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      Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?

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      In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, a “psychohistorian” in a far-flung galactic empire figures out a way to predict the future so exactly that he can anticipate both the empire’s fall and the way that civilization can be painstakingly rebuilt. This enables him to plan a project — the “foundation” of the title — that will long outlast his death, complete with periodic messages to his heirs that always show foreknowledge of their challenges and crises.Until one day the foreknowledge fails, because an inherently unpredictable figure has come upon the scene — the Mule, a Napoleon of galactic politics, whose advent was hard for even a psychohistorian to see coming because he’s literally a mutant, graced by some genetic twist with the power of telepathy.Donald Trump is not a mutant telepath. (Or so I assume — fact checkers are still at work.) But the debates about how to deal with his challenge to the American political system turn, in part, on how much you think that he resembles Asimov’s Mule.Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world, precisely the sort of figure a “psychohistory” of our era would have anticipated? In which case, are attempts to find some elite removal mechanism likely to just heighten the contradictions that yielded Trumpism in the first place, widening the gyre and bringing the rough beast slouching in much faster?I have basically changed sides in this debate. Into the early part of Trump’s presidency I was an apologist for elite machinations: I wanted party unity against his primary candidacy, a convention rebellion against his nomination, even a 25th Amendment option when he appeared initially overmastered by the office of the presidency.Past a certain point, though, I became convinced that these efforts were not only vain but counterproductive. In part, this reflected strategic considerations: The plausible moment for unified intraparty resistance had passed, and the united front of elite institutions had failed spectacularly to prevent Trump from capturing the White House. In part it reflected my sense that “Resistance” politics were driving liberal institutions deep into their own kind of paranoia and conspiracism.But above all my shift reflected a reading of our times as increasingly and ineradicably populist, permanently Trumpy in some sense, with inescapable conflicts between insider and outsider factions, institutionalists and rebels — conflicts that seemed likely to worsen the more that insider power plays cement the populist belief that the outsiders would never be allowed to truly govern.This shift doesn’t mean, however, that I am immune to the arguments that still treat Trump as unique, even Mule-ish, with a capacity for chaos unequaled by any other populist. You can see this distinctiveness in the failures of various Republican candidates who have tried to ape his style. And you can reasonably doubt that a different populist would have gone all the way to the disgrace of Jan. 6 — or inspired as many followers.So as much as I find the legal case for the 14th Amendment disqualification entirely unpersuasive, I can almost make myself see the return-to-normalcy future that some of its advocates seem to be imagining.Start with a 7-to-2 decision, maybe written by Brett Kavanaugh, disqualifying Trump. Then comes a lot of ranting and rage that mostly works itself out online. Then a sense of relief among Republican officeholders who move on to a Nikki Haley vs. Ron DeSantis primary. Then various Trump-backed spoiler-ish and third-party options emerge but fizzle out. Then, quite possibly, you have a DeSantis or Haley presidency — in which partisan loyalty binds Republicans to their new leader, and an aging Trump eventually fades away.I will concede to partisans of disqualification that such a scenario is theoretically possible. I certainly would find some versions of it eminently desirable. (My fears about a Haley presidency I will save for a future column.)But what I would ask them in turn is whether, having lived through the last eight years of not just American but global politics, they actually find it likely that normalcy will be restored through this kind of expedient — a judicial fiat that millions of Americans will immediately regard as the most illegitimate governmental action of their lifetimes?What odds would they give that future historians, reflecting on our republic’s storms the way we now reflect on ancient Rome, will memorialize such an action as the moment when the seas began to calm?As opposed to what seems so much more likely — that it would eventually produce some further populist escalation, every-deepening division, not peace but the sword.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Three Years After Jan. 6, Trump’s Immunity Claims to Take Center Stage

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      An appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday over the former president’s attempt to shut down the federal election case. Much is riding on how — and how quickly — the issue is decided.Three years after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, former President Donald J. Trump will make his latest and potentially most consequential argument in the coming week for why he should not be held responsible for seeking to overturn the 2020 election.Impeachment proceedings, the House Jan. 6 committee’s inquiry and two separate criminal investigations have established a comprehensive set of facts about Mr. Trump’s deep involvement in overlapping efforts to remain in office despite having been defeated at the polls.But when — or even whether — he will ultimately face a trial on charges related to those efforts remains unclear. One of the most decisive factors in getting an answer to those questions will be the success or failure of the arguments his legal team plans to make on Tuesday in a federal appeals court in Washington.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are banking on a long shot, hoping to convince a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the Constitution affords him complete immunity from actions he undertook as president. The assertion, while untested in the courts, has the advantage to the former president of chewing up time in the service of his strategy of trying to delay any trial until after Election Day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Should Trump Be Removed From the Ballot?

