Presidential Election of 2024

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      In New Book, Romney Unloads on Fellow Republicans

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      The senator from Utah and 2012 presidential nominee is openly critical of the direction of his party. Here are some of his views on his colleagues and peers, past and present.Even before Senator Mitt Romney of Utah announced he would not seek re-election next year, he made no secret of his disapproval of the direction of the Republican Party and former President Donald J. Trump’s grip on it.But in a new, deeply reported biography, “Romney: A Reckoning,” set to be released next week, Mr. Romney goes beyond his broad disdain for the party and gives his unvarnished opinion of some of his fellow Republicans.In interviews with the book’s author, McKay Coppins, Mr. Romney, who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, offers frank appraisals that are rare in Washington.Such tell-all, insider books often foster a practice known as the “Washington read,” in which boldfaced names immediately flip through the index to find out what damaging assessments may come to haunt them.Here is a selection of what Mr. Romney’s peers and colleagues, past and present, might find.Christie, ChrisMr. Romney’s advisers in 2012 suggested that he consider Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, as a running mate, according to the book.But Mr. Romney had reservations about Mr. Christie’s “prima donna tendencies,” and worried that the governor was not “up to the physical demands” of being on the ticket and was plagued by “barely buried” scandals, Mr. Coppin writes.The two also came into conflict in 2016 after Mr. Christie became one of the first establishment Republicans to back Mr. Trump.“I believe your endorsement of him severely diminishes you morally,” Mr. Romney wrote in an email. He added: “You must withdraw that support to preserve your integrity and character.”Evaluating Mr. Christie’s 2024 campaign, Mr. Romney labels him “another bridge-and-tunnel loudmouth” like Mr. Trump, saying it would be “a hoot” to watch the two of them spar on the debate stage.Cruz, TedMr. Romney called Senator Ted Cruz of Texas “scary” and “a demagogue” in his journal, and in an email assessing political candidates in 2016, he said Mr. Cruz was “frightening.”He was also bluntly critical of Mr. Cruz’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including his perpetuating Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.Mr. Romney said that he believed Mr. Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, another objector, were too smart to believe what they were saying.“They were making a calculation that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution,” Mr. Romney said.DeSantis, RonOf all of the would-be challengers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Romney seemed to have the most to say about Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was viewed early on as having the best shot at challenging Mr. Trump for the nomination.Mr. Romney’s views on the governor were decidedly mixed, according to the book.“Mr. Romney wanted to like the governor,” Mr. Coppins writes. The senator said that it was a “no-brainer” to support Mr. DeSantis if it meant keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House.Yet Mr. Romney appeared to have reservations. He worried that Mr. DeSantis shared “odious qualities” with Mr. Trump, pointing to his penchant for stoking the culture wars and his fight with the Walt Disney Company.And Mr. Romney appeared to have objections to the Florida governor on a more personal level.“There’s just no warmth at all,” Mr. Romney said. He added that when Mr. DeSantis posed for photos with Iowa voters, “he looks like he’s got a toothache.”Even his appraisal of Mr. DeSantis’s positive qualities came with a backhanded sting.“He’s much smarter than Trump,” Mr. Romney said. But, he added, “there’s a peril to having someone who’s smart and pulling in a direction that’s dangerous.”Gingrich, NewtWhile Mr. Romney was running unsuccessfully for Senate in Massachusetts in 1994, Mr. Gingrich, a hard-line conservative who would become House speaker, was rising to prominence.Mr. Romney recalls thinking, according to the book, that Mr. Gingrich “came across as a smug know-it-all; smarmy and too pleased with himself and not a great face for our party.”Two decades later, when the two were competing against each other in the Republican presidential primary, Mr. Romney was no more impressed.Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney saw Mr. Gingrich as “a ridiculous blowhard who babbled about America building colonies on the moon.” He also had moral objections to Mr. Gingrich’s admitted adultery.In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote that his wife, Ann, thought that Mr. Gingrich was “a megalomaniac, seriously needing psychiatric attention.”McConnell, MitchAs he does with many other Republicans in the book, Mr. Romney hammers Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, over what he sees as a gap between his public and private statements relating to Mr. Trump.Mr. Coppins writes that Mr. Romney questioned “which version of McConnell was more authentic: the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.”Still, Mr. Romney seems to have respect for Mr. McConnell. In January 2021, he said, he believed Mr. McConnell had been “indulgent of Trump’s deranged behavior over the last four years, but he’s not crazy.”Pence, MikeMr. Romney makes his disdain for the former vice president abundantly clear, calling him “a lap dog to Trump for four years.”He seems particularly appalled by what he viewed as Mr. Pence’s willingness to compromise his own moral views, or contort them, to be a loyal foot soldier to Mr. Trump.