Presidential Election of 2024

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      Trump’s Extremists Are Now In Charge of the House

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      The three-week battle to choose a House speaker may be over, yet the fallout for the United States and its reputation as a sound government and a beacon of democracy will be long-lasting and profound.The Republicans in the House unanimously voted for a man who made it his mission to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who put the political whims and needs of former President Donald Trump ahead of the interests and will of the American people. A party that once cared deeply about America as the leader of the free world, and believed in the strength, dependability and bipartisan consensus that such a role required, has largely given way to a party now devoted to an extremism that is an active threat to liberal values and American stability.Americans and the world are starting to get to know Mike Johnson, now the second in line to the presidency, and it’s a troubling introduction. Donald Trump may not be in the White House, but Trumpism as an institution has transcended the man and provided the operating principles for the House of Representatives and much of the Republican Party.Those operating principles include allowing Mr. Trump to all but select the speaker, and elevating, in Mr. Johnson, one of the party’s most prominent election deniers. It has been disturbing to watch the slide from Republican speakers like Paul Ryan and John Boehner, who denounced attempts to challenge the election results, to the hemming-and-hawing of Kevin McCarthy, to the full-blown anti-democratic stands of Mr. Johnson. And it has certainly been a long slide from the party of Ronald Reagan — whose 11th Commandment was not speaking ill of other Republicans and who envisioned the party as a big tent — to the extremism, purity tests and chaos of the House Republican conference this year.Every Republican present in the chamber voted on Wednesday for Mr. Johnson, reflecting the exhaustion of a party that has been ridiculed for incoherence since it deposed Mr. McCarthy for working with Democrats to fulfill the basic function of Congress, to fund the federal government. The choice of Mr. Johnson came after Mr. Trump helped engineer the result by torpedoing a more moderate candidate, setting the stage for the 2024 presidential election to unfold with someone in the speaker’s chair who has proved his willingness to go great lengths to overturn a free and fair vote.It’s obvious why the former president was so supportive of the new speaker. Mr. Johnson was “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” to Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020, as a New York Times investigation found last year. He made unfounded arguments questioning the constitutionality of state voting rules, he agreed with Mr. Trump that the election was “rigged,” cast doubt on voting machines, and supported a host of other baseless and unconstitutional theories that ultimately led to a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Johnson now refuses to talk about his leading role in that shameful drama. When a reporter for ABC News tried to ask him about it on Tuesday night, he would not respond; his fellow Republicans booed the question, and one yelled at the reporter to “shut up.” Such questions cannot be dismissed when Mr. Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Though changes in the law and Democratic control of the Senate make it much harder for the House of Representatives to impede certification of the vote, the American public deserves a speaker of the House who will uphold the will of the people, not someone willing to bend the rules of an election for his own side.More immediately, while his election as speaker will make it possible for the House to continue functioning, it is not clear that Mr. Johnson is committed to the work of actually governing. At the end of September, he voted against the stopgap spending measure negotiated by Mr. McCarthy that prevented a government shutdown. That bill was an important litmus test; Mr. McCarthy brought it to a vote and got it passed with bipartisan support, over the objections of Mr. Trump, leading to his downfall as speaker. Two other Republican speaker candidates, Tom Emmer and Steve Scalise, also voted for it — and were also vetoed by the extreme right.Mr. Johnson now says he would support another temporary stopgap to give the House time to pass drastic spending cuts. That promise may have won over the Republicans who blocked the candidacy of another extremist, Jim Jordan, last week. But Mr. Johnson’s voting record so far leaves little doubt that he prefers the performance of taking positions to actual lawmaking.This leaves Congress in a precarious state. The 22 days of indecision, backbiting and bullying that followed Mr. McCarthy’s ouster did significant damage to the reputation of the United States as a country that knows how to govern itself. One of the country’s two major political parties sent a piercing signal to the world and the nation that it is no longer a reliable custodian of the legislative branch — and many party members knew it.“This is junior-high stuff,” Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas, said a few days ago. “We get wrapped around the axle of a lot of nonsensical things. But, yes, the world is burning around us. We’re fiddling; we don’t have a strategy.”Nevertheless, Mr. Womack voted for Mr. Johnson. His preferred choice was Mr. Emmer, a Republican whose views are more moderate and who might have led the party out of its hard-line cul-de-sac. Mr. Emmer had the support of many other Republicans, but his candidacy never even got to the House floor for a vote.That’s because Mr. Trump exacted retribution for Mr. Emmer’s willingness to recognize the true outcome of the 2020 election. Mr. Emmer voted to certify those results, defying Mr. Trump, and the former president has never forgiven him. On Tuesday, he denounced Mr. Emmer on social media as a “globalist” and a fake Republican who never respected the MAGA movement. After Mr. Emmer dropped out in the face of growing opposition from the far right, Mr. Trump boasted to a friend: “I killed him.”Mr. Johnson will take control of the House at a moment when the United States needs to demonstrate leadership on the world stage. One of the most important decisions is coming right up: Will Mr. Johnson support Mr. Biden’s request for nearly $106 billion for aid to Ukraine and Israel? He has already voted against most bills to support Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression.As speaker of the House, he plays a crucial role in the legislative system, determining the agenda by choosing which bills will reach the House floor for a vote, supervising committee appointments, and hammering out compromises to get legislation passed. (Nancy Pelosi, for example, demonstrated make-or-break leadership in creating the Affordable Care Act.)Mr. Johnson believes that the “true existential threat to the country” is immigration and led the Republican Study Committee, the largest group of conservatives in the House, which issued a plan to erode the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid. It also refers to free public education as “socialist-inspired.”On social issues, Mr. Johnson has also embraced the positions of the hard right. He supported state laws that criminalized gay sex, and wrote in 2004 that gay marriage would “place our entire democratic system in jeopardy” and lead to people marrying their pets. As a congressman, he celebrated the demise of Roe v. Wade in 2022.It bears repeating that this Trump loyalist is now second in line to the presidency. The former president has never accepted being out of the White House, and it’s clear he still commands firm control over half of the Capitol building.Source photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Could Mike Johnson, the New House Speaker, Undermine the 2024 Election?

