Presidential Election of 2024

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      Trump Highlights Abortion Supreme Court Decision at Faith and Freedom Conference

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      Former President Donald J. Trump told an evangelical gathering that no president had done more for Christians than he did.One year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, former President Donald J. Trump reminded a gathering of evangelical activists in the nation’s capital how he had shaped the court’s conservative supermajority that ended nearly 50 years of constitutional protections for abortion.Appearing at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gala in Washington on Saturday night, he cited his appointment of three of the six justices who voted to strike down the law as a capstone of his presidency. And he cast himself as an unflinching crusader for the Christian right in a meandering speech that lasted nearly 90 minutes.“No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” he said, adding, “I got it done, and nobody thought it was even a possibility.”It was the eighth appearance by Mr. Trump in front of the group, whose support he is seeking to consolidate in a crowded G.OP. competition for the 2024 nomination, though he is the front-runner in the field. He said that Republican voters were skeptical of claims by some of his rivals that they were stronger opponents of abortion, and suggested that the skepticism had arisen on the campaign trail.“A woman stood up and said, ‘This guy ended Roe v. Wade. How the hell can you go against him?’” Mr. Trump said.A few thousand activists gave Mr. Trump an ovation when he mentioned the ruling, which he said gave conservatives leverage in the ongoing battle over abortion rights. Several hundred more filled an overflow room.“You have power for the first time,” he said.Former Vice President Mike Pence called for the 2024 Republican field to back a 15-week federal abortion ban — an abortion policy more extreme than what Mr. Trump has supported.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesVirtually all of Mr. Trump’s rivals in the crowded G.O.P. field appeared during the group’s three-day Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton. The lineup included Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief rival, and former Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s onetime running mate.At a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial earlier on Saturday commemorating the court’s ruling, Mr. Pence urged anti-abortion activists to continue fighting to place further restrictions on the procedure at the state level.“Save the babies, and we will save America,” he said, adding, “As the old book says, that many more are with us than are with them.”In a speech at the gathering a day earlier, Mr. Pence called on the entire 2024 Republican presidential field to pledge support for a national abortion ban at 15 weeks — a ban more extreme than what Mr. Trump has backed so far.David Porter, 64, a Republican from Newport News, Va., who wore a “Walk With Jesus” hat to the rally, commended Mr. Trump for his imprint on the judiciary.“He’s my guy right now,” he said.Several times in his speech on Saturday night, Mr. Trump sought to align himself with the faith community and said that it was under attack, much like he was.“Together, we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, globalists and the Marxists,” he said.Each indictment, he added, was a “great badge of courage.”“I’m being indicted for you,” he said.Mr. Trump’s alliance with the Christian right is a study in political opportunism, one that has yielded prodigious dividends for both.In 2016, evangelical voters helped propel Mr. Trump to successive Republican primary victories in South Carolina and other key states, giving him a pathway to the nomination and ultimately the presidency.The influential electoral bloc demonstrated its willingness to look beyond the impieties of the twice-divorced Mr. Trump, whose extramarital affairs had long been tabloid fodder and who came with a history of supporting abortion rights in the 1990s. Evangelical voters bought into Mr. Trump’s populist narrative, as well as his pledges to carry out a hard-line reset of the nation’s immigration and trade policies and to appoint “pro-life” justices.The group collected its returns during Mr. Trump’s presidency when he cemented a supermajority on the Supreme Court.Mr. Trump has heralded his remake of the nation’s highest court as he once again seeks the support of evangelical voters, this time beset by a cascade of indictments, including one in a hush-money case involving a porn star.But even as Mr. Trump has highlighted his role in the right’s fight to end abortion rights, he has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Republicans managed to steer one through the divided Congress.Mr. Porter, the anti-abortion activist from Virginia, said Mr. Trump’s evasiveness was concerning.Mr. Trump has suggested that a six-week abortion ban signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was “too harsh,” causing some of his rivals to see an opening on the right of Mr. Trump on the issue.Pete Marovich for The New York Times“Either you stand for what you believe in or you don’t,” he said.Mr. DeSantis, who spoke on Friday at the evangelical conclave, has sought to stake out the right flank against Mr. Trump on abortion policy. He criticized the former president for suggesting that a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida was “too harsh.”Susan Migliore, an anti-abortion activist from Falls Church, Va., who said she was religious but not evangelical, said at the Lincoln Memorial rally that she was grateful for Mr. Trump’s court picks, but had not decided which candidate she will support in 2024. More

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      It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party

