Presidential Election of 2024

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      Top Aides Resign From Embattled North Carolina Candidate’s Campaign

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      Most of the senior staff members on Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor resigned on Sunday, dealing a seismic blow to the embattled Republican who has faced widespread criticism after an explosive CNN report that he had made a series of disturbing comments on a pornographic website.Among the resignations was his top campaign consultant, Conrad Pogorzelski III, who for years had been one of Mr. Robinson’s most loyal confidants and who had been the only consultant to take a chance on him during his run for lieutenant governor four years ago.Mr. Pogorzelski confirmed his resignation in a text message on Sunday evening, saying he and seven other campaign staffers had resigned on “our own accord.”The other resignations included Chris Rodriguez, the campaign manager; Heather Whillier, the finance director; and Jason Rizk, the deputy campaign manager. Two political directors, John Kontoulas and Jackson Lohrer, and the director of operations, Patrick Riley, also resigned.The 11th-hour shake-up in the campaign less than 50 days before the election will only exacerbate the troubles already plaguing Mr. Robinson, the fiery Trump acolyte who has been widely criticized for comments perceived as racist, antisemitic, transphobic and hateful.CNN reported on Thursday that Mr. Robinson had written on a porn site years ago that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that slavery was not bad. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager. Mr. Robinson has denied that he wrote the posts and ignored calls from some fellow Republicans to withdraw from the race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      MAGA Wants Transgression, and This Is What Comes With It

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      The North Carolina Republican Party is facing one of the most predictable crises in the history of party politics.Its primary voters enthusiastically supported a candidate for governor named Mark Robinson — voting for him by a more than 45-point margin over his closest rival (he won by 64.8 percent to 19.2 percent) — even though he had a remarkable record of deeply inflammatory and even unhinged statements.Last week, a comprehensive CNN report unearthed compelling evidence that Robinson had posted on a porn site called Nude Africa. I cannot possibly repeat the worst posts, but the less graphically obscene ones included statements like this: “I’m a Black Nazi,” and “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.”That’s not all. “I’m not in the K.K.K.,” he also said, according to the CNN report. “They don’t let Blacks join. If I was in the K.K.K. I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” He said he’d prefer Hitler to what he sees in Washington today.No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump Can’t Shake Project 2025

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      In 2024, the deep state that defeats Donald Trump might be his own.That, after all, is what Project 2025 was actually meant to be. The 900-page tome that Democrats hoist in front of the cameras is a festival of policy options, detailed down to the sub-agency level. But options for whom? Not for Trump himself. Even the most wonkish of presidents can only engage on a small fraction of what the executive branch does. And Donald Trump was not the most wonkish of presidents. When he said, during his debate with Kamala Harris, that he hadn’t read Project 2025 and has no intention of doing so, I believed him.But Project 2025 — and much else like it that has gotten less press — is more than a compendium of policy proposals: It is an effort to build a deep state of Trump’s own. The presidency is not one man, Diet Coke in hand, Fox & Friends on TV, barking orders. It’s 4,000-or-so political appointees — nearer to 50,000 if Trump again uses Schedule F powers to strip civil-service protections from vast swaths of the federal government — trying to do what they think the president wants them to do or what they think needs to be done. They do that by setting policy for the more than two million civilian employees of the federal government and by writing regulations that the rest of society must follow.Veterans of Trump’s administration believe personnel was their biggest problem. They could not act ambitiously or swiftly enough because they were at constant war with the government they, in theory, controlled. Part of this reflected Trump’s erratic leadership style and the constant conflict between the warring factions inside his White House: the traditional Republicans clustered around Mike Pence and Reince Priebus; the MAGA types led by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller; the foreign policy establishment that spoke through H.R. McMaster and Nikki Haley; the corporatists led by Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn. Read any book on the Trump presidency, and you will be buried in examples of Trump’s top appointees trying to foil each other — and him.But some of it reflected a federal bureaucracy that resisted Trump and the people he appointed. In a presentation at the 2024 National Conservatism conference in Washington, Katy Talento, who oversaw health care policy on Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, described the obstacles she faced:There’s like a handful of political appointees at an agency with hundreds of thousands of employees and maybe one or two of those appointees is sufficiently experienced to write regulations. They can’t seek any help from experienced but hostile bureaucrats that surround them, or those drafts get leaked, or bad advice gets provided, and poison pills get put into regs, drafts get slowed down or scuttled all together. So this dramatically limits the productivity potential of a Republican administration.This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing. There is an online portal that, even now, invites applicants to apply for inclusion in “the Presidential Personnel Database.” It goes on to say that “with the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government.”To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.“The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power — including power currently held by the executive branch — to the American people,” writes Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, in one of its chapters. Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      On the Trail, Trump and Vance Sharpen a Nativist, Anti-Immigrant Tone