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      The Louisiana Republican played a pivotal role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But his elevation to the top post in the House does not give him special powers in the certification process if he tries again.Ever since Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana assumed office on Wednesday, a question has been on Democrats’ minds: Could the elevation of Mr. Johnson, who worked in league with former President Donald J. Trump in trying to undermine the 2020 election results, allow him to succeed in 2024 where he failed the last time?The speakership, which is second in line to the presidency, comes with broad powers over the functioning of the House. And Mr. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer whose stature in his party has grown with his election to the top post, could try again to interfere. But there are several reasons that Mr. Johnson’s new job alone would not allow him special powers to overturn the will of the voters unilaterally.Here’s how it works.The vice president, not the speaker, presides over Congress’s counting of electoral votes.When Mr. Trump was attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his pressure campaign focused on his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was presiding over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, to count the electoral votes. Mr. Trump encouraged Mr. Pence to throw out legitimate votes in favor of false slates of electors, a move Mr. Pence said was unconstitutional.Vice President Kamala Harris is in line to preside over the joint session on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress will meet in a joint session to certify the results of the 2024 election. The speaker has no special role in the proceedings.Johnson may not even be speaker by then.Mr. Johnson, 51, just became speaker, but his term will expire before Jan. 6, 2025.Should Democrats prevail in the House in the 2024 election — an outcome many analysts see as a strong possibility — a Democrat would take over control of the chamber, likely the current minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York.Should Republicans hold the House, Mr. Johnson would need to win another leadership election among his party. Given how raucous the Republican conference has been in recent months, that’s not a sure thing either.The Electoral Count Reform Act has tightened safeguards.In the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s attempt to cling to power, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, passed a reform bill to try to ensure no similar plan could be carried out in the future.The new law makes clear that a vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is “solely ministerial,” with no power to reject electors. It also requires that one-fifth of both the House and Senate sign on before any objection to state’s electors can be heard. The law also limits the grounds for objections.Republicans who defend Mr. Johnson’s actions related to the 2020 election note that Democrats have objected to certain states’ electors during previous congressional certifications. But they have never done so as part of an organized campaign directed by their candidate, with false slates of electors being put forward and a violent mob assembled at the Capitol demanding that the election results be reversed. Mr. Johnson could still attempt to undermine the election.While Mr. Johnson cannot unilaterally overturn the 2024 election, he could attempt other extreme steps to try to interfere with certification.For example, Mr. Johnson could use the power of his bully pulpit and his status as a party leader to organize Republican lawsuits or pressure state boards of elections to throw out legitimate votes. He could attempt to refuse to seat new Democratic members of the House.“His main power would be as party leader,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who served on the House Jan. 6 committee.Mr. Johnson also could demand that Republicans in Congress vote as a bloc on Jan. 6, 2025, against certifying election results. But he would need 20 percent of both chambers to agree to object, and then a majority of both chambers to vote to sustain the objection.Should that occur, the presidential election could fall to a contingent election of the House, in which state delegations would decide who became the next president. Such a scenario — in which the House selected a president who had lost at the ballot box — would almost certainly end up in the courts.Those who have studied the reforms to the Electoral Count Act see it as highly unlikely that Mr. Johnson could lead enough Republicans in both chambers against the will of the voters.“The election deniers are far from having 51 votes in the United States Senate, and that’s not going to change for many, many years,” said Norman L. Eisen, who was a special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and testified on the need for reform legislation. “Fortunately, the Electoral Count Reform Act has closed off many of the avenues that would be available to mischief makers. But given his history, we will have to be on our guard.” More

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      Republican Jewish Coalition to Gather at a Moment of Peril for Israel