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      Donald Trump this month became the first former or incumbent American president to be charged with crimes against the nation that he once led and wishes to lead again. He cynically calculated that his indictment would ensure that a riled-up Republican Party base would nominate him as its standard-bearer in 2024, and the last few weeks have proved that his political calculation was probably right.The former president’s behavior may have invited charges, but the Republicans’ spineless support for the past two years convinced Mr. Trump of his political immortality, giving him the assurance that he could purloin some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets upon leaving the White House — and preposterously insist that they were his to do with as he wished — all without facing political consequences. Indeed, their fawning support since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has given Mr. Trump every reason to believe that he can ride these charges and any others not just to the Republican nomination, but also to the White House in 2024.In a word, the Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6. One would think that, for a party that has prided itself for caring about the Constitution and the rule of law, this would stir some measure of self-reflection among party officials and even voters about their abiding support for the former president. Surely before barreling headlong into the 2024 presidential election season, more Republicans would realize it is time to come to the reckoning with Mr. Trump that they have vainly hoped and naïvely believed would never be necessary.But by all appearances, it certainly hasn’t occurred to them yet that any reckoning is needed. As only the Republicans can do, they are already turning this ignominious moment into an even more ignominious moment — and a self-immolating one at that — by rushing to crown Mr. Trump their nominee before the primary season even begins. Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country. No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning.The stewards of the Republican Party have become so inured to their putative leader, they have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future. But rushing to model their campaign on Mr. Trump’s breathtakingly inane template is as absurd as it is ill fated. They will be defending the indefensible.On cue, the Republicans kicked their self-defeating political apparatus into high gear this month. Almost as soon as the indictment in the documents case was unsealed, Mr. Trump jump-started his up-to-then languishing campaign, predictably declaring himself an “innocent man” victimized in “the greatest witch hunt of all time” by his “totally corrupt” political nemesis, the Biden administration. On Thursday, he added that it was all part of a plot, hatched at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., to “rig” the 2024 election against him.From his distant second place, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida denounced the Biden administration’s “weaponization of federal law enforcement” against Mr. Trump and the Republicans. Mike Pence dutifully pronounced the indictment political. And both Governor DeSantis and Mr. Pence pledged — in a new Republican litmus test — that on their first day in office they would fire the director of the F.B.I., the Trump appointee Christopher Wray, obviously for his turpitude in investigating Mr. Trump. It fell to Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, to articulate the treacherous overarching Republican strategy: “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”There’s no stopping Republicans now, until they have succeeded in completely politicizing the rule of law in service to their partisan political ends.If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved.There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Mr. Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Mr. Trump — even over the aging Mr. Biden — when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Mr. Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.When Republicans faced an 11th-hour reckoning with another of their presidents over far less serious offenses almost 50 years ago, the elder statesmen of the party marched into the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon the truth. He had lost his Republican support and he would be impeached if he did not resign. The beleaguered Nixon resigned the next day and left the White House the day following.Such is what it means to put country over party. History tends to look favorably upon a party that writes its own history, as Winston Churchill might have said.Republicans have waited in vain for political absolution. It’s finally time for them to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink — for the good of the party, as well as the nation.If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.J. Michael Luttig (@judgeluttig) was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.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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      A.I.’s Use in Elections Sets Off a Scramble for Guardrails

