Presidential Election of 2020

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      Trump Lawyers Seek Meeting With Garland Over Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Two lawyers for the former president asserted that he was being treated unfairly in the investigations into his handling of classified documents and his efforts to remain in power.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump sent a letter on Tuesday requesting a meeting with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland related to the special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump’s conduct.The letter cited no specifics but asserted that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly by the Justice Department through the investigations led by the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Smith is scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s handling of classified material that was discovered at his private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, after his presidency, as well as his efforts to retain power after he lost the 2020 election.There are indications that Mr. Smith is approaching the stage of the investigation where he could start making decisions about whether to seek indictments of Mr. Trump and others in the documents case. The status of his other line of inquiry, into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and how they contributed to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters, is less clear.“Unlike President Biden, his son Hunter and the Biden family, President Trump is being treated unfairly,” the lawyers for Mr. Trump, James Trusty and John Rowley, wrote to Mr. Garland.“No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion,” they wrote.They requested a meeting to discuss the “ongoing injustice” by Mr. Smith’s team.The letter was reported earlier by ABC News.A spokesman for Mr. Smith declined to comment.The letter’s tone is markedly different from the approach taken by Mr. Trump shortly after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, recovering documents that Mr. Trump had failed to turn over after receiving a subpoena demanding that they be returned to the government. At the time, Mr. Trump, through an intermediary, sent a message to Justice Department officials that the search inflamed the country, and he asked how he could help to lower the temperature.The letter from his lawyers on Tuesday was directly confrontational. It implied that the family of Mr. Biden, who appointed Mr. Garland and who is himself the focus of a special counsel investigation into a far smaller number of classified documents from his vice-presidential and Senate days found in spaces where he worked and in his home, is benefiting from more favorable treatment.Hunter Biden is under separate investigation on possible tax charges and for possibly having lied about his drug use on a federal form he filled out to purchase a handgun.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination in an increasingly crowded Republican field. But with the letter, Mr. Trump is relying on a frequently used playbook, in which he suggests a judge or prosecutor is treating him unfairly by the act of investigating him.Most recently, he tried suggesting the judge overseeing an indictment against him in a state court in Manhattan has a conflict because a family member works for Democrats.Seen another way, the letter could be an attempt by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to lay down a marker toward asking Mr. Garland to recuse himself from involvement in whether Mr. Trump faces charges.While Mr. Smith will make the recommendation on whether to charge Mr. Trump with federal crimes in the two cases, a final decision would be made by Mr. Garland. In the documents-related case, prosecutors have examined evidence related to obstruction of justice, as well as to whether he mishandled classified material.Mr. Smith’s team is still hearing from witnesses in the two cases, according to multiple familiar with the activity, although all signs point to the documents investigation nearing its end point.Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately predicted that the former president will face charges in the case related to the documents at a minimum, although they maintain he did nothing wrong. They have also grown angry at the number of people who have been subpoenaed, from low-level workers at Mar-a-Lago to former government officials.Mr. Trump is under indictment in New York on charges of paying hush money to a porn star and is facing a separate investigation in Georgia into his efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls there in 2020.It is highly unlikely that Mr. Garland would agree to meet with Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of the attorney general’s former aides said.“Merrick Garland will not meet with Trusty or any of the other Trump lawyers,” said Anthony Coley, Mr. Garland’s former spokesman. “Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Merrick Garland.”Glenn Thrush More

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      Trump Is Back, to Tear Our Families Apart Once More

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      My cousin back in rural Illinois, where I grew up and where most of my family still lives, sent me a nice note over Facebook the other day. She saw I had a novel coming out and told me she was proud of me and couldn’t wait to read it. I thanked her and said I’d love to catch lunch the next time I’m in town. She said that would be nice.Then she added: “And no politics … I promise!”I promised as well. We’re going to do our best to honor that promise. But it’s getting harder. Again.Families across America that were so divided by the Trump era have only started to heal in the last couple of years — and now we’re facing the real possibility of a sequel.I’m dreading, and I sense that she and many other Americans are dreading, having to go through this gantlet so soon again. Politics have divided families in ugly ways, and I do sense that the Biden era, for many, has been a chance to try to heal. But the wounds may be about to be reopened.One of the implicit, but