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      Why Trump Won’t Let Go of His Dream of Domination

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      Throughout his life — in his overlapping business, TV and political careers — Donald Trump has attempted to portray himself as what is conventionally known as an “alpha male.” But now he has run into a buzz saw of criminal investigations and civil suits that threaten to reveal both the ludicrousness of his self-image and his failure to meet the traditional standards of leadership.This does not diminish the seriousness of the threat he poses to American democracy.As both a candidate and as president, Trump has repeatedly made grandiose claims. Perhaps the best recent example came during his speech at a March 25 campaign rally in Waco, Texas: “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Trump told his supporters. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, described one way of looking at Trump in an email:Trump is a cartoon of an alpha-male wannabe, including the ruff of hair to exaggerate his height, his oversize phallic necktie, his defensiveness about the size of his hands and boast about the size of his genitals, his exaggeration of his height in his official biography, his looming behind Hillary Clinton during their presidential debate; his bizarre objection to her taking, like most of the other debate participants, a mid-debate break (“I know where she went — it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said, “No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting”) and his hair-trigger reaction to sleights and challenges.Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, sees Trump a bit differently, writing by email:Trump’s behavior in office — from his aggressive morning tweets to the Cabinet meetings he held in which obsequious beta males, like the vice president and attorney general, engaged in elaborate rituals of submission in the presence of their alpha — mirrors closely the tactics of domination and intimidation exhibited by alpha chimps in chimpanzee colonies. More than any other American president in memory, and like Putin and Orban, Trump exhibits what evolutionary social psychologists call “dominance” leadership, which is an evolved tendency (tracing back at least 5-7 million years in human prehistory) to attain status and exert influence in groups through brute force and intimidation.Trump’s bid for dominance has never, however, produced majority support. His unfavorable ratings remained consistently higher than his favorable ratings throughout his presidency and afterward, according to RealClearPolitics, and remain so to this day.Let’s put this approach to the Trump phenomenon into a larger context, starting with the work of Amar Sarkar and Richard Wrangham, both of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Sarkar and Wrangham are the authors of the March article “Evolutionary and Neuroendocrine Foundations of Human Aggression.”“Socio-cognitive advances in the mid-Pleistocene (781,000 years to 126,000 years ago),” they write, “are hypothesized to have enabled lower-ranking males to form alliances that effectively controlled coercive alpha males.”Sarkar and Wrangham are describing the crucial evolutionary role of coalition formation to overcome the power of “coercive alpha males.” So-called sub-elite males, according to them, had the ability to form coalitions in order to inflict “capital punishment and targeted conspiratorial killing” that would overcome “individuals who persistently or egregiously violate social norms.”At that point, Sarkar and Wrangham observe that “a physically formidable coercive alpha male was nonetheless vulnerable to less formidable sub-elite males who possessed sufficient cognitive capacity to form an alliance to kill the alpha male.”Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, contended in his 2001 book, “Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior,” that these prehistoric developments are actually tracing “the roots of democracy.”Boehm’s main hypothesis is that “the collective weapon of the rank and file has been their ability to define their own social life in moral terms, and to back up their thoughts about political parity with pointed actions in the form of collectivized social sanctioning.”Boehm goes on: “The ‘democratic’ origins I describe are not recent and historical, but evolutionary and ancient. They date well back in the Paleolithic era and were intimately involved with the development of human nature itself.”In effect, Sarkar, Wrangham and Boehm are describing an early stage of what over time has become an essential ingredient of a civilized, ordered society: the acquisition by the state of police power and the legal use of force to enforce norms and laws.In an email, Sarkar put it this way: “Humans appear to have inherited the capacity to coordinate with one another to enact violence.” While chimpanzees also demonstrate this capacity, according to Sarkar, “one factor that contributes to the uniqueness of human violence is the ability to use language, which allows individuals to freely share thoughts and intentions with one another and to form remarkably precise plans. This means that humans are able to engage in much higher levels of coordination in planning and performing aggression.”Sarkar added that it is “very difficult — or impossible — to connect the evolutionary origins of aggression to contemporary political events.”In their article, Sarkar and Wrangham continue the argument:For coalitionary proactive aggression against a formidable alpha male to be adaptive, it was critical for sub-elite males to ensure that their alliance was stable and that the execution could be performed at minimal risk to alliance members. Only then could they act safely without retribution from the alpha male or his sycophants.This shift of authority and control away from abusive, domineering individual males to collective groups of less powerful men and women had substantial consequences for the composition of society, then and now:Alpha alliances of sub-elite males could kill coercive alpha males, drastically reducing the reproductive success of coercive alpha males. Such control would also have signaled the limits of acceptable intragroup aggression. The direction of selection on male aggression thus changed as a result: rather than selection favoring coercive behavior that males used to achieve and maintain alpha status, the actions of alpha alliances ensured that selection acted against it. Simultaneously, the necessity of coordination and cooperation for targeted conspiratorial killing of alpha males meant that selection favored proactive aggression, and especially coalitionary proactive aggression.The result: “Individual alpha males were thus replaced by alpha alliances of subelite males.”In a separate 2019 article, Wrangham argues:The explanation that best accounts for a novel selection pressure leading to a reduction in reactive aggression starting around 300,000 years ago is the emergence of collective intentionality in the form of language-based conspiracy. The evolution of this newly sophisticated cognitive ability would have led subordinates to socially select against aggressive fighters, creating a reverse dominance hierarchy. The spread of the new style of hierarchy could have occurred by individual learning or by selection of group-cultures, and would have paved the way for diverse selection pressures to additionally influence the evolution of the characteristically human social traits.Where does all this fit in with the state of politics today?The barrage of criminal investigations and civil suits against Trump is, in many respects, the sophisticated and complex way America’s democratic system of government has developed to constrain an ominous, and even somewhat delusional, deregulated “alpha-male wannabe.”Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, describes Trump in an email as “a unique case. He is a narcissist. He is not hungry for power. He wants attention and praise. So he has some alpha male traits, certainly, but he is not prototypical.”In his book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion,” Haidt cites Boehm while making the case that the early acquisition of weaponry played a crucial role in the democratization of authority within groups of humans:Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between alpha males (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering.Once early humans had developed spears, Haidt continues,anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations, then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group.Over time, the aversion to bullying males developed into what Haidt calls “the liberty/oppression moral foundation,” which, he proposes,evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance.The liberty foundation, Haidt goes on to say,supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere. The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”Pinker argued by email that over the long haul,History has seen the invention of increasingly complex systems that limit the power of the leader, such as coalitions (as per Sarkar and Wrangham), power-sharing or turn-taking agreements, parliaments, constitutions, and rule-governed bureaucracies. Our leader is called a “president” because he merely presides over the government, rather than ruling over it.But, Pinker cautioned,We’re always in danger of slipping back into the dynamic of dominance. In democracies, voters, on average, favor the taller candidate and often crave a “strong leader.” Presidents and prime ministers, for their part, often arrogate more power than the constitution allows. The system of laws that constrains the leader’s power is often tested to its limits, and in countries that are not democracies, their only hope may be what Sarkar and Wrangham call an “alpha coalition,” namely the coup-plotters that many of us hope might someday depose Putin.Rose McDermott, a professor of international relations at Brown whose research has focused in part on the biological and genetic bases of political behavior, provided further explanation in an email: “Humans show self-domestication over time — they become more peaceful — and that may seem like it is not true in light of all the violence in the world, but relative to the death rates in earlier hunter-gatherer kinds of nomadic communities, it is true.”This process of self-domestication, she continued,happens as groups of beta and gamma males (the less strong ones) work together to unseat alphas who exploit the community. They might ostracize him (the alpha male) but mostly they assassinate him. What that means is that slowly over time you get more egalitarian dynamics (such as the birth of democracy, for example).In the case of the former president, McDermott wrote:Trump is a poster child for a “coercive alpha male” and frankly I have been surprised that more Republicans don’t try to take him on directly. I think part of it is that other potential Republican leaders are so narcissistic that they cannot band together in the kind of coalition that historically would have brought down a leader like this in one way or another. This depends on coalitional dynamics: men working together in cooperation, not against each other.Democratic norms, according to McDermott,are one way the country has tried to constrain the negative effects of Trump through things like rule of law and elections (Biden won in 2020). But they have not been as strong as many would like or hope for, and I agree that this is partly (although not entirely) related to increasing polarization (i.e. the inability to form strong united coalitional bonds).As far as “coercive alpha males” go, Trump is a bully, as demonstrated by his treatment both of competitors for the nomination in 2016 and of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida now; he boasts of his predatory sexual activity; and he lacks empathy, as reflected in his policies separating the children of detained immigrants from their parents at the border.As the same time, Trump has a long and detailed history of violating the fundamental obligations of a true leader. He is both unreliable and a liar, repeatedly failing to pay bills for services, products and construction; defrauding students who paid to learn about real estate; distorting the truth repeatedly and extensively, about everything from President Barack Obama’s place of birth to the size of his inauguration crowd all the way on through to the results of the 2020 election; promising to “drain the swamp” only to preside over an administration rife with self-dealing.On top of all that, Trump is often simply preposterous, more a late-night TV subject of ridicule, lacking character and the observable qualities of a credible leader, crude more than calculating, a con artist, huckster and hustler.Even so, there are a large number of people who are not persuaded by Wrangham’s line of thinking. John Horgan, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he serves as director of the Stevens Center for Science Writings, emailed his response to my inquiry:I have a meta-objection to Wrangham’s use of biology to explain modern social behavior. It’s far too deterministic, it lets us off the hook, it reduces our autonomy. When Wrangham’s ideas seep into popular culture, they feed into peoples’ fatalism about hierarchies, inequality and militarism.R. Brian Ferguson, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, responded to my inquiry regarding the Sarkar-Wrangham paper by first acknowledging:I come from a very critical position. One foundational difference in perspectives is that my new book, “Chimpanzees, War and History: Are Men Born to Kill?” is intended to refute current primatological consensus that chimpanzees have evolved propensities to “proactively” kill neighbors.Ferguson continued:I have been deeply involved in understanding war, conflict, and politics in tribal societies, and I do not recognize anything like their idea of alphas facing death because of sub-alpha elite coalitions, except in the notable category of segmental tributary chiefdoms and states, where there are rivals near the top ready to rebel, and usually then take over.McAdams, the professor of psychology at Northwestern, does not share Horgan and Ferguson’s doubts about Wrangham. In an essay written in the first year of the Trump presidency, “The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J. Trump,” Ferguson argued along lines similar to Pinker’s:If angry extraversion and disagreeableness characterize his temperament style, narcissism captures Trump’s underlying motivational agenda. Although some dominant leaders subscribe to an overarching set of values and goals, Trump has no political philosophy to speak of, and his central goal in life is, and always has been, to promote himself. In Trump’s case, narcissism seems to play well with the authoritarian dynamic.Trump, McAdams continues, “harkens back to an older evolutionarily paradigm for achieving status in primate groups. It is the paradigm of