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      From calling for mass deportations to spreading false claims about migrants’ eating pets, former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, are taking a hard line.As former President Donald J. Trump warned supporters on Saturday in Wilmington, N.C., that immigrants were “taking your jobs,” his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, campaigned about 500 miles north in Leesport, Pa., where he told his crowd that immigrants were taking their homes — and their children’s homes.Battling in a tight race, the Trump-Vance team is sharpening the anti-immigrant nativism that fueled the former president’s initial rise to power in 2016, seizing on scare tactics, falsehoods and racial stereotypes. They spread a false claim that Haitian migrants in a small Ohio city were stealing and eating the pets of their neighbors. And they are increasingly failing to draw a distinction between migrants who are in the country legally and those they call “illegal aliens,” whom they blame for a raft of social ills.Mr. Trump likened the influx to an “invasion” at his rally in North Carolina. “We are going to totally stop this invasion,” he said. “This invasion is destroying the fabric of our country.” He also claimed, falsely, “Every job in this country produced over the last two and a half years has gone to illegal aliens — every job.”Mr. Vance, at the rally in Pennsylvania, said migrants deserved some of the blame for rising home prices because they were “people who shouldn’t be here, people who are competing against you and your children to buy the homes that ought to be going to American citizens.” He faulted the policies of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration.“Our message to Kamala Harris is: Stop giving American homes to foreigners who shouldn’t be in this country,” Mr. Vance said. “Start giving them to American citizens who deserve to be here.”Both Mr. Trump, who has promised to oversee mass deportations if elected, and Mr. Vance are increasingly questioning the status of Haitian migrants who are in the country legally.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At a Rally in North Carolina, Trump Avoids Topic A: Mark Robinson

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      Through an awkward quirk of scheduling former President Donald J. Trump found himself headlining a rally in North Carolina on Saturday just two days after the man he endorsed to become the state’s next governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, was accused of making a series of disturbing posts on a pornographic website.In the lead-up to the rally, there was a great deal of curiosity in political circles about how Mr. Trump, who had called Mr. Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids,” might react to an explosive CNN report that Mr. Robinson had once called himself a “black NAZI” and defended slavery years ago on a pornographic forum.The answer? He wouldn’t.Speaking for just over an hour at a boisterous rally on an airport tarmac in Wilmington, N.C., Mr. Trump made no mention of Mr. Robinson or the scandal surrounding him, even as he gave shout-outs to a number of the state’s officials and politicians. And Mr. Robinson, who has denied the accusations, was conspicuous by his absence.Instead, Mr. Trump delivered a fairly standard rally speech, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats on the economy and immigration while digressing to criticize Ms. Harris’s livestreamed event this week with Oprah Winfrey; to call her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, “weird”; to say that he would ask Elon Musk to help him send rockets to Mars; and to claim falsely that an Olympic boxer was transgender.One of the only speakers at Saturday’s rally to acknowledge the controversy engulfing Mr. Robinson was Representative Dan Bishop, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, who called the revelations “a meticulously timed and coordinated character assassination.”Building on his effort to make immigration, an area where voters are dissatisfied with Democrats, the central issue of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump announced that he would push Congress to pass legislation outlawing so-called sanctuary cities, places that limit how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities. During his presidency, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that tried to withhold federal grants to such locales, an effort that was blocked by federal courts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Georgia Voters Feel Re-energized, Even as 2020 Looms Large