central, selling points of a Joe Biden presidency was that, if he did his job right, the average American wouldn’t have to pay much attention to him. The “normalcy” Mr. Biden vowed to return us to was partly about making the executive branch a functioning arm of government again, and about no longer being the (very scary) joke that the country had become globally during the Donald Trump presidency.But at home, for many Americans, it was about something simpler than that: It was about returning to a world where we did not have to talk and fight about politics all the time. It was about being in your own home, among your own family and being able to forget, if just for a little while, that politics were happening at all — or at least assume that reasonable people were taking care of it.The Trump years made this impossible, and the ubiquitousness of politics, the sense that you had to be screaming about the state of the world at all times, fractured families across the country. What had once been merely some awkward moments at Thanksgiving became constant fissures pitting kids against parents, siblings against siblings, generation against generation.Some of these fissures became ruptures, or even chasms: I have one friend who clashed with his in-laws over Mr. Trump so dramatically that they still haven’t met their 3-year-old granddaughter. The constant and inescapable political discourse of 2015 to 2021 frayed every bond of American society, perhaps family most of all.But there has been a quiet change the last couple of years. These disagreements have not gone away: The world is as perilous and fraught as it has always been. But since Mr. Trump left office, you’ve been able to find moments of escape and respite, and even, yes, normalcy. There have not been constant presidential tweets; there has not been a ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries; whatever verbal gaffes Mr. Biden might make, you have felt fairly confident he’d never refer to another country with a scatological vulgarity.Things have not been perfect, and there are still people desperately trying to fight about everything — there’s always that relative who insists on making sure you saw his “Let’s Go Brandon” hat. But with the easing of a pandemic that scrambled the planet, you have been able to walk around in the world for at least a few minutes at a time without worrying that it would explode. Maybe you even mended some fences with the people who, no matter how much you may disagree with them, you love. (My friend’s daughter finally has a meeting with her grandparents planned for this summer.)You could take those first steps, because, for the first time in a long time, politics hasn’t been the center of American life. But the recent CNN town hall with Mr. Trump was a reminder of storm clouds on the horizon — and these clouds look very familiar.A majority of Americans do not want to see another matchup between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. There are many reasons for this, yet I wonder if a big one for many people is the fear that those tumultuous times that we just went through and unceasing torrent of political battles that invaded our holiday dinner table are about to return. Trump versus Biden? This is what we just went through. We have to go through that again?And what if Ron DeSantis gets the Republican nomination over Mr. Trump? Maybe that will just lead to entirely new fights. Though considering how bruising any nomination battle that Mr. Trump loses would be — if such a battle ends at all — I suspect it won’t leave the country in a healing mood, either.My cousin and I disagree on many things, and there have been times — as when I saw her on Facebook cheering on the buses of “patriots” on their way to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021 — when I thought our relationship was essentially over. This was not long after she, someone who detasseled corn in the vast Illinois fields alongside me when we were both children, called me an “elitist deep stater.” It was difficult to wrap my mind around how much had changed: I had gone from affably disagreeing with her about Mitt Romney to wondering if she’d lost touch with reality entirely.But the fact remains: I love my cousin, and my cousin loves me. It is impossible to imagine my life, who I would be, without her place in it, and I’m sure she feels the same way. She has known me forever in a way so few people have. I’ve enjoyed reconnecting and have even thought, “If our relationship can survive 2020, it can survive anything.” But can it survive that twice? I am not sure. I suspect many families across the country are wondering the same thing.We can avoid talking about it, but it’s coming. It lurks, waiting to blast us all apart again. If you want to know why millions of Americans are so wary of a Trump-Biden sequel, that gathering storm is a big part of the answer.Will Leitch is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Time Has Come,” and is a contributing editor at New York magazine.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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      Why ‘Succession’ Is a Work of Fantasy

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      It was interesting, after writing last week’s newsletter on the problems of conservative media, to watch Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Succession,” in which the show’s lightly fictionalized version of Fox News, run by its somewhat more meaningfully fictionalized version of the Fox-owning Murdoch family, takes center stage for an imagined election night. (There will be some spoilers below, fair warning.) Between the Dominion Voting Systems settlement and the Tucker Carlson firing, we’ve had a lot of real-world Fox drama lately, and the contrast between reality and fiction tells us something interesting about how art depicts our politics — and how the nature of democratic politics can resist successful dramatization.In the real world, the last presidential election night saw Fox News call Arizona early (calling it correctly, though probably earlier than was justified by the extremely narrow margin), yielding fury from Donald Trump’s campaign and backlash from the