“No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly, than Mike Pence,” Mr. Romney told Mr. Coppins.Perry, RickMr. Romney described Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor who was a rival for the 2012 Republican nomination, as a “dimwit,” Mr. Coppins writes.In his journal, Mr. Romney wrote of Mr. Perry that “Republicans must realize that we must have someone who can complete a sentence.”In 2016, when Mr. Perry ran a short-lived campaign for president, Mr. Romney said that the Texan’s “prima donna, low-IQ personality” was a non-starter.Santorum, RickThe former senator from Pennsylvania, who also ran against Mr. Romney in 2012, was “sanctimonious, severe and strange,” in Mr. Romney’s assessment.At one point during the 2012 campaign, Mr. Romney finds himself irked by his rival’s “apparently bottomless self-interest,” Mr. Coppin writes.In his journal, Mr. Romney said Mr. Santorum was “driven by ego, not principle.”Trump, Donald J.Perhaps the freshest revelation in Mr. Romney’s book is his acknowledgment that many of his colleagues in the Senate, including Mr. McConnell, privately shared his poor view of Mr. Trump.But that harsh assessment — which would set up Mr. Romney’s conflict with Mr. Trump throughout his presidency — was made most clear in the email Mr. Romney sent to Mr. Christie in 2016.“He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence,” Mr. Romney wrote. “There is simply no rational argument that could lead me to vote for someone with those characteristics.” More

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      Supreme Court Delays Efforts to Redraw Louisiana Voting Map

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      The Louisiana dispute is one of several voting rights cases churning through the courts that challenge a state’s congressional map.The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a lower-court ruling that delays an effort to redraw Louisiana’s congressional map, prolonging a bitter clash over the representation of Black voters in the state.The order temporarily leaves in place a Republican-drawn map that a federal judge had said diluted the power of Black voters while an appeal moves through the lower courts.Civil rights groups had sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court abruptly canceled a scheduled hearing aimed at drafting a new map for Louisiana. That map was to include two districts in which Black voters represent a large enough share of the population to have the opportunity to select a candidate. The appeals court said that the state legislature should have more time to redraw its own map before a lower court stepped in.The Supreme Court’s order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications, and there were no public dissents.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a brief concurring opinion, emphasized that Louisiana should resolve the dispute in time for the 2024 election.In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, the plaintiffs had argued that delays in the case could complicate efforts to instate a new map by the next election, leaving the state with a version that lumps Black voters from different parts of the state into one voting district, diluting their power.By the time the Supreme Court issued its order on Thursday, a hearing date had passed. Another has been set for February.The consolidated cases, Galmon v. Ardoin and Robinson v. Ardoin, are part of a larger fight over redistricting. State lawmakers in the South have contested orders to refashion congressional maps and establish additional districts to bolster Black representation. The outcomes could help tilt control of the House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.Weeks earlier, the court refused a similar request by Alabama, which had asked the justices to reinstate a map with only one majority-Black district. A lower court had found that Republican lawmakers blatantly disregarded its order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”At issue in Louisiana is a voting map passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in the winter of 2022. The map carved the state into six districts, with only one majority-Black district, which joined Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the state’s two largest cities. About a third of the population in the state is Black.The case has reached the Supreme Court before.A coalition that included the N.A.A.C.P. Louisiana State Conference, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and Louisiana voters sued state officials and said the map unfairly weakened the power of Black voters.A district court, siding with the plaintiffs, temporarily blocked Louisiana from using its map in any upcoming elections. A new map, it said, should include an additional district where Black voters could choose a representative. The court gave the Legislature until June 20, 2022, to sign off on a redrawn map.Louisiana immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and a three-judge panel unanimously denied the request. The state then asked the Supreme Court to intervene.The Supreme Court paused the case until it ruled in the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, which concerned similar questions. That essentially allowed the Republican-drawn map in Louisiana to go into effect during the 2022 election.The court lifted the pause in June after a majority of the justices, in a surprise decision, found Alabama’s map had unfairly undercut the power of Black voters. The justices said the appeals court should review the case before the 2024 elections. More

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      Biden’s Aid, and Pointed Advice, to Israel

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      More from our inbox:How to Unify, and Save, the CountrySadly, CBC Ends a Time-Honored TraditionOver-the-Counter MedicinesPresident Biden was greeted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his arrival in Israel on Wednesday.