outcome would be treated by Trump supporters as an outright exoneration.A conviction would not undermine his support any more than his myriad previous shocking transgressions. While the inevitable appeals would last well past the election, his martyrdom might improve his electoral chances.And were he to lose the election, he would surely claim that he lost only because of these indictments. Here he would have a powerful argument because so many of us hope that the indictments will have precisely that effect.The alternative, that he wins the election, either before or after the trial, is too dreadful to contemplate.If there is anything that can terminate the plague of Trumpism, it is for a few prominent Republicans whose seniority makes their voices important — Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush — to speak out and unequivocally state that Donald Trump is unfit for office. That they all believe this is generally acknowledged.If they fail to defend American democracy at this time, they will be complicit in what Trumpism does to the Republican Party and to the Republic.Robert N. CahnWalnut Creek, Calif.‘Thank You, Mr. Trump’Former President Donald Trump has made his 2024 race principally about his own personal grievances — attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him.David Degner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Playing Indicted Martyr, Trump Draws In His Base” (news article, Aug. 9):Thank you, Mr. Trump, for sacrificing yourself for the greater good. And when you spend years and years and years in prison, we will never forget what you did to (oops, I mean for) us.Winnie BoalCincinnatiMushroom Clouds U.S. Department of DefenseTo the Editor:Re “A Symbol Evoking Both Pride and Fear,” by Nicolas Rapold (Critic’s Notebook, Arts, Aug. 1):Richland High School in Washington State is in an area, highly restricted during World War II, where plutonium essential to building the first atomic bombs was produced. As in areas of New Mexico, there have been numerous “downwind” cancer cases, as well as leakage of contaminated water into the Columbia River basin.Bizarrely, Richland High’s athletic teams are called the Bombers; a mushroom cloud is their symbol on uniforms and the gym floor. This must be the worst “mascot” on earth.Nancy AndersonSeattleMacho C.E.O.s Illustration by Taylor CalleryTo the Editor:Re “We’re in the Era of the ‘Top Gun’ C.E.O.” (Sunday Business, July 30):The propensity of the current class of business leaders to grab at team-building gimmicks knows no bounds. Simulating the role of fighter pilots at $100,000 a pop might give a C.E.O. a fleeting feeling of exhilaration, but it is a poor substitute for actual team-building.That happens when organizations and compensation levels are flattened to more down-to-earth levels. With some C.E.O.s pulling in pay rewards that are hundreds, if not thousands, of times more than their median employee, team-affirming commitment in the boardroom is far from genuine.Employees are not fooled by C.E.O.s trying to play Top Gun for a day, and making more in that short time than most employees will earn in a year.J. Richard FinlayTorontoThe writer is the founder of the Finlay Center for Corporate and Public Governance. More

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      Does Information Affect Our Beliefs?

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      New studies on social media’s influence tell a complicated story.It was the social-science equivalent of Barbenheimer weekend: four blockbuster academic papers, published in two of the world’s leading journals on the same day. Written by elite researchers from universities across the United States, the papers in Nature and Science each examined different aspects of one of the most compelling public-policy issues of our time: how social media is shaping our knowledge, beliefs and behaviors.Relying on data collected from hundreds of millions of Facebook users over several months, the researchers found that, unsurprisingly, the platform and its algorithms wielded considerable influence over what information people saw, how much time they spent scrolling and tapping online, and their knowledge about news events. Facebook also tended to show users information from sources they already agreed with, creating political “filter bubbles” that reinforced people’s worldviews, and was a vector for misinformation, primarily for politically conservative users.But the biggest news came from what the studies didn’t find: despite Facebook’s influence on the spread of information, there was no evidence that the platform had a significant effect on people’s underlying beliefs, or on levels of political polarization.These are just the latest findings to suggest that the relationship between the information we consume and the beliefs we hold is far more complex than is commonly understood. ‘Filter bubbles’ and democracySometimes the dangerous effects of social media are clear. In 2018, when I went to Sri Lanka to report on anti-Muslim pogroms, I found that Facebook’s newsfeed had been a vector for the rumors that formed a pretext for vigilante violence, and that WhatsApp groups had become platforms for organizing and carrying out the actual attacks. In Brazil last January, supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro used social media to spread false claims that fraud had cost him the election, and then turned to WhatsApp and Telegram groups to plan a mob attack on federal buildings in the capital, Brasília. It was a similar playbook to that used in the United States on Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol.But aside from discrete events like these, there have also been concerns that social media, and particularly the algorithms used to suggest content to users, might be contributing to the more general spread of misinformation and polarization.The theory, roughly, goes something like this: unlike in the past, when most people got their information from the same few mainstream sources, social media now makes it possible for people to filter news around their own interests and biases. As a result, they mostly share and see stories from people on their own side of the political spectrum. That “filter bubble” of information supposedly exposes users to increasingly skewed versions of reality, undermining consensus and reducing their understanding of people on the opposing side. The theory gained mainstream attention after Trump was elected in 2016. “The ‘Filter Bubble’ Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming,” announced a New York Magazine article a few days after the election. “Your Echo Chamber is Destroying Democracy,” Wired Magazine claimed a few weeks later.Changing information doesn’t change mindsBut without rigorous testing, it’s been hard to figure