Fox audience, whose drift toward other outlets helps explain why Fox allowed election conspiracy theories to run wild on some of its shows. It was a case study in the problem I described last week, where conservative media has ended up captive to the particular expectations of a large television audience — a demand for infotainment, reality-TV drama, good guys and bad guys, nothing that doesn’t make sense within the expected nightly narrative.In the world of “Succession,” the key election-night dilemma is somewhat similar — when to call a crucial state — but the dynamics are quite different. The show’s presidential election is disrupted by a fire (arson?) at a Milwaukee precinct that destroys thousands of ballots, leaving the right-wing candidate ahead pending litigation, and his campaign wants ATN (the show’s Fox News) to call Wisconsin for him immediately. The decision gets punted up to the Roy siblings, the would-be heirs to their recently deceased father’s corporate empire, and though there are references to what the ATN audience wants, the Roys end up making a very bad, republic-undermining decision for reasons internal to their family dynamics. The brothers, Kendall and Roman, want to keep the company rather than go through with a planned sale to a Scandinavian tech billionaire, the right-wing candidate has promised to block the deal for them if he’s elected, and their sister, Shiv, the liberal of the group, is playing her own double game that blows up in her face.A key question throughout the show’s seasons has been whether “Succession” is ultimately the drama of, well, succession promised by the title — a story in the style of “The Godfather,” where one of the main characters emerges as the (corrupted) heir to the father’s empire — or whether it’s headed for a version of the “Hamlet” ending, where everybody stabs or poisons everybody else and some outsider shows up to claim the throne. With two episodes left, the dice seem loaded for the second outcome: Failsons and a faildaughter lose their company and, oops, bring down the American republic along the way.But as a political drama, which “Succession” is at least secondarily, both of these narratives are essentially elite-driven and family-driven, suggesting a world where to understand what happens in American politics, you mostly need to understand the pressures and pathologies afflicting a narrow group of power brokers.Which is, certainly, part of the truth. I write a lot about elites, everybody writes a lot about elites, because as the word suggests they’re pretty important to figuring out what’s going on in society — and also because when you write about politics for a living, you’re often writing for an audience that thinks of itself as at least elite-adjacent, part of the professional class, the overclass, the meritocracy.Thus a lot of arguments about the Republican Party in the age of Trump necessarily revolve around what some segment of this overclass is getting wrong. Is it liberal elites whose failures and ideological fixations keep giving oxygen to populism? Or media elites who keep covering Trump the wrong way (with vast disagreements about what the right way would be)? Or conservative elites who just need to summon moral courage and stand up against demagogy? Or the entire elite that needs replacement by a better one, ideally forged by classically minded finishing schools and papal encyclicals? The answer varies but the narrative endures because “affecting some change in elite behavior” is the biggest lever that seems within a pundit’s reach.When I watch “Succession” with this mind-set, my main complaint about the show’s political vision is that it mostly leaves out a kind of Republican elite who would be connected to any Fox News-like enterprise. The show obviously has no trouble scripting the amoral cynics getting rich off a conservative base they secretly despise, and it does a decent job channeling the voice of the very-online right (the far-right presidential candidate has a weird patois that sounds like Robert Nisbet crossed with a Nietzschean edgelord). But it doesn’t have much representation for the more normal Republicans who definitely exist inside Fox World, the kind of people who believe in conventional conservative principles and end up compromising with populists they dislike because of liberals they fear more. The show can only imagine weird fanatics on the one hand, and on the other hand pure cynics who secretly know the liberals are right and they themselves are bad guys.But what’s really missing from the political drama on “Succession” isn’t just sincere, non-edgelord Republicans. It’s the crucial role of non-elites — mass opinion, “the people,” anything from a national majority to a primary-season electorate or just a particularly large television audience — as a force unto themselves, a gravity well that every elite stratagem has to work with or around.Sure, the people don’t rule in some naïve or simplistic sense; some kind of elite power is always fundamental. But from a dramatic point of view, the mass American public is as important a “character” in the story of right-wing populism as Rupert Murdoch or for that matter Trump himself. The people, in the form of the mass Fox News audience, drove what happened around and after the 2020 election more than any sibling rivalry inside the House of Murdoch. They’re why the alleged election fraud fiasco went down the way it went down. They’re why Carlson became a cable news ratings king. They’re why, since his firing, a lot fewer people have been watching Fox and Newsmax has been pulling in about as many viewers in its 8 p.m. time slot as CNN.The same point applies to democratic politics writ large. People in rooms talking drive a lot of political action, but if they drove all of it, Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would have been the Republican nominee in 2016 (when Murdoch’s network was surprised and overwhelmed by Trumpism), Elizabeth Warren probably would have been the Democratic nominee in 2020 and Trump definitely wouldn’t be a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024. Our elites can work to tame mass opinion, to master it or redirect it or find some means of resistance — but