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Backs Israel, as Cause of Blast Remains Disputed” and “Biden Urges Caution in War on Hamas” (front page, Oct. 19):President Biden offers good advice that one hopes will be heard by all: Do not let shock, pain and rage lead to counterproductive decisions, decisions that cause unnecessary loss of innocent life and squander the world’s sympathy.Palestinians and Israelis have each been failed by their leaders. Palestinians and Israelis have each suffered unspeakable harm.We pray that Palestinians and Israelis and their respective leaders and all of the people who empathize with them will remember that in the midst of righteous anger, ill-conceived actions can make matters much, much worse for everyone.Ron BoyerEugene, Ore.To the Editor:As an American Jew, I am horrified by President Biden’s response to Hamas’s horrific murder of Israelis on Oct. 7. By providing military aid to Israel, the U.S. government is fueling the Israeli government’s vastly disproportionate response, in which it has already killed more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas.Mr. Biden may have urged the Israeli people not to be consumed by the rage they feel about the Hamas terror attacks, but that statement is completely contradicted by his sending the very weapons that the Israeli military is using to kill civilians.The U.S. can stop this immoral violence, but instead is fanning the flames by providing support for the autocratic Israeli government. I am joined by many other American Jews in condemning the Israeli government’s killing of thousands and threatening millions of innocent lives in the name of the Jewish people.Miriam ShakowNarberth, Pa.To the Editor:In this time of unbelievable misery and loss, it may be naïve to talk about international law. But some of the participants in the current fighting in Israel (and their allies) have represented that they are trying to respect the laws of war. Since many observers may not be familiar with those laws, I write simply to report two indisputable principles.First, the same rules of conduct apply to the “aggressor” and to its victims. “They started it” is no excuse for doing things that would otherwise be illegal.Second, the fact that the overall objective is permissible (like self-defense) or even laudatory does not excuse using methods that result in disproportionate harm to civilians.Applying these principles, it is a violation of the laws of war to knowingly cut off food, water, fuel and medical supplies to entire trapped localities. The harm would fall disproportionately on civilians who have even less access to whatever supplies exist than those in authority. It cannot be justified.Lea BrilmayerBranford, Conn.The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Yale University.To the Editor:As an American Israeli living in Israel with a son in the Israel Defense Forces, I feel that I must speak out.It was uplifting for Israelis to hear President Biden’s remarks after the attacks on Oct. 7. Israelis everywhere felt encouraged by the president’s unequivocal support, and the unambiguous message that the events of Oct. 7 constituted “pure, unadulterated evil” — because they truly did.It is clear to Israelis that in carrying out these atrocities, Hamas was seeking to draw Israel into precisely the actions that Israel is now engaged in. The justification for those actions could be debated endlessly, but the world must know that Israel considers itself in existential peril. And in our hour of trial, we derive incredible strength from American support.The objective of Israel’s war with Hamas is not the suffering of Gazans or Palestinians but the crippling of a murderous terrorist organization that has caused unprecedented suffering for Israelis and Palestinians alike.David GilmoreHolon, IsraelHow to Unify, and Save, the Country Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:These are unprecedented times. Democracy, national security and the world order are at stake. Our nation has never been so divided.While our young experiment in democracy faces a challenge to its very existence, our world faces heightened conflict from dangerous leaders who present existential threats, and our planet faces increased temperature extremes, violent destructive storms and devastating wildfires.Considering all that is at stake, our nation must find its way to tamp down the noise from the extreme sides of both parties, the disinformation promulgated by partisan media and the contempt for others fueled by social media.I propose a unique approach to ensure the continued success of our republic. As much as I respect and admire Vice President Kamala Harris, I would ask that for the greater good of our nation and the world, she step aside as President Biden selects a moderate Republican (such as Larry Hogan, the former Maryland governor) as his 2024 running mate.Not only would this virtually guarantee his re-election, but it would also be a giant step in uniting the country.Bradley S. FeuerWellington, Fla.Sadly, CBC Ends a Time-Honored TraditionThe “long dash,” as the CBC’s daily announcement of the official time was known to generations of Canadians, was broadcast for the final time on Oct. 9.Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “After 84 Years, Time Abruptly Runs Out on Canadian Radio Tradition” (news article, Oct. 18):CBC’s dropping of its 84-year tradition of announcing the precise time at 1 p.m. day in and day out may seem like a trivial matter in the current world environment. But find me a Canadian who cannot finish the sentence “The beginning of the long dash …” (for the non-Canadian readers: “indicates exactly 1 o’clock Eastern Standard Time”).It’s as common as eight months of winter and hockey, and always saying “I’m sorry.”It was enough of a collective jolt when the middle of the announcement (“following 10 seconds of silence”) was abandoned. We grew up counting down that 10 seconds of radio silence while at the ready to instantly adjust our watches if necessary. And now we are completely on our own.Go easy on us, world, if the lone Canadian invited to the party is now always early or late. We’re sorry.Mary E. CampbellOttawaOver-the-Counter Medicines Jackson GibbsTo the Editor:Re “We’ve Known for 20 Years This Cold Medicine Doesn’t Work,” by Randy C. Hatton and Leslie Hendeles (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 1):Nonprescription, over-the-counter (O.T.C.) medicines are a cornerstone of our nation’s health care system, yet your essay draws sweeping conclusions and disregards decades of regulatory oversight, scientific review, and real-world evidence supporting their safety and efficacy.Phenylephrine, the only O.T.C. oral decongestant available without purchase restrictions, has decades of use as a safe and effective option for temporary nasal congestion relief. The Food and Drug Administration has twice determined phenylephrine to be “generally recognized as safe and effective,” the regulatory standard for O.T.C. medicines.However, the authors’ assessment discounts this history, and other evidence, while elevating their own limited research. No medicine works equally for everyone, and every medicine has unique considerations for therapeutic selection. Providing Americans with options that offer freedom of choice for personal health care needs is a core attribute of our health care system.Consumers can have confidence in their O.T.C. medicines, and the regulatory framework that oversees them.Scott MelvilleWashingtonThe writer is president and C.E.O. of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. More