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      Gaps in campaign rules allow politicians to spread images and messaging generated by increasingly powerful artificial intelligence technology.In Toronto, a candidate in this week’s mayoral election who vows to clear homeless encampments released a set of campaign promises illustrated by artificial intelligence, including fake dystopian images of people camped out on a downtown street and a fabricated image of tents set up in a park.In New Zealand, a political party posted a realistic-looking rendering on Instagram of fake robbers rampaging through a jewelry shop.In Chicago, the runner-up in the mayoral vote in April complained that a Twitter account masquerading as a news outlet had used A.I. to clone his voice in a way that suggested he condoned police brutality.What began a few months ago as a slow drip of fund-raising emails and promotional images composed by A.I. for political campaigns has turned into a steady stream of campaign materials created by the technology, rewriting the political playbook for democratic elections around the world.Increasingly, political consultants, election researchers and lawmakers say setting up new guardrails, such as legislation reining in synthetically generated ads, should be an urgent priority. Existing defenses, such as social media rules and services that claim to detect A.I. content, have failed to do much to slow the tide.As the 2024 U.S. presidential race starts to heat up, some of the campaigns are already testing the technology. The Republican National Committee released a video with artificially generated images of doomsday scenarios after President Biden announced his re-election bid, while Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida posted fake images of former President Donald J. Trump with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former health official. The Democratic Party experimented with fund-raising messages drafted by artificial intelligence in the spring — and found that they were often more effective at encouraging engagement and donations than copy written entirely by humans.Some politicians see artificial intelligence as a way to help reduce campaign costs, by using it to create instant responses to debate questions or attack ads, or to analyze data that might otherwise require expensive experts.At the same time, the technology has the potential to spread disinformation to a wide audience. An unflattering fake video, an email blast full of false narratives churned out by computer or a fabricated image of urban decay can reinforce prejudices and widen the partisan divide by showing voters what they expect to see, experts say.The technology is already far more powerful than manual manipulation — not perfect, but fast improving and easy to learn. In May, the chief executive of OpenAI, Sam Altman, whose company helped kick off an artificial intelligence boom last year with its popular ChatGPT chatbot, told a Senate subcommittee that he was nervous about election season.He said the technology’s ability “to manipulate, to persuade, to provide sort of one-on-one interactive disinformation” was “a significant area of concern.”Representative Yvette D. Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said in a statement last month that the 2024 election cycle “is poised to be the first election where A.I.-generated content is prevalent.” She and other congressional Democrats, including Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, have introduced legislation that would require political ads that used artificially generated material to carry a disclaimer. A similar bill in Washington State was recently signed into law.The American Association of Political Consultants recently condemned the use of deepfake content in political campaigns as a violation of its ethics code.“People are going to be tempted to push the envelope and see where they can take things,” said Larry Huynh, the group’s incoming president. “As with any tool, there can be bad uses and bad actions using them to lie to voters, to mislead voters, to create a belief in something that doesn’t exist.”The technology’s recent intrusion into politics came as a surprise in Toronto, a city that supports a thriving ecosystem of artificial intelligence research and start-ups. The mayoral election takes place on Monday.A conservative candidate in the race, Anthony Furey, a former news columnist, recently laid out his platform in a document that was dozens of pages long and filled with synthetically generated content to help him make his tough-on-crime position.A closer look clearly showed that many of the images were not real: One laboratory scene featured scientists who looked like alien blobs. A woman in another rendering wore a pin on her cardigan with illegible lettering; similar markings appeared in an image of caution tape at a construction site. Mr. Furey’s campaign also used a synthetic portrait of a seated woman with two arms crossed and a third arm touching her chin.Anthony Furey, a candidate in Toronto’s mayoral election on Monday, used an A.I. image of a woman with three arms.The other candidates mined that image for laughs in a debate this month: “We’re actually using real pictures,” said Josh Matlow, who showed a photo of his family and added that “no one in our pictures have three arms.”Still, the sloppy renderings were used to amplify Mr. Furey’s argument. He gained enough momentum to become one of the most recognizable names in an election with more than 100 candidates. In the same debate, he acknowledged using the technology in his campaign, adding that “we’re going to have a couple of laughs here as we proceed with learning more about A.I.”Political experts worry that artificial intelligence, when misused, could have a corrosive effect on the democratic process. Misinformation is a constant risk; one of Mr. Furey’s rivals said in a debate that while members of her staff used ChatGPT, they always fact-checked its output.“If someone can create noise, build uncertainty or develop false narratives, that could be an effective way to sway voters and win the race,” Darrell M. West, a senior fellow for the Brookings Institution, wrote in a report last month. “Since the 2024 presidential election may come down to tens of thousands of voters in a few states, anything that can nudge people in one direction or another could end up being decisive.”Increasingly sophisticated A.I. content is appearing more frequently on social networks that have been largely unwilling or unable to police it, said Ben Colman, the chief executive of Reality Defender, a company that offers services to detect A.I. The feeble oversight allows unlabeled synthetic content to do “irreversible damage” before it is addressed, he said.“Explaining to millions of users that the content they already saw and shared was fake, well after the fact, is too little, too late,” Mr. Colman said.For several days this month, a Twitch livestream has run a nonstop, not-safe-for-work debate between synthetic versions of Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. Both were clearly identified as simulated “A.I. entities,” but if an organized political campaign created such content and it spread widely without any disclosure, it could easily degrade the value of real material, disinformation experts said.Politicians could shrug off accountability and claim that authentic footage of compromising actions was not real, a phenomenon known as the liar’s dividend. Ordinary citizens could make their own fakes, while others could entrench themselves more deeply in polarized information bubbles, believing only what sources they chose to believe.“If people can’t trust their eyes and ears, they may just say, ‘Who knows?’” Josh A. Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, wrote in an email. “This could foster a move from healthy skepticism that encourages good habits (like lateral reading and searching for reliable sources) to an unhealthy skepticism that it is impossible to know what is true.” More

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      Trump Steers Campaign Donations Into PAC That Covers His Legal Fees