it’s always there, always doing something in the story.And if that’s a somewhat difficult thing for punditry to reckon with, at least we can write and talk about it in terms of opinion polling and television ratings and the like. Dramatizing the force of mass opinion artistically is much harder. It’s a big part of why there aren’t that many great novels or great movies about the workings of American democracy, relative to the monarchical systems of the past; one of the democratic age’s central characters, the mass public, is just really hard to realize on the page or on the screen.Likewise, a significant part of the contemporary appeal of both historical fiction and my own favored genre of fantasy is that they return politics to a period where the personal encompasses more of the political — where family rivalries and court intrigues loom larger, and mass politics means the occasional mob or the rampaging army but not the daily poll or the nightly ratings, the force of public opinion that lacks embodiment but constantly drives political action nonetheless.The elite world of “Succession,” where the patriarch Logan Roy was both a corporate king and a political kingmaker, is thus ultimately a kind of fantasy fiction, a George R.R. Martin-ish gloss on contemporary American politics: entertaining and smart and on point in some ways, hopefully headed for a more successful wrap than “Game of Thrones,” but finally inadequate to actual political reality, because it always leaves a protagonist offstage.Programming NotesFirst, a reminder that I’m part of a new Times podcast, “Matter of Opinion,” that comes out every Thursday; find the latest episodes here.Second, The Times has just introduced a new iOS app for audio journalism called New York Times Audio, featuring all our podcasts as well as narrated articles from across all our sections, from Opinion and Politics to Food and Sports. It includes the archive of “This American Life” and read-aloud stories from a range of national magazines. It’s available to Times news subscribers, and you can download it here.BreviaryNathan Pinkoski on the evolution of Francis Fukuyama.Scott Alexander compares Francis Galton and Paul Ehrlich.Alex de Waal on the war for Khartoum.Richard Rushfield and Matt Stoller on the Hollywood writers’ strike.Damon Linker tries to stabilize social liberalism. More

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      Fani Willis Signals August Timetable for Charges in Georgia Trump Inquiry

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      The Fulton County district attorney said most of her staff would work remotely at times, and asked judges not to schedule trials, in the first half of August.The Georgia prosecutor leading an investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies has taken the unusual step of announcing remote work days for most of her staff during the first three weeks of August, asking judges in a downtown Atlanta courthouse not to schedule trials for part of that time as she prepares to bring charges in the inquiry.The moves suggest that Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, is expecting a grand jury to unseal indictments during that time period. Ms. Willis outlined the remote work plan and made the request to judges in a letter sent on Thursday to 21 Fulton County officials, including the chief county judge, Ural Glanville, and the sheriff, Pat Labat.“Thank you for your consideration and assistance in keeping the Fulton County Judicial Complex safe during this time,” wrote Ms. Willis, who has already asked the F.B.I. to help with security in and around the courthouse.Ms. Willis had said in a previous letter that any charges related to the Trump investigation would come in the grand jury term that runs from July 11 to Sept. 1. Her letter on Thursday appears to offer more specificity on timing.Her timetable, however, has already been pushed back as she has sought to hammer out cooperation deals with some potential defendants.Mr. Trump’s legal team is trying to scuttle the case with a motion, filed in March, seeking to quash much of the collected evidence and throw Ms. Willis off the case before any charges are filed.Ms. Willis’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.Ms. Willis must now seek approval from a regular grand jury for any charges she plans to bring.With security concerns about the looming indictments in such a high-profile investigation weighing on county officials, Ms. Willis said that she would reduce staffing in her office by about 70 percent and rely on remote work on days when grand juries were in session from July 31 to Aug. 18.She said that there would be exceptions to the remote work plan, including “my leadership team” and “all armed investigators.”Ms. Willis noted in the letter that most judges would be attending a judicial conference during the week of July 31. She added: “I respectfully request that judges not schedule trials and in-person hearings during the weeks beginning Monday, Aug. 7 and Monday, Aug. 14.”Last year, Ms. Willis wrote to the Atlanta field office of the F.B.I., asking for a risk assessment of the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta and for the agency to “provide protective resources to include intelligence and federal agents.”She noted in the letter last year that Mr. Trump had called the prosecutors investigating him “vicious, horrible people” during a Texas rally in January 2022 and called for protests in cities where he was being investigated. His recent criminal indictment in New York City, on charges related to hush money payments made to a porn star, took place largely without incident. Armed pro-Trump protesters appeared around the Georgia State Capitol a number of times in the weeks after the 2020 election, as Mr. Trump and his allies made false accusations of electoral fraud. On at least one occasion, armed counterprotesters were also in the streets.Ms. Willis, who has had some staff members outfitted with bulletproof vests, is clearly concerned about the potential for unrest after any indictments in the Trump inquiry. In a letter sent to the local sheriff last month, she wrote of “the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.” More

