Presidential Election of 2024

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      Iowa Pastors Say Video Depicting Trump as Godly Is ‘Very Concerning’

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      A viral video praising former President Donald J. Trump has offended a key Iowa constituency in the lead-up to next week’s critical Iowa caucuses: faith leaders.The video, which Mr. Trump first posted to Truth Social last Friday and then played before taking the stage at several rallies in Iowa over the weekend, is called “God Made Trump.” In starkly religious, almost messianic tones, it depicts the former president as the vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation.“God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” begins the video, which appears to use artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of Paul Harvey, a conservative radio broadcaster who died in 2009. Mr. Trump, it adds, “is a shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them.”Since the video was posted, it has been widely shared, racked up millions of views and drawn a lot of attention. But much of that attention has been negative, particularly among Iowa’s pastors, some of whom said they were shocked and offended by the content.“It was very concerning,” said Pastor Joseph Brown of the Marion Avenue Baptist Church in Washington, Iowa, a town of 7,500 people about 40 minutes south of Iowa City. He took issue, he said, with how it used language plucked from the Bible — such as describing Mr. Trump’s arms as “strong” yet “gentle” — to compare Mr. Trump directly to God, rather than a servant of a higher power.“The original sin of Satan or Lucifer is not that he wanted to take over God’s position but that he wanted to be like God. There is only one god, and it’s not Trump or any other man,” said Mr. Brown, who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but says he will not this year.The opinions of religion leaders like Mr. Brown carry considerable weight in Iowa. More than three-quarters of the state’s population identifies as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center, and 28 percent of the population describes themselves as evangelicals — both measures are well above the national average. What’s more, the preponderance of voters in Iowa primary elections have historically been evangelicals.Mr. Trump, who rarely attends church, has nonetheless managed to gain the support of a large swath of the nation’s faithful — particularly less traditional, non-churchgoing Christians. But the cohort has not universally embraced him.A high-profile example came in November, when the Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats endorsed one of his rivals in the primary race, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.For pastors like Darran Whiting of Liberty Baptist Church in Cedar Rapids, who say they would never vote for Mr. Trump, the video only underscores why.“God has ordained servant leadership, not the arrogant, self-serving righteous leadership that particular video portrays,” said Mr. Whiting, who plans to vote for Mr. DeSantis. He noted that while Mr. Trump’s campaign did not make the video, the former president’s decision to share it speaks to his endorsement of its message.The clip’s authors are members of the Dilley Meme Team, an organized collective of video producers who call themselves “Trump’s Online War Machine.” The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, describes himself as Christian and a man of faith, but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church. He has said that Mr. Trump has “God-tier genetics” and, in response to outcry over the “God Made Trump” video, he posted a meme depicting Mr. Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.Other members of the meme team frequently express religious faith, and one, a musician named Michael Beatty, has recorded several albums of original Christian songs. Multiple passages in “God Made Trump” hew closely to language from the Bible, and they are delivered in a voice that sounds nearly identical to Mr. Harvey’s when he spoke at the 1978 Future Farmers of America convention. That speech was called “So God Made a Farmer.”A different oratory by Mr. Harvey, 1965’s “If I Were the Devil,” is the seeming inspiration for another video created by the Dilley Meme Team that went viral last summer. Called “If I Were the Deep State,” it also features a voice-over that sounds like Mr. Harvey, a symbol of Midwestern practically and old-fashioned conservative values, in this case delivering ominous lines about fraudulent elections, corrupt prosecutors and the medical establishment.“If I was the Deep State, you would fear to ever resist me,” the video intones. “If I was the Deep State, you would wish I was really the devil.” More

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      Trump Dreams of Economic Disaster

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      Did Donald Trump just say that he’s hoping for an economic crash? Not exactly. But what he did say was arguably even worse, especially once you put it in context.And Trump’s evident panic over recent good economic news deepens what is, for me, the biggest conundrum of American politics: Why have so many people joined — and stayed in — a personality cult built around a man who poses an existential threat to our nation’s democracy and is also personally a complete blowhard?So what did Trump actually say on Monday? Strictly speaking, he didn’t call for a crash, he predicted one, positing that the economy is running on “fumes” — and that he hopes the inevitable crash will happen this year, “because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”If you think about it, this isn’t at all what a man who believes himself to be a brilliant economic manager and supposedly cares about the nation’s welfare should say. What he should have said instead is something like this: My opponent’s policies have set us on the path to disaster, but I hope the disaster doesn’t come until I’m in office — because I don’t want the American people to suffer unnecessarily, and, because I’m a very stable genius, I alone can fix it.But no, Trump says he wants the disaster to happen on someone else’s watch, specifically and openly so that he won’t have to bear the responsibility.Speaking of which, when did Trump start predicting economic disaster under President Biden? The answer is before the 2020 election. In October 2020, for example, he asserted that a Biden win would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions.”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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      Did Ron DeSantis Shake His Wife’s Hand?