brute dominance, an atavistic proclivity whose primal appeal never seems to fade.”Why, McAdams asks, “did 63 million Americans elect a president of the United States who was repeatedly described during the campaign, by both Democrats and Republicans, as a serial liar, a sexual predator, a swindler, a narcissist and a bully?”He answers:No U.S. president in recent memory, and perhaps none ever, has tapped so effectively into the primal psychology of dominance. None has so effectively cultivated an authoritarian dynamic with his followers.In addition, according to McAdams:Trump’s unique personality profile — the high extraversion and low agreeableness, the narcissistic motivations, the “warrior” life story — seems perfectly suited to assume the authoritarian mantle at a time in American history when many Americans crave the security and exult in the excitement that such a mantle seems to confer. Even as he creates chaos, Donald Trump — as president of the United States — confidently assured Americans that he would deliver them from chaos. We will be standing safe and strong in the end. We will win. We will dominate.To some, Trump is less a cause than a symptom of the pervasive contemporary undermining of the American commitment to democratic values.Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska, argued by email that there is no doubt that there has been a weakening of democratic norms and that this erosionhas loosened the constraints on what counts as behavioral red lines for political leaders. This is almost certainly true for “coercive alpha males,” but I think it is broader than that. As those norms decay there is simply more room available for a range of personalities to get their swagger on in the political arena, as it were, aggressively and openly seeking power to aggrandize themselves and punish those who stand in the way.Smith pointed out that there are no “gender limits here (think of Marjorie Taylor Greene).” In addition, in Smith’s view, the issue goes to the heart of “the corroding of what’s considered beyond the behavioral pale.”In a large heterogeneous republic like ours, Smith wrote, “it is not easy, it is not just a matter of having clear rules or laws, but establishing broad acceptance and respect for the process, something more in the realm of custom, tradition or folk intuition.” But “once established, those norms can help insulate democratic systems from what otherwise is a natural vulnerability to demagogues and tyrants.”Those norms, Smith continued,are incredibly hard to institutionalize, but unfortunately apparently much easier to destroy. And once they are gone they may be incredibly hard to re-establish. If that’s correct, then the end result may be a political system that is indeed more open to shocks of unconstrained “coercive alpha male behavior,” but also to unprincipled behavior among political elites more generally. If there are few costs and clear benefits to such behavior, what’s the argument for not seeking power solely to benefit you and yours and to heck with everybody else?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 Will Return to CNN, Ending a Long Boycott

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      Since leaving the White House, Donald J. Trump has favored more friendly, right-wing outlets. His decision to appear on CNN represents a shift in his media strategy ahead of the 2024 election.After a long hiatus, former President Donald J. Trump will return to CNN.Mr. Trump, who has openly feuded with CNN hosts and executives over the years, has not appeared on the network since his 2016 presidential campaign. But next Wednesday, May 10, he will appear at a town hall-style forum the network is hosting in New Hampshire.CNN said that its morning show co-host, Kaitlan Collins, would moderate, and that the former president would take questions from Republicans and independents.Mr. Trump’s decision to sit for questioning on a network he considers less than friendly represents a shift in his approach with the media. In his post-presidency, Mr. Trump has largely shunned mainstream networks like CNN, preferring to speak with conservative outlets and talk show hosts.And his on-again, off-again clashes with Fox News have meant he’s been absent from that network’s airwaves for months at a time. Though Fox helped introduce Mr. Trump to a conservative audience in the early 2010s and gave him a powerful platform from which to start his political career, it has also shunned him at times.He has attacked the network in turn — most recently, he criticized them for firing its star host, Tucker Carlson — and still holds a grudge over its projection on election night in 2020 that he would lose Arizona. Fox was the first network to do so.His decision to appear on a rival network, CNN, is a signal to Fox, which is a crucial pipeline to Republican primary voters: He doesn’t consider it the only game in town. The move is also a way of drawing a sharp contrast with one of his expected opponents in the race, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who largely shuts out the mainstream media.Lately, Mr. Trump has fumed about the release of private emails that show how Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corporation, expressed derision and contempt for him and his false claims of being cheated in the 2020 election. Those messages were released as part of the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems filed against the network for amplifying conspiracy theories that Dominion machines were somehow involved in a plot to steal votes from him and flip them to President Biden.Mr. Trump lashed out at Mr. Murdoch and Fox for “aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA” on his social media platform, Truth Social.Mr. Trump also plans to skip at least one of the first two debates with his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination, according to several people familiar with his plans. The first, scheduled for August in Milwaukee, is being hosted by Fox News. He has said he does not want to give the lower-polling G.O.P. candidates the oxygen that a nationally televised debate would provide.In recent weeks, however, Mr. Trump has started appearing more regularly on Fox News. He has done interviews with three Fox hosts since the end of March. And the network has aired coverage critical of the Manhattan district attorney’s decision to pursue criminal charges against him.In 2016, coverage of Mr. Trump by outlets outside of the conservative media bubble was crucial to his success. He sat for lengthy interviews with NBC News, The Washington Post, CNN and others. And despite his branding of the mainstream media as the “enemy of the people,” he has long cultivated relationships with a broad variety of reporters. More

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      Georgia’s Hot Mess Is Headed Your Way