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      Trump Lawyer Resigns From Defense Team in Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Timothy Parlatore, who has been defending the former president in the investigations into classified documents and Jan. 6, is leaving as federal prosecutors appear to be nearing decisions about bringing charges.Timothy Parlatore, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump in the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has resigned from the former president’s legal team.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Parlatore declined to discuss the specific reasons for his departure, but said it was not related to the merits of either inquiry — both of which are being led by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Parlatore said that he informed Mr. Trump of his decision directly and that he left the legal team on good terms with the former president.His departure was reported earlier by CNN.Mr. Parlatore’s withdrawal from the twin special counsel cases leaves Mr. Trump a lawyer short at a moment when prosecutors under Mr. Smith seem to be nearing the end of their sprawling grand jury investigations and may be approaching a decision about whether to bring charges.Two other lawyers — James Trusty and John Rowley — will for now continue to take the lead in representing Mr. Trump in both of the cases.Mr. Parlatore informed Mr. Trump’s team on Monday that he anticipated withdrawing, according to a person familiar with the events.Since last summer and until recently, Mr. Parlatore played a key role in Mr. Trump’s attempts to use attorney-client and executive privilege to limit the scope of the testimony provided by a series of witnesses who appeared in front of grand juries hearing evidence in both of the matters.Over and over in sealed filings and at closed-door hearings, Mr. Parlatore and his colleagues sought to assert privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump in the hopes of narrowing testimony from top Trump aides like Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence. But their efforts were almost completely unsuccessful.At one point, Mr. Parlatore himself was subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury investigating the documents case. During his appearance, he answered questions about efforts made by Mr. Trump’s legal team to comply with a subpoena issued by the Justice Department last May demanding the return of all classified material in the former president’s possession.Among the things that Mr. Parlatore said he discussed with the grand jury were searches — ordered by a judge in response to a push from the Justice Department — that he oversaw at the end of last year of several properties belonging to Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla. During the search of the storage site, investigators found at least two more documents with classified markings.Those searches followed a search in August of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, by the F.B.I., which led to the discovery of more than 100 classified documents that had not been returned in response to the earlier subpoena.Mr. Parlatore was brought on to the legal team by Boris Epshteyn, who had been serving as something of an in-house counsel, hiring and negotiating contracts for lawyers. Mr. Epshteyn has shown a penchant for delivering sunny news to Mr. Trump despite bad circumstances, and for creating a bottleneck for the lawyers in dealing with the client, according to several people familiar with the events.Last month, Mr. Parlatore wrote a letter to Congress asking lawmakers for help in taking the documents investigation away from prosecutors and giving it to the intelligence community — a move that, among other things, would have removed the threat of a criminal indictment against Mr. Trump.The letter also seemed to preview some of Mr. Trump’s potential defenses in the documents case, noting that during his chaotic departure from the White House, aides “quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida.” This hasty process, Mr. Parlatore argued, suggested that “White House institutional processes,” not “intentional decisions by President Trump,” were responsible for sensitive material being hauled away.Last week, Mr. Trump appeared to undercut those assertions on live television, declaring at a CNN town hall event that he knowingly removed government records from the White House and claiming that he was allowed to take anything he wanted with him as his personal property.“I took the documents,” he said at the event. “I’m allowed to.” More

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      Pence Looks Toward 2024 Run, Using Reagan’s Playbook, Not Trump’s

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      A pro-Pence super PAC is being formed, and so is a plan to barnstorm Iowa. “This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” a G.O.P. operative said.Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to soon declare a long-shot campaign for the White House against the president under whom he served, pitching himself as a “classical conservative” who would return the Republican Party to its pre-Trump roots, according to people close to Mr. Pence.Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and pushing back against Republican efforts to police big business on ideological grounds. He faces significant challenges, trails far behind in the polls and has made no effort to channel the populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.In a sign his campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, a pro-Pence super PAC called Committed to America is being set up. A veteran Republican operative, Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and was the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the group alongside Jeb Hensarling, a close friend of Mr. Pence’s who served with him in Congress.