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      The Republican Jewish Coalition gathers in Las Vegas this weekend, drawing G.O.P. leaders and candidates at a moment of unique peril for Israel and American Jewry.For years, the annual meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition has been a routine stop on the presidential primary trail, an opportunity for would-be presidents to demonstrate their foreign-policy credentials while plying donors with requisite one-liners. But nothing is routine this time.With an escalating conflict in Israel that threatens to spread across the region and a rise in tensions and antisemitism in the United States, the meeting will be like none of the others in the organization’s decades-long history. When Republican officials, lawmakers and candidates gather in Las Vegas this weekend, they will come together at a moment of unique peril for Israel and, many attendees believe, for American Jewry.Security has been tightened and seats added to accommodate a wave of new attendees who decided to come after the Oct. 7 attacks. An empty Shabbat table will sit in the middle of the room, honoring the more than 200 people being held hostage in Gaza. Along with the American national anthem, attendees will sing Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, and offer special prayers for those who are missing and wounded.And while the overall tone will be subdued, members of the organization said they expected nothing short of full-throated, unequivocal support for Israel and the protection of Jews in America from the 2024 Republican field.“I would venture half the room, if not more than half, has relatives who are in the I.D.F.,” said Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary under President George W. Bush and a member of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s board, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “They don’t want to see a single weak knee, elbow or joint. They want to see support for a nation that’s in trauma against the modern-day equivalent of Nazism.”All eight major candidates running for the Republican nomination, including the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, are expected to attend, a reflection of how the attacks have thrust foreign policy into the center of American politics. On Wednesday, the House passed a resolution vowing to give the Israeli government whatever security assistance it needs, the first legislation taken up by the new speaker, Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Trump’s Allies Pledged Loyalty to Him. Until They Didn’t.

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      The former president is facing down Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer, in a Manhattan courtroom, while other ex-loyalists are cooperating in a case against him in Georgia.Donald J. Trump could not hide his anger. Sitting at the front of a crowded New York courtroom this week, he folded his arms tightly across his chest. He tossed his head and scowled. He stared into the middle distance and scrolled through his phone.His ire was directed at Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, who had taken the witness stand 15 feet away and had promptly called Mr. Trump a liar. Mr. Cohen has told his share of lies as well. But in court, he swore he had done so “at the direction of, in concert with and for the benefit of Mr. Trump.”Mr. Cohen’s two days of dramatic testimony this week provided the first glimpse of what could become a familiar scene: Mr. Trump, sitting at a defense table, watching as a lawyer who once did his bidding now cooperated with the authorities seeking to hold him to account.On the same day Mr. Cohen began his testimony, Jenna Ellis, who had sought to help Mr. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, pleaded guilty to state charges in Georgia. She was preceded by Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, both lawyers who worked with Mr. Trump’s campaign, both now expected to cooperate in the criminal case that the Georgia prosecutors brought against him.The circumstances surrounding the Georgia criminal case and the Manhattan civil fraud trial are vastly different. But near the center of each case are lawyers who pledged public fealty to Mr. Trump — until they very publicly did not.Mr. Trump has long relied on a phalanx of legal attack dogs to speak on his behalf, or to do or say things he would rather not do or say himself. And because Mr. Trump has such a tenuous relationship with the truth, those lieutenants often spread a message that prosecutors and investigators consider to be outright lies. Lies about an election he lost, a relationship with a porn star he may have had and a net worth he may not quite have achieved.Now those statements are ricocheting back at Mr. Trump as he contends with the civil trial in New York, brought by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, and with four criminal indictments up and down the East Coast. And while Mr. Trump is quick to blame his betrayers — Mr. Cohen is “proven to be a liar,” he said outside the courtroom this week — his predicament was born from his own lopsided approach to relationships.Mr. Trump has a history of disavowing people who were once close to him and find themselves in trouble. He had long since cut ties with Mr. Cohen — until Tuesday, they had not seen each other in five years — and more recently he distanced himself from the lawyers in the Georgia case. He had also refused to pay their mounting legal bills.Their relationships, a one-way street flowing in Mr. Trump’s direction, appeared to work for a time. But when those loyal soldiers faced their own legal jeopardy, their allegiance to the former president became strained or even shattered.There have been exceptions since Mr. Trump’s split with Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump’s political action committee has picked up the legal bills for his co-defendants in the federal criminal case involving his handling of classified government documents, as well as those of several witnesses connected to the case.Mr. Trump’s company also agreed to dole out a $2 million severance payment to his longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, and continues to pay for Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers. Mr. Weisselberg pleaded guilty to tax fraud and testified at the company’s criminal trial last year, but has stopped short of turning on Mr. Trump.Mr. Cohen was among several in a series of people who Mr. Trump turned to over decades in the hopes they would emulate his first fixer and defender, the lawyer Roy Cohn. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Mr. Trump told one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, in an interview. “He brutalized for you.”That brutality — along with Mr. Cohn’s method of conflating public relations defenses with legal ones, making showy displays in court and accusing the federal government of “Gestapo-like tactics” against Mr. Trump in a 1970s suit alleging housing discrimination — became Mr. Trump’s preferred model for a lawyer.Mr. Cohen has often said that those sort of tactics influenced what Mr. Trump looks for in those who defend him.While it is unclear how useful Ms. Ellis and the other two lawyers will be to the case against Mr. Trump in Georgia, Mr. Cohen has already been tormenting Mr. Trump for the last five years. Ms. Ellis became critical of him publicly in the last several months.Mr. Trump made a point of attending the trial in Manhattan this week to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony in person.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesFor Mr. Trump, the feud with Mr. Cohen is personal. Although he is running for president and fighting the four indictments, none of those obligations could pry him away from the Manhattan courtroom to watch Mr. Cohen’s testimony. Mr. Trump did not have to attend the testimony, but people close to him say he believes events go better for him when he is present.Mr. Trump’s falling out with Mr. Cohen stemmed from their dealings with the porn star Stormy Daniels.In the final stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to silence her story of an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier — an affair that Mr. Trump denied had ever taken place.The deal came to light in 2018, and soon, the F.B.I. had searched Mr. Cohen’s home and office. As Mr. Cohen’s life imploded, Mr. Trump began to distance himself from his fixer, and eventually, his company stopped paying Mr. Cohen’s legal bills altogether.Mr. Cohen soon lashed out and began to speak with prosecutors. When he pleaded guilty that year for his role in the hush-money deal, he stood up in court and pointed the finger at the then-president. Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen declared, had directed the payment of the hush money.Although the federal prosecutors declined to indict Mr. Trump, this year the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against him related to the deal, using Mr. Cohen as a potential star witness for a trial scheduled to start in the spring. Mr. Cohen has also testified before Congress that the former president’s company had manipulated financial statements to reach Mr. Trump’s desired net worth. That testimony was the catalyst for Ms. James to open her investigation.When Ms. James’s team questioned Mr. Cohen on Tuesday, he repeated many of the same accusations, testifying that Mr. Trump had directed him to “reverse engineer” annual financial statements to reach the former president’s desired net worth.Mr. Cohen spoke calmly and confidently as he recounted Mr. Trump’s obsession with his net worth.But the Trump team’s cross-examination exposed the perils of relying on a disgruntled former aide, especially one as temperamental as Mr. Cohen.Mr. Trump’s lawyers seized on Mr. Cohen’s inconsistent statements about the former president and his own crimes, leading him to admit to having lied a number of times. Toward the end of the second day of cross-examination, Mr. Cohen appeared visibly flustered as he tripped over rapid-fire questions about whether Mr. Trump had personally directed him to inflate numbers on his annual financial statements. Mr. Cohen said he had not, prompting Mr. Trump and one of his lawyers, Alina Habba, to throw their hands up in victory.Ms. Habba also resurfaced a series of glowing remarks Mr. Cohen once made about his boss, further underscoring his about-face.“I think he’s going to be an amazing president”; “I’m the guy who would take the bullet for the president”; “I think the world of him, I respect him as a business man and I respect him as a boss,” Ms. Habba emphatically read, as she circled the courtroom with a hand-held microphone like a preacher delivering a sermon.This appeared to delight Mr. Trump, who turned to watch Ms. Habba while draping his arm over her empty chair.Before Mr. Cohen completed his testimony on Wednesday, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Justice Arthur J. Engoron to dismiss the case, citing Mr. Cohen’s contradictions.Justice Engoron denied the request, and Mr. Trump stormed out of the courtroom.Kate Christobek More

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      Solidarity Between American Activists and Palestinians — Including a Rebuke of Biden

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      Since the heinous Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s declaration of war against the terrorist group, I have been going over and over a question I’ve not been able to answer fully: During this episode, why has the Palestinian cause sparked so much passion among veteran activists of the movement for Black lives?Last week, I wrote that this could be traced to the ideological lens and residual energy of a younger generation attuned to protest and the ideas of equality and justice. But after interviewing several prominent activists in recent days, I realize there’s more to explore in the critical dynamics fueling that passion, which is born, in part, out of longstanding personal connections and a common sense of purpose.There are two pivotal events that seem to have ignited the new era of solidarity between some young American activists and the people of Palestine. The first came in the form of Palestinian activists expressing support on social media for the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., which activists describe as an uprising, not just a series of protests. Palestinians provided not just moral support, but offered practical tips that, as activist Cherrell Brown told me, included advice for protesters about how to protect themselves from tear gas.Around that time, a small delegation of Palestinians even traveled to Ferguson and St. Louis to meet with American activists. This all created a moment of bonding around a shared sense of resistance.The second event was a 2015 pilgrimage to