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      More from our inbox:Reflections After Claudine Gay’s Resignation at HarvardLegal challenges similar to the one former President Donald J. Trump faces in Colorado are pending in at least 16 additional states. Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Seeing Threat to Democracy, With Trump on Ballot or Not” (front page, Dec. 31):The argument by Republicans like J.D. Vance and Chris Christie and Democrats like Gavin Newsom that removing Donald Trump from the ballot would be anti-democratic and would deprive voters of the right to choose their president is flawed in two respects.First, the 14th Amendment — like the rest of the Constitution — was adopted through a democratic process. It is no more anti-democratic to deny Mr. Trump a place on the ballot because he engaged in insurrection than it is to disqualify a 34-year-old from running for president because of the age requirement.Second, if the Supreme Court chooses not to enforce the 14th Amendment on the premise that voters should be able to make an unfettered decision, it must give voters an opportunity to assess all of the facts for themselves. If the court were to reverse the Colorado decision to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot, a necessary corollary must be an expedited criminal trial on the Jan. 6-related indictment so that voters can be fully informed before deciding whether to vote for Mr. Trump.The polls suggest that the results of this trial could change the votes of a significant number of Mr. Trump’s supporters and could determine the outcome of the election.Randy SpeckWashingtonTo the Editor:“Seeing Threat to Democracy, With Trump on Ballot or Not” leaves out a crucial problem: the glacial pace of the criminal justice system. Whether former President Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection should have already been decided in court. But our justice system is too slow, and too vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s favorite legal strategy, to delay, delay, delay.Since March 2023, Mr. Trump has been charged with 91 felonies in four cases: falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, and attempting to overturn the 2020 election through an insurrection and by trying to strong-arm Georgia officials. But we haven’t seen Mr. Trump cleared or convicted of these charges, charges filed only years after the fact.With courtroom justice delayed, and mountains of compelling evidence publicly available, it’s no surprise that challenges have been filed in 32 states to consider whether Mr. Trump is guilty of insurrection and thus ineligible to run for president.Deciding Mr. Trump’s guilt or innocence before the next election is still possible. But it will require judicial officials to act faster than may be comfortable or usual. American democracy is at stake, making it imperative that justice not be denied through delay.Tom LevyOakland, Calif.To the Editor:Re “How Justices May Weigh Trump Case,” by Adam Liptak (news analysis, front page, Dec. 30):In 2000, I wrote a statement eventually signed by 673 law professors (and run as a full-page ad in The Times) denouncing the Bush v. Gore justices for acting as “political partisans, not judges of a court of law.” Will they do so again?The Republican-appointed justices can escape partisanship by rejecting the feeble arguments against removing Donald Trump from the ballot.First, the 14th Amendment plainly applies to the presidency. Who can take seriously the notion that the amendment’s authors wanted to prevent insurrectionists from running for dogcatcher but not the most powerful office in the land?Second, Jan. 6 was obviously an insurrection — a violent attempt to overturn an election and prevent a lawfully elected president from taking office.Finally, those who argue “let the voters decide” ignore that it was precisely the point of the constitutional provision to prevent voters from deciding to put insurrectionists back into power.Anti-democratic? In a way. Those who wrote Section 3 of the 14th Amendment recognized that American democracy remained at risk from those who had once tried to overthrow our government. When it came to insurrection, their view was: “One strike, you’re out.”We face the very same risks today. An insurrectionist wants another shot at dictatorship. The Constitution says no way.Mitchell ZimmermanPalo Alto, Calif.To the Editor:Re “In Trump Case, Voters’ Will vs. Rule of Law,” by Charlie Savage (news analysis, Dec. 23):Mr. Savage considers the argument that removing Donald Trump’s name from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment would deprive voters of the right to pick their leaders, and he sees a clash between voters’ rights and the principle that no one is above the law.But there is no such conflict here. We must of course respect voters’ rights, if our democracy is to endure. Which is all the more reason to enforce the 14th Amendment and keep Mr. Trump off the ballot.He was already rejected by the voters in 2020, and he refused to accept their decision. He refused to honor his constitutional duty to enable the peaceful transfer of power. He attempted to deprive millions of voters of their right to have their votes counted. One purpose of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is to prevent such people from repeating such a travesty.Let us also dispense with the argument that we should keep Mr. Trump on the ballot to avoid social unrest. The coming election — assuming a rematch between President Biden and Mr. Trump — will be fraught with problems, no matter the outcome.If Mr. Trump wins, he will keep his promises to destroy many of our democratic institutions; if he loses, he will not accept his defeat, and we will see a replay of 2020, and possibly of Jan. 6, 2021.The consequences of enforcing the law might be dire, but the consequences of not enforcing it might be worse.Larry HohmSeattleReflections After Claudine Gay’s Resignation at Harvard Adam Glanzman for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” by Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 4):I applaud Dr. Gay’s guest essay. She emphasizes how her position as a Black woman in a position of power partly explains the venom with which she has been attacked. The press, including The New York Times, should be drawing greater attention to the rampant misogyny unleashed in these attacks on leading women in academia.Susan Laird ModyPlattsburgh, N.Y.The writer is emerita associate professor of education and gender and women’s studies at SUNY Plattsburgh.To the Editor:Claudine Gay wraps herself in Harvard’s toga of integrity. It simply won’t work, not for herself nor for Harvard. Plagiarism allegations are serious, especially for an academic researcher — or for a president of a leading academic institution. The best she can do now is to leave gracefully, without excuses or explanations.Mark CastelinoNewarkThe writer is an associate professor of finance at Rutgers Business School.To the Editor:As a Harvard alumnus, I for one am sorry to see Claudine Gay go. Not because she was a perfect president. But because she demonstrated several qualities often lacking in public figures today: kindness, humility and a commitment to growth.I also don’t understand people who say she wasn’t “qualified” because she didn’t have a voluminous research record. The presidency of Harvard is not a Nobel Prize. It’s an administrative role, and Dr. Gay was an accomplished university administrator. We should consider the agendas of those who suggest otherwise.Bernie ZipprichNew York More