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      A previously unnoticed change in Donald Trump’s online fund-raising appeals allows him to divert a sizable chunk of his 2024 contributions to a group that has spent millions to cover his legal fees.Facing multiple intensifying investigations, former President Donald J. Trump has quietly begun diverting more of the money he is raising away from his 2024 presidential campaign and into a political action committee that he has used to pay his personal legal fees.The change, which went unannounced except in the fine print of his online disclosures, raises fresh questions about how Mr. Trump is paying for his mounting legal bills — which could run into millions of dollars — as he prepares for at least two criminal trials, and whether his PAC, Save America, is facing a financial crunch.When Mr. Trump kicked off his 2024 campaign in November, for every dollar raised online, 99 cents went to his campaign, and a penny went to Save America.But internet archival records show that sometime in February or March, he adjusted that split. Now his campaign’s share has been reduced to 90 percent of donations, and 10 percent goes to Save America.The effect of that change is potentially substantial: Based on fund-raising figures announced by his campaign, the fine-print maneuver may already have diverted at least $1.5 million to Save America.And the existence of the group has allowed Mr. Trump to have his small donors pay for his legal expenses, rather than paying for them himself.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, did not answer detailed questions about why the Trump operation has changed how the funds he is raising are being split. Save America technically owns the list of email addresses and phone numbers of his supporters — one of the former president’s most valuable assets — and the campaign is effectively paying the PAC for access to that list, he explained.“Because the campaign wants to ensure every dollar donated to President Trump is spent in the most cost-effective manner, a fair-market analysis was conducted to determine email list rentals would be more efficient by amending the fund-raising split between the two entities,” Mr. Cheung said in a written statement.Mr. Trump gave the keynote speech at the state Republican convention in Georgia this month. Onstage, he mentioned the indictments against him, which have become intertwined with his fund-raising efforts.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesThe different rules governing what political action committees and candidate campaign committees can pay for are both dizzying and somewhat in dispute. But generally, a PAC cannot spend money directly on the candidate’s campaign, and a campaign committee cannot directly pay for things that benefit the candidate personally.For more than a year, before Mr. Trump was a 2024 candidate, Save America has been paying for bills related to various investigations into the former president and his allies. In February 2022, the PAC announced that it had $122 million in its coffers.By the beginning of 2023, the PAC’s cash on hand was down to $18 million, filings show. The rest had been spent on staff salaries, on the costs of Mr. Trump’s political activities last year — including some spending on other candidates and groups — and in other ways. That included the $60 million that was transferred to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that is supporting Mr. Trump. And more than $16 million went to pay legal bills.Mr. Trump’s rivals are not similarly splitting their online proceeds with an affiliated PAC. The websites of former Vice President Mike Pence, former Ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina direct all the proceeds to their campaign committees. The same goes for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Vivek Ramaswamy.Mr. Trump at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., in April. On his campaign website, supporters can buy an “I Stand With Trump” T-shirt and other merchandise alluding to his costly legal troubles.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I think in this particular situation, specifically because of the use of the leadership PAC to pay legal expenses and potentially other expenses that would be illegal personal use of campaign money, there’s an unusual incentive for the leadership PAC to take in more than it normally would,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director of Campaign Legal Center.In the run-up to Mr. Trump’s latest campaign, his legal bills exploded in size. Save America spent $1.9 million in what it identified as legal expenses in the first half of 2022. That figure ballooned to nearly $14.6 million in the second half of last year, federal records show.In late 2022, a Trump adviser said that about $20 million had been set aside by Save America PAC to cover legal expenses.Since then, Mr. Trump has been indicted twice, once by a Manhattan grand jury on charges stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star, and once by a federal grand jury in Florida on charges including violations of the Espionage Act arising from Mr. Trump’s possession of classified material and government records long after he left office.A prominent attorney, Todd Blanche, left his white-collar law firm in April to join the former president’s legal team and is now representing him in both cases, and Mr. Trump recently met with about a half-dozen lawyers in Florida.Mr. Trump’s legal troubles are deeply intertwined with his political campaign and fund-raising efforts. His campaign store is selling an “I Stand With Trump” T-shirt showing the date of his indictment in Manhattan (“03.30.2023”) for $36; it recently added a second shirt with his Florida indictment date (“06.08.2023”) for $38. Half the featured items on the store’s landing page show a fake mug shot and the words “not guilty.”And Mr. Trump’s usual legal strategy — delay, delay, delay — could prove costly as overlapping teams of white-collar lawyers defend him in the federal case and the Manhattan criminal case, as well as in the investigation in Georgia, where Mr. Trump could face yet another indictment this summer for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. He is also facing an intensifying investigation by the special counsel Jack Smith into his efforts to cling to power after losing the election.It remains unclear whether Mr. Trump will try to use his campaign funds to pay for lawyers, should he run into difficulties with the political action committee — and whether such a move would run afoul of spending rules.“He can use the campaign to pay for legal bills that arise out of candidate or officeholder activity — and of course, some of the current legal matters fall into that category, and some do not, and some are in a gray area,” Mr. Noti said. “It really depends on what matter we’re talking about.”Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election lawyer, said he believed Mr. Trump was barred from using Save America donations to pay his personal legal expenses now that he’s a candidate, arguing that doing so would be “an excessive contribution” under Federal Election Commission precedent. And he said Mr. Trump could not use campaign money at all, because it would qualify as personal use.There have been signs that Mr. Trump’s campaign has been carefully monitoring its expenses.He has mainly attended events organized by other groups, as opposed to staging his own large-scale political rallies, which were the lifeblood of his two past runs for president and are one of his favorite parts of campaigning. Those rallies are expensive, costing at least $150,000 and usually more than $400,000.Mr. Trump has held only one full-scale rally in the seven months he has been running, with a second scheduled on July 1 in South Carolina, his first in an early-nominating state. (A rally in Iowa on May 13 was canceled after a tornado warning, though the weather cleared and Mr. DeSantis pointedly held an impromptu event nearby.)People familiar with the Trump campaign’s plans have said that the dearth of rallies was as much about husbanding resources as it was about getting Mr. Trump to engage with voters in a more traditional way. The people also suggested that more large-scale events might come in the fall, as the primary race heats up.But the fund-raising surges that Mr. Trump experienced after his first indictment at the end of March and again in June are expected to obscure a broader fund-raising slowdown. His campaign announced that he had raised $12 million in the first week after his first indictment and $7 million in the week after his second one. He will next disclose the state of his PAC and campaign’s finances in federal filings in July.Mr. Trump is unusually dependent on online fund-raising. He has held only one major campaign fund-raiser that was billed as such by his team: the event at Bedminster on the evening of his indictment. It raised $2 million. More

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      Republicans Serve Up Red Meat for a Reason