Israel and the Palestinian territories organized by Ahmad Abuznaid, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian American who co-founded the Dream Defenders, a group of activists who came together in response to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin.The small delegation included some people who would also become central in the American movement, like the journalist and scholar Marc Lamont Hill.When we spoke, Abuznaid, who has been criticized for his support for B.D.S., a movement calling for boycott, divestment and sanctioning of Israel, said he has led or been a part of several delegations to the Palestinian territories focused on what he describes as the injustices caused by the Israeli occupation.These trips help not only to develop strong bonds between communities half a world away from each other, but also to connect the issues facing them. Hill, who lost his job as a CNN contributor after he gave a speech at the United Nations about Israel and Palestine that was condemned by groups including the Anti-Defamation League, would go on to be a co-author of a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.”The events during this period reinforced a sense of internationalism among activists and connected a present solidarity with a historical one. It called back to a time when an American figure as notable as Malcolm X spoke out for the Palestinian cause.Even activists who didn’t make these journeys describe coming to this cause in part through personal connections with Palestinians and Palestinian Americans.And unlike some conflicts around the world, this one continues to play out in full view, in traditional media and social media. As the comedian, actress and activist Amanda Seales told me, this crisis has an urgency around it that others don’t because “we’re able to see it” in an unfiltered way.The other thing that I initially underestimated is the level of criticism of the Biden administration for its response to this conflict and what effect that might have in 2024.Shaun King, a former writer for The Daily News who has millions of followers on Facebook, Instagram and X, the site formerly known as Twitter, posted recently about how he would not vote for President Biden next year because of his embrace of Israel.King, who has never been a strong Biden supporter and is far from a mainline Democrat, told me, “I feel like a voter without a candidate.”While most activists I spoke to didn’t sound a note as strident as King’s about their voting intentions, several of them sounded an alarm about a possible wave of voter disappointment on the left over Biden’s stance in this conflict.As Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told me, he couldn’t think of a more “demobilizing experience” for young, democracy-minded, multiracial coalition voters than an escalating war and escalating human suffering “with the understanding that our country and our government could have done more to prevent it.”Tiffany Loftin, who describes herself as a civil rights activist and labor union organizer, and is a former national director of the N.A.A.C.P. youth and college division, said she would have a difficult time casting her ballot for “somebody who supported genocide” of Palestinians, which is how she characterized Biden’s position in the Israel-Gaza war. “I don’t know if I can do that, Charles,” she said.The questions for the Democratic Party and the Biden administration are: How much of their support base does this discontent represent, and how much voter abstention can they absorb?A lot will happen next year, and public attention will inevitably turn to other issues and controversies, but in a tight presidential race, an increasingly disaffected activist base on the left could be disastrous for Biden, and in a rematch with Donald Trump, that could be disastrous for our democracy.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Mike Johnson’s Speakership Reveals GOP’s Trump Loyalty Test

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      The developments on Capitol Hill highlighted the extent to which one of the greatest sins inside the Republican Party is to have certified Joseph R. Biden’s victory.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana had just survived a closed-door vote to end a tumultuous period of paralysis without a House speaker on Tuesday night and was celebrating with smiling and exhausted Republican colleagues.“Democracy is messy sometimes,” he said, “but it is our system.”But moments later, Mr. Johnson was confronted at a news conference about his own past role in American democracy, when he worked in alliance with former President Donald J. Trump to block the certification of the 2020 election.Boos rang out at the reporter’s inquiry. Mr. Johnson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Shut up! Shut up!” one congresswoman shouted. “Next question,” Mr. Johnson said. Only hours earlier, the speakership bid of another candidate, Tom Emmer, the majority whip, had been felled amid a lobbying blitz from Mr. Trump himself. Among Mr. Emmer’s apparent apostasies: certifying President Biden’s election. His tenure as speaker designate lasted only four hours.Then, on Wednesday, when Representative Pete Aguilar, a Democrat, chastised Mr. Johnson for leading efforts to reject the Electoral College votes on the House floor in 2020, one Republican lawmaker shouted back, “Damn right!”The back-to-back-to-back developments on Capitol Hill underscored not only the extent to which loyalty to Mr. Trump has become a prerequisite to taking power in today’s Republican Party, but also how — two and half years after a riot that left the Capitol covered with blood and broken glass — the greater sin inside the G.O.P. is to have stood with the voters that day and certified the election of Joseph R. Biden.“Bottom line is the Trump wing of the House is dominant and has been dominant for some time,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania. Mr. Dent called Mr. Johnson “affable” and “bright” but said the political takeaway was clear: “A member of the Trump populist wing is now speaker.”Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump ally who filed the motion that took down former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, beamed, “This is what victory feels like,” celebrating Mr. Johnson’s rise on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Wednesday before the official floor vote. Mr. Gaetz called him “MAGA Mike Johnson” — the same moniker that the Biden campaign used hours later.At a New York courthouse, where he and his company are on trial for financial fraud, Mr. Trump himself praised Mr. Johnson. “I think he’s going to be a fantastic speaker,” the former president said Wednesday.The internal politics of House Republicans do not revolve solely around Mr. Trump. The former president had publicly backed Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio for speaker earlier this month, only to see him blockaded by a more moderate faction in the conference.But the end of the three-week paralysis shows that the party remains yoked to the former president’s election denialism, with Mr. Johnson’s selection by his Republican colleagues coming on the same day that one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers tearfully pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these postelection challenges,” said Jenna Ellis, a once-combative Trump attorney who is now cooperating with Mr. Trump’s prosecutors. Prosecutors struck deals with two other Trump figures, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, in the last week.It was a different story on Capitol Hill.With Mr. Trump dominating polls in the 2024 presidential primary — and even his top rivals staying relatively silent on his election fraud falsehoods — the party appears content to look past the fact that many of the party’s most prominent election deniers lost in key swing states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in the 2022 midterm elections.For many Republicans, the primary victories that preceded those defeats are as politically significant. Last year, Mr. Trump sought to methodically cleanse the party of his critics, especially those who had voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6 riot. He mostly succeeded: Only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him survived.In contrast, Mr. Johnson served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team. And before that he recruited House Republicans to sign onto a legal brief to object to the outcome of the 2020 election. When that failed, he had played a key role in articulating a rationale for Republican lawmakers to oppose certification of the 2020 results on the floor. His guidance did not directly echo Mr. Trump’s wild allegations and was narrower in scope, but it led to the same final vote.“We know now it’s too high of a hurdle to be directly criticized by Donald Trump” and still become speaker, said Kevin Sheridan, a veteran Republican strategist. Referring to Mr. Johnson, he added, “He seems to have found the right temperature for the porridge so far.”But Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, a nonprofit devoted to vote counting and election certification, said she was “very concerned” about Mr. Johnson’s ascent.“As a member of the House, Johnson was willing to use the powers of his office to try to obstruct a fair election and interfere with certification,” she said. “And we have to assume he would do the same with the broader powers of the speakership.”Mr. Johnson has served as vice chairman of the Republican conference and was previously the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee. He is initially expected to be a more policy-minded leader than Mr. McCarthy, who was best known for his backslapping personality. Mr. McCarthy also objected to certifying the election and visited Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago only weeks after the attack on the Capitol, in a trip that was widely seen to restore some legitimacy to the former president.An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson has vocally opposed abortion and gay marriage. (During the roll call vote in which he was elected as speaker, Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, pointedly declared, “Happy wedding anniversary to my wife!” to Democratic applause.) Democrats were quick to highlight some of his hard-line stances.Elected to the House in 2016, the same year that Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Johnson, a former constitutional law attorney, will have the least years of House experience of any speaker in many decades. But he is representative of the wave of House Republicans who have served in Washington only since the party was reshaped by Mr. Trump — and who are now a majority of the conference.“If you don’t have a coup on your résumé,” Charlie Sykes, the Trump-tired editor in chief of The Bulwark, wrote in a column about the speakership fight, “don’t bother to apply.” More

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      Trump and GOP Candidates Call for Campus Crackdowns Against Anti-Israel Speech

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      The G.O.P. field, including former President Trump, has been wading into the emotional debate among students playing out over the deadly war between Hamas and Israel.As tensions mount on U.S. college campuses over the war in Gaza, several Republican presidential candidates are proposing a crackdown on students and schools that express opposition to Israel, appear to express support for the deadly Hamas attacks or fail to address antisemitism.Former President Donald J. Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have called for the federal government to revoke international students’ visas, while others have suggested that universities should lose public funding.After students at George Washington University projected messages on Tuesday onto the side of a campus building — including “Glory to our martyrs,” “Divestment from Zionist genocide now” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” a phrase that encompasses all of Israel as well as Gaza and the West Bank — two candidates argued almost immediately that the students or the universities, or both, should be punished.