Presidential Election of 2024

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      Tim Scott Plans to Endorse Donald Trump

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina will endorse Donald J. Trump on Friday evening at a rally in New Hampshire, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. Scott was traveling to Florida on Friday so that he could fly with Mr. Trump to New Hampshire for the rally, the two people said. His endorsement of Mr. Trump is likely to spur additional discussion of Mr. Scott as a potential running mate for the former president. He is the highest-ranking elected Black Republican in the nation. Mr. Scott arrived at his decision only recently. After ending his own campaign for president on Nov. 12, he had said he would not endorse “anytime soon.” But he came to the conclusion that Mr. Trump was the best candidate to defeat President Biden, according to one person familiar with his thinking.A spokesman for Mr. Scott declined to comment. A spokesman for the former president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Haley, in a statement, said: “Interesting that Trump’s lining up with all the Washington insiders when he claimed he wanted to drain the swamp. But the fellas are gonna do what the fellas are gonna do.”During the race, Mr. Trump avoided criticizing Mr. Scott, a sign that he held warmer feelings for the senator, whom he worked alongside while president. In 2020, Mr. Trump had given Mr. Scott one of the most coveted speaking roles in politics, making him a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention. Mr. Scott also was fairly gentle about Mr. Trump, mildly criticizing him for saying he wanted to forge a compromise with Democrats on abortion but generally steering clear of sharp attacks. Mr. Trump has pursued Mr. Scott’s endorsement since the senator exited the race last year. His endorsement not only lifts Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, which hosts its primary on Tuesday, but also in South Carolina, the home state of one of Mr. Trump’s top remaining Republican rivals, Nikki Haley. The Trump team is hoping to force from the race both Ms. Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida with a decisive win in South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 24, avoiding an expensive fight for delegates that would otherwise extend through March after Super Tuesday. Mr. Trump has made collecting prominent endorsements a key part of his attempts to project inevitability now that the nomination fight has begun, and for months he has worked behind the scenes to lobby for formal backing. Mr. Scott’s support comes on the heels of two endorsements from Mr. Trump’s former rivals from 2016: Senator Ted Cruz of Texas backed Mr. Trump after he won the Iowa caucuses on Monday and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said he supported Mr. Trump the day before Iowa voted.The decision to back Mr. Trump could especially sting for Ms. Haley. As governor of South Carolina, she had appointed Mr. Scott to the Senate, announcing him as her choice more than a decade ago, in 2012.Mr. Scott has fielded calls from all three of the remaining candidates in the race — Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis. Ms. Haley had called him this week and some mutual friends in South Carolina had also reached out to lobby on her behalf for his endorsement. Mr. Trump and South Carolina’s other senator, Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Mr. Trump, had lobbied him steadily. Mr. DeSantis also called Mr. Scott last year after Mr. Scott exited the race, according to the two people briefed on Mr. Scott’s endorsement decision.The lobbying was a sign of how coveted Mr. Scott’s backing would be. While Mr. Scott struggled to gain traction in the primary, he remains overwhelmingly popular with Republican voters.Surveys last fall from Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm that has worked with the DeSantis operation, showed Mr. Scott with a 78 percent favorability rating in South Carolina and a 67 percent favorability rating in New Hampshire. More

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      Americans Might Tune Out the Trump Show Reboot