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      More Than Words: 10 Charts That Defined 2023

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      Some years are defined by a single event or person — a pandemic, a recession, an insurrection — while others are buffeted by a series of disparate forces. Such was 2023. The economy and inflation remained front of mind until the war in Gaza grabbed headlines and the world’s attention — all while Donald Trump’s […] More

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      Principles at Stake in Push to Disqualify Trump: Will of Voters and Rule of Law

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      If the Colorado Supreme Court is right that the former president is constitutionally ineligible to run for president, fundamental values are in severe tension.The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald J. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again pits one fundamental value against another: giving voters in a democracy the right to pick their leaders versus ensuring that no one is above the law.Mr. Trump’s status as the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, despite his role in the events that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has created severe tensions between those two principles. If the court’s legal reasoning is correct, obeying the rule of law produces an antidemocratic result.That constitutional and political dilemma is likely to land before the U.S. Supreme Court. And while Mr. Trump’s name would stay on the primary ballot as the justices weighed the matter, their decision would have consequences far beyond his opportunity to win Colorado’s 10 Electoral College votes.For one, similar legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility are pending in at least 16 additional states. Moreover, the precedent the case will set could open or shut the door to the risk that partisans will routinely turn to state courts to try to keep major federal candidates off the ballot.Supreme Court justices have life tenure in the hope that their work will be independent of political influence, and, under the principle of the rule of law, it would be illegitimate for them to torque their interpretation of the Constitution with an eye toward political consequences. Under the rule of law, the Constitution and federal statutes apply equally to everybody, and no one’s power, wealth, political influence or other special status puts him or her above the law.But under the principle of democracy, the government’s legitimacy stems from the fact that voters decided whom to put in charge. The prospect of unelected judges denying voters the opportunity to make their own decision about Mr. Trump’s political future has given pause even to some of his critics who fervently hope Americans will reject him at the ballot box.Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that even if one thinks that Mr. Trump’s actions rendered him unfit for office in line with the 14th Amendment, there are other — and less alarmingly novel — systems that could have addressed that problem before it reached the courts. These would have freed the Republican Party to have a starkly different primary contest, he said.“The problem is that we’re just not set up for this — we’ve run through the safety nets,” Mr. Vladeck said. “We’ve been spared from this problem in the few prior episodes where it could have arisen by different sets of constraints. And so now we’re in this position because those backstops have failed.”Had nine more Republican senators voted to convict Mr. Trump at his Jan. 6 impeachment trial, he would be ineligible to hold future office anyway, said Mr. Vladeck, who wrote a column about the complications of the Colorado court’s ruling titled “The Law and High Politics of Disqualifying President Trump.” And if more Republican voters were repelled by Mr. Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term, his political career would be over as a practical matter.The legal dispute turns on a clause of the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. Its third section says that people who betrayed their government oaths by engaging in an insurrection are ineligible to hold office. Citing Mr. Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6. riot, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that he was an oath-breaking insurrectionist whose name could not lawfully appear on the ballot.Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the former president was disqualified from holding office again.Stephen Speranza for The New York Times“If the language is clear and unambiguous, then we enforce it as written,” a four-justice majority wrote.But even if a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court privately agree that the disqualification clause, by its plain text, seems clearly to bar Mr. Trump from returning to government power, it will not be surprising if they hesitate at the prospect of issuing a ruling affirming the Colorado court’s decision.If the justices want to overturn the Colorado ruling, they will have numerous potential offramps. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have technical arguments, like whether the clause in question has legal force by itself or whether Congress would first need to enact a statute for it take effect. His lawyers will also have substantive arguments, like denying that the mob violence of Jan. 6 rose to the level of an “insurrection” in the constitutional sense.The dilemma invites comparisons to the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election, which overruled Florida’s Supreme Court and ensured that George W. Bush would maintain his narrow lead over Al Gore in that state to win its Electoral College votes and become the next president.A similarity is the risk of the appearance of partisanship. In the Bush v. Gore case, the five most conservative justices ensured that the Republican candidate would prevail. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is controlled by a supermajority of six Republican appointees, so a decision to overturn the Colorado ruling and help Mr. Trump could also carry partisan overtones.A difference is the implications for democracy. The Florida Supreme Court in 2000 was not itself deciding the fate of the candidates but trying to allow the completion of a recount that would have clarified the will of voters. If the Supreme Court now overturns the Colorado ruling, it will be leaning in the direction of letting voters decide about Mr. Trump; upholding the state court’s ruling would be the opposite.There has always been inherent tension in the American governing system because the Constitution sets certain limits on democracy. For one, most decisions are made by elected representatives, not directly by plebiscites and referendums.The current dilemma invites comparisons to the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election.Mark Wilson/Newsmakers, via Getty ImagesThe structures of the Senate and the Electoral College system undercut the democratic principle that everyone has an equal say by giving disproportionate power to voters in sparsely populated states — including sometimes enabling the loser of the national popular vote, like Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016, to nevertheless become president.Not everyone who lives in the United States is allowed to vote for government leaders. Noncitizen permanent residents, people under 18 and convicted felons in some states may not participate in elections — all of which conflicts with the principle that the legitimacy of the government stems from the consent of the governed about who will be in charge.Other requirements restrict who is eligible to hold office. The 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being elected president a third time, even if voters want to keep that person in place. It was added after President Franklin D. Roosevelt violated the constitutional norm of retiring after two terms, which President George Washington had established.The Constitution sets age limits: One must be at least 25 years old to be a member of the House, 30 to be a senator and 35 to be president, even if voters would prefer someone who happens to be younger. And the Constitution dictates that to be eligible to be president, a person must be a natural-born citizen. The antidemocratic nature of that rule drew some attention when the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a naturalized citizen who was born in Austria, was elected governor of California. He could never run for president, no matter how popular he was with voters.The issue of citizenship at birth has also been the subject of political attention. When Senator John McCain ran as the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, there were questions at the fringes about whether he was eligible because he had been born in the Panama Canal Zone, although to American parents.Mr. Trump’s rise to national political prominence was fueled by his lie that President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, might have been born in Kenya. And in the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Trump attacked a rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, over his birth in Canada, similarly seeking to raise doubts about his eligibility for the presidency.But, despite Mr. Trump’s own history of questioning the eligibility of his political adversaries for president, his legal disqualification would risk undermining democratic legitimacy in a society where extreme polarization and partisanship are already raw.The moment calls to mind an ambiguous legal phrase that is often invoked as a rallying cry for courageously following the law but, as Mr. Vladeck pointed out, also carries a grim warning: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” More

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      Trump Is Selling Pieces of His Mug Shot Suit