“If this was done by a foreign national, deport them,” Mr. Scott wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday morning. “If the college coddles them, revoke their taxpayer funding. We must stand up against this evil anti-Semitism everywhere we see it — especially on elite college campuses.”Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota wrote: “Antisemitism cannot be tolerated. Period. The students responsible should be held accountable and if the university fails to do so it should lose any federal funding.” He indicated in another post that he would “fully enforce” a Trump-era executive order to use Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to revoke federal funding for any university that “enables” antisemitism.They and other Republicans are wading into an emotional debate on college campuses over Hamas’s attack on Israel, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict — turning the opinions of individual students and student groups, starting at Harvard and New York University, into national flash points. Days of simultaneous pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel demonstrations have exposed painful divisions, including significant and potentially consequential ideological rifts between donors, students and faculty members.The suggestion of punishing anti-Israel views is part of a broader campaign against liberal-leaning campus environments, which many Republicans claim indoctrinate students. But it is also in tension with other parts of that campaign: In many cases, the same candidates have previously condemned what they described as censorship of students who expressed conservative opinions.Mr. Scott was a co-sponsor of a Senate resolution in 2021 that called on colleges and universities to “facilitate and recommit themselves to protecting the free and open exchange of ideas” and argued that “restrictive speech codes are inherently at odds with the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.”Mr. Burgum signed legislation in North Dakota, also in 2021, that forbade universities in the state to discriminate against student organizations or speakers based on their viewpoint.When asked where Mr. Scott drew the line between protected and unprotected speech, his campaign did not comment on the record but cited a previous statement in which he called it a “fine line.” Mr. Burgum’s campaign pointed to the Trump executive order as requiring action.Separately, on Tuesday, the chancellor of the State University System of Florida wrote in a letter to university presidents that he had determined — “in consultation with” Mr. DeSantis — that two campus chapters of the group Students for Justice in Palestine “must be deactivated.”The national Students for Justice in Palestine organization released guidance to campus chapters earlier this month calling for demonstrations “in support of our resistance in Palestine.” The guidance called Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,400 people, “a surprise operation against the Zionist enemy” and “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”It added, “This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies, but armed confrontation with the oppressors.”The letter from the chancellor, Ray Rodrigues, said the chapters had violated a Florida law against providing “material support” to “a designated foreign terrorist organization.”“The State University System will continue working with the Executive Office of the Governor and S.U.S.’s Board of Governors to ensure we are all using all tools at our disposal to crack down on campus demonstrations that delve beyond protected First Amendment speech into harmful support for terrorist groups,” it said. “These measures could include necessary adverse employment actions and suspensions for school officials.”The national Students for Justice in Palestine organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The letter came a few days after Mr. DeSantis declared at a campaign event in Iowa that, if elected president, he would revoke the visas of students who supported Hamas. He did not say how he would determine who fell into that category; some public commentary has applied the label “pro-Hamas” to demonstrators expressing broader support for Palestinians or opposition to Israel’s military actions in Gaza, which have killed more than 6,500 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. (Its figures could not be independently verified.)Mr. Trump made the same proposal at his own recent event in Iowa, also not providing details. “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home,” he said.Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, joined Mr. Scott and Mr. Burgum in saying she would cut federal funding to colleges that did not condemn students who supported Hamas.“No more federal money for colleges and universities that allow antisemitism to flourish on campus,” Ms. Haley wrote on X, arguing that the promotion of certain opinions in relation to the Hamas attack constituted “threatening someone’s life” and was “not freedom of speech.”Only one candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, publicly rejected efforts to punish schools or individual students for anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian statements.“Colleges are spaces for students to experiment with ideas & sometimes kids join clubs that endorse boneheadedly wrong ideas,” he wrote on X this month in response to an uproar over a letter from student groups at Harvard that held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”He added: “It wasn’t great when people wearing Trump hats were fired from work. It wasn’t great when college graduates couldn’t get hired unless they signed oppressive ‘DEI’ pledges. And it’s not great now if companies refuse to hire kids who were part of student groups that once adopted the wrong view on Israel.” More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s Lawyers Are Going Down. Is He?