out whether the filter bubble effect was real. The four new studies are the first in a series of 16 peer-reviewed papers that arose from a collaboration between Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, and a group of researchers from universities including Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and others.Meta gave unprecedented access to the researchers during the three-month period before the 2020 U.S. election, allowing them to analyze data from more than 200 million users and also conduct randomized controlled experiments on large groups of users who agreed to participate. It’s worth noting that the social media giant spent $20 million on work from NORC at the University of Chicago (previously the National Opinion Research Center), a nonpartisan research organization that helped collect some of the data. And while Meta did not pay the researchers itself, some of its employees worked with the academics, and a few of the authors had received funding from the company in the past. But the researchers took steps to protect the independence of their work, including pre-registering their research questions in advance, and Meta was only able to veto requests that would violate users’ privacy.The studies, taken together, suggest that there is evidence for the first part of the “filter bubble” theory: Facebook users did tend to see posts from like-minded sources, and there were high degrees of “ideological segregation” with little overlap between what liberal and conservative users saw, clicked and shared. Most misinformation was concentrated in a conservative corner of the social network, making right-wing users far more likely to encounter political lies on the platform.“I think it’s a matter of supply and demand,” said Sandra González-Bailón, the lead author on the paper that studied misinformation. Facebook users skew conservative, making the potential market for partisan misinformation larger on the right. And online curation, amplified by algorithms that prioritize the most emotive content, could reinforce those market effects, she added.When it came to the second part of the theory — that this filtered content would shape people’s beliefs and worldviews, often in harmful ways — the papers found little support. One experiment deliberately reduced content from like-minded sources, so that users saw more varied information, but found no effect on polarization or political attitudes. Removing the algorithm’s influence on people’s feeds, so that they just saw content in chronological order, “did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes,” the researchers found. Nor did removing content shared by other users.Algorithms have been in lawmakers’ cross hairs for years, but many of the arguments for regulating them have presumed that they have real-world influence. This research complicates that narrative.But it also has implications that are far broader than social media itself, reaching some of the core assumptions around how we form our beliefs and political views. Brendan Nyhan, who researches political misperceptions and was a lead author of one of the studies, said the results were striking because they suggested an even looser link between information and beliefs than had been shown in previous research. “From the area that I do my research in, the finding that has emerged as the field has developed is that factual information often changes people’s factual views, but those changes don’t always translate into different attitudes,” he said. But the new studies suggested an even weaker relationship. “We’re seeing null effects on both factual views and attitudes.”As a journalist, I confess a certain personal investment in the idea that presenting people with information will affect their beliefs and decisions. But if that is not true, then the potential effects would reach beyond my own profession. If new information does not change beliefs or political support, for instance, then that will affect not just voters’ view of the world, but their ability to hold democratic leaders to account.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

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      Trump Tells Supporters His Indictments Are ‘For You’ on 2024 Campaign Trail

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      The former president, who has made his 2024 campaign principally about his own personal grievances, is attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him.As lawyers for Donald J. Trump float various legal arguments to defend him in court against an onslaught of criminal charges, the former president has settled on a political defense: “I’m being indicted for you.”In speeches, social media posts and ads, Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared the prosecutions a political witch hunt, and he has cast himself as a martyr who is taking hits from Democrats and the government on their behalf.“They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom,” Mr. Trump told the crowd at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.”In two previous campaigns, 2016 and 2020, Mr. Trump presented himself to voters as an insurgent candidate who understood their grievances and promised to fight for them. Now, however, Mr. Trump has made his 2024 race principally about his own personal grievances — attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him. He continues to argue, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and to present it as a theft also against his voters. The legal jeopardy he now faces from multiple indictments, he tells followers, is the sort of persecution that they, too, could suffer.There is evidence that the message is resonating.Lorraine Rudd, who attended Mr. Trump’s appearance in New Hampshire, said that after his third indictment last week, in a point-by-point 45-page account of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, she felt that she, too, could be wrongly prosecuted.“If they can do it to him and take him down, they can come for me,” Ms. Rudd, a 64-year old Massachusetts resident, said.She said she firmly agreed with Mr. Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election. “What, am I next?” she said.In March, when Mr. Trump announced his candidacy before any indictments, he told supporters, “I am your retribution.” The shift to the recent plaint of “I am being indicted for you” suggests a further tailoring of his campaign pitch, as he paints the criminal cases against him as an effort to prevent him from returning to the White House.In June, after being charged with retaining government secrets, Mr. Trump told a Republican gathering in Michigan: “Essentially, I’m being indicted for you.”On Aug. 3, the day of his third indictment, for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump posted on his social media site that facing fraud and obstruction charges in Washington was an “honor” because, as he wrote in all caps, “I am being arrested for you.”Portraying himself as a victim of the criminal justice system — and echoing themes from when he faced an investigation over Russian influence in the 2016 campaign and his first impeachment — has served to consolidate Republican support around Mr. Trump.Since his very first indictment in March, in New York on charges related to payments to a porn star, Republican voters have buoyed Mr. Trump in polls. Congressional Republicans, mindful that the party base has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, have leaned into investigations of what they call the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. And many of Mr. Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals have repeated his pledge to fire the F.B.I. director and end the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House.In a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, before Mr. Trump’s latest indictment, 71 percent of Republican voters said he had not committed serious federal crimes and that Republicans needed to stand behind him.When a long-shot challenger of Mr. Trump, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, told a Republican gathering in Iowa recently that the former president was running not to represent people who supported him in 2016 or 2020 but “to stay out of prison,’’ Mr. Hurd was booed.In public comments, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have indicated they will mount a free-speech defense in the latest case related to the 2020 election. They have argued that anything Mr. Trump said leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot were merely “aspirational” requests. Those include lying about widespread fraud to voters, pressuring Mr. Pence to ignore the Constitution and asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to help him win the state.The former president and his allies in the conservative media and in Congress are simultaneously waging a battle for public opinion by accusing Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, of misconduct in business dealings and trying to tie allegations of shady practices to Mr. Biden himself when he was vice president. Investigations led by House Republicans have turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, but the effort has convinced many Republicans that Mr. Trump’s indictments are part of a conspiracy to divert scrutiny from Mr. Biden and his family.On Tuesday, Mr. Trump promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bidens, his likely political rival should he win the G.O.P. nomination. He also continued his personal attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel in the federal cases against Mr. Trump, calling him “deranged.”And without referring to her by name, he criticized Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is Black, as a “racist.” She is overseeing a separate investigation into alleged efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to interfere with the election in the state, where he lost to President Biden.With Mr. Trump dominating every Republican primary poll, a few 2024 rivals have lately been more direct in challenging him on the subject of the 2020 election.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said this week that “of course” Mr. Trump lost re-election in his most blunt acknowledgment yet of a reality he has tiptoed around for three years. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who could be a star witness in a trial focused on Jan. 6, said that Mr. Trump pushed him to “essentially overturn the election.”Roughly an hour northwest of Mr. Trump’s rally on Tuesday night, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, one of Mr. Trump’s toughest critics in the race, mocked the former president’s proclamations.“As I’m walking around Ukraine, he’s waltzing into a courtroom in Washington, D.C., to tell us that he’s being indicted for us. For us! How lucky are we! That we have such a selfless, magnanimous leader,” Mr. Christie said, prompting laughter and a sprinkling of applause. “Because you know that the government was coming to get you and on their way to get you, lo and behold, they came across Donald Trump and they said, ‘Okay, we won’t get you, we’ll get him, for you.’”The narrative of unfair persecution by the criminal justice system, which Republicans as the party of law and order once staunchly defended, has taken strong root among Mr. Trump’s supporters.Steve Vicere, who drove all the way from his home in Florida to see Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, said the indictments were a “diversion” and represented attempts by Democrats to stop Mr. Trump from regaining power.“Everyday freedoms are being systematically taken away, and nobody ever gets held accountable,” Mr. Vicere, 54, said.Dean Brady, a limo driver from Newmarket, N.H., embraced Mr. Trump’s message that he was taking a hit on behalf of his supporters.“He’s representing us,” Mr. Brady, 60, said. “He’s not in it for himself, he could quit this and just go on with life. He’s up there because he loves America and he cares about us.”But not all Republican voters embrace Mr. Trump’s sense of victimhood. Jean Davis, who attended a barbecue in Iowa on Sunday to hear seven of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. rivals, said that his latest indictment ought to disqualify him as a candidate.Her husband, Russ Davis, who supports Mr. DeSantis, said that if Mr. Trump were to become the nominee, his chances of defeating Mr. Biden would be “next to nothing.”“There are so many people on the Republican side who just can’t get past his loud mouth,’’ he said. More

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      The ‘Never-Again Trumper’ Sham