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation. The political profile he built under former President Donald J. Trump was more supplicant than standard-bearer, at least until the rupture in their relationship on Jan. 6, 2021. He would begin far behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in early national and state polls of 2024 Republican primary voters.The Pence team’s bet is that a “Reagan coalition” can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThe Pence candidacy will focus heavily on winning over evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, where the super PAC is already preparing to organize all 99 counties. Iowa’s caucuses are the first contests for Republican presidential contenders early next year.“Iowa feels more like Indiana than any other state in the union,” Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview. “It just feels like home.”On a recent call with reporters, Mr. Reed, who will help lead the pro-Pence super PAC, described the Iowa caucuses as the “defining event” of Mr. Pence’s candidacy and foreshadowed an old-fashioned blitz of retail politics. “We’re going to organize Iowa, all 99 counties, like we’re running him for county sheriff,” he said.If Mr. Trump represents the populist New Right, Mr. Pence is preparing to run for president in the mold of Ronald Reagan. His team’s improbable bet is that a “Reagan coalition” — composed of the Christian right, fiscal conservatives and national security hawks — can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.“We have to resist the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” Mr. Pence said in the interview.In a Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire focused on economics, Mr. Pence is expected to call for “free trade with free nations,” according to a person familiar with the draft.He is casting himself as a “Reagan conservative” and staking out sharply different positions from Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the most important policy questions framing the Republican 2024 race. Still, running against Mr. Trump so directly will force Mr. Pence to confront the contradictions inherent in having served as the president’s yes-man for four years through the turmoil of the Trump administration.“This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” Mr. Reed said. “People know Mike Pence. They just don’t know him well.”It remains to be seen how frequently Mr. Pence will discuss the moment that has defined him for the last two years: his rejection on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to get him to exceed his constitutional authority while President Biden’s Electoral College victory was certified.That issue is not a winning one with the base of the Republican Party. But Mr. Pence’s team believes there are enough Republicans who might be won over by Mr. Pence describing the moment as adhering to constitutional principles.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMr. Pence stands almost alone among the prospective Republican field in advocating views that were once standard issue for his party.Case in point: Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed back as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt. Before Mr. Trump entered national politics in 2015, cutting entitlement programs was Republican orthodoxy. But Mr. Trump changed that. The former president has promised in his third campaign not to cut either program and he has attacked Mr. DeSantis on the issue, claiming the governor would cut those programs.“It is fairly remarkable that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have the same position on fiscal solvency: The position of never going to touch Social Security and Medicare,” Mr. Pence said.Mr. Pence said he would “explain to people” how the “debt crisis” would affect their children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits won’t apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people in retirement today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will pitch ideas to cut spending for people under 40.Mr. Pence is also drawing a stark contrast on foreign policy. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have questioned whether the United States should be supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Pence sees the battle as a modern version of the Cold War.“There’s a bit of a movement afoot in the Republican Party that would abandon our commitment to being the leader of the free world and that questions why we’re providing military support in Ukraine,” Mr. Pence said.Unlike almost every major Republican running for president, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, though he acknowledged in the interview that the “weapons of mass destruction” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.“In the aftermath of September 11th, the president articulated a doctrine that I wholly supported,” Mr. Pence said, “which was that it’s harder for your enemies to project force if they’re running backward.”Mr. Pence supports a national ban on abortion. “For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” he said.Allison Joyce/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Pence is also resisting the anti-corporate furies that are dominating Republican politics today, arguing limited government means not intervening in the private sector. He was one of the first major Republicans to criticize Mr. DeSantis for his fight against Disney.In the view of New Right politicians such as Mr. DeSantis, limited-government conservatives are naïve to the fact that liberals have overtaken major American institutions — academia, Fortune 500 companies, the news media — and conservatives need to use governmental power to fight back.Mr. Pence will run as a staunch social conservative, drawing a contrast with Mr. Trump on abortion policy. In his town hall with CNN last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly refused to say he would support a federal ban on abortion. He has said the issue should be left to the states.Mr. Pence unapologetically endorses a national ban on abortion.