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      In crude material terms, Donald Trump’s presidency benefited the media, with subscriptions, ratings and clicks all soaring. It’s therefore not surprising that lots of people believe his return to the center of our politics will once again generate obsessive interest. “When Trump Wins, So Does the Media,” the center-left writer Matthew Yglesias wrote in October. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently predicted that because of Trump’s presidential campaign, “cable news channels may soon see a resurgence.” Even warnings about the manifold ways a second Trump presidency could damage a free press tend to assume that four more years of MAGA pandemonium would be lucrative. The business model behind our ailing industry, wrote George Packer in The Atlantic, “works better with Trump.”I’m not so sure this is true anymore. A few overarching questions animated Trump’s first term: Can he really get away with this? When will Republicans break with him? Will the law ever catch up? In a second Trump presidency, those questions would be answered. (Yes, never and no.) The constant hope that Trump could be exposed and even ousted would be gone. Thus among liberals, I suspect, the anxious hypervigilance sparked by Trump’s first election would be replaced, at least initially, by depression. In 2019, Viv Groskop wrote in The New York Review of Books about how some in Vladimir Putin’s Russia had resurrected the Soviet idea of internal exile or internal emigration, a disillusioned retreat from politics into private life and aesthetic satisfactions. If Trump is re-elected, I’d expect to see a lot of Americans adopting a similar stance as an emotional survival strategy. If that happens, the danger won’t be just to bottom lines in the news business. Though Trump thrives on attention, he’d be even more destructive without the pressure of sustained public outrage.The Atlantic writer Jennifer Senior recently described the twitchy psychic landscape of the Trump-era liberal news fanatic: “I’d spent nearly five years scanning the veld for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin.” Such compulsive news consumers were a huge factor in the Trump-era journalism boom. “The increase that news organizations saw in terms of audience engagement during the first Trump administration, a lot of that was driven by people who consume a lot of news. They were just consuming more and more and more of it,” said Benjamin Toff, a journalism professor and an author of the new book “Avoiding the News.” “But a lot of the rest of the public, I think, was pretty disengaged from it.”Since then, the ranks of the disengaged have grown. Trump keeps doing appalling things: In just the past couple of days, he nearly got thrown out of the second defamation trial brought against him by a woman he sexually abused, according to a jury, and then claimed on social media that presidents should enjoy absolute immunity from criminal prosecution even when they “cross the line.” But his misdeeds have lost the capacity to shock, and they no longer drive conversations. That might change if he is once again president, but like a virus, he won’t generate as strong a reaction when he’s no longer novel.People who avoid the news, said Toff, tend to believe that nothing they do can change it. By contrast, the people who joined the Trump resistance had a great sense of personal efficacy. They poured into politics and organizing, sure that they had the power to mitigate the catastrophe of Trump’s election. But now, everywhere I look, I see a terrifying resignation. A potentially significant number of people on the left, particularly young ones, believe that because President Biden has disappointed them, it’s not worth voting for him to head off a Trump restoration. (Online, some have even adopted the sarcastic right-wing phrase “orange man bad,” meant to dismiss liberal revulsion against him.) Some centrist plutocrats have also made their peace with a Trump return. “U.S. Executives in Davos See a Trump Victory in 2024, and No Cause for Concern,” says a CNBC headline. As Jonathan Chait wrote recently, holding the anti-Trump coalition together “required maintaining a level of focus and willpower that has simply given out.” Who is going to want to be glued to the news of that failure?Obviously, as a journalist, I have a vested interest in people caring about the news, but what really scares me is less the decline of profits in my industry than growing numbness and despair in the face of possible political calamity. I keep thinking of the early 1970s, another period when broad-based, idealistic social movements had recently fragmented, with some turning toward a militant sectarianism while others withdrew from politics, seeking self-realization in lifestyle experimentation. “Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to ‘relate,’ overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure,’” wrote Christopher Lasch in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism.” It wouldn’t be surprising if people react to another Trump presidency in a similar fashion. (Already both psychedelics and polyamory are back in a big way.) The reboot of the Trump show would be a lot darker than the original. People who value their equanimity might decide it’s not worth watching.Do you have a question for Michelle Goldberg about this column?Please submit it below. She will be responding to a selection of readers in a future piece. More

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      The Davos Consensus: Donald Trump Will Win Re-Election