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      Biden’s Response to Israel-Hamas War Meets Centrist Praise and Liberal Anger

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      A prime-time address to the nation on Thursday will be the president’s third major speech on the Mideast conflict as his Democratic coalition strains over his handling of the violence.When President Biden delivers a prime-time Oval Office address on Thursday about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it will be his third major speech on the Mideast conflict as he grapples with a fragile Democratic coalition that is closely watching how he handles the outbreak of violence.In his remarks last week and again on Wednesday in Tel Aviv, Mr. Biden sought to put no daylight between the United States and Israel — though in his second speech, he warned the Israelis not to “be consumed” by their rage about the Hamas attack this month that killed more than 1,400 people. He pleaded with the Israelis not to overreact, as he said the United States did after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.The centrist Democrats who make up the core of Mr. Biden’s political base were nearly unanimous in their praise.“I am grateful to have @POTUS thoughtful leadership in this moment,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri wrote on social media. “As we continue working save the lives of hostages and hold Hamas accountable, I encourage him to continue using his platform to call for restraint and the protection of innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike.”Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Mr. Biden “speaks for me and speaks for all of America” on Israel. And Richard Haass, the former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, called the Wednesday speech “nothing less than masterful.”And while Biden campaign officials insist they aren’t planning to use the Israel trip as campaign fodder, Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts forecast what could become the sort of contrast the president’s aides and allies make with former President Donald J. Trump should he win the Republican presidential nomination.“Joe Biden flew into a war zone to stand with Israel,” Mr. Auchincloss said late Wednesday. “Trump wouldn’t even visit a cemetery of American war dead.” (Mr. Trump, in 2018, canceled a planned trip to a French cemetery, and his aides cited the rainy weather.)Liberal Democrats who have been critical of how Mr. Biden has tethered the White House to Israel as the Israelis carry out attacks on the Gaza Strip focused their attention Wednesday on amplifying attention on antiwar demonstrators who marched around the Capitol and renewed their calls for a cease-fire.“We cannot bomb our way to peace,” wrote Representative Cori Bush of Missouri. “We need a cease-fire,” said Representative André Carson of Indiana. And several left-wing members of Congress reposted a message from Pope Francis in which he called the situation in Gaza “desperate” and pleaded that “the weapons be silenced; let the cry for peace be heard from the poor, from the people, from the children!”Some used especially heated language: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, speaking outside the Capitol, said, “We are literally watching people commit genocide and killing a vast majority, just like this, and we still stand by and say nothing.”Some Democrats began attacking their party colleagues who are skeptical of the Israeli war effort. Representative Jerry Nadler of New York condemned the organization behind the Capitol protest, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota that “you have been training your outrage on the wrong party” after Ms. Omar reiterated her call for Mr. Biden to seek a cease-fire.Progressive activists circulated a video of Dilawar Syed, a deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration, being booed while speaking at a vigil for Wadea Al-Fayoume, the 6-year-old Palestinian boy from the Chicago suburbs who was killed in what prosecutors said was an attack motivated by hate for Muslims amid the fighting in Israel and Gaza.Another meme circulating on left-wing social media showed a stylized Mr. Biden behind the wheel of a convertible with the caption “Genocidin’ with Biden.”And Josh Paul, a career State Department official, announced his resignation because of the Biden administration’s “blind support for one side,” which he said was leading to policy decisions that were “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

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      ROMNEY: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins“For most of his life, he has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.” One doesn’t expect these opening words from an authorized biography of a handsome, wealthy, happily married and instinctively moderate man, but this is how McKay Coppins’s “Romney” begins. Perhaps Mitt Romney fears his severance from so many blessings, but as Coppins’s revealing new book demonstrates, this businessman-politician has often wondered if he deserved such an abundance of good fortune at all.Coppins conducted 45 interviews with Romney over two years and had access to hundreds of pages in private journals that the now 76-year-old senator has kept since 2011. “Romney” presents a man given to cycles of rationalization and guilt, to sometimes near-O.C.D. levels of repetitive thinking and self-recrimination. The biographer pronounces his “defining trait” to be a “meld of moral obligation and personal hubris.”Romney has, in fact, had two brushes with sudden death, the first in a terrible automobile accident in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old Mormon missionary in France. The second came a half-century later on a January afternoon in the besieged Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, to which the better angels of Romney’s conscience