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      There are, as of Saturday, at least 13 people running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination: former President Donald Trump; his U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, his vice president, Mike Pence; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida; Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota; the former governors Chris Christie of New Jersey and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; the former representative Will Hurd of Texas; Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami; and the entrepreneurs and media personalities Vivek Ramaswamy, Perry Johnson and Larry Elder.With this many candidates, you might assume that Republicans were fighting over a broad range of different ideas and competing solutions to the nation’s most serious problems, of which there are more than a few. But they aren’t. Instead, Republicans are studiously focused on the fever dreams and preoccupations of right-wing media swamps while showing an almost total indifference to the real world.Consider the wildfires.This month, because of unusually strong and destructive fires in the Canadian wilderness, much of the U.S. Northeast was blanketed with smoke and other pollutants. In the worst-hit areas, such as New York City, public health officials urged residents to either stay inside or use masks when venturing outdoors.This is what climate crisis looks like. Rising average temperatures mean drier conditions, increased drought and greater accumulation of the organic material — dead and dying trees, leaves and shrubs — that fuel wildfires. And this is on top of emissions produced by cars and other vehicles in an economy that still runs on fossil fuels. For many Americans, in other words, it takes little more than a glance outside the window to see a major problem of national consequence.President Biden issued a statement on Twitter, pledging assistance to the Canadian government as it fought to contain blazes and connecting the increasing strength, length and frequency of wildfires to climate change. “We’ve deployed more than 600 U.S. firefighters, support personnel and equipment to support Canada as they respond to record wildfires — events that are intensifying because of the climate crisis,” he said.Other national politicians have made similar points. “It bears repeating how unprepared we are for the climate crisis,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted. “We must adapt our food systems, energy grids, infrastructure, healthcare, etc ASAP to prepare for what’s to come and catch up to what is already here.”Missing in the discussion of what to do about the wildfires — and how to equip the country for future climate emergencies — is the entire Republican presidential field. There’s been no serious attempt to speak to the reality that millions of Americans have been exposed to dangerous amounts of air pollution and that this will only worsen in our continued climate crisis. No grappling with the fact that wildfire haze over the past several years has erased nearly two decades of clean air gains across the country.But we do have their previous statements on climate change. Trump appears to think that climate change is a hoax. “In my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up, and you go down,” he said in a Fox News interview last year. “If you look into the 1920s, they were talking about global freezing.” As president, he rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations.His closest rival for the nomination, DeSantis, has called the concern over the climate a “pretext” for “left-wing stuff” from activists who are trying to “smuggle in their ideology.”Pence and Scott do not deny that climate change is real, but they consistently downplay the extent of human responsibility and the severity of the effect on the environment. And in a testament to their overall indifference to the problem, both of them want to expand U.S. production of fossil fuels. “From banning gas stoves to blocking vital pipelines, the far-left’s energy policies are completely unrealistic,” Scott said on Twitter this month. “The American people know the solution to affordable energy is simple: stop the radical climate agenda and start unleashing our domestic energy supply.”Haley and Christie have also acknowledged the existence of man-made climate change; they just don’t think the government should actually do anything about it. And Ramaswamy has denounced climate activism as a secular “religion.”You get the picture. In the face of a real crisis, the would-be leaders of the United States have no real plan.You can go down the list of issues. What do the Republican presidential candidates have to say about gun violence and mass shootings? Well Haley, at least, says that we need to end “gun-free zones” and consider the use of “clear bulletproof tape” in schools. Beyond that, she and her rivals have had nothing substantive to say. Child poverty? Nothing. Mental health care? Very little in the way of actual policies.Ask the Republican presidential candidates about the “woke mind virus” or gender-affirming care, on the other hand, and you’ll hear an endless stream of comment and condemnation, all to the deafening applause of Republican voters. Which gets to the issue.Red meat is what Republican voters want. And even Trump — who will say anything to win the approval of a crowd — is a little shocked by it. “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that,” the former president said this month, referring to critical race theory and transgender issues. “I talk about cutting taxes, people go like that. I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.”I am reminded here of George Wallace, the infamous and influential Alabama governor who rode the anti-civil-rights backlash to the highest reaches of American politics. In 1958, however, he was a racial moderate, running for governor against a virulent segregationist who, he said, was “rolling with the new wave of the Klan and its terrible tradition of lawlessness.” Wallace lost. And when he returned to the stage four years later, he did so as an even fiercer segregationist than his former opponent. Asked to explain his terrible transformation, he was blunt.“I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes, and I couldn’t make them listen,” he said. “Then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”If Republican politicians have nothing to say of substance, it is because Republican voters don’t want substance. They want to stomp the floor.What I WroteMy Friday column was on Trump’s conception of the presidency — that it belongs to him — and what that might reflect about the current shape of the Republican coalition.No longer content to run government for business, the Republican Party now hopes to run government as a business.But this doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry. It means, instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.The next Republican president, in short, will almost certainly be the worst boss you, and American democracy, have ever had.Now ReadingRobin D.G. Kelley on the long war on Black studies for The New York Review of Books.J. Mijin Cha on the alliance between labor and climate activists for Dissent magazine.Erik Baker on Daniel Ellsberg for The Baffler magazine.Kali Holloway on Clarence Thomas for The Nation magazine.K. Austin Collins on the westerns of Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart for Current magazine.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieA festive home, seen during a recent visit to New Orleans. I used a Yashica twin-lens reflex camera and Kodak color film.Now Eating: One-Pot Pasta With Ricotta and LemonI’ve been on a real pasta kick recently, and this is an exceptionally easy dish to make — and popular with kids, too. There are a few things you can do to make this a full meal. You can add peas, asparagus or spinach as the pasta finishes boiling, and you can toss with a nice tinned tuna as well. If you want to up the flavor, you can make your own ricotta. Either way, I would serve with a simple salad to make sure the plate has plenty of green. Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.IngredientsKosher salt1 pound short, ribbed pasta, like gemelli or penne1 cup whole-milk ricotta (8 ounces)1 cup freshly grated Parmesan or pecorino (2 ounces), plus more for serving1 tablespoon freshly grated lemon zest plus ¼ cup lemon juice (from 1 to 2 lemons)Black pepperRed pepper flakes, for serving¼ cup thinly sliced or torn basil leaves, for servingDirectionsBring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to package instructions until al dente. Reserve 1 cup pasta cooking water, then drain the pasta.In the same pot, make the sauce: Add the ricotta, Parmesan, lemon zest and juice, ½ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon pepper and stir until well combined.Add ½ cup pasta water to the sauce and stir until smooth. Add the pasta and continue to stir vigorously until the noodles are well coated. Add more pasta water as needed for a smooth sauce.Divide the pasta among bowls and top with some of the sauce that’s pooled at the bottom of the pot. Garnish with grated Parmesan, black pepper, red pepper flakes and basil, if using. More