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      In a campaign full of strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of warmth, Ron DeSantis’s encounter with his wife at the presidential primary debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night was one of the more curious.During the second commercial break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the edge of the stage and reached down to shake hands with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Republican of Iowa, and her husband. Then, with a businesslike rigor, he grasped the outstretched palm of Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.Did he just shake his wife’s hand? Onlookers in the room were bewildered.Interactions with spouses on the campaign trail can be fraught, even for the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be fair, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a tight timetable, making an embrace impractical. Too much affection runs its own political risks.And who knows? Maybe The Handshake was some sort of inside joke, or an effort to create a signature routine, like Barack and Michelle Obama’s coy fist bump (which was weaponized by Mr. Obama’s political foes as a “terrorist fist jab”).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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      Fact Checking Nikki Haley’s DeSantis Lies Website

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      During this week’s debate in Iowa, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, tirelessly promoted a website to fact-check Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. We took a closer look, and here’s what we found.More than a dozen times during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, directed viewers to a website purporting to correct what she called Ron DeSantis’s “lies.”But the Haley campaign’s website is itself a political project — not an exercise in objective fact-checking.The site does point to independent fact-checking to help push back on claims twisting Ms. Haley’s positions on things like Gaza refugees and to clarify her comments about being motivated to run for office by a speech made by Hillary Clinton, despite their political differences.But there are key differences between Ms. Haley’s effort and an independent fact-checking operation. The website, for example, doesn’t directly quote Mr. DeSantis or cite the specific comments being rebutted. It also deems a “lie” some statements that don’t actually contain checkable facts.“Mr. DeSantis claims he will take on the big spenders in Washington,” the site says, calling his claim a lie because while in Congress he voted to increase the federal debt limit. Ms. Haley may well use that line of criticism in her campaign, but that alone doesn’t make Mr. DeSantis’s statements about his intent to rein in federal spending a “lie.”“Ultimately it’s still campaign propaganda,” said Bill Adair, the creator of the website PolitiFact and a Duke University journalism professor. “It’s not fact-checking.”It’s certainly not the first time a political campaign has harnessed the style of fact-checking for its own objectives, Mr. Adair said, noting that the 2008 Obama campaign created a website to push back against “smears.”On the debate stage Wednesday, “it was just trumpeted more prominently and more often than I’ve ever seen it before,” Mr. Adair said. He added: “I think that shows that fact-checking has matured to the point where candidates are pretending to be fact checkers to try to give their own account of facts, although often it’s not the full truth.”Here’s further context on several of the claims made on Ms. Haley’s website, Desantislies.com.Gender-transition careThe website states that “DeSantis falsely claims Nikki Haley supports gender-changing surgeries for minors.” It goes on to say that, in fact, Ms. Haley “opposes gender-changing surgeries and puberty blockers for minors and is on record saying as much multiple times.”It is true that Ms. Haley has spoken out against minors being able to undergo gender-transition surgeries before the age of 18. But Mr. DeSantis and other critics have homed in on a comment she made in June — not mentioned on Ms. Haley’s website — suggesting that the law should not be involved in regulating such care.During a CBS interview, Ms. Haley was asked what the law should say regarding transgender care for youths. “I think the law should stay out of it, and I think parents should handle it,” Ms. Haley responded.Still, even then, Ms. Haley added that “when that child becomes 18, if they want to make more of a permanent change they can do that.”Free speechThe website says that “DeSantis falsely claims Haley opposes free speech on social media,” and points out that Mr. DeSantis previously expressed support for legal efforts to crack down on journalists’ use of anonymous sources.But the site ignores that Ms. Haley did in November call for requiring social media users to be verified by name, before walking back her comments amid criticism.“When I get into office, the first thing we have to do, social media accounts, social media companies, they have to show America their algorithms,” Ms. Haley said during a Fox News event. “Let us see why they’re pushing what they’re pushing. The second thing is every person on social media should be verified by their name.”Ms. Haley added: “First of all, it’s a national security threat. When you do that, all of a sudden people have to stand by what they say. And it gets rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots. And then you’re going to get some civility when people know their name is next to what they say, and they know their pastor and their family members are going to see it.”Mr. DeSantis quickly criticized her comments, saying, “Haley’s proposal to ban anonymous speech online — similar to what China recently did — is dangerous and unconstitutional.”A day later, Ms. Haley said on CNBC that “life would be more civil” if people did not post anonymously, but noted: “I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech. What I don’t like is anonymous Russians and Chinese and Iranians having free speech.”Confronted during the December Republican debate, Ms. Haley misleadingly claimed she “never said government should go and require anyone’s name.”TaxesMr. DeSantis and his supporters have made misleading claims about Ms. Haley’s record on taxes while she was governor of South Carolina. But the claims weren’t always found to be categorically false, as Ms. Haley’s website contends.The website links to four articles, including two from The New York Times. In one example, The Times fact-checked a pro-DeSantis super PAC’s argument that Ms. Haley “raised taxes” and found it to be misleading.That’s because, technically speaking, Ms. Haley cosponsored legislation passed in 2006 that did raise the state sales tax by one percentage point. But that measure also exempted owner-occupants from paying property taxes for schools — among other provisions — and was considered by experts to be a “tax swap,” not a tax increase. An analysis at the time projected that most homeowners would have an overall decreased tax burden.ChinaCalling Ms. Haley the “most outspoken candidate on the growing China threat,” the website claims that “DeSantis falsely attacks Nikki Haley’s record on China.”There have indeed been distortions: Mr. DeSantis claimed that Ms. Haley gave a Chinese company land near a military base, referring to a fiberglass company. But while Ms. Haley celebrated the company’s opening of a plant in South Carolina, and although the state provided a grant for improving the site, it was the county government — not the state — that provided the land as part of a deal to secure hundreds of jobs.But it’s worth noting that the flawed attacks have gone both ways.For example, a pro-Haley super PAC wrongly claimed that Mr. DeSantis “voted to fast-track Obama’s Chinese trade deals.” That claim was based on a vote Mr. DeSantis took as a congressman in 2015 to extend the president’s authority to fast-track trade legislation (he was among 190 Republicans in the House to vote for it). No trade agreements subject to that authority were made with China. More