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      In private, many business and political leaders at the World Economic Forum say they expect Donald Trump to return to the White House. Many business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland say Donald Trump will win the race for the White House.Denis Balibouse/ReutersThe Davos consensus on the presidential election Publicly, the global business leaders who gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, haven’t wanted to predict the winner of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. The closest they’ve come? Referring to it as a “geopolitical risk.”But talk to executives privately, and they’re more explicit: They expect Donald Trump to win and while many are worried about that, they are also resigned to it.The predictions of a Trump victory came in different forms. Many pointed to the headlines and the mood in the U.S. One senior banker told DealBook that you only had to look at the polls to figure out that Trump was on track to win.Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase also got a lot of attention for his comments. In an interview with Andrew on CNBC, he didn’t predict that Trump would win, but suggested that dismissing the former president and his supporters would be a mistake.“Just take a step back and be honest,” Dimon said, listing the things that he thought Trump got at least partially right: NATO, immigration, the economy, China and more. “He wasn’t wrong about some of these critical issues, and that’s why they’re voting for him,” he said.“I think this negative talk about MAGA will hurt [President] Biden’s campaign,” he added.That said, the Davos crowd often gets things wrong. A common critique of those who attend the forum is that they are a contra-indicator of what’s to come, so their expectations could bode well for Biden or for Trump’s Republican rivals. “Trump is already the president at Davos — which is a good thing because the Davos consensus is usually wrong,” Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, said on a panel.A little history: The Davos consensus was that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump in 2016. And in 2020, the prevailing view was that there were few risks to the economy … as the pandemic began to explode.Seen and heard:Perhaps the biggest complaint among attendees was about the long lines everywhere, especially at the Grandhotel Belvédère. Many complained that the process of entering the building — with wait times sometimes reaching an hour — was worse than ever and it didn’t matter whether you were a business titan or a less famous guest. One executive complained to DealBook that the security was more restrictive than at U.S. airports because he had to take off his Apple Watch every time. At previous gatherings, executives wanted a room at the Belvédère because the hotel was considered the best in town and was closest to the main venue — but many told DealBook that they no longer do.Despite the rigid class system — people are assigned different colored badges that grant various levels of access — the event has odd ways of leveling the playing field, at least a little. At last night’s Salesforce party, the hottest ticket of the week, even billionaires had to wait outside with everyone else to get in to watch Sting perform.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING Congress approved a stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown. President Biden is expected to sign the bill into law on Friday to keep the federal government operating through to early March. It’s the third such stopgap bill since October.Jamie Dimon gets a big bump in pay. JPMorgan Chase’s board granted its C.E.O. $36 million in compensation for 2023, a year in which the bank weathered a banking crisis and rising interest rates, and generated record profit. The 67-year-old, the longest tenured chief of a large American bank, has not given any indication on when he might retire.Reddit reportedly considers a March public listing. The social media platform is said to be moving forward with a long-held plan to file for an I.P.O. in the first quarter, according to Reuters. The market for new listings has been a bumpy one and the outlook looks little improved this year.Macy’s will cut thousands of jobs. The country’s biggest department store operator will lay off 2,350 employees, about 3.5 percent of the work force. The cuts come as Tony Spring, a veteran retail executive, prepares to take over as C.E.O. next month. Macy’s has been struggling with slowing sales since the pandemic-inspired shop-from-home boom shook up the retail sector.BYD doubles down on overseas expansion. The Warren Buffett-backed Chinese maker of electric vehicles plans to invest $1.3 billion in a new Indonesian factory as it continues its aggressive push beyond its home market. Indonesia is home to the world’s largest reserves of nickel, a crucial mineral in production of E.V.s.The E.S.G. exodus intensifies The money flowing out of E.S.G. funds has gone from a trickle to a torrent as investors sour on a sector hit by greenwashing concerns, red-state boycotts and boardroom debates.The investing strategy has become increasingly politicized after being used by companies to address environmental, social, and governance issues among their employees, customers and other stakeholders. In a sign of the times, the phrase has been scrubbed from the World Economic Forum’s official program in Davos, after being on the agenda in previous years.Investors pulled $5 billion out of E.S.G.-focused “sustainable” investment funds last quarter, according to a new report by Morningstar. The withdrawals occurred despite a wider market rally at the end of 2023.E.S.G. funds saw outflows of $13 billion for the full year. All in all, it was the “worst calendar year on record,” wrote Alyssa Stankiewicz, Morningstar’s director of sustainability research.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why Wasn’t DeSantis the Guy?

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      Right before the blizzard conditions hit Iowa ahead of the caucus, in a barbecue place with arcade games and waiters in red T-shirts weaving through reporters with beers and baskets of fried food, Ron DeSantis came onstage, as he does, to Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time.”This is a fratty song, and the vibe of the place was retro, much like a T-shirt I saw a guy wearing at a DeSantis event in 2022. The back read “Can’t Miss DeSantis” and featured a cartoon drawing of Mr. DeSantis, flanked by palm trees, playing beer pong.The existence of the T-shirt suggests that it once seemed possible, to someone anyway, to adopt the MAGA intellectual ethos of using the state to rebalance society and smash ideological enemies, and also be relaxed, normal, above it. Or maybe the intellectual part was never involved: There was a kind of conservative who liked the idea of a young governor making the libs cry from time to time, but whose fundamental premise was “the Free State of Florida” where a person could get back to living their lives, unbothered. And that’s where you’d find the theoretical Mr. DeSantis, ironically playing beer pong at a Bucs tailgate after church and a Home Depot run.This is reading a lot into a T-shirt, but ideas and realities about who candidates are, and what voters really want, seem central to understanding the last few years in politics. And even in 2022 that T-shirt stood out for the way its relaxed, fun bro diverged from the harder, more lawyerly governor who promised an updated, aggressive social conservatism that would use most tools of the state to battle academics and bureaucrats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Jan. 6 Cannot Go Down the Memory Hole