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      Biden Warns That Republicans Are Not Finished on Abortion

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      A year after the end of Roe v. Wade, Biden administration officials are working with a limited set of tools, including executive orders and the bully pulpit, to galvanize supporters on abortion rights.Minutes after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer, a group of West Wing aides raced to the Oval Office to brief President Biden on the decision. As they drafted a speech, Mr. Biden was the first person in the room to say what has been his administration’s rallying cry ever since.Passing federal legislation, he told the group, was “the only thing that will actually restore the rights that were just taken away,” recalled Jen Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council.But if the prospect of codifying Roe’s protections in Congress seemed like a long shot a year ago, it is all but impossible to imagine now, with an ascendant far-right bloc in the House and a slim Democratic majority in the Senate.Instead, with the battle over abortion rights turning to individual states, officials in the Biden administration are working with a limited set of tools, including executive orders and the galvanizing power of the presidency, to argue that Republicans running in next year’s elections would impose even further restrictions on abortion.“Make no mistake, this election is about freedom on the ballot,” Mr. Biden said Friday at a Democratic National Committee event, where he collected the endorsements of several abortion rights groups.On Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris was set to deliver a speech in North Carolina marking the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion after almost 50 years. Ms. Klein, who recalled refreshing news websites on the day the decision came down last June, said that she was “shocked but not surprised” by the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.She added that “efforts to really take extreme action do not represent the majority of opinion of where people are on this.”The White House has argued that Mr. Biden is reaching the legal limits of his powers through executive actions. On Friday, his latest executive action in response to the Dobbs decision ordered federal agencies to look for ways to ensure and expand access to birth control.Mr. Biden previously has issued a memorandum to protect access to abortion medication at pharmacies and taken action to protect patients who cross state lines to seek care. The Justice Department has taken legal action against some states restricting abortion. And the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion-pill drug mifepristone was quickly challenged in the courts. (In April, the Supreme Court issued an order to preserve access to the pill as litigation continues.)The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee will make abortion a primary focus of the president’s re-election effort.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAs the White House has clarified its message around abortion rights, framing the fight as one in support of privacy, safety and civil rights, so has the president. Mr. Biden, a Catholic who attends mass almost every week, has struggled throughout his career with defending abortion rights. Since Roe was overturned, he has grown more outspoken.“I think that he is somebody who really has his own personal views, and has also been quite clear that Roe v. Wade was rightly decided,” Ms. Klein said.Recent polling shows that a majority of Americans may feel similarly. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll conducted earlier this month found that one in four Americans said that restrictive abortion bans enacted at the state level have made them more supportive of abortion rights. Another poll, conducted by PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist, said that 61 percent of American adults support abortion rights.Some activists suspect that some Republican presidential candidates are paying attention to the polling. Mike Pence, the former vice president and presidential candidate, said on Friday that he would support a 15-week national ban on the procedure. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has also backed such a ban.Other candidates have avoided a definitive stance. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a six-week abortion ban into law in his state, though he has not said whether he would support a national ban.“It was the right thing to do,” Mr. DeSantis said Friday of signing the law.The G.O.P. primary front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, takes credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, but he has so far also resisted embracing a federal ban.As the G.O.P. field assembles, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee will make abortion a primary focus of the president’s re-election effort. Earlier this month, the Biden campaign launched an advertisement campaign focused on battleground states, including the funding of billboards in Times Square that will highlight Republican efforts to restrict abortion access.The Democratic National Committee is also encouraging local Democrats to press Republicans to specify what their position is on national bans, believing it will help contrast Mr. Biden’s approach with extremist positions, according to a D.N.C. official.Inside the White House, Ms. Klein said officials are tracking court cases in individual states and bringing abortion-rights activists together to compare notes on which policies have succeeded.Still, activists are wary that court victories can be short-lived and do not take away the threat of a wider abortion ban the way legislation would.In recent months, administration officials have regularly highlighted the stories of women who have been denied emergency medical care when suffering pregnancy loss.Ms. Harris, who has made several trips and delivered speeches in defense of abortion rights, has frequently introduced medical care providers at her events to bolster the argument that the decision to end a pregnancy is a private one and not to be toyed with by local politicians.Vice President Kamala Harris, displaying a map showing abortion access, has emerged as a strong voice in the administration on abortion rights.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesJill Biden, the first lady, has also been enlisted in the effort. On Tuesday, she hosted a group of women in the Blue Room of the White House and asked them to share their stories. One of the women, Dr. Austin Dennard, a physician in Texas, said she was forced to travel out of state for an abortion when her fetus was diagnosed with anencephaly, a condition that causes a baby to be born without parts of the brain and skull.Another, a Houston-based Democratic campaign worker named Elizabeth Weller, had gone into labor at 18 weeks and was directed to go home until she developed an infection so severe that a hospital ethics panel allowed a doctor to end the pregnancy.“Joe is doing everything he can do,” the first lady told the group.Mini Timmaraju, the president of the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, agreed that the Biden administration is “doing everything they can,” but she said the limitations are real.“We have to give them a pro-choice majority Congress,” she said. “That’s it. They’ve done everything they can up until that point, but without the support of Congress, they are limited and we are limited in what we can do.” More