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      A perpetually expanding sprawl encircles Atlanta, the capital of Georgia and arguably all of the South. Newcomers from all over have powered its rapid growth, lured by a sense of promise and possibility. Because of the demographic shifts in these rapidly diversifying suburbs, Georgia recently emerged as a battleground state, after years of Republican dominance. […] More

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      Trump’s Base in North Carolina Still Supports Mark Robinson, but Some Doubt He Can Win

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      Faithful supporters of former President Donald J. Trump lined up on Saturday afternoon to cheer him on at a rally at the Aero Center in Wilmington, N.C., their red shirts billowing from a beach-side breeze.When asked about the former president’s chances of winning North Carolina, many in the crowd were confident and brimming with energy. They would be the force to keep the battleground state red for Mr. Trump.But many of their smiles shrank when they were asked about the embattled Republican nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has been under fire since CNN reported this week on the lewd comments he made on a pornography website several years ago. According to CNN, Mr. Robinson wrote on the site that he was a “black NAZI,” that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography and that he defended slavery. He also recounted on the site how he went “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a teenager.Few rally attendees believed the article about Mr. Robinson, who had already faced criticism for old Facebook posts that were widely condemned as racist, antisemitic and transphobic. And while many voters said they would still stand behind him, some acknowledged that the allegations were damning.“Look, he’s toast,” said David Huffman, 60, of Wilmington, who wore a collared shirt printed with the American flag. “I’m still going to vote for Mark, but at this point it’s worse than a Hail Mary.”Not only was Mr. Robinson not at the rally, but Mr. Trump also did not mention his name once to the thousands of supporters who were in attendance, the very people who helped fuel the rise of the lieutenant governor in 2020.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance to Appear With Tucker Carlson, Who Amplified False Holocaust Claims

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      Not long ago, candidates running for national office spent much of the general election distancing themselves from the fringes of their parties.But on Saturday, Senator JD Vance of Ohio will share a stage with someone on the fringes of his.Mr. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is scheduled to appear in Hershey, Pa., as the special guest of the “Tucker Carlson Live” show, just weeks after Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, praised and aired the views of Darryl Cooper, who falsely claimed that the Holocaust was not an intentional act of genocide.Mr. Carlson described Mr. Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” In Mr. Carlson’s interview with him, which was posted on social media this month, Mr. Cooper falsely claimed that the Nazis’ systematic killing of European Jews was an accident of history carried out by a German military overwhelmed with prisoners of war — not an act of premeditated genocide. In fact, the Nazis’ killing of almost six million Jews was meticulously planned and documented.Mr. Cooper also called Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, “the chief villain of the Second World War” for declaring war on Germany after the Nazis invaded Poland.Mr. Carlson’s promotion of Mr. Cooper drew criticism from the Biden White House and from some conservatives.A Vance campaign spokesman said this month that Mr. Vance did not share the views of Mr. Cooper but “doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.”Mr. Vance has defended his decision to keep his interview with Mr. Carlson, saying that Republicans believe in free speech and debate. “Tucker Carlson is not affiliated with the campaign, so I don’t think what Tucker Carlson does is a distraction or is not,” Mr. Vance said this month. “He’s going to do what he wants to do, and we can disagree or agree with the viewpoints.”Tickets for the events ranged from $35 for upper-level seats to $1,600 for a “V.I.P. Meet and Greet Experience” that included access to a reception with Mr. Vance, a photo with Mr. Carlson and a seat in the first five rows.Mr. Carlson is in the midst of his first live tour, a national, monthlong run of shows with some of the most well-known and controversial figures in conservative politics. His guests have included Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point Action, and media personalities such as Glenn Beck and Dan Bongino.Later this month, Mr. Carlson will be joined by Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who has been ordered to pay over $1.4 billion in defamation damages to the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; and Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest child and the host of the podcast “Triggered.” More