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      Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.Republicans elsewhere should keep watch. Democrats too. What’s happening in Georgia is a cautionary tale for pluralism, an example of how the soul of a party can become warped and wrecked when its leadership veers toward narrow extremism. And while every state’s political dynamics are unique, a variation of the Peach State drama could be headed your way soon — if it hasn’t begun already.The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.New party leadership is on the way. Mr. Shafer is not seeking another term. (Fun fact: He is under investigation for his role in the pro-Trump fake-elector scheme of 2020.) Party delegates will elect his successor at the upcoming state convention. But the problems run deeper. Republican critics say that the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial. And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s and now runs a public affairs firm in Atlanta.Mr. Shafer defends his tenure, noting in particular that, since he took over in 2019, the party has gone from being mired in debt to having “over $1 million in the bank.”To be fair, the Georgia G.O.P. has a rich history of rocky relations with its governors. But the Trump era, which brought a wave of new grassroots activists and outsiders into party meetings, put the situation “on steroids,” says Martha Zoller, a Republican consultant and talk radio host.“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” adds Cole Muzio, a Kemp ally and the president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group.That seems unlikely to change any time soon, as some of the party’s more extreme elements gain influence. In recent months, leadership elections at the county and district levels have seen wins by candidates favored by the Georgia Republican Assembly, a coterie of ultraconservatives, plenty of whom are still harboring deep suspicions about the voting system.One of the more colorful winners was Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District. A keen peddler of conspiracy nuttiness, Ms. Taylor ran for governor last year, proclaiming herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” After winning just slightly more than 3 percent of the primary vote, she declared that the election results could not be trusted and refused to concede — an antidemocratic move straight from the Trump playbook. As a chairwoman, she is promising “big things” for her district. So southeast Georgia has that to look forward to.Why should anyone care about the state of the Georgia G.O.P.? Well, what is happening in Georgia is unlikely to stay in Georgia — and has repercussions that go beyond the health and functionality of the Republican Party writ large. After election deniers failed to gain control of statewide offices across the nation in 2022, many of them refocused their efforts farther down the food chain. In February, The Associated Press detailed the push by some of these folks to become state party chairmen, who are typically chosen by die-hard activists. In Michigan, for instance, the state G.O.P. elevated the Trumpist conspiracy lover and failed secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo to be its chairwoman.MAGA zealots don’t simply present ideological concerns, though their politics do tend toward the fringes. Too many embraced the stop-the-steal fiction that the electoral system has been compromised by nefarious Democrats and must be “saved” by any means necessary. Letting them oversee any aspect of the electoral process seems like a poor idea.If this development persists, Republicans more interested in the party’s future than in relitigating its past might want to look at how Kemp & Company have been trying to address their intraparty problems — and what more could and should be done to insulate not only the party’s less-extreme candidates, but also the democratic system, from these fringe forces. There are risks that come with ticking off election deniers and other Trumpian dead-enders. But the greater risk to the overall party, and the nation, would be declining to do so.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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      Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Step up Inquiry Into Trump Fund-Raising

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      The Justice Department has been gathering evidence about whether the former president and his allies solicited donations with claims of election fraud they knew to be false.As they investigate former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors have also been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results, according to three people familiar with the matter.Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory.In the past several months, prosecutors have issued multiple batches of subpoenas in a wide-ranging effort to understand Save America, which was set up shortly after the election as Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising entity. An initial round of subpoenas, which started going out before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy in the 2024 race and Mr. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November, focused on various Republican officials and vendors that had received payments from Save America.But more recently, investigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.The possibility that the fund-raising efforts might have been criminally fraudulent was first raised last year by the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power.But the Justice Department, with its ability to bring criminal charges, has been able to prompt more extensive cooperation from a number of witnesses. And prosecutors have developed more information than the House committee did, having targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine if a barrage of fund-raising solicitations sent out after the election were knowingly misleading, according to the three people familiar with the matter.The fund-raising efforts are just one focus of Mr. Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse his loss at the polls.Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes.Peter Dejong/Associated PressProsecutors have also been examining the plan to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the broader push by Mr. Trump to block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.On Thursday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a key witness to Mr. Trump’s efforts, testified for hours to the grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation.Prosecutors have been looking at the nexus between research the Trump campaign commissioned almost immediately after the election to try to prove widespread fraud, public statements that he and his allies made at the time, the fund-raising efforts and the establishment of Save America.The Washington Post reported earlier on the efforts by the campaign to fund research into claims of fraud and the new round of subpoenas.Mr. Trump’s team may argue that the fund-raising represented political speech with solicitations that were generally vague, and that subjecting it to a criminal process could raise First Amendment issues and create a slippery slope for future candidates. Political fund-raising materials often engage in bombast or exaggeration.Republicans may also argue that Democrats have been loose in claims they have used in fund-raising solicitations. And the Trump campaign may argue that it did in fact use the funds to try to investigate fraud.