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      Shortly after last year’s midterms, when Republicans failed to take the Senate and eked out only a thin majority in the House, Paul Ryan gave an interview to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in which he described himself as a “Never-Again Trumper.” It’s worth recalling what Ryan and other Republicans said about Donald Trump the first time he ran to see what a sham this feeble self-designation is likely to become.In 2015, Ryan, the House speaker then, denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “not conservatism,” “not what this party stands for” and “not what this country stands for.” Then-Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana privately complained that Trump was “unacceptable,” according to the G.O.P. strategist Dan Senor, before he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. Ted Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” for insulting his wife, Heidi, before declaring that “Donald Trump will not be the nominee.”They all folded — and they all will fold again. Their point of principle wasn’t that Trump had crossed so many moral and ethical lines that they would rather live with a Democrat they could honorably oppose than a Republican they would be forced to dishonorably defend. Their point was simply that Trump couldn’t win. When he did, they become powerless to oppose him.Seven years later, they’ve learned nothing.In his interview with ABC, Ryan said he was “proud of the accomplishments” of the Trump years, citing tax reform, deregulation, criminal-justice reform, and conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges. So why oppose Trump in 2024? “Because I want to win,” Ryan said, “and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20 and now in 2022.”The best that can be said about this argument is that it’s a half-clever way for Ryan and the type of “normal Republicans” he represents to salute and absolve themselves at the same time — to claim, in effect, that the conservative policy wins of the Trump years were all their doing, while the Republican electoral defeats were all his.But the analysis is shaky in its premises and dangerous in its implications, at least to Republicans like Ryan. Shaky, because does anyone remember the conservative policy achievements of the Romney-Ryan administration?Trump, the man everyone assumed couldn’t win in 2016, did. He brought millions of voters into the G.O.P. fold, including former Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders supporters. Did his manners and methods repel an even larger share of voters, particularly centrists who in previous years might have voted for Republicans? Probably. But the inescapable fact is that without MAGA voters there would have been no victory in 2016 and none of the conservative victories of which the former speaker is proud. For Ryan to say “we lose with Trump” may or may not be right, but it fails to wrestle with the fact that Republicans can’t win without him.As for the danger of Ryan’s argument, it’s that it fails to come to grips with what really ails the Republican Party.The trouble for Republicans does not lie in the difficulty of holding together a fractious coalition of MAGA and non-MAGA conservatives. That would be politics as usual in any major party. It lies in the depressing combination of MAGA bullies and non-MAGA cowards, with people like Ryan being a prime example of the latter. If there’s anything more contemptible than being a villain, it’s being an accomplice — less guilty than the former, but also less compelling, confident and strong.That’s what became of Ryan’s side of the G.O.P. in the Trump years. Every policy victory they helped achieve was a political victory for Trump and his side of the party. But every Trumpian disgrace was a disgrace for the Ryan side but not for Trump. The 2020 election lies and Jan. 6 and Trump’s blatant obstruction of justice in the documents case may trouble the conscience of Ryan. The MAGA crowd? They’re cool with it.This is why Trump is now cruising toward renomination, much to the chagrin of those conservatives who assumed he would have faded away by now. With the honorable exception of Asa Hutchinson and the intriguing one of Chris Christie, none of Trump’s most notable so-called opponents have actually bothered to oppose him. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be a younger version of Trump; Ron DeSantis an angrier version. But just as people will prefer a villain to an accomplice, they’ll take the original over the imitation.Even at this point, it may be too late to change the fundamental dynamic of the Republican race, particularly since every fresh criminal indictment strengthens Trump’s political grip and advances his argument that he’s the victim of a deep-state conspiracy.But if the Paul Ryans of the conservative world want to make a compelling case against Trump, it can’t be that he’s unelectable. It’s that he’s irredeemable. It’s that he brought shame to the party of Lincoln; that he violated his oath to the Constitution; that he traduced every value Republicans once claimed to stand for; and that they will not support him if he is the Republican nominee.That may not keep Trump from the nomination or even the presidency. But on any road to redemption, the starting point has to be the truth, most of all when it’s hard.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 Georgia Election Inquiry: Grand Jury Likely to Hear Case Next Week

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      The district attorney in Atlanta is expected to take the findings from an election interference investigation to a grand jury, which could issue indictments.The fourth criminal case involving Donald J. Trump is likely to come to a head next week, with the district attorney in Atlanta expected to take the findings from her election interference investigation to a grand jury.The Georgia investigation may be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges as a result of the investigation, which Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has pursued for two and a half years.Ms. Willis has signaled that she would seek indictments from a grand jury in the first half of August. In a letter to local officials in May, she laid out plans for most of her staff to work remotely during the first three weeks of August amid heightened security concerns. Security barriers were recently erected in front of the downtown Atlanta courthouse, and at lunchtime on Tuesday, 16 law enforcement vehicles were parked around the perimeter.On Tuesday afternoon, two witnesses who received subpoenas to appear before the Fulton County grand jury said in interviews that they had not received notices instructing them to testify within the next 48 hours, a sign that the case will not get to the jury until next week.Earlier this month, Mr. Trump was indicted in a federal case brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, in an investigation also related to election interference that listed a number of unindicted co-conspirators. The Georgia inquiry, elements of which overlap with the federal case, involves not just the former president, but an array of his aides and advisers at the time of the 2020 election, several of whom are expected to face charges.If Mr. Trump were to be convicted in a federal prosecution, he could theoretically pardon himself if he were re-elected president. But presidents do not hold such sway in state matters. Moreover, Georgia law makes pardons possible only five years after the completion of a sentence. Getting a sentence commuted requires the approval of a state panel.