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      It’s not just a piece of political memorabilia — it’s a strategy.When Donald J. Trump walked into a Georgia courthouse on Aug. 24 to be booked as part of his fourth criminal indictment, becoming the first former president (and only current presidential candidate) to have a mug shot taken, the picture seemed destined to become a symbol of this fraught, unprecedented moment in American history. As has become increasingly clear, however, Mr. Trump and his team have come to see the mug shot in a different way.Specifically, as the source material for a new strain of political pop culture mythmaking and memorabilia.Almost overnight they splashed the image, with Mr. Trump’s signature glower, across mugs, T-shirts and posters in their campaign store, using it and all it represents as a key component of their fund-raising. Then, this week, NFT INT, the official licensee of the Trump name and image for digital trading cards, began selling a special “Mugshot Edition” NFT set that includes, for a certain few willing to buy the whole thing, pieces of the blue suit and red tie Mr. Trump wore in the photo.Or, as the NFT INT website calls the garment, “The most historically significant artifact in American history.”The 47 cards on offer were created by the artist Clark Mitchell and depict Mr. Trump as, for example, Captain America, and sitting in for Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Cards can be bought individually for $99 or as a full set that runs for $4,653 and includes a physical trading card (some of which will be signed by Mr. Trump) with a swatch of suit fabric and an invitation to a special dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Those who buy 100 of the NFT cards receive a swatch of the jacket or pants, plus a swatch of the tie and the dinner at Mar-a-Lago.According to the NFT INT website, the suit is “priceless.” There are enough tiny suit pieces for 2,024 buyers (because, you know, election year), and enough tie pieces for 225.In other words, it’s not just a suit. It’s a font of potential relics — one that positions the mug shot suit as the most important suit of Mr. Trump’s career so far, rather than, say, Mr. Trump’s inauguration suit.The mug shot edition is just the latest in a series of NFT cards released on the site portraying former President Donald J. Trump.NFT INTThe mug shot edition is the third set of NFT cards released, with the first two drops selling out in “a little more than 24 hours,” according to Kevin Mercuri, a spokesman for NFT INT and the chief executive of Propheta Communications. The new offering comes complete with a video of Mr. Trump endorsing the drop — and the suit — at the top of the web page. Mr. Mercuri said the idea for selling the suit swatches came from NFT INT and was inspired by the way sports figures sell pieces of their jerseys to fans. Mr. Trump was “aware of the trend and receptive” to the proposal, he said, and “generously gave the suit to NFT INT. He felt that members of the public would want to have a piece of history.”The suit was then authenticated by MEARS, a company that specializes in validating sports memorabilia. Troy R. Kinunen, the chief executive of the company, said that “the team at CollectTrumpCards provided the suit directly from the President” and that MEARS then verified certain design elements of the garment against photos and video, including pocket placement, buttons, and the collar of the suit jacket, which Mr. Trump had sewn down in the back to keep it in place. (Though given the number of blue suits Mr. Trump appears to own, it is hard to know how anyone could tell them apart.)Selling the mug shot suit tracks, to a certain extent, with other examples of fan culture. Paige Rubin, an assistant vice president and the head of sale for handbags at Christie’s, said there was an almost insatiable public appetite for souvenirs of the famous and infamous, and often the most valuable pieces of memorabilia at auction are determined by provenance: “Does the object you are selling resonate with the fan base? Does it connect to an iconic moment in a career?”Similarly, there is a long tradition of auctioning memorabilia from public figures, including many presidents, as Summer Anne Lee, a historian of presidential dress at the Fashion Institute of Technology, noted. Scraps of Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained bedsheets regularly come up for auction, and a pair of Richard Nixon’s eyeglasses from around the time of his resignation were sold in 2005 for $1,955. In 2019, a pair of underpants believed to have belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, were gaveled at almost $5,000.However, despite the fact that Melania Trump likewise sold one of her most notable White House outfits — the white hat she wore during the French state visit in 2018 — as part of her own NFT drop, and despite Mr. Trump’s own history of monetizing his own brand in a way other political candidates might not dare, it is almost unheard-of for a living president to hawk his own memorabilia for his own profits, Ms. Lee said. Though NFT INT is not related to the Trump organization and Mr. Trump is not a part of the company, as a licenser Mr. Trump would probably receive a percentage of sales.Which makes it in his interest to divide the suit into as many pieces as possible — both financially and, even more pointedly, conceptually.After all, if a garment is considered “historic,” keeping it whole would seem the more desirable choice. That would allow it to be exhibited in a museum, or a presidential library (or, in the case of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum).On the other hand, most tiny scraps of clothing that exist in collections are religious curios, fragments of martyrs’ gowns. Treating the mug shot suit in the same way “suggests Trump believes the suit he wore for his mug shot will be even more motivational to his fans than any other,” Ms. Lee said. “They are offering it like pieces of religious clothing, which implies Mr. Trump is a saint who has been through trials and tribulations for the country.”Indeed, said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, the sale suggests a “quasi-religious element, as if the suit Trump wore in court has special charismatic qualities.”Well, one of the cards in the set does depict Mr. Trump as a golden god. More

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      The Real Reason Ron DeSantis’s Campaign Is Rotting