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump who worked on the 2020 campaign, said that the “Deep State is ramping up their attacks on President Trump” as his poll numbers have increased. “The ‘political police’ have been pushing their witch hunt since President Trump came down the escalator, and they’ve been proven wrong every single time,” he added.Officials with the Republican National Committee declined to comment.Immediately after the election, an adviser to the Trump campaign reached out to Ken Block, the owner of a Rhode Island-based firm, Simpatico Software Systems, to have him evaluate specific allegations of fraud.Jason Miller, a former top Trump aide, appearing on a screen last year during a hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Block ended up researching multiple claims of possible fraud that Mr. Trump’s aides brought to him. He never produced a final report. But each time he investigated a claim, he said in an interview, he found there was nothing to it.Mr. Block said he had disproved “everything that came in and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” He said he was isolated from what was taking place within the campaign, as Mr. Trump railed at aides about staying in office and continued to insist he had won an election that he was repeatedly told he had lost.“I was kept very walled off from all of the insanity,” said Mr. Block, whose firm was paid $735,000, records show. He received a subpoena for documents, but declined in the interview to discuss anything related to the grand jury.Days after starting to work with Mr. Block and Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group. The federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.The grand jury has been asking questions related to whether Mr. Trump was briefed on findings by Berkeley suggesting there had been no widespread fraud.The company ultimately submitted a report indicating there had been no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election, and was paid roughly $600,000 for its work. The company was hired through a law firm that has long represented Mr. Trump in his personal capacity, Kasowitz Benson Torres, although lawyers there were not involved in pursuing Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims, according to a person briefed on the matter.A deputy counsel for Berkeley Research Group said the company has a “no comment” policy and declined to discuss the matter further.During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several people close to Mr. Trump testified that they had informed him that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.Within two weeks of the election, the Trump campaign’s own communications staff drafted an internal report debunking many aspects of a conspiracy theory that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked and used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump. That report was written before pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani promoted the false Dominion story at news conferences and on television.As part of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s postelection fund-raising, the Jan. 6 panel subpoenaed records from Salesforce.com, a vendor that helped the campaign and the Republican National Committee send emails to potential donors. The R.N.C. fought back, filing a lawsuit to quash the subpoena, and the House committee ultimately withdrew it.In the latest round of subpoenas, federal prosecutors have sought documents related to Salesforce in addition to other vendors, according to a person briefed on the matter. More

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      Seeking Clarity Amid Confrontation

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      In the new season of “The Run-Up” podcast, the host Astead W. Herndon interviews some of the political establishment’s loudest voices. It’s not always easy.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.“The Run-Up,” a New York Times podcast hosted by the politics reporter Astead W. Herndon, returned this month to try to make sense of the political divisions in the United States and the intricacies of the 2024 presidential election — no small tasks.Last year, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots movements; Mr. Herndon interviewed voters on both sides of the aisle to help listeners think critically about the midterm elections. With the 2024 race looming, Mr. Herndon is using this season to explore the larger political establishment and how decision makers influence daily life in America.But interviewing media-savvy figures, who often have an agenda to push, can be tricky, and conversations can become tense. On the most recent episode of “The Run-Up,” for example, Mr. Herndon spoke with Mike Lindell, the founder and chief executive of MyPillow and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump’s.Mr. Lindell, an election denier, is being sued by the election equipment company Dominion Voting Systems over his assertions that Dominion’s machines helped to orchestrate election fraud during the 2020 presidential election. At times during the interview, Mr. Lindell yells and cuts off Mr. Herndon.In an interview, Mr. Herndon explained his approach to these kinds of exchanges and how he keeps his cool under pressure. This interview has been edited and condensed.How would you describe your interview style?It depends on who I’m interviewing. I’m someone who wants to come in with a purpose and know why I’m talking to someone. You have to have a sense of mission. I’m a friendly, alert and respectful interviewer. I want to be a direct and active listener so that I am responding to someone in real time based on what I’m hearing and what I’m learning.One of the things I love about audio is that we have a plan as to what we want to do in these interviews. But I’m also empowered to freestyle questions based on what I’m hearing.I’m not trying to be the smartest person in the room or confrontational for confrontation’s sake. I am trying to get clarity. If I feel I’m not getting that clarity, I will push back, but I think it has to be earned.During a recent episode, Mike Lindell sounded agitated when you asked him about voter fraud. What was going through your head?I think he was agitated because we were pushing him for real answers. In that moment, I didn’t want to escalate the situation; I wanted to sift through that anger and bluster to hear whether he’s answering my question or not. Particularly when it’s someone who is a political figure, I do not see anger as a thing that should scare me off, especially if I know that I’ve come to this interview respectfully seeking answers. As long as you’re engaging, there’s more opportunity to get that clarity. I’m not going to stoke the anger, but at the same time, I’m not going to be put off by it.How do you prepare for interviews you think may become tense?I learned this from reporting on crime when I was at The Boston Globe. I would get to a scene — a murder, a fire, some deeply emotional scene — and I would sit in the car for a minute and make sure that I was emotionally ready to step into it. I see this in the same way. When I am going to do something that might be difficult, it may get prickly, it may lead to something that can be tense, I want to make sure that I am not taking it personally. I want to make sure I’m not escalating, that I’ve centered myself.How do you approach interviews with listeners in mind and get them to think critically and broadly about the election?I don’t think we do our job if things feel smart; I think we do our job if things feel clear. That to me is the line we are always pushing for: How are we untangling a political system — that is not actually built for people to understand — in a tangible way? How are we clearing up the political decisions folks are making that are intended to be out of public view? That, to me, is the core of “The Run-Up.”We try to start episodes from ground zero, so that we’re not assuming any knowledge. The question I was getting from friends while I was on the trail from 2018 to 2021 was, “Why are things moving in one direction, when it feels like people have been begging for it to move in the opposite direction?” I started our reporting process thinking, let’s help people understand why. We’re trying to live up to it. More