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have described an indictment in Georgia as a foregone conclusion in recent legal filings, and the forewoman of a special grand jury that heard evidence for several months last year strongly hinted afterward that the group, which served in an advisory capacity, had recommended Mr. Trump for indictment.Two grand juries have been hearing cases at the Fulton County Courthouse during the current Superior Court term, which began on July 11 and runs through Sept. 1. Twelve of 23 jurors need to agree that there is probable cause to hand down criminal charges after hearing evidence in a case.“The work is accomplished,” Ms. Willis recently told a local TV station. “We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go.”“The work is accomplished,” Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., recently told a local TV station. “We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go.”Audra Melton for The New York TimesHer office began investigating in February 2021 whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden.The inquiry focused on five things that happened in Georgia in the weeks after the election. They include calls that Mr. Trump made to pressure local officials, including a Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his loss.Ms. Willis’s office also scrutinized a plan by Trump allies to create a slate of bogus electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia, even though Mr. Biden’s victory had been certified several times by the state’s Republican leadership. The office also investigated harassment of local election workers by Trump supporters, as well as lies about ballot fraud that were advanced by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, and other allies during legislative hearings after the election.At times the investigation stretched beyond Fulton County, including to rural Coffee County, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, where Trump allies and contractors working on their behalf breached the election system in the first week of 2021.Ms. Willis has said that by bringing charges under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, her inquiry could cover a wide range of issues. Broadly speaking, so-called RICO laws require prosecutors to prove that a group of people conspired to take part in organized criminal activity.With RICO indictments, Ms. Willis said in an interview last year, “there are sometimes acts that occurred outside of the jurisdiction that are overt acts that we can use if they are evidence of the greater scheme.”The special grand jury heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months and recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, its forewoman has said. The Trump aides and allies whose conduct has been scrutinized in the inquiry include Mr. Giuliani, who was told last year that he was a target who could face charges. A number of other lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have also been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before the special grand jury last year. He traveled to Georgia after the election and became personally involved in the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office despite his loss.Ms. Willis’s office also sought the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking official at the Justice Department, but was blocked by the department. Mr. Clark sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election, over the strong objections of more senior officials at the department.More than half of the 16 Republicans who were bogus Trump electors in Georgia are cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office, but others have been told they could face charges, including David Shafer, the former leader of the state Republican Party.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have called the Atlanta inquiry a “clown show” and have filed numerous court motions seeking to disqualify the district attorney and derail the investigation. They argued that the special grand jury proceedings were unconstitutional, and that Ms. Willis has made prejudicial public statements.But Georgia judges have shown no inclination to act before any charges are brought. Both the presiding Fulton Superior Court judge, Robert C.I. McBurney, and the Georgia Supreme Court have rejected motions from the Trump team in recent weeks.Two witnesses who have been subpoenaed to appear before Fulton grand jurors currently hearing cases — George Chidi, an independent journalist, and Jen Jordan, a former state senator — said Tuesday afternoon that they had not received 48-hour notices to appear this week. Mr. Chidi was one of a handful of reporters who discovered a December 2020 meeting of bogus Trump electors, and Ms. Jordan, a Democrat, attended a legislative hearing in which Mr. Giuliani and other Trump allies advanced false claims of election fraud.This has been a busy year for Mr. Trump’s lawyers. In April, he was indicted in state court in Manhattan on 34 felony counts related to his role in what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme, covering up a potential sex scandal to clear his path to the presidency in 2016.In June, he was indicted in Miami on federal criminal charges related to his handling of classified documents and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to recover them after he left office.Christian Boone contributed reporting. More

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      Today’s Top News: DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Loss, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Along with other Republican presidential candidates, Ron DeSantis has been testing new lines of attack against Donald Trump.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:DeSantis Bluntly Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Defeat, with Nicholas NehamasWhat’s at Stake in Ohio’s Referendum on Amending the State ConstitutionThe Taliban Won but These Afghans Fought On, with Christina GoldbaumEli Cohen More

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      DeSantis reconoce la derrota de Trump en 2020