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      Biden Campaign to Send Top Allies to Iowa to Spread Democrats’ Message

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      Iowa is dominated by Republicans right now. The events by presidential candidates are for Republicans, the voters who come to see them are Republicans and the main event, Monday’s caucuses, will feature Republicans.But Democrats will try to get in on the action on Monday, when President Biden’s campaign is expected to dispatch some of its biggest surrogates to Iowa to make the party’s case in the hours before Republicans gather to vote.These allies include Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and a co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign; Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who is a member of the campaign’s national advisory board; and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota. They are planning to appear at a news conference in downtown Des Moines on Monday afternoon shortly before the caucuses begin, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s scheduling.Mr. Katzenberg is a longtime Democratic megadonor who has taken on his largest political role to date with the Biden campaign, serving as a conduit to big donors while assuming a role of publicly calming worries about Mr. Biden’s fund-raising, staffing and political vulnerabilities.Mr. Pritzker, America’s wealthiest elected official, is organizing this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ms. Smith, who represents a neighboring state, is in her first full term as senator.“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans’ all-out assault on democracy and Americans’ personal freedoms will be front and center as Iowans begin to caucus Monday,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “The Biden campaign will be on the ground, talking directly to voters and reminding everyone that President Biden is fighting to ensure MAGA Republicans’ extreme, out-of-touch agenda continues to lose at the ballot box.” More

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      Trump’s Press Conference Aired as His Civil Fraud Trial Comes to a Close

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      CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all carried a live news conference by Donald J. Trump on Thursday on the final day of his civil fraud trial, a stark reminder that the former president’s legal troubles offer a uniquely outsize media platform as he pursues the Republican nomination.His appearance lasted only a few minutes, but viewers were treated to an unfiltered fusillade of incendiary and misleading comments, with Mr. Trump assailing President Biden as a “crooked” politician who “could not string two sentences together.”Fraud charges against a former president are undoubtedly newsworthy, but Mr. Trump has seized on the legal proceedings as a chance to hog the media spotlight — a notable advantage over rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, who can struggle for similar airtime.Trump campaign aides took particular pleasure that CNN carried Mr. Trump live and allowed him to deliver his talking points, unmediated, to the American public. This framing — on Mr. Trump’s own terms, with TV cameras capturing his every word without real-time fact-checking — is exactly how Mr. Trump and his allies envisage they can exploit any criminal trials that might be held during the election season.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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      A Convicted Criminal as the Nominee? Trump’s Rivals Avoid Even Raising It