had led him after a long up-and-down political life.His father, George, was a progressive Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, marching with civil rights activists even as his own church banned Black members from the priesthood. His 1968 run for the presidency collapsed after he referred to the military cheerleading for the Vietnam War as “brainwashing.”Mitt grew up with predictable comforts but nothing like a sense of direction until, during his Mormon mission, sick with diarrhea, he knocked on doors in the French port city of Le Havre that might as well have been brick walls. It eventually “struck him with the force of something divine” that, however futile they seemed, his sacrifices were accepted by God.Once back home he was on his way, along a path both faithful and lucrative, into the expanding worlds of business consulting and private equity in the 1970s and ’80s. Straining to make time for both his church and the five sons he and his wife were raising in suburban Boston, Romney achieved big success at Bain Capital, the investment firm he helped found that guided the office-supply chain Staples toward explosive growth and cut jobs at Ampad, one of the stationery manufacturers that stocked Staples’ shelves.Romney was moving fast, and Coppins himself is a bit headlong in the book’s early going, which includes Romney’s ill-fated 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s later repair of Utah’s shambolic preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics propelled him to a single term as governor of Massachusetts, during which he enacted the health-insurance plan that came to be seen as a state-level precursor of Obamacare. The governor was logical and naïve enough to believe that the program’s success might get him the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But after running into Iowans’ suspicions of Mormonism, he limped toward an early withdrawal from the race.Four years later, he somehow succeeded with Republican primary voters newly jazzed by tea-partying and birtherism and not particularly craving a candidate who had to spend time convincing them that Romneycare was actually quite different from Obamacare. To overcome Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Romney needed to dial his rationalization settings high enough to endure mad conversation with the conservative provocateur Glenn Beck.Securing the nomination proved only a prelude to what Coppins, with some justice, calls “one of the pettiest, most forgettable presidential elections in modern history” — no matter that it’s been all downhill since then. Romney was demagogued by Vice President Joe Biden, who told Black voters in one audience that the Republican candidate hoped to “put y’all back in chains,” and mocked by Obama for having observed that Russia would be our most dangerous long-term adversary. But he lost the election mostly on his own, with a gaffe worse than his father’s old brainwashing one: Romney was caught on tape dissing the “47 percent” of voters “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”Few moments of that year’s campaign will be more cringe-inducing to a reader than Romney’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s endorsement, in Las Vegas, for the Republican nomination. Throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis. As late as May 2012, Romney was confiding this description of Trump to his journal: “No veneer, the real deal. Got to love him. Makes me laugh and makes me feel good, both.” Four years later, having come to his senses, Romney refused Trump his own endorsement, earning the candidate’s fury.Romney also sent a blistering email to Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor came out for Trump: “He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic.” Even so, after Trump’s victory, thinking he could perhaps be a force for restraint, Romney allowed himself to be humiliated by Trump’s prolonged public dangling of the secretary of state job.It took two more years for him to arrive at his finest — and final — hours in politics. In 2018, as a handful of anti-Trump Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake left Congress, Romney jumped in. His becoming a freshman senator from Utah was made possible by his own humility and the Mormon state’s temperamental aversion to the president’s personality, which had helped depress Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state.Setting up shop in a lousy basement office, Romney abandoned his plan “to fight Trumpism while ignoring Trump,” at last realizing he had to face the man head-on. While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled (Ben Sasse) or submissively swooned (Lindsey Graham), Romney kept his head above the fetid waters, eventually developing a particular contempt for J.D. Vance, the once anti-Trump hillbilly elegist who reached the Senate via what Romney’s father might have called self-brainwashing. Resistance to Trump’s election-fraud claims left Romney to be jeered by fellow passengers on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. Even before his vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment, private security for his large family was costing him $5,000 a day.“Romney: A Reckoning” is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions: One remembers Monica Crowley’s “Nixon Off the Record” (1996) and Thomas M. DeFrank’s “Write It When I’m Gone” (2007), a collection of opinions that Gerald Ford wanted to make public, though not too soon.Romney has not waited until he’s dead to unleash his candor and surrender his journals, but he has announced his retirement from electoral politics, on the sensible grounds that it is already too geriatric an arena. Even so, a second Senate term was hardly guaranteed to him. Whatever remains of Mormon distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and meanness, 2024 will be a meaner year than 2018; in a poll taken in the spring, more than half of Utah’s Republicans did not want Romney to run again.Coppins, a fellow Mormon, is generally as polite as his subject, though the characterization of Romney’s “late-in-life attempt at political repentance” seems a bit stark. As this able book shows, Romney almost certainly has less to repent of than the average politician. Indeed, one believes Coppins when he says that “watching Trump complete his conquest of the G.O.P. was even more devastating to Romney than losing his own election in 2012.”The depicted “reckoning” is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within. Romney’s moral vitality, for all its fitfulness and ambivalence, has kept him a free man. Only a morally dead one, whose self-worth comes entirely from without, will find that stone walls do indeed a prison make.ROMNEY: A Reckoning | By McKay Coppins | 403 pp. | Scribner | $32.50 More