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      Over the past two weeks, I’ve been awash in condolences. Friends tell me how deeply sorry for me they feel. They say they can only imagine my pain. They wonder how I’ve gotten through it.They’re talking about the hours I had to spend with Ron DeSantis.To be more specific, they’re talking about my coverage first of his televised face-off with Gavin Newsom and then, six days later, his debate with Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and (is there no mercy in this world?) Vivek Ramaswamy, whose singularly manic smugness makes him the political equivalent of one of those carnival rides that just spin you in circles, faster and faster. I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.But he isn’t the great puzzle of the race for the White House. That honor belongs to DeSantis, who won a second term as Florida governor in 2022 by an indisputably wowie margin of nearly 20 percentage points, had donors lining up for the pleasure of hurling big wads of cash at him, and was supposed to be MAGA magic — Donald Trump’s priorities without Donald Trump’s pathologies.He performed a nifty trick, all right. Abracadabra: His early promise disappeared.And while DeSantis’s downward trajectory recalls the sad arcs of Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 presidential race and Scott Walker eight years later, a big part of the explanation is peculiar to him. It’s a deficit of joy.His joylessness is why it’s so unpleasant to watch him, whether he’s at a lectern or a state fair, dressed up or dressed down, demonizing schoolteachers or migrants or Mickey Mouse.Oh, sure, there’s the demonizing itself, which positions him contemptuously and censoriously far to the right. But the scornful manner completes the spiteful message. You can get away with an air of meanness if there are gusts of exuberance along with it — if you relish your rants and exult in your evil, as Trump seems or long seemed to. But not if you project the sense that campaigning is some nuisance you’ve deigned to put up with. Not if you’re put out. Not if your every smile comes across as an onerous homework assignment in a class you were forced to take for your major.“Grinding away methodically” — that’s how Dan Balz, in an article in The Washington Post last weekend, described both DeSantis’s county-by-county trudge across Iowa and his point-by-point slog through debates. Balz was sizing up Haley’s surge past DeSantis into second place in many polls, and he was kinder than the CNN senior political commentator Ana Navarro, who several days later said that the DeSantis campaign had “that certain stench of political death.”It’s not moribund yet. As Balz rightly noted, Iowa is famously unpredictable and DeSantis has garnered some important endorsements in the state. He’s also concentrating his resources there in a manner that could well lift him above Haley (though not Trump) in the end.But even before his campaign’s stench of death, he often bore the expression of someone catching a whiff of something foul. And a sour puss is not the sweetest bait. It’s not the smartest presidential audition.Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all had moments when they communicated an outsize delight at drawing near, and then reaching, the pinnacle of American politics. They had their resentments, too, and their degrees of interest in masking those, along with their success in doing so, varied widely. Trump devolved into all resentment all the time. It’s where he dwells — or, rather, rages — now.But a while back he, like the others, could flash a certain spark. Joe Biden still can — he clearly regards the presidency as a great privilege.Maybe DeSantis does, too, and perhaps his quest for it really does excite and inspire him. You wouldn’t know it from his debates or from his CNN town hall in Des Moines on Tuesday night, when his diminished chances to win his party’s nomination prompted a salvo of negative comments about Trump that he should have been firing off all along.Maybe he’s just terrible at glee or at anything glee adjacent. Maybe that won’t matter: We’ve entered a scarier, stranger chapter of American political life — of American life, period — in which a genuine smile may seem discordant and a grudging one in tune with mournful times.Whatever the case, it’s possible that DeSantis will be back on a debate stage just before the Iowa caucuses. I apparently haven’t suffered enough.For the Love of SentencesGetty ImagesIn The Washington Post, Monica Hesse marveled at the extent to which Paris Hilton has outsourced her newborn’s diaper changing to a nanny and has thus been spared “close encounters of the turd kind.” (Thanks to Trish Webster of Hudson, Ohio, and Marjorie Hollis of Port Angeles, Wash., for nominating this.) Also in The Post, Sally Jenkins deconstructed the wild finish of the N.F.L. game last Sunday between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs: “It’s the time of year when some teams flex and some teams fold. The Chiefs have been hanging on to their accustomed dominance with their fingernails, and you can almost hear the titch, titch of them slipping.” (George Gates, Greensboro, N.C.)And Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford observed that the National Guardsman Jack Teixeira’s alleged leaking of classified documents reflected “an omnivorous appetite for information about global affairs.” “It was as if he had gone to the secrets buffet and sampled one of every dish,” they wrote. (Terry Burridge, Arlington, Va.)In The Times, Lindsay Zoladz nailed a seasonal annoyance: “When a nonholiday song is suddenly reclassified in the cultural imagination as a holiday song, often, one must blame Pentatonix.” (Chris Winters, Seattle)Also in The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’” (Dave Powell, Longboat Key, Fla.)And