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      “Joe Biden es el presidente”, dijo el gobernador de Florida en una entrevista con NBC News. DeSantis y otros aspirantes republicanos han estado implementando nuevas estrategias contra Donald Trump.Ron DeSantis, el gobernador de Florida, afirmó claramente en una entrevista reciente que Donald Trump perdió las elecciones de 2020, deslindándose así de la ortodoxia de la mayoría de los votantes republicanos. Esto sucede mientras los rivales republicanos del expresidente prueban nuevas estrategias de ataque contra él para reimpulsar sus campañas.“Por supuesto que perdió”, dijo DeSantis en una entrevista con NBC News divulgada el lunes. “Joe Biden es el presidente”.Los comentarios de DeSantis —que, tras tres años de evasivas, constituyen la primera vez que reconoce de manera clara el resultado de las elecciones de 2020— fueron la señal más reciente de que los rivales de Trump tratan de usar sus crecientes problemas legales en su contra. Desde que Trump fue acusado de cargos de conspiración para anular las elecciones de 2020, tanto DeSantis como el ex vicepresidente Mike Pence se han distanciado drásticamente del expresidente por sus acciones que el 6 de enero de 2021 desencadenaron los disturbios en el Capitolio.La crítica ha sido sutil. Ninguno de los candidatos ha atacado a Trump de manera abierta ni ha sugerido que los cargos estén justificados. En sus comentarios más recientes, DeSantis continuó sugiriendo que las elecciones tuvieron problemas, y dijo que no habían sido “perfectas”. Pero ambos parecen estar buscando maneras de usar la acusación para ejercer presión sobre las debilidades del expresidente y formular argumentos a su favor que incluso los partidarios de Trump tomen en cuenta.DeSantis también ha estado tratando de reimpulsar su campaña en declive, y sus donantes lo han presionado para que modere sus posturas con el fin de atraer a una audiencia más amplia.Sin embargo, DeSantis debe encontrar la manera de ganar las elecciones primarias republicanas, en las que Trump tiene una ventaja dominante en las encuestas. Los más recientes comentarios de DeSantis, aunque correctos, podrían enfrentarlo a gran parte de la base republicana: aunque se determinó ampliamente que las elecciones de 2020 fueron seguras, cerca del 70 por ciento de los votantes republicanos afirman que la victoria del presidente Biden no fue legítima, según una encuesta de CNN realizada el mes pasado.A través de un comunicado, Steven Cheung, portavoz de Trump, dijo que “Ron DeSantis debería dejar de ser el mayor animador de Joe Biden”.Hasta el momento, de los candidatos más destacados, el exgobernador de Nueva Jersey, Chris Christie y Pence son los que se han pronunciado de forma más enérgica contra Trump. La plataforma desde la que se está postulando Christie es explícitamente anti-Trump. Pence ha dicho que el exmandatario merece la “presunción de inocencia”, pero también ha afirmado que, de ser necesario, testificaría en el juicio por los hechos del 6 de enero.“El pueblo estadounidense merece saber que el presidente Trump me pidió que lo pusiera por encima de mi juramento a la Constitución, pero mantuve mi juramento y siempre lo haré”, le dijo Pence a CNN en una entrevista que se transmitió el domingo. “Y en parte me postulo a la presidencia porque creo que cualquiera que se ponga por encima de la Constitución nunca debería ser presidente de Estados Unidos”.Pero ninguno de los argumentos parece estar resonando entre los votantes republicanos. Christie tiene alrededor del 2 por ciento de apoyo en las encuestas nacionales, y Pence aún no ha calificado para el primer debate republicano que se celebrará a fines de este mes. En una cena para el Partido Republicano de Iowa a finales del mes pasado, la audiencia abucheó al exrepresentante de Texas Will Hurd, un candidato con pocas posibilidades, luego de que acusó al expresidente de “correr para no ir a prisión”.En la entrevista de NBC, DeSantis dijo que considera que hubo problemas en la forma en que se realizaron las elecciones de 2020. Citó el uso generalizado de boletas por correo, las donaciones privadas a los administradores electorales por parte del fundador de Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, y los esfuerzos de las empresas de redes sociales para limitar la difusión de informaciones sobre la computadora portátil de Hunter Biden.“No creo que hayan sido unas elecciones bien hechas”, dijo DeSantis. “Pero también creo que los republicanos no se defendieron. Tienes que defenderte cuando eso está sucediendo”.DeSantis reconoció el viernes que las falsas teorías conspirativas del exmandatario sobre las elecciones del 2020 argumentando que estuvieron amañadas “no tenían fundamentos”.En el período previo a las elecciones de mitad de mandato del año pasado, DeSantis hizo campaña a favor de escandalosos negacionistas electorales, como Doug Mastriano, quien se postuló para gobernador en Pensilvania, y Kari Lake, quien lo hizo en Arizona.Ambos perdieron, al igual que todos sus homólogos más conocidos, lo que demostró que si bien la negación de los resultados de las elecciones presidenciales puede tener buenos resultados en las primarias republicanas, no funciona tan bien en las elecciones generales en los estados disputados. El 60 por ciento de los votantes independientes en todo el país creen que Biden ganó las elecciones de 2020, según la encuesta de CNN, una señal ominosa para los republicanos que aceptan el negacionismo electoral de cara a 2024.Para los partidarios radicales de Trump, los recientes comentarios de DeSantis sobre las elecciones de 2020 fueron vistos como descalificadores.“Cualquier político que diga que Donald Trump perdió esas elecciones y que Biden realmente ganó, está acabado”, afirmó Mike Lindell, el fundador de una compañía de almohadas que ha sido un gran promotor de las teorías de conspiración sobre las máquinas electorales, en una entrevista con The New York Times el lunes. “Su campaña básicamente se acaba cuando hacen un comentario como ese”.Sin embargo, el cambio de DeSantis sirve para reforzar su argumento general contra Trump: que bajo su liderazgo, los republicanos han tenido un mal desempeño en tres elecciones seguidas.Además, podría ayudar a calmar los temores de algunos de los grandes donantes de DeSantis. Robert Bigelow, quien contribuyó con más de 20 millones de dólares a un súper PAC (sigla en inglés que designa al comité de acción política) que respaldaba a DeSantis, le dijo a Reuters la semana pasada que no dará más dinero a menos que el candidato adopte un enfoque más moderado. La campaña del gobernador está experimentando un déficit de recaudación de fondos y el mes pasado despidió a más de un tercio de su personal.Como parte del “reimpulso” de su campaña, DeSantis ha salido de su zona de confort mediática en la que solo conversaba con analistas conservadores y presentadores de opinión en Fox News para darle más acceso a los principales medios de comunicación, por lo que ha concedido entrevistas a CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC y The Wall Street Journal. También ha respondido más preguntas de los periodistas en los actos de campaña electoral.DeSantis ha utilizado esas plataformas para criticar a Trump por su edad, su incapacidad de “drenar el pantano” durante su mandato y por la “cultura de la derrota” que, según DeSantis, se ha apoderado del Partido Republicano bajo el liderazgo de Trump.