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      Biden Denounces Abortion Bans, Warning That Privacy Is Next

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      The president sought to galvanize supporters a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade as Democrats hope the issue helps them win next year’s elections.President Biden denounced on Friday new restrictions on abortion imposed in Republican-led states in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and warned that the right to privacy, which has been the foundation for other rights like same-sex marriage and access to birth control, could be at risk next if Democrats do not win next year’s elections.Marking Saturday’s anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision eliminating a national right to abortion for women, Mr. Biden decried its “devastating effects,” telling an abortion rights rally that women had been deprived of basic health care and noting that some leading Republicans, not content to leave the issue to the states as they had long advocated, are now seeking a national ban on the procedure.“They’re not stopping here,” said Mr. Biden, who was joined at the rally by his wife, Jill Biden, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff. “Make no mistake, this election is about freedom on the ballot.”The president collected the endorsement of the nation’s leading abortion rights groups, Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and NARAL Pro-Choice America. While the endorsement was hardly a surprise, the early timing underscored the role that Democrats believe abortion rights will play in next year’s election.Polls show that support for legalized abortion has risen since the Dobbs decision. Democrats argue that it helped them avoid a Republican wave during last year’s midterm elections — “you all showed up and beat the hell out of them,” as Mr. Biden put it — and could be critical to retaining the White House and recapturing the House next year. Republicans are at odds with each other over how much to emphasize the issue, with some worried that it will only hurt them in a general election. But some progressive activists have privately expressed frustration that Mr. Biden has not made it more of a public priority until now.Abortion has long been an uncomfortable issue for Mr. Biden, who has cited his Catholic faith as his views have shifted over the years. While a young senator, he declared that the Supreme Court had gone “too far” in the Roe decision and later voted for a constitutional amendment allowing states to individually overturn the ruling before reversing himself. He supported the so-called Hyde amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortion, including through Medicaid, until the 2020 campaign, when he changed his mind under pressure from liberals in his party.By contrast, Ms. Harris has unabashedly joined the battle for abortion rights since Roe was reversed, becoming by all accounts the administration’s most passionate and effective voice on the issue. At Friday’s event, Laphonza Butler, president of Emily’s List, praised Mr. Biden’s team as “the most pro-choice administration we’ve ever seen” but reserved her most effusive words for Ms. Harris.The rally on Friday, organized with the Democratic National Committee, was part of a series of messaging efforts by the Biden team around the anniversary of the Dobbs ruling. Earlier this week, Dr. Biden hosted a session with women from states that have imposed limits on abortion to highlight the consequences even for those not seeking to end a pregnancy. On Saturday, Ms. Harris will deliver an address on abortion rights in Charlotte, N.C.Mr. Biden’s allies on Capitol Hill on Friday also called attention to the issue. House Democrats led by Representative Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts introduced legislation to require insurance coverage to include abortion care, shield patients and providers from criminal charges, and affirm a legal right to abortion and miscarriage care. The bill has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled House but was meant as a signal to supporters.As he has over the last year, Mr. Biden sought to expand the debate to other privacy-related concerns, ideological ground where he is more comfortable, as he cast Republicans as extremists beyond the question of abortion. The White House announced Friday that in his third executive action in response to the Dobbs decision, he was ordering federal agencies to look for ways to ensure and expand access to birth control.“The idea that I had to do that — I mean, no, really, think about it, think about it,” he told supporters. “I know I’m 198 years old but all kidding aside, think about that. I never, ever thought I’d be signing an executive order protecting the right to contraceptives.”He boasted that he had done more to put women in positions of power than any of his predecessors. In addition to making Ms. Harris the first woman to serve as vice president, he noted that he is the first president to have a majority-woman cabinet, pointed to his appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and said that he had installed more Black women to federal appeals courts than all of the previous presidents combined.“Look, we made so much progress,” Mr. Biden said. “We can’t let them take us backwards.” More

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      Pence Challenges 2024 Republicans to Embrace 15-Week National Abortion Ban