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      On Tuesday morning, Jenna Ellis became the third Donald Trump-allied lawyer to plead guilty in Fulton County, Ga., to state criminal charges related to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. She joins Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro in similar pleas, with each of them receiving probation and paying a small fine, and each of them cooperating with the prosecution in its remaining cases against Trump and his numerous co-defendants.The Ellis, Powell and Chesebro guilty pleas represent an advance for both the state election prosecution in Georgia and the federal election prosecution in Washington. While their guilty pleas came in the Georgia case (they’re not charged in the federal prosecution, though Powell and Chesebro have been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case), the information they disclose could be highly relevant to Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump.Perhaps as important, or even more important, the three attorneys’ admissions may prove culturally and politically helpful to those of us who are attempting to break the fever of conspiracy theories that surround the 2020 election and continue to empower Trump today. At the same time, however, it’s far too soon to tell whether the prosecution has made real progress on Trump himself. The ultimate importance of the plea deals depends on the nature of the testimony from the lawyers, and we don’t yet know what they have said — or will say.To understand the potential significance of these plea agreements, it’s necessary to understand the importance of Trump’s legal team to Trump’s criminal defense. As I’ve explained in various pieces, and as the former federal prosecutor Ken White explained to me when I guest-hosted Ezra Klein’s podcast, proof of criminal intent is indispensable to the criminal cases against Trump, both in Georgia and in the federal election case. While the specific intent varies depending on the charge, each key claim requires proof of conscious wrongdoing — such as an intent to lie or the “intent to have false votes cast.”One potential element of Trump’s intent defense in the federal case is that he was merely following the advice of lawyers. In other words, how could he possess criminal intent when he simply did what his lawyers told him to do? He’s not the one who is expected to know election laws. They are.According to court precedent that governs the federal case, a defendant can use advice of counsel as a defense against claims of criminal intent if he can show that he “made full disclosure of all material facts to his attorney” before he received the advice, and that “he relied in good faith on the counsel’s advice that his course of conduct was legal.”There is a price, though, for presenting an advice-of-counsel defense. The defendant waives attorney-client privilege, opening up both his oral and written communications with his lawyers to scrutiny by a judge and a jury. There is no question that a swarm of MAGA lawyers surrounded Trump at each step of the process, much like a cloud of dirt surrounds the character Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons, but if the lawyers themselves have admitted to engaging in criminal conduct, then that weakens his legal defense. This was no normal legal team, and their conduct was far outside the bounds of normal legal representation.Apart from the implications of the advice-of-counsel defense, their criminal pleas, combined with their agreements to cooperate, may grant us greater visibility into Trump’s state of mind during the effort to overturn the election. The crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege prevents a criminal defendant from shielding his communications with his lawyers when those communications were in furtherance of a criminal scheme. If Ellis, Powell or Chesebro can testify that the lawyers were operating at Trump’s direction — as opposed to Trump following their advice — then that testimony could help rebut Trump’s intent defense.At the same time, I use words like “potential,” “if,” “may” and “could” intentionally. We do not yet know the full story that any of these attorneys will tell. We only have hints. Ellis said in court on Tuesday, for example, that she “relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” Indeed, Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has indicted two other attorneys with “many more years of experience” — Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. If Ellis’s court statement is any indication, it’s an ominous indicator for both men.If you think it’s crystal clear that the guilty pleas are terrible news for Trump — or represent that elusive “we have him now” moment that many Trump opponents have looked for since his moral corruption became clear — then it’s important to know that there’s a contrary view. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a respected former federal prosecutor, argued that Powell’s guilty plea, for example, was evidence that Willis’s case was “faltering” and that her RICO indictment “is a dud.”“When prosecutors cut plea deals with cooperators early in the proceedings,” McCarthy writes, “they generally want the pleading defendants to admit guilt to the major charges in the indictment.” Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. Ellis and Chesebro both pleaded to a single felony charge, but they received punishment similar to Powell’s. McCarthy argues that Willis allowed Powell to plead guilty to a minor infraction “because minor infractions are all she’s got.” And in a piece published Tuesday afternoon, McCarthy argued that the Ellis guilty plea is more of a sign of the “absurdity” of Willis’s RICO charge than a sign that Willis is closing in on Trump, a notion he called “wishful thinking.”There’s also another theory regarding the light sentences for the three lawyers. When Powell and Chesebro sought speedy trials, they put the prosecution under pressure. As Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia defense attorney, wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, it was “extremely smart” to seek a quick trial. “They got the best deal,” Fleischman said, “because their lawyers picked the best strategy.”As a general rule, when evaluating complex litigation, it is best not to think in terms of legal breakthroughs (though breakthroughs can certainly occur) but rather in terms of legal trench warfare. Think of seizing ground from your opponent yard by yard rather than mile by mile, and the question at each stage isn’t so much who won and who lost but rather who advanced and who retreated. Willis has advanced, but it’s too soon to tell how far.The guilty pleas have a potential legal effect, certainly, but they can have a cultural and political effect as well. When MAGA lawyers admit to their misdeeds, it should send a message to the Republican rank and file that the entire effort to steal the election was built on a mountain of lies. In August, a CNN poll found that a majority of Republicans still question Joe Biden’s election victory, and their doubts about 2020 are a cornerstone of Trump’s continued political viability.Again, we can’t expect any single thing to break through to Republican voters, but just as prosecutors advance one yard at a time, opposing candidates and concerned citizens advance their cultural and political cases the same way. It’s a slow, painful process of trying to wean Republicans from conspiracy theories, and these guilty pleas are an important element in service of that indispensable cause. They represent a series of confessions from the inner circle and not a heated external critique.Amid this cloud of uncertainty, there is one thing we do know: With each guilty plea, we receive further legal confirmation of a reality that should have been plainly obvious to each of us, even in the days and weeks immediately following the election. Trump’s effort to overturn the election wasn’t empowered by conventional counsel providing sound legal advice. It was a corrupt scheme empowered by an admitted criminal cabal.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More