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      Pence Testifies Before Grand Jury on Trump’s Efforts to Retain Power

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      The former vice president is a key witness to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to block congressional certification of Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared on Thursday before the grand jury hearing evidence about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election, a person briefed on the matter said, testifying in a criminal inquiry that could shape the legal and political fate of his one-time boss and possible 2024 rival.Mr. Pence spent more than five hours behind closed doors at the Federal District Court in Washington in an appearance that came after he was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury earlier this year.As the target of an intense pressure campaign in the final days of 2020 and early 2021 by Mr. Trump to convince him to play a critical role in blocking or delaying congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Pence is considered a key witness in the investigation.Mr. Pence, who is expected to decide soon about whether to challenge Mr. Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands that he use his role as president of the Senate in the certification of the Electoral College results to derail the final step in affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Pence’s advisers had discussions with Justice Department officials last year about providing testimony in their criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and a number of his allies broke federal law in trying to keep Mr. Trump in power. But the talks broke down, leading prosecutors to seek a subpoena for Mr. Pence’s testimony.Both Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump tried to fight the subpoena, with the former vice president claiming it violated the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution given his role overseeing the election results certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump claiming their discussions were covered by executive privilege.Mr. Trump’s efforts to prevent testimony based on executive privilege claims were rebuffed by the courts. Mr. Pence partially won in his effort to forestall or limit his testimony; the chief judge overseeing the grand jury ruled that he would not have to discuss matters connected to his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, but that he would have to testify to any potential criminality by Mr. Trump.A federal appeals court on Wednesday night rejected an emergency attempt by Mr. Trump to stop Mr. Pence’s testimony, allowing the testimony to go forward on Thursday.Mr. Trump’s effort to hold onto the presidency after his defeat at the polls — and how it led to the assault on the Capitol — is the focus of one of the two federal criminal investigations being overseen by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Mr. Smith is also managing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.Mr. Smith has gathered evidence about a wide range of activities by Mr. Trump and his allies following Election Day in 2020. They include a plan to assemble slates of alternate electors from a number of swing states who could be put forward by Mr. Trump as he disputed the Electoral College results. They also encompass an examination of whether Mr. Trump defrauded donors by soliciting contributions to fight election fraud despite having been repeatedly told that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen from him.A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., Fani T. Willis, has also been gathering evidence about whether Mr. Trump engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the election results in that state, and has signaled that she will announce any indictments this summer.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to block or delay certification of the electoral outcome, infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.Mr. Pence subsequently became a target of the pro-Trump mob that swamped the Capitol building that day, with some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they moved through the complex. Someone brought a fake gallows that stood outside the building.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided on Thursday. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s accounts of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that they could use the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.That plan relied on Mr. Pence using his role as president of the Senate to hold up the process. But Mr. Pence’s top lawyer and outside advisers concluded that the vice president did not have the legal authority to do so.Mr. Pence described some of his conversations with Mr. Trump in his memoir, “So Help Me God.”Mr. Pence described in the book how Mr. Trump worked with Mr. Eastman to pressure him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He wrote that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump tried to bludgeon him again on a phone call.“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”Some of Mr. Pence’s aides have already appeared before the grand jury, in addition to providing extensive testimony last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and what led to it. More

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      The Moment When Donald Trump Started to Lose May Have Begun

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      What’s the right form of justice for the problem of Donald Trump?There’s already been one indictment. There’s expected to be another in Georgia, possibly a sprawling one, about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Although there’s a literal point to an investigation (find out what went wrong) followed by a prosecution (hold people accountable), investigations and prosecutions can also take on cultural or symbolic meaning.The Fox News settlement last week offered a microcosm of what’s happening now with Mr. Trump: The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit was about one thing (the claim of defamation against a business), but it took on a broader meaning (the public learned more about how Republican politics really works right now). And, notably, few agree what the settlement means, whether the $787.5 million paid by Fox to Dominion reflects accountability or inconsequence, whether an apology was required or whether a trial was, even as the case risked a ruling with unpredictable repercussions.Different people have different views of what the real problem and the right form of justice look like for Mr. Trump. Maybe the only certainty right now is the answer will be unsatisfying.He, meanwhile, has never let up. Last month, Mr. Trump stood with his hand over his heart in Waco, Texas, as scenes from the Jan. 6 riot played on a big screen and a recording by the J6 Prison Choir blasted through speakers at a rally for his presidential campaign.So what’s the point? Mr. Trump is surrounded by disparate legal actions of varying importance by disconnected individuals. But if we step back and think about the meaning of this period, are we trying to move on from the Trump era, to put it behind us, or to understand what went wrong? “Justice for the problems of