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      At a gathering of evangelicals, the former vice president and other top Republican candidates backed a ban that is more strict than what former President Donald J. Trump has said he would support.In a speech one year after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, former Vice President Mike Pence challenged the entire 2024 Republican presidential field to support a national abortion ban at 15 weeks, demanding that the party go farther than its primary front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, has so far been willing to go.Mr. Pence issued the call at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, a major two-day evangelical gathering in Washington, D.C., that drew Mr. Trump’s leading challengers and at the same time showcased the steep climb ahead of them.Mr. Trump was a focus of attention for candidates and attendees alike. Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, was booed for rebuking the former president for his lack of leadership. Mr. Pence settled for drawing contrasts with Mr. Trump without naming him. And Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s leading — yet still far behind — rival in the polls, gave a speech that was well received, in part because he referred to his disagreements with Mr. Trump only implicitly.“Everyone is running to bring Trump down, not to be the nominee,” said Veronica Steinkirchner, 75, who came to the conference from the Pittsburgh area and supports Mr. Trump. “If you look at the polls, they’re not going to catch him.”Mr. DeSantis recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida that Mr. Trump said some in the anti-abortion movement considered “too harsh.” Both Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Pence have seized on that phrase to criticize the former president, though neither did so by name on Friday.“It was the right thing to do,” Mr. DeSantis said Friday of signing the law. “Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t.”It was revealing that some of the loudest cheers at the conference came not for any of Mr. Trump’s rivals but for Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for governor, and who made a surprise endorsement onstage of the former president.“This nation is at war,” Mr. Robinson said. “We need a warrior.”Still, the Republican candidates present, including Mr. Pence and Mr. DeSantis, see abortion as providing an important political opening on Mr. Trump’s right flank and a chance to appeal to evangelical voters, who are an especially large voting bloc in two of the early-voting states, Iowa and South Carolina.In a sign of the sway Christian conservatives are expected to have in the party’s primaries, the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference is the first gathering to draw the top candidates for the Republican nomination to the same event. Seven Republican candidates addressed the crowd in the windowless ballroom of the Washington Hilton on Friday; others will speak on Saturday, including Mr. Trump, who will headline an evening gala.“There is no path to the nomination that doesn’t run through the evangelical community,” Ralph Reed, who is the chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and a decades-long fixture on the Christian right, said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis, who is Catholic, recently sat for an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, telling him that, “Our household is a Christ-centered household.” He recounted that his son, then 4, had wanted a slingshot for Christmas “to be like David slaying Goliath.”The long-running tension in Mr. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical right is between the New York businessman’s personal behavior and the policies he pursued as president. He is both a three-times-married celebrity who was indicted in Manhattan this year over a hush-money payment to a porn star and a former president who rarely hewed from the policy preferences of conservative evangelical leaders while in office.While Mr. Trump has repeatedly taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he has so far resisted embracing a federal ban and has blamed backlash surrounding “the abortion issue” for some of the party’s losses in 2022.Mr. Pence, who has sought to position himself as a leading opponent of abortion, pressed that point, declaring, “Every Republican candidate for president should support a ban on abortion before 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard.” He told the audience that “we must not rest and must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly avoided taking a clear stance on whether he would support a national abortion ban that would curb access to the procedure even in Democrat-controlled states. In his CNN town hall earlier this year, Mr. Trump said he would strike some type of undefined deal on abortion if he returned to the White House. “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy,” Mr. Trump said at one point. “Make a deal that’s going to be good,” he said at another.At the conference, Mr. Trump also received pressure on the issue from supporters, like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has endorsed Mr. Trump and is the sponsor of a 15-week ban in the Senate. Mr. Graham urged all the candidates to support the proposal.“I challenge everybody wanting to be the standard-bearer for the Republican Party to be proudly pro-life,” Mr. Graham said. “You should want to talk about this. You need to talk about this.”Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri who has not endorsed in the race yet, told reporters after his own speech on Friday that a 15-week ban was a “consensus position.”“The deal ought to be 15 weeks,” Mr. Hawley said. “There, made it easy.”While abortion was a dominant topic on the eve of the Dobbs decision anniversary at the evangelical gathering, there was also an intense focus on transgender policies in almost every speech.Mr. Pence, who received a polite reception, also spurred cheers when he vowed, “We will end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our school.”Some of the candidates mixed the messages on abortion and transgender issues.“God is real, unborn life is life, there are two genders,” Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican candidate for president, said in his speech, which received louder applause than some more prominent Republican candidates.But if there were loud cheers for every mention of “gender ideology,” it was a different story when candidates talked about Mr. Trump, including when Mr. Christie criticized him for blaming aides for his own shortcomings.“That is not leadership, everybody,” he said, “That is s a failure of leadership.” The crowd hissed, with some shouting “We love Trump!”“You can love him all you want, but I can tell you, doing that kind of thing makes our country smaller,” Mr. Christie retorted.Like many in the crowd, Billy Walkowiak, who is running for as a Republican for county commissioner in Gastonia, N.C., said he still liked Mr. Trump’s message. But with all the legal threats facing Mr. Trump — he was indicted this month for the second time this year and accused of obstruction and of mishandling classified documents — “There’s a lot of uncertainty of what’s going to happen with him.”“The door” for Mr. Trump’s rivals, Mr. Walkowiak said, “is ajar.”Alyce McFadden More