“For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” Mr. Pence said. His senior adviser, Marc Short, said Mr. Pence regarded a 15-week national ban as a “minimal threshold” and would support federal efforts to “protect life beginning at conception.”There is little chance Mr. Pence will receive many endorsements from members of Congress. His team insists that Mr. Pence does not need elected officials to vouch for his credentials. Yet, it’s also unclear how many Republican donors will back his bid. An early sign of interest came last week in Dallas when the billionaire Ross Perot Jr., a real estate developer and son of the former presidential candidate, hosted a lunch for Mr. Pence with other major donors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the gathering.Among the hires for the super PAC supporting Mr. Pence is Bobby Saparow, who led the ground game for Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful re-election campaign in Georgia in 2022, one of the few brights spots for Republicans in the midterms. Mr. Saparow promised to “replicate” the effort with Mr. Pence.For now, Mr. Pence is signaling he’s willing to do without a staple of Republican presidential campaigns in the modern era: Mr. Trump’s smash-mouth politics and constant warfare against the media.“People want to see us get back to having a threshold of civility in the public debate,” Mr. Pence said. “And when I say that, when I tell people that I think democracy depends on heavy doses of civility, I get a very visceral response from crowds.” More

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      Georgia Prosecutor Rebuts Trump’s Effort to Scuttle Elections Case

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      The NewsFani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., asked a judge to dismiss former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to have her disqualified from leading an investigation into whether he and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in the state.She also asked the judge, in a 24-page court document filed on Monday, to reject a request from Mr. Trump to suppress the final report of a special grand jury that weighed evidence last year in the election meddling case.Ms. Willis was responding to an earlier motion filed by Mr. Trump’s lawyers that accused her of making biased statements over the course of her investigation. The lawyers also argued that the work of the special grand jury had been “tainted by improper influences,” noting that jurors were allowed to read news articles about the matter during their time of service. (Special grand juries in Georgia have different rules than regular grand juries or trial juries.)In her response, Ms. Willis said that the Trump legal team had not met the “exacting standards” for disqualifying a prosecutor and did not back up various accusations about the investigative process with evidence.She also argued that Mr. Trump did not have legal standing to bring his motion in the first place, noting that he had never been called as a witness before the special grand jury.Donald J. Trump at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., in April.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The Georgia investigation could result in Donald J. Trump being indicted this summer.Mr. Trump has already been criminally indicted in a separate case in New York over hush-money payments made to a porn star, and the Justice Department has two other criminal investigations into Mr. Trump underway. There are indications that the Georgia inquiry could result in a broad indictment that may directly address whether Mr. Trump violated state laws as he sought to overturn President Biden’s victory in the weeks after the 2020 election.A number of experts have said that it would be difficult for Mr. Trump’s legal team to derail the Georgia investigation this early in the process. However, the judge presiding over the case, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, has ruled against Ms. Willis in the past.Most notably, Judge McBurney ruled last July that Ms. Willis’s office could not pursue a criminal case against Lt. Gov. Burt Jones of Georgia, a Republican who was one of 16 Trump supporters who filed bogus papers claiming to be the state’s presidential electors. Ms. Willis, the judge ruled, had a conflict of interest because she had headlined a fund-raiser for Mr. Jones’s Democratic rival in the lieutenant governor’s race.Background: Mr. Trump has accused the chief prosecutor in the case of bias.The special grand jury’s report remains largely under seal, and Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in their motion, asked that it be “quashed and expunged from the record.” The special grand jury heard evidence for roughly seven months before recommending more than a dozen people for indictments, according to its forewoman, who strongly hinted in a February interview with The New York Times that Mr. Trump was among them.Mr. Trump’s motion criticized public statements that Ms. Willis made in 2021 and 2022, pointing in particular to a “biased political cartoon” that was retweeted by Ms. Willis’s campaign Twitter account last July. The cartoon depicted her in a boat with a fishing rod, “fishing a recently subpoenaed witness out of a swamp,” as the Trump motion put it.The Trump motion also said that Judge McBurney had made prejudicial statements, and that Georgia’s laws governing special grand juries were so vague as to be unconstitutional.Ms. Willis’s response said the Trump team’s contentions were “procedurally flawed” and “advance arguments that lack merit.” It noted that if Ms. Willis’s statements and Twitter posts “were the egregious grounds for disqualification which he asserts they are,” Mr. Trump “had a duty to raise them to the court’s attention as soon as he learned of them.”What’s Next: The judge will decide whether to hold a hearing on Mr. Trump’s requests.Ms. Willis, in her motion, asked that Judge McBurney settle the matter without holding a hearing. It remains to be seen if he will set one.Also unclear is whether Mr. Trump, a master of legal delay tactics, can somehow use the skirmish as a way to delay Ms. Willis’s timetable. Last month, Ms. Willis wrote in a letter to law enforcement officials that a decision on any charges against Mr. Trump or others would come between July 11 and Sept. 1. More

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      What We Learned About Trump’s Policies in Contentious Town Hall