the Trump era” or “preventing another Trump presidency”?If you think hard about the Jan. 6 select House committee, its exact point might seem a little opaque. The committee couldn’t arrest anybody; its criminal referrals depended on a different branch of government to pursue them. The point couldn’t be justice, and while people may have mistaken the committee for a legal entity, it was a political one.But the committee served some purpose in American life: Millions of people watched its hearings, millions learned new details about this major event. Maybe the committee’s chief purpose, then, was about the documents and the interview transcripts and video — a truth project.Former Representative Stephanie Murphy, who served on the committee, told me in November this was its meaning: “for history,” to “document what happened.” To her, a former national security specialist at the Pentagon, the riot revealed the Capitol to the world as a “soft target,” and that “if we don’t walk away from perilous moments like that and take a moment to reflect and figure out how to improve, then I think we will have failed.” In an interview this month, Representative Zoe Lofgren isolated the main question — “We were there for the riot and the mob. How did it happen?” — and took it one further: to make the details “accessible to people,” filming depositions (even if only iPhone video or screen capture was available) and releasing the maximum amount of supporting material with the final report.The effect of the committee’s presentation, a kind of effort at building consensus about recent history, was less tangible: to reorient the country’s attention, through the hearings, to how bad Jan. 6 really was. Attention is hard to maintain and focus, especially when, with Mr. Trump, it’s as if we’re always trying to hold water in our hands.And this can have political consequences. In December, Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics wrote on Twitter that he had come to believe the Dobbs abortion ruling had more of a regional effect on the 2022 midterm results, but it was the hearings that shaped the national choice: “By re-centering Trump in the narrative,” the Trump-backed candidates became “less palatable to independents at a time when impressions were formed.”With hindsight, that committee had a pretty contained purpose — a public examination and narrative about a catastrophic event in American life, a kind of truth project.But it’s hard to assign a neat goal like that to every piece of the avalanche of litigation, investigation and prosecution that has converged in the last few months, between prosecutions or investigations for things that are or aren’t the problem with Mr. Trump (the Stormy Daniels payments, the efforts to overturn the election in Georgia, the handling of classified documents); the lawsuits about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in New York; the lawsuits about actors who responded to Mr. Trump’s election claims (like the Fox-Dominion lawsuit). We probably wouldn’t be here if, after the riot, Republicans had actually barred Mr. Trump from holding office, as my colleagues Ezra Klein and David French recently discussed. Impeachment was another political, civic process, rather than a criminal one. But it didn’t work, and now we have this.Without obvious shared goals, arguably all these different prosecutors, officials and individuals are undertaking an inadvertent deterrence project, keeping alive the bad parts of the recent past and applying pressure on the central players. We talk about a “chilling” effect with abortion laws, regulatory action against corporations and certain speech policies; these “work” by exerting pressure, making people skittish and worried about getting caught up in legal trouble.The endless hearings and legal heartburn might be working in a similar manner. As a friend put it to me, post-Jan. 6 prosecutions and the prospect of an indictment in Georgia may be causing people to be less rowdy.In advance of Mr. Trump’s New York indictment, his former adviser Roger Stone reminded people to keep their protests “civil” and “legal.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would “be pointing at people to be arrested if they’re being violent.” Many (but not all) of the Trump-backed candidates who lost in November conceded their elections within a normal time frame. This was good for the country, but also a bit of a puzzle: Many of these people claimed a major election was stolen, why wouldn’t they do the same for their own? The drag and scrutiny in the aftermath of Jan. 6 might be an answer.Deterrence is an uneasy goal, however — hard to measure, impossible to predict, and at danger of becoming retribution in the wrong hands, or even hardening reactionary and illiberal elements by accident.Deterrence would also suggest an established kind of consensus: that a specific crime was, in fact, committed and the goal moving forward is to keep other crimes like it from being perpetrated. With many entry points to the problem, and without a shared consensus about what the real problem with the Trump era was, satisfaction here might be difficult to achieve. There’s also a kind of dark-night-of-the-soul, “The Godfather Part II” concern, which surfaced in early polling after the New York indictment, that at least some segment of the country likely finds that prosecution to be political, and doesn’t seem to mind. And Mr. Trump is raising a lot of money and consolidating his polling advantage in the wake of the first indictment.Consensus and order are unusual, though. Ms. Lofgren noted that the Jan. 6 committee was different from any experience she’d had, beginning with its unique presentation structure. “You had to have a unified view of what was the mission, and the mission was to find all the facts that we could, and then tell them,” she said. “There wasn’t a political divide on that. But that doesn’t mean we saw everything exactly the same way, exactly at the same time.” The committee, she explained, used closed-door discussions to reach public unity: “There were times when I thought one thing and by the time we’d spent a couple of hours thinking through it, I became convinced of someone else’s point of view. And the same thing happened with other members. That’s also rare.”Reaching one shared idea of what happened and why things went wrong, even within a smaller group behind closed doors, has real appeal, even if it’s not how we would want a country run. Instead, it’s like the best society can do is to keep applying a kind of societal weight to Mr. Trump — attention on the accurate memory of the events, the creation of legal hurdles and public scrutiny, possibly doomed prosecutions of varying quality — adding a little more weight, a little more weight, a little more weight in an effort to contain him. It’s like some mixed-up version of deterrence and truth, with a society trying something, anything, with possibly volatile precedents for the future.Even in all this chaos of information and opaque goals, a story can still stick out as representative of the frustrating parts of this time. In part of the materials released at Christmas by the select committee, in an episode you may have missed, a former White House deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, described an argument some of the press staff got into about who would benefit if Mr. Trump called the insurrection off, and whether he should condemn the violence at all.Ms. Matthews wanted him to do that:tell everyone to go home. According to her account of the day from her closed-door testimony, someone suggested that maybe people from the antifa movement were behind the riot; that was, Ms. Matthews said, all the more reason to condemn the violence. According to Ms. Matthews, someone kept arguing that to condemn the riot would allow the media to “win,” because Democrats had not been asked to condemn violence during the protests after George Floyd’s death in 2020.