“Creo que soy el único candidato actual que puede ganar las primarias, derrotar a Joe Biden y luego cumplir con todas estas cosas que sabemos que deben hacerse”, dijo DeSantis en un evento de la estación televisiva WMUR con votantes de Nuevo Hampshire, la semana pasada.Sin embargo, también ha defendido sistemáticamente a Trump por los cargos penales. Ha afirmado que representan el uso del gobierno federal como un arma contra un rival político de Biden.En conjunto, los comentarios de DeSantis sobre el expresidente sugieren que en vez de apresurarse, está avanzando poco a poco hacia una confrontación más directa con Trump. El gobernador nunca lo menciona por su nombre en los discursos de campaña dirigidos a los votantes, y prefiere abordar el tema solo cuando los asistentes a los eventos de su campaña o los periodistas se lo preguntan.Algunos candidatos que se están postulando para la candidatura republicana ya han confirmado la legitimidad general de las elecciones de 2020.En una conversación con los votantes el mes pasado, el senador Tim Scott de Carolina del Sur —quien actualmente ocupa el tercer lugar en Iowa, detrás de Trump y DeSantis, según la encuesta más reciente de The New York Times/Siena College— dijo que no creía las elecciones hubieron sido “robadas”.“Hubo trampa, pero ¿se robaron las elecciones?”, preguntó Scott. “Hay una diferencia”.Nikki Haley, exgobernadora de Carolina del Sur, ha rechazado las afirmaciones falsas de Trump de que las elecciones fueron robadas, pero ha oscilado entre las críticas y la defensa del expresidente.Antes de los disturbios en el Capitolio, Haley se negó a reconocer que Trump estaba actuando de manera imprudente o que fue irresponsable al negarse a aceptar la derrota. Pero inmediatamente después criticó de forma severa a Trump y predijo erróneamente que había caído tan bajo que iba a perder cualquier viabilidad política.En cuestión de meses, Haley volvió a respaldar a Trump, asegurando que el Partido Republicano lo necesitaba. Después de que se hiciera pública la acusación sobre el 6 de enero contra Trump, Haley dijo en un programa de radio de Nuevo Hampshire que de forma premeditada se había abstenido de publicar una declaración porque estaba “cansada de comentar sobre todos los dramas de Trump”.Vivek Ramaswamy, el millonario de la biotecnología que ha sido un firme defensor de Trump, declaró a través de un comunicado: “Joe Biden prestó juramento como el presidente número 46 de Estados Unidos y, como dije poco después de la toma de posesión, acepto ese resultado”.Pero agregó: “En realidad, no creo que Joe Biden esté liderando el país. Creo que es un títere de facto de la clase gerencial en el Estado administrativo que lo utiliza como instrumento para lograr sus propios objetivos”.Al señalar, como lo hizo DeSantis, las quejas sobre la difusión del caso de la computadora portátil de Hunter Biden, Ramaswamy afirmó: “Las grandes empresas de tecnología se robaron las elecciones de 2020”.Ruth Igielnik More

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      G.O.P. Contenders Feed Voter Distrust in Courts, Schools and Military

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      As Donald J. Trump has escalated his attacks on the justice system and other core institutions, his competitors for the Republican nomination have followed his lead.Ron DeSantis says the military is more interested in global warming and “gender ideology” initiatives than in national security.Tim Scott says the Justice Department “continues to hunt Republicans.”Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to “shut down the deep state,” borrowing former President Donald J. Trump’s conspiratorial shorthand for a federal bureaucracy he views as hostile.As Mr. Trump escalates his attacks on American institutions, focusing his fire on the Justice Department as he faces new criminal charges, his competitors for the Republican nomination have followed his lead.Several have adopted much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric sowing broad suspicion about the courts, the F.B.I., the military and schools. As they vie for support in a primary dominated by Mr. Trump, they routinely blast these targets in ways that might have been considered extraordinary, not to mention unthinkably bad politics, just a few years ago.Yet there is little doubt about the political incentives behind the statements. Polls show that Americans’ trust in their institutions has fallen to historical lows, with Republicans exhibiting more doubt across a broad swath of public life.The proliferation of attacks has alarmed both Republicans and Democrats who worry about the long-term impact on American democracy. Public confidence in core institutions — from the justice system to voting systems — is fundamental to a durable democracy, particularly at a time of sharp political division. Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign says he is fighting “abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our country at levels never seen before.”Doug Mills/The New York Times“We’ve had these times of division before in our history, but we’ve always had leaders to bridge the gaps who have said we need to build respect, we need to restore confidence in our institutions — today we have just the opposite,” said Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas and a moderate whose campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has so far gained little traction.“That defines the course of 2024,” he added. “We’re going to have a leader that brings out the best of America, which is the first job of being president. Or you’re going to have somebody that increases distrust that we have in our institutions.”Mr. Trump is still the loudest voice. As he blames others for his defeat in 2020 and, now, after being charged in three separate criminal cases, he has characterized federal prosecutors as “henchmen” orchestrating a “cover-up.” After he was indicted last week on charges related to his attempts to overturn the election, his campaign cited “abuse, incompetence and corruption that is running through the veins of our country at levels never seen before.”Mr. DeSantis, however, has echoed that view, making criticisms of educators, health officials, the mainstream news media, “elites” and government employees central to his campaign, and even, at times, invoking violent imagery.“All of these deep-state people, you know, we are going to start slitting throats on Day 1,” Mr. DeSantis said during a New Hampshire campaign stop late last week. The governor, a Navy veteran, used similar language about the Department of Defense late last month, saying that if elected he would need a defense secretary who “may have to slit some throats.”Other candidates, too, have keyed into voters’ trust deficit. Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, wants to shut down the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. as part of his fight against the so-called deep state. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations, has said she opposes red-flag gun laws because “I don’t trust that they won’t take them away from people who rightfully deserve to have them.”Even Mike Pence, who has criticized Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election at the heart of the charges filed late week, has suggested the Justice Department is politically motivated in its prosecution, warning of a “two-tiered system of justice,” with “one set of rules for Republicans, and one set of rules for Democrats.”Running against the government is hardly new, especially for Republicans. For decades, the party called for shrinking the size and reach of some federal programs — with the exception of the military — and treated President Ronald Reagan’s declaration that “government is the problem” as a guiding principle.But even some Republicans, largely moderates who have rejected Trumpism, note the tenor of the campaign rhetoric has reached new and conspiratorial levels. Familiar complaints about government waste or regulatory overreach are now replaced with claims that government agencies are targeting citizens and that bureaucrats are busy enacting political agendas.“Does anyone believe the IRS won’t go after Middle America?” Nikki Haley tweeted in April.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted in April, “Does anyone believe the IRS won’t go after Middle America?” Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesNone of the candidates responded to requests for interviews about these statements.Casting doubt on the integrity of government is hardly limited to Republican candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination, has made questioning public health officials on long-established science a focus of his campaign. In her quixotic bid for the nomination, Marianne Williamson has declared that she is “running to challenge the system.”And President Biden, whose resistance to institutional change has often frustrated the left wing of his party, has mused about his skepticism of the Supreme Court — “this is not a normal court,” he said after the court’s ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions.A Gallup poll released in July found that public confidence in major American institutions is at record low levels, with historic levels of distrust in the military, police, schools, big business and technology. Several other institutions — including the presidency, the Supreme Court and the criminal justice system as well as newspapers and broadcast news, are just slightly above the record low they hit last year.There is an unmistakable partisan divide: Republicans are far less likely to express confidence in a majority of institutions in the survey, including the presidency and public schools. Democrats have far more doubt about the Supreme Court and the police. (There is bipartisan distrust in the criminal justice system, with less than one in four voters expressing confidence in the system.)The military has seen an especially steep decline in trust from Republican voters, with 68 percent saying they have confidence in the armed forces, compared with 91 percent three years ago. Mr. DeSantis in particular has spoken to that shift on an institution that Republicans were once loath to criticize.“When revered institutions like our own military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission — from global warming to gender ideology and pronouns — morale declines and recruiting suffers,” he said when he announced his bid. “We need to eliminate these distractions and get focused on the core mission.”In a Fox News interview, he recently said, “The military that I see is different from the military I served in.”Feeding on voters’ already deeply embedded skepticism might have once been seen as politically risky, but social media and the right-wing media have helped change that, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who conducts weekly focus groups with her party’s voters.Ms. Longwell says these forces have created a “Republican triangle of doom,” with the party’s voter base, politicians and partisan media creating a feedback loop of complaints and conspiracy theories.“The lack of trust has become a defining feature of our politics,” she said. “Voters feel like there is an existential threat any time that someone who doesn’t share your politics is in charge of something. We’ve lost the sense that neutral is possible.”But that does not explain the whole picture. The public’s trust in government institutions has been slipping for decades, first declining in the wake of the Vietnam War and then again after Watergate and yet again after the war in Iraq and the Great Recession.Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, wants to shut down the F.B.I. and the I.R.S.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesFormer Gov. Jerry Brown of California noted that he ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1992 by attacking Washington institutions as corrupt, but the argument never caught fire in the way it has with Republicans, he said, in part because his party’s base generally trusted government.Today he sees the country as more polarized. Notions that would have once been seen as being on the fringe, such as Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, are mainstream. Many Republican voters expect to hear candidates attack election results routinely, undermining the system they depend on for power.“Democracy does depend on trust,” even if “politics depends on fear,” Mr. Brown said in a recent interview. “The world is getting more dangerous, and at home it’s getting less governable.”The impact of the lack of trust was particularly apparent in the pandemic, when many Americans blamed public authorities for inconsistent guidance and unpopular lockdowns. Ultimately, that distrust fed the anti-vaccination campaigns.Questioning public health officials has been essential to the rise of Mr. DeSantis, who more than two years ago wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal with the headline: “Don’t Trust the Elites.”Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, has also taken aim at the government. In another era, he might have been an unlikely hero for the anti-establishment — a Harvard-educated businessman who has lent more than $15 million to his own campaign.Still, as the disdain for the elites has metastasized deeper and further into the party, Mr. Ramaswamy has embraced the pugilistic language of Mr. Trump, frequently on social media.“Shut down the FBI & IRS,” he posted this month. “Pardon defendants of politicized prosecutions. Replace civil service protections with 8-year term limits. Punish bureaucrats who violate the law. Get aggressive.”Kitty Bennett More