Andrew Solomon, reviewing “The Covenant of Water,” by Abraham Verghese, defended Verghese’s idealistic sensibility, asking, “Why should we assume that sophistication requires cynicism?” “People may not be as good as Verghese’s characters,” he added, “but neither are they as bad as Philip Roth’s or Saul Bellow’s. Ugliness is not truer than loveliness, nor cruelty more so than kindness.” (Florence Nash, Durham, N.C.)On Semafor, Liz Hoffman surveyed the witnesses called by a Senate committee pondering new banking rules. “We all know the image: C.E.O.s lined up behind a wood table, wearing a practiced look of contrition and their third-best watch,” she wrote. (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)On the music blog Stereogum, Tom Breihan noted the link of a No. 1 Kelly Clarkson hit, “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” to a certain German philosopher: “For a proto-fascistic theorist who died in an insane asylum after a syphilis-induced nervous breakdown, Nietzsche had a real knack for a catchy phrase.” (Mark Pitcock, Merrimack, N.H.)And in an article in The New Yorker with the terrifically clever (and frightening) headline “All the Carcinogens We Cannot See,” Siddhartha Mukherjee described a conversation with a researcher named William Hill: “Hill reached into a drawer and pulled out a vial filled with a coal-black sludge. ‘That’s a solution of suspended particles of dust and soot,’ he explained. ‘It’s liquid air pollution.’ I shook the vial, watching the particles rise and settle. It was as if someone had made a hideous snow globe with the grime wiped from my windows in New York.” (Susan Hacker, Willingboro, N.J.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m WatchingJoJo Whilden/NetflixMy end-of-year movie binge continues, at least to the extent that it can amid a storm of work obligations. Students’ final papers! Proofreading the pages of my forthcoming book! This newsletter! I was so far behind last weekend that I couldn’t use the ticket I bought to a Sunday night showing of “Maestro.”But I found time days before that for “May December,” which I enjoyed less than most critics apparently did. I found its jumble of tones and its melodramatic score distancing, though I’m never sorry to spend time watching Julianne Moore, who plays a woman who went to prison for the sexual abuse of a minor; married and had children with him; and is trustingly but tentatively welcoming an actress (Natalie Portman) who is about to play her into the couple’s home.I’m also never sorry to spend time with Tilda Swinton, whose one extended scene with Michael Fassbender is the high point of “The Killer,” an otherwise uneven, underbaked affair about a professional assassin (Fassbender) who botches a job, is marked for elimination and strikes back against the people coming after him.“Leave the World Behind” — about strangers warily sizing up one another as they confront what just might be the end of the world — held my interest more effectively than either of those other movies did. While it plays heavy-handedly with the question of whether we humans are worse than we admit or better than we realize — whether we’re drowning in our own malice or buoyed by our fugitive grace — it expertly builds tension and has a few bravura sequences. It also has a quartet of excellent performances by Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la. On a Personal NoteTravis Dove for The New York TimesBoth courses that I taught this semester ended last week, and in the waning minutes, my students and I allowed ourselves conversations far afield of the topics at hand. That always seems to happen. I asked them questions about their lives that I hadn’t asked before. They asked me questions about mine. A few of them, eyeing the vast and scary expanse beyond college, were curious about my path to where I am now. Did I plan it all out?Yes.And no.“Plan” is a flexible verb, an elastic concept. The students were talking about a meticulous choreography, a step-by-step progression. That’s how many people approach the future, and for some of them, it’s the right call. But what those people see as a risk-minimizing strategy always seemed dangerous to me, because it presumes a degree of control over events that most of us don’t really have and a predictability by which the world doesn’t operate. It also creates a merciless yardstick: If things don’t happen a certain way by a certain point, you’re off course. You’re behind schedule. You’ve failed.But there’s another kind of planning. It involves knowing generally what you’re after, preparing for a range of possibilities therein, not so much writing a script as sculpting a space: You want a career in the law, but you choose your focus — or it chooses you — as you go along. You want to arm yourself with the skills and sensibility to start a business, but the nature of that enterprise will be determined by circumstances that you can’t, and shouldn’t, guess right now. You want to lavish your energy on — and earn your keep with — words, but whether they’re in screenplays, novels, magazines or newspapers is up for grabs.We talk too little about that kind of map, though it has much to recommend it, including its allowance for serendipity, for surprise, which can thrill as often as it disappoints.My students asked me: Did I plan to leave New York for North Carolina and trade the churn of Manhattan for the calm of my suburb? Was I determined to become a professor? Was I set on Duke?I wasn’t set at all. I didn’t time this to happen when it did, two and a half years ago. I felt an itch for just a bit of an adventure. I felt a pang for new scenery and a new challenge. I craved more green, less noise. And I’d arranged my life so that I could make such a pivot when the pivot made sense. Then I got an email about my current job, and I let life fill in the blanks. More