“I pointed at the TV,” Ms. Matthews testified last year, “and said — I guess yelled — ‘Do you think we’re winning right now?’” She became emotional, left the room and, later that day, resigned.This is, on the one hand, sort of a pointless thing to know — a vivid but peripheral episode, from overlooked supporting materials to a report from a committee that no longer exists. On the other hand, it speaks to the lasting change in American politics since 2016: When Ms. Matthews was working for House Republicans and testified publicly last summer, the House Republican Conference called her a “liar” and “pawn” on Twitter, before deleting the post.There’s something emblematic of this frustrating and confused era in a woman hopelessly shouting, “Do you think we’re winning right now?”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Covering Dominion’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox

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      Katie Robertson, a media reporter for The New York Times, was in court in Wilmington, Del., when Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle for a staggering $787.5 million.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The first sign that things were amiss came Sunday evening, the day before what was supposed to be the most high-profile media defamation trial in decades was set to begin.I was eating dinner with a few New York Times colleagues at a hotel restaurant close to the courthouse in Wilmington, Del., where Fox News was facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. We, along with journalists from what seemed like every media outlet in the country, and more than a few from overseas, had expected to spend the next six weeks writing articles on the trial.But around 8 p.m., we received an email from the Delaware Superior Court. It said Judge Eric M. Davis had decided to delay the trial’s start by a day, though it offered no reasons for the move.While one of my Times colleagues fielded calls from our editors, the rest of us tried to riddle out the cause of the delay. Was Fox about to settle, or was a commonplace court issue at play? At the restaurant, we spotted a couple of lawyers for Dominion. They were casually drinking by the hotel bar, seemingly unbothered by the turn of events.Fox News was on trial for defaming Dominion by linking its voting technology to a vast conspiracy of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. But the trial was about more than that.Some saw it as a chance for accountability for the lies about a stolen election, pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. The trial touched on questions about a divided country and the role the media plays in those divisions, about echo chambers and the distortion of facts, about how a country operates as a democracy in an age of misinformation.It was also a test of First Amendment protections for the press, placing some libel experts in a curious position: cheering on a case against a media company when they were typically the first to warn of the dangers of such a thing.Media reporters at The Times had covered the lead-up to the trial since the lawsuit was filed in March 2021. Since January, I had pored over hundreds of pages of exhibits and attended numerous pretrial hearings. I’d gone back and forth from Wilmington enough times to warn my colleagues which hotels to avoid.Since the judge would not allow filming or recording inside the court, the Media team at The Times had planned to provide readers with real-time updates of the trial with a daily newsletter and a live blog.We were expecting to see some high-profile witnesses testify, too — including Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old head of the Murdoch media empire that owns Fox News, and a few of the network’s top-rated hosts. A tent had been erected at the back of the courthouse to shield some of the witnesses when they entered and exited. (A source told me the tent had been set up by the Delaware Capitol Police after Fox told the court that some of its witnesses had received threats.)Two days after the judge’s announcement, on Tuesday morning, we watched the jury selection. My colleagues Jeremy Peters and Jim Rutenberg were in the main courtroom, where reporters were allowed to have laptops only for taking notes; they weren’t allowed to use the internet. I watched the proceedings from an overflow room next door, where I was able to connect to the internet and report live updates on the proceedings.After a lunch break, lawyers for Dominion and Fox were ready to give their opening statements. The minutes, though, ticked by — no judge or jury had entered the courtroom. After about two hours of waiting, we saw the lawyers speaking quietly on their cellphones and occasionally ducking into the judge’s chambers for brief, private meetings.Then Judge Davis came out and addressed the court: “The parties have resolved the case.” It was all over before it began.Journalists scrambled to try to catch the lawyers as they were leaving. Fox’s legal team didn’t make any comments, but Dominion’s lead lawyers set up an impromptu news conference in front of the courthouse and told us the details of the settlement.Fox had agreed to pay a staggering $787.5 million and acknowledged the court’s ruling that certain claims it had made about Dominion were false. Defamation cases are almost always settled before they get to trial. That we had gotten this far was a wonder in itself, but the settlement still caught me somewhat by surprise — and upended our carefully laid coverage plans.Still, Dominion’s case provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a news empire that I had reported on for years. I started my career in journalism as a reporter for an Australian tabloid newspaper owned by Mr. Murdoch. The way the Murdochs, and especially Rupert, run their hugely influential media operations across the world has long interested me, from my inside view in Perth, Australia, to my current role years later covering the media industry from The Times’s Manhattan headquarters.The Dominion case revealed hundreds of emails, texts and internal messages between Fox hosts and executives that showed they hadn’t believed what they were telling their viewers. Those filings presented a challenge, too. Many pages of depositions and messages were heavily redacted, and The Times, along with NPR and The Associated Press, hired a lawyer to challenge the legality of those redactions. The settlement was also not the end of the story: On Monday, Fox News dropped the bombshell that it was parting ways with Tucker Carlson, its most popular prime time host, a signal that the Murdochs were making changes in the wake of the lawsuit and a move I had not expected.We are still calling, emailing and talking with sources to figure out which shoe will drop next, and when. One of the most difficult aspects of my job as a reporter who covers the news media is sifting through volumes of gossipy chatter (from sources, in my inbox and on social media) to find the truth. But experience on the beat and an understanding of Murdoch Kremlinology go a long way in discerning who is credible and who is not. More