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      Former President Donald J. Trump staked out positions on several major issues, including separating migrant children from their parents and pardoning Jan. 6 rioters.Among the barrage of falsehoods and bluster, former President Donald J. Trump laid markers down on several major and divisive issues at the CNN town-hall meeting on Wednesday night.Mr. Trump spoke of several actions he might take if re-elected, at times with a specificity he often dodges in speeches and friendlier interviews. He also revealed much about his thinking on positions that are likely to roil his party, including the war in Ukraine and access to abortion.Here’s a look at some of what Mr. Trump said about policy:Reconsidering migrant family separationsWhen asked if he would return to a policy of separating migrant children from their parents when they arrive at the border, Mr. Trump did not rule it out.“Well, when you have that policy, people don’t come,” he said. “If a family hears that they’re going to be separated, they love their family, they don’t come.”Mr. Trump acknowledged that the policy “sounds harsh” but claimed that the situation warranted it.Some 5,500 foreign-born children, and hundreds of U.S. citizens, are known to have been separated from their parents under the Trump administration’s so-called zero tolerance policy, which jailed and criminally charged migrant parents for crossing the border without authorization.Mr. Trump abandoned the policy after an international outcry in 2018.President Biden formed a commission to reunite parents with their children, some of whom have spent years in foster care. He also vowed not to separate families at the border and quickly ended the detention of families, though the administration is considering new efforts such as curfews and the use of more GPS monitors for adults as they see more surges of families arriving at the border.Pardons for the Jan. 6 riotersWhen asked if he had any regrets about his actions leading up to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump insisted that he did nothing wrong and sympathized with his supporters who took part.A retired lawyer in the audience asked Mr. Trump if he would issue pardons to those rioters who were convicted of federal offenses.“I am inclined to pardon many of them,” Mr. Trump said. “I can’t say for every single one because a couple of them, probably, they got out of control.”More than 900 people have been criminally charged as part of the assault on the Capitol, including four members of the far-right group the Proud Boys, who were convicted this month of sedition.Mr. Trump did not rule out pardons for them, saying he would have to review their individual circumstances.“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d have to look at their case, but I will say in Washington, D.C., you cannot get a fair trial, you cannot. Just like in New York City, you can’t get a fair trial either.”Dodging on a national abortion banMr. Trump repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Republicans managed to steer one through the divided Congress. He also would not say how many weeks into a pregnancy he might consider banning an abortion.“I’m looking at a solution that’s going to work,” he said. “Very complex issue for the country. You have people on both sides of an issue, but we are now in a very strong position. Pro-life people are in a strong position to make a deal that’s going to be good and going to be satisfactory for them.”Mr. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his presidency, paving the way for the court to eliminate the federal right to an abortion. But he has since resisted being drawn into the debate, and has privately worried about political backlash.Characterizing his views on abortion restrictions as similar to President Ronald Reagan’s, Mr. Trump said that he believed in exceptions for rape, for incest and to save the life of a mother.Not taking Ukraine’s sideMr. Trump skirted the issue when asked multiple times if he wanted Ukraine to win the war after being invaded last year by Russia.“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing,” he said. “I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people.”The former president claimed he would bring the war to an end in 24 hours, if he returned to office, but did not specifically say what he would do to broker a peace.He would not call President Vladimir Putin of Russia a war criminal, as Mr. Biden has, saying that doing so would make it more difficult to end the hostilities between the two nations.Mr. Trump did say Mr. Putin had “made a bad mistake” by invading Ukraine.Threatening default on U.S. debtMr. Trump suggested on Wednesday night that Republicans in Congress should hold fast against raising the federal debt ceiling without budget cuts, even if it means the country defaults on its debt.“I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default,” he said.A growing list of economists and analysts have warned about the potential consequences if Congress does not raise the borrowing limit before the government can no longer pay its bills, including huge job losses, a recession and a nosedive on Wall Street.Mr. Trump predicted that Democrats would “absolutely cave” when confronted with the choice between accepting spending cuts and defaulting. Still, when asked to clarify if he would endorse a default, he said he would.“We might as well do it now because you’ll do it later,” he said.When Ms. Collins pointed out that Mr. Trump had once said when he was president that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge could not happen, he said that circumstances had changed.“Because now I’m not president,” he said.The Big Lie 2.0?On a night when he doubled and tripled down on his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, Mr. Trump refused to say unconditionally that he would accept the results of next year’s election should he become the Republican presidential nominee.“If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to,” he said.Mr. Trump spent much of the interview re-litigating his defeat and closed with a caveat about the next election.“If it’s an honest election, correct, I will,” he said of accepting the results.Alyce McFadden More