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      The former president’s legal jeopardy offers an obvious line of attack for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but fearing voter blowback, that cudgel remains largely unused.It is an obvious line of attack that has been creeping into the arsenal of rivals trying to stop former President Donald J. Trump ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday — if nominated to be the Republican Party’s White House standard-bearer, the former president could very well be a convicted criminal by Election Day.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida inched toward that cudgel at a debate on Wednesday night, warning that a “stacked left-wing D.C. jury” is likely to sit in judgment of Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and asking, “What are the odds that he’s going to get through that?”Then, he added, “what are we going to do as Republicans in terms of who we nominate for president? If Trump is the nominee, it’s going to be about Jan. 6, legal issues, criminal trials.”Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has been far more reluctant to broach his legal troubles, speaking almost daily of Mr. Trump as an agent of “chaos” and “disarray” without explicitly mentioning the 91 felony counts looming against him.But perhaps taking their cues from voters leery of attacks on the former president, Mr. Trump’s closest rivals continue to avoid one ominous word: conviction.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, left, and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina have continued to avoid using one word: conviction.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFor the Republican Party, the reality of Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy is inescapable, and was underscored on Tuesday when he left the Iowa campaign trail to attend courthouse arguments on whether he can claim absolute legal immunity for any actions taken as president. Regardless of how voters feel about his indictments for subverting the 2020 election, mishandling highly classified documents and falsifying business records to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign, one of those cases could go to trial before the election.And a conviction by a jury of his peers after a widely publicized trial could land differently than the indictments themselves, which were dismissed by Mr. Trump and most of his rivals as political efforts by Democrats to interfere with the presidential election.“I actually still believe they will have a trial, and he will be convicted of at least one felony count,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and federal prosecutor still pursuing his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. “That puts the Republican Party in jeopardy: a flawed nominee, a historical precedent of a nominee convicted of a felony, and then a loss” in the general election.That might sound like a potent argument for Mr. Trump’s more prominent foes, but many Republican voters don’t want to hear it. On Tuesday morning, at an Irish pub in Waukee, Iowa, Nick and Kadee Miller of Adel, Iowa, were awaiting Ms. Haley when both expressed doubts about the charges facing Mr. Trump. They supported the decisions of Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis to steer clear.“I really do believe if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Ms. Miller, a 49-year-old political independent who remains undecided about her choice of candidates.Voters waited for Ms. Haley to speak at Mikey’s Irish Pub in Waukee, Iowa, on Thursday. Polling shows that a growing number of Mr. Trump’s supporters would not want him to be the Republican nominee if he were convicted of a crime.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesSteph Herold, a 62-year-old retiree from West Des Moines, said such negativity spent on Mr. Trump would waste Ms. Haley’s time.“What I love about Nikki is she speaks in facts and truth,” she said. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, “we all reverted back to the middle school playground, beating people up and being bullies. We don’t need more of that.”Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Urbandale, Iowa, was certain a conviction would only bolster Mr. Trump’s support, as the indictments did last year.But that is not what polling shows. Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s own supporters told New York Times/Siena College pollsters in December that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee if he is found guilty of a crime. Some 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters said he should go to prison if convicted of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and 23 percent of his supporters said in December that they believed he had committed “serious federal crimes,” up from 11 percent in July.“When you put it that way, a convicted felon, no, I don’t want to vote for a convicted felon,” Ms. Miller said, breaking with her husband, who said he would “absolutely” vote for a convicted Mr. Trump “if he could beat Biden.”On Wednesday, at a snow-covered vineyard in Indianola, Iowa, Laura Leszczynski, a 57-year-old security and information technology business owner from St. Mary’s, Iowa, was awaiting the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Still undecided, she conceded she was not well-versed in the cases arrayed against Mr. Trump, but she was not willing to dismiss them.“It just seems like there’s a lot there,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer. I haven’t studied up, but I am worried.”Still, it is perhaps no coincidence that the two Republican candidates who were most ready to raise the prospect of conviction — Mr. Hutchinson and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — were seeing single digits or worse in national polling of Republican primary voters before Mr. Christie dropped out of the race on Wednesday.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey suspended his candidacy for president during an event in Windham, N.H., on Thursday.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIn his farewell speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie returned to the moment in the August Republican primary debate when almost all the candidates on the stage raised their hand when asked if they would vote for Mr. Trump even if he were a convicted criminal.“I want you to imagine for a second if Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Washington were frankly sitting here tonight,” he said. “Do you think they could imagine that the country they risked their lives to create would actually be having a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should be president of the United States?”Yet that conversation continues.In an interview on Friday with The Des Moines Register and NBC News, Ms. Haley danced around the prospects of a conviction for nearly three minutes: “He’s innocent until he’s proven guilty,” she said. “He’ll have to figure that out. I don’t have to deal with those court cases.”Mr. DeSantis has been nudging toward acknowledging the danger. In an interview last month with the conservative radio personality Hugh Hewitt, he blamed Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy on liberals out to get him: “I think it’s very difficult for a Republican, much less Donald Trump, to get a fair shake in front of a D.C. jury,” he said.But as he has made his case against Mr. Trump more aggressively ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. DeSantis has adjusted that argument.“We’re taking a huge risk by empowering a jury of, probably an all-Democrat jury in the nation’s capital, the most Democrat area in the country, to pass a judgment,” he said in the NBC News interview, “because obviously if they rule against him, if they have a verdict against him, that’s going to hurt us in the election.”Nicholas Nehamas More