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      Following the passage of the first Enforcement Acts, written to protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved, Congress created a bipartisan committee in 1871 to investigate reports of vigilante violence against freed people and their white allies in the states of the former Confederacy. The next year, the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States released its report, a 13-volume collection of testimony from 600 witnesses, totaling more than 8,000 pages.The men and women who spoke to the committee attested to pervasive violence and intimidation. There were innumerable reports of whippings and beatings and killings. “Tom Roundtree, alias Black, a negro, murdered by a Ku-Klux mob of some fifty or sixty persons, who came to his house at night on the 3rd of December last, took him out, shot him, and cut his throat,” reads a typical entry in the volume devoted to Klan activity in South Carolina. “James Williams,” reads another entry in the same volume, “taken from his home at night and hung, by Ku-Klux numbering about forty or fifty.”There were also, as the historian Kidada E. Williams shows in “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” accounts of terrible sexual violence. Williams describes one attack in which a group of vigilantes whipped their victim, Frances Gilmore of Chatham County, N.C., “set fire to her pubic hair, and cut her genitals.”Because of these reports and others collected by lawyers, journalists and other investigators, the American public had “access to more information about the Ku-Klux than about almost any other person, event, phenomenon, or movement in the nation,” the historian Elaine Frantz Parsons observes in “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction.” Between government reports, testimony from witnesses, the confessions of actual Klansmen and the physical evidence of violence and destruction, it would seem impossible to deny the awful scope of Klan terror, much less the existence of the Klan itself.Yet that is exactly what happened.“Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate and evaluate information about the Ku-Klux Klan,” Parsons writes, “the national debate over the Ku-Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku-Klux existed.”In fact, as the historian Stephen A. West points out in The Washington Post in a 2022 piece on the committee’s report, “for much of the last 150 years, Reconstruction’s critics trivialized Black witnesses’ testimony in the Klan report and used it instead to discredit the period’s democratic possibilities.”It is difficult to look at this episode, which transpired a little more than 150 years ago, and not think of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, which compiled a similarly painstaking record of fact on the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of pages of testimony. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage. The words, under oath, of men and women who participated. The physical evidence. The broken bodies and lost lives.We know, as much as we can know anything, that Donald Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the results of an election that he lost. We know that this involved an attempt to derail the certification of electoral votes. We know that he assembled a crowd of thousands to protest that process. We know that he told that crowd, soon a mob, to “fight like hell” to try to seize the victory they could not win at the ballot box.But despite this unambiguous evidence of insurrection, there is a concerted effort — either out of skepticism or denial — to present the events of Jan. 6, including the schemes that led up to the attack on the Capitol, as something else. The legitimate protest of an exuberantly disappointed group of ordinary American voters, perhaps, or — in the rendering of Trump’s most devoted apologists — a last-ditch effort to save the Republic itself from the illegitimate grasp of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.It is tempting to say that the facts contained in the Jan. 6 committee report will stand on their own, that the body of evidence is simply too great to sustain a posture of skepticism and denial. But facts are mediated to us through our beliefs, experiences and interests. Most people do not and will not believe facts that cut against those beliefs, experiences and interests.In the case of the Ku Klux Klan testimony, it was in the political, social or ideological interests of many Americans — from partisans of the Democratic Party to leading members of the national press — to downplay the significance of the testimony. The same is true today of the facts gathered by the Jan. 6 committee.Those facts will not speak for themselves. The struggle for the meaning of Jan. 6 will, like the struggle over the significance of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, resolve itself only through politics. And in much the same way that the collapse of Reconstruction and the political victory of so-called Redeemers heralded the ideological victory of the Klan’s defenders, sympathizers and apologists, it is Trump’s ultimate fate that will shape and determine our lasting memory of what happened on Jan. 6.In other words, the world in which the attack on the Capitol of the United States by the vengeful followers of a defeated president is just ordinary politics gone a little wild is a world in which Trump and his rioters eventually won.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Why Is There No Effective Anti-Trump Constituency?

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts take apart why Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis can’t seem to form competitive coalitions against Donald Trump, and whether Haley, DeSantis, the Supreme Court “or God himself” can keep the former president from becoming the Republican nominee.Plus, Michelle Cottle reveals her Plan B if her political reporting career doesn’t work out.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:Suffolk University-Boston Globe poll of likely New Hampshire Republican primary votersHot dog car sketch on “I Think You Should Leave”Thoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Derek Arthur, Phoebe Lett and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It is edited by Alison Bruzek and Jordana Hochman. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Our fact-checking team is Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

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      How Biden’s Immigration Fight Threatens His Biggest Foreign Policy Win

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      The debate over immigration in the United States is spilling over into other parts of President Biden’s agenda, particularly the war in Ukraine.The soaring number of people crossing into the United States from Mexico has been a political vulnerability for President Biden for the past three years, chipping away at his approval rating and opening him up to political attacks.But now, the crisis is threatening to upend America’s support for the war in Ukraine, throwing the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy into jeopardy.After a meeting with Mr. Biden at the White House on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that the Republican-led House would not pass legislation to send aid to Ukraine unless Democrats agreed to sweeping new restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.And even if the two sides do come to some sort of agreement, many Republicans, especially in the House, would be loath to give an election-year win to Mr. Biden on an issue that has given them a powerful line of criticism toward the White House. The issue is also at the center of the candidacy of Mr. Biden’s likely opponent this fall, former President Donald J. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More