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      Republicans Use Israel Attack to Stoke Fears About U.S.-Mexico Border

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      G.O.P. lawmakers and candidates regularly invoke record-high border crossings to address a range of issues, including crime and jobs.Crime in American cities. The national opioid crisis. Election integrity. And now a terror attack considered the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history.Not long after Hamas terrorists killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis this month, a wave of Republicans — on the presidential campaign trail, in state and congressional races and in the far-right corners of conservative media — reached for a familiar playbook: tying the issue to the nation’s southern border.“What happened to Israel could happen to America because our country has been invaded by millions of people from over 160 different countries,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said on Fox News more than 24 hours after the attack.“We know that there’s an open border, and I know that the biggest national security threat is if those terrorists come into America, and we have another 9/11,” Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador under former President Donald J. Trump, told reporters last week in Concord, N.H.“You cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, a baseless claim that was met with applause at a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, a Des Moines suburb.While Republicans are otherwise reckoning with deep divisions, the remarkable unity on this front underscores the degree to which the 2,000-mile dividing line between the United States and Mexico remains a potent political symbol for the party. Since Mr. Trump paved his way to power on a nativist and hard-line approach to immigration, Republicans have invoked fortifying the border to address nearly every issue, in increasingly militant terms and often exaggerating the facts.There are some indications that message is resonating. A national NBC News poll taken in September suggests that voters overwhelming trust Republicans over Democrats when it comes to handling the economy and crime — as well as immigration — heading into the 2024 election.Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and a former adviser to Senator Marco Rubio, said the aggressive turns toward the border could be particularly effective now as the Biden administration grapples with two very real humanitarian crises: record numbers of migrants trying to cross the border and a fight against fentanyl that has become an urgent public health problem.“The border is something that concerns a majority of Americans, especially when you can tie it to problems they see in their own neighborhoods,” he said.After Donald J. Trump won the presidency on a hard-line approach to immigration, Republicans have tied border policies to countless other issues.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHomeland Security officials have said they have found no specific or credible threat to the United States tied to Hamas. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, responded to Republicans in part by saying there is “strict national security vetting to determine whether individuals coming from anywhere in the world have ties to terrorist organizations.” Immigration experts said that the government cannot screen people who enter undetected but that the large numbers of migrants turning themselves in at the border are subjected to screening processes.Since the southern border was drawn, American politicians have sought to wring political advantage by tapping into xenophobic fears, at times aimed at Chinese laborers, or young German men believed to be spies, or Jews and Catholics, historians and political analysts said.Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a government professor at George Mason University in Virginia and who tracked the rise of the Mexican criminal organization Los Zetas, said the latest Republican rhetoric took cues from three distinct moments in U.S. history: the migration of Mexican laborers who became the economic engine of the Southwest, the government’s war on drugs that began in the 1970s, and the 9/11 terror attack and the so-called war on terror. All resulted in an increased military presence at the border, the building of physical barriers and an expansion of the U.S. deportation system.Ms. Correa-Cabrera said that, much like now, those earliest border enforcement measures were mostly based on political arguments, not data that migrants increased crime or posed a greater threat to public safety. Many studies have shown this is not the case. “It had to do with prejudice,” she said.Attempts by politicians to link Mideast terror groups and Mexican criminal organizations have at times gained traction over the past two decades, but no substantial evidence has surfaced to support the claim, counterterrorism and insurgency experts said. The two kinds of groups have vastly different objectives and operate in cultural and economic borderland regions that do not share remotely similar dynamics.With apprehensions at the southern border up overall, U.S. officials this year have recorded an increase in apprehensions of people whose identities match those on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list — 160 migrants in the 2023 fiscal year as of July, up from 100 the fiscal year before, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Such rolls constitute a small fraction of the millions of people seeking to cross the southern border and do not significantly measure the terror threat against the United States, terrorism and insurgency experts said. The uptick may be owing in part to the broad nature of the lists, they added, ensnaring people wanted for terrorist