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      in Elections

      Why Jack Smith Is Taking Trump’s Immunity Claim Straight to the Supreme Court

      by

      The special counsel has substantive and procedural reasons for wanting a quick ruling on whether Donald Trump can be prosecuted for his actions as president.Jack Smith, the special counsel who has brought two cases against former President Donald J. Trump, made a bold move this week designed to undercut one of Mr. Trump’s chief defenses against accusations of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Smith asked the Supreme Court to rule on Mr. Trump’s attempts to have the election subversion charges dismissed on a sweeping claim of executive immunity before a lower appeals court even has the chance to consider the issue.Mr. Smith also asked the justices to make their decision quickly.“The United States recognizes that this is an extraordinary request,” he told the Supreme Court in a petition filed on Monday.But there was a reason it was needed.“This is an extraordinary case,” he wrote.Here is a look at the intersecting legal and political issues surrounding the special counsel’s move.What does Mr. Smith want the Supreme Court to do?He made two separate requests.First, he asked the justices to consider a legal issue they have never looked at before: whether the Constitution confers absolute immunity on a former president against a federal prosecution for crimes he committed while in office.Mr. Trump put that argument at the center of his initial motion to dismiss the election case, which he filed in October in Federal District Court in Washington. He contended that because the charges were based on official actions he took while in the White House, the indictment in its entirety had to be thrown out.Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is handling the case, disagreed and rejected the motion two weeks ago. Mr. Trump’s lawyers challenged her decision in the normal way in front of a federal appeals court in Washington and also asked her to freeze the case while the appeal was being heard.Mr. Smith asked the Supreme Court to step in front of an appeals court to rule on former President Donald J. Trump’s claims of immunity.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesWhile the lawyers obviously hoped to win the appeal, they also had another goal: to drag out the process for as long as possible and postpone a trial on the election interference charges.It was that delay strategy that appeared to underlie Mr. Smith’s second request to the Supreme Court. He asked the justices not only to rule on the immunity issue before the lower appeals court did, but also to do so on an expedited basis.Mr. Smith told the justices that an ordinary, even a relatively fast, appeal could take too much time. And he expressed concern in particular about keeping the trial, now set to go before a jury on March 4, more or less on schedule.What could happen if the trial is delayed?It depends on whom you ask and how long the trial is postponed.A significant delay could push the trial into summer or fall — the heart of the 2024 campaign season. That could cause problems for Mr. Trump because he would be obliged to attend the trial in Washington every weekday for two or three months when he could be holding rallies or meeting voters.Mr. Trump would likely respond to such a situation by bringing his campaign to the steps of the federal courthouse. He would almost certainly hold daily news conferences in front of the television cameras that would await his exit from the courtroom and use them to deliver his political talking points and attack the legal proceeding. He has employed a similar strategy during the civil fraud trial in New York in which he is accused of inflating his company’s net worth.There could also be serious consequences, however, if the trial is pushed off until after the election.If that happens and Mr. Trump wins the race, he would suddenly have the power to order the charges to be dropped. Moreover, millions of voters would never get to hear the evidence that Mr. Smith’s team collected about Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the last election before making a decision about whether to elect him again.What do we know about whether the Supreme Court will take the case on an expedited basis?It would require only four of the nine justices to come together for Mr. Smith’s request to be granted. Shortly after Mr. Smith filed his petition, the court issued an order telling Mr. Trump’s legal team to respond with their opinions on the issue by Dec. 20. While the schedule the justices set gave no indication of whether they might ultimately take the case, it did seem to suggest that the court was not inclined to drag its feet in reaching a decision.A significant delay in the case could plunge the trial into the heart of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesHistorically speaking, the Supreme Court has only rarely stepped in front of lower appeals courts by using the procedure known as “certiorari before judgment.” Before 2019, the court had not used the provision for 15 years, according to statistics compiled by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas. But as of late last year, the court had used it 19 times since.The procedure has been used in cases involving national crises, like President Richard M. Nixon’s refusal to turn over tape recordings to a special prosecutor during a criminal investigation.Mr. Smith urged the court to use it in Mr. Trump’s criminal case as well, saying that the proceeding involved “issues of exceptional national importance.”How sympathetic has this Supreme Court been to Trump in such cases?While the court’s current majority has voted in favor of a number of staunchly conservative policies, from striking down abortion rights to reversing affirmative action, it has shown less of an appetite for supporting Mr. Trump’s attempts to monkey with the democratic process.Just months before Mr. Trump appointed his third Supreme Court justice, the court ruled by a 7-to-2 vote in 2020 that he had no absolute right to block the release of his financial records from investigators in a criminal inquiry.“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.That same year, in a brief unsigned order, the court rejected a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas seeking to throw out the election results in four battleground states that Mr. Trump had lost. It also declined requests to review suits filed by pro-Trump lawyers claiming that voting machines across the country had been hacked by a cabal of foreign actors to flip votes away from Mr. Trump.Last year, the Supreme Court refused a request from Mr. Trump to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, effectively rejecting his claims of executive privilege.The court’s unsigned order upheld the original decision made in the case by none other than Judge Chutkan. And she had scathing words for Mr. Trump in her initial decision rejecting his claims of executive privilege.“Presidents are not kings,” she wrote, “and plaintiff is not president.”What could happen next?If the Supreme Court takes the case and agrees with Mr. Trump’s immunity claims, then the indictment would be tossed out and there would be no trial on the election interference charges. But if the court hears the case and quickly sides with Mr. Smith, a trial would be held, likely before the election.On the other hand, if the justices decline to hear the case at this stage, then it would go back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. But the Supreme Court could eventually come back into the picture and consider challenges to the decision of the appeals court. More