activities against their home countries but not aimed at the United States, as well as relatives or associates not accused of wrongdoing. Although experts do not completely rule out the threat of a terror attack launched from the southern border, they described it as unlikely.If Mideast terror organizations ever did plan an attack, “the northern border may even be more vulnerable,” said Bruce Hoffman, professor and director of the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University who specializes in terrorism studies. And such a plot would not necessarily be connected to illegal immigration, he added.The 9/11 hijackers entered the United States on tourist, business and student visas. The last man to physically cross the border with materials for an explosive — Ahmed Ressam — was arrested in 1999 after he came in from Canada.Still, the southern border remains a powerful symbol, for politicians and voters. When Mr. Trump adopted his “America First” slogan during his 2016 presidential campaign, he used it to harness grievance, xenophobia and fears about threats from abroad, economic competition from China on trade, and the potential economic and social consequences of increases in new immigrants.On Monday, Mr. Trump, under fire for his criticism of Israel and for calling Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization, “very smart,” invoked the deadly Hamas attacks on the Jewish state to stoke fears of terrorism at home. Returning to some of his most inflammatory themes on illegal immigration, he also took aim at legal pathways by pledging to reinstitute the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries and expand the freeze on refugees he enacted during his presidency.“We aren’t bringing anyone from Gaza,” he said at his rally in Clive.Mr. Trump is not alone. Republican candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida often steer conversations with voters back to immigration. At a town hall in Iowa in August, when he was asked two questions in quick succession on unrelated issues, Mr. DeSantis managed to hit on the border. On the issue of eminent domain, he said he would support it “for the border wall down south.” Asked about the war in Ukraine, he said that as president, his “first obligation” would be “to protect the American people and to protect our border.”In mailers, television ads and remarks, Republicans in state and congressional races regularly fault border enforcement. They cast blame on Mexican criminal organizations and undocumented immigrants for the fentanyl crisis — but not the American pharmaceutical companies that fueled the legal market for the drugs or the U.S. citizens who law enforcement officials say typically bring the harder narcotics across the border. They have claimed without basis that unauthorized immigrants are gaining access to the ballot box, while claims that widespread numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting have been consistently discredited.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly invoked the U.S.-Mexico border after the attack in Israel.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesHistorians and political analysts warned that much of the heated language on immigration plays into far right and sometimes explicitly racist tropes that fuel fear with the potential for violence.Two white supremacist shooting suspects in the last five years, Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh and Patrick Crusius in El Paso, Texas, cited “invaders” and a “Hispanic invasion” in the lead-up to their crimes.On Saturday, the authorities in suburban Chicago said, Joseph Czuba, 71, fatally stabbed a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounded the child’s mother because of their Palestinian background. Officials tied the attack to what Mr. Czuba was hearing on conservative talk radio about the fighting overseas.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump Is Going to Get Someone Killed

      by

      Donald Trump’s life has been a master class in the evasion of consequences. Six of his businesses have declared bankruptcy but he is still acclaimed as a business visionary; he’s been married three times but is still beloved by evangelicals; he’s been impeached twice but still remains a leading candidate for president. For years, Mr. Trump’s critics have believed that a moment of accountability was just over the horizon, thanks to, say, a Bob Woodward takedown or a Robert Mueller investigation; disappointment followed.Now, Mr. Trump confronts another moment of apparent peril as he begins to face his accusers in criminal and civil court proceedings. The verdicts in these cases remain months away, but he is reacting in apparent confidence that the consequences of his actions will, as ever, turn out well for him. But it’s equally important to ask how Mr. Trump’s response to his latest predicament will affect others, especially those who are now targets of his wrath.Over the past two weeks, the judges in Mr. Trump’s civil fraud case in New York and his criminal prosecution in Washington have issued limited gag orders forbidding him from trying to intimidate witnesses and other participants in the trials. Mr. Trump is appealing at least one of the orders, but even if he abides by them, which is by no means certain, the directives do not prohibit the vast range of threats and attacks Mr. Trump has made and shows every sign of continuing to make. The former president’s current language represents an imminent threat to his rhetorical targets and those around them.Mr. Trump has always employed invective as a political tool, but as his days of courtroom reckoning have arrived, his rhetoric has grown more menacing. He’s suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been executed; that shoplifters should be shot; that the judge’s clerk in the civil case against him is Sen. Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend; and that “you ought to go after” the state attorney general who is prosecuting him. In language evoking Nazi eugenics, he has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”Mr. Trump’s adversaries often look to the courts for relief, but there’s no remedy there for his tirades. The First Amendment protects all but the most explicit incitements to violence, so Mr. Trump has little reason to fear that prosecutors will bring charges against him for those remarks.The most notorious moment of Mr. Trump’s presidency also demonstrated the limits of relying on the courts as a meaningful check on his own provocations. In his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to “fight like hell,” and many did just that at the Capitol. But they paid a price, and he didn’t. In yet another example of Mr. Trump’s life without consequences, more than 1,000 people have been charged for their conduct on Jan. 6, and many if not most of them broke the law because they thought that’s what the president at the time wanted. Still, the special counsel Jack Smith refrained from charging Mr. Trump with inciting the violence, undoubtedly because of the Constitution’s broad protection for freedom of speech. Incitements like Mr. Trump’s, even if they are not crimes in themselves, can have dangerous consequences, as they did on Jan. 6.Angry people, especially those predisposed toward violence, can be set off by encouragement that falls well short of the legal standard for criminal incitement. To see the consequences of such constitutionally protected provocation, one need only look to the case of Timothy McVeigh, who set off the bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people on April 19, 1995. More than a decade before the attack, when Mr. McVeigh was still in high school, he first read “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a right-wing rebellion against the federal government. Earl Turner, the hero and narrator of the novel, ignites a civil war by setting off a truck bomb next to the F.B.I. building in Washington — the act that planted the idea for what Mr. McVeigh later did in Oklahoma City. But once Bill Clinton took office in 1993, McVeigh’s revulsion at the new president prompted him to move the idea from the back of his mind to a definite plan of attack.Mr. McVeigh was specifically outraged at the F.B.I.’s raid on the Branch Davidian complex, near Waco, Texas, which led to the death of 82 Branch Davidians and four federal agents and ended on April 19, 1993, and at Mr. Clinton’s signing of a ban on assault weapons, which took place the following year.Mr. McVeigh’s anger was boiling at a time of incendiary political language in the mid-1990s, when, for example, Newt Gingrich, who would go on to become speaker of the House in 1995, said: “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.” In particular, on his long drives across the country, Mr. McVeigh became a dedicated listener to Rush Limbaugh, whose radio talk show was in its heyday. Mr. Limbaugh was saying things like, “The second violent American revolution is just about — I got my fingers about a quarter of an inch apart — is just about that far away.” Of course, all of this rhetoric, from the words of the novel to those of Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Limbaugh, was protected by the First Amendment.One person who understood the possible connection between the language on the airwaves and the violence it spawned was Mr. Clinton himself, who had seen repeated examples of extreme right-wing violence during his days as governor of Arkansas. In a speech shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Clinton said, “We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other.” He went on: “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable … I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today. Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences.” Then as now, from Mr. Limbaugh to Mr. Trump, the act of calling out their provocations produces the same cries of wounded innocence. In response to Mr. Clinton’s speech, Mr. Limbaugh denounced “irresponsible attempts to categorize and demonize those who had nothing to do with this. … There is absolutely no connection between these nuts and mainstream conservatism in America today.” Mr. Trump used the same rhetorical dodge regarding his responsibility for the violence he fomented on Jan. 6. In his answer to the report of the congressional committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol, he said in a post on his Truth Social website: “The unselect committee [sic.] did not produce a single shred of evidence that I in any way intended or wanted violence at our Capitol. The evidence does not exist because the claim is baseless and a monstrous lie.”Mr. Trump, like Mr. Limbaugh before him, uses the Constitution’s broad protections for inflammatory speech as a shield against any sort of accountability. The implicit argument is that unless a criminal prosecution establishes a direct cause and effect between his words and the violence that follows, then there is no connection at all. But that isn’t true, nor can it be. Mr. Clinton was just reflecting common sense when he said, “words can have consequences,” and Mr. McVeigh’s story illustrates the effect that constitutionally protected words can have. But Mr. Trump never acknowledges that his words have any outcome other than those he chooses to recognize.The temptation with Mr. Trump, for President Biden and others, has always been to ignore the former president’s more outrageous statements in favor of the high (or at least higher) road. But that restraint is a disservice to the public and, in all likelihood, bad politics, too. If Mr. Trump isn’t called out for his encouragement of violence before it actually takes place, that will bolster his proclamations of innocence when the worst happens; he shouldn’t have that opportunity. Mr. Trump’s statements represent an immediate danger to the targets of his rage and the public at large; it’s Mr. Biden’s responsibility, as well as a political opportunity, to issue that warning.Mr. Trump has never respected the norms of political behavior and there’s little reason to think gag orders will provide meaningful discipline either. As on Jan. 6, his supporters shed traditional rules as well. The day is fast approaching when someone picks up a gun or builds a bomb and then seeks to follow through on Mr. Trump’s words. If and when that happens, he will say that he did not specifically direct or cause the violence, and he will probably escape without criminal charges — but the blood will be on his hands.Jeffrey Toobin is the author of “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.”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