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      Trump’s Fraud Trial and McCarthy’s Ouster Show How Chaotic the GOP Has Become

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      A revolt in Congress. Insurgent candidacies in swing states. A likely nominee on trial. This week showed how the party has turned more insular, antagonistic and repellent to general-election voters.Turbulence has trailed the Republican Party ever since Donald J. Trump’s rise. This week, that chaos looked like an organizing principle.Internal discord rippled through the party’s ranks in battleground states and the nation’s capital, showing clearly how a Trumpian algorithm has incentivized Republicans to keep their electorally self-destructive patterns in place.In Arizona and Michigan, two firebrand conservatives kicked off campaigns for the U.S. Senate, complicating plans from party leaders to retake the chamber in November.In Congress, conservative lawmakers ended the speakership of Representative Kevin McCarthy in an unprecedented power struggle that served as a gift to gleeful Democrats eager to tell 2024 voters about the failures of Republican governance.And in downtown Manhattan, the prohibitive favorite for the party’s presidential nomination, Donald J. Trump, sat in a courtroom — his lips pursed and eyebrows knit — at his civil fraud trial, the latest in a long line of legal setbacks that will tie him up in court throughout the campaign season. Even after a judge imposed a gag order on him for attacking a court clerk on social media, Mr. Trump lashed out online at the prosecutor and declared the trial a “witch hunt.”Taken together, the events this week showed how disorder has created its own reward system among Republicans, turning the party increasingly insular and antagonistic — and, as a result, more repellent to general-election voters. After three consecutive disappointing election cycles for the party, it shows few signs of getting itself back on track.Long gone are the carrots and sticks that traditionally helped party leaders shepherd their flocks, like fund-raising help from national committees or plum committee assignments.Instead, the way to rise as a Republican is, one, to display unbending devotion to Mr. Trump and then, two, to embrace some mix of relentless self-promotion, militant opposition to Democrats and a willingness to burn the federal government to the ground — even if it means taking the party down, too.“This all goes back to our reward structure, and how that’s gotten turned on its head,” said Doug Heye, a former aide to Representative Eric Cantor, the onetime majority leader ousted in 2014 by a far-right challenger, pointing out that some of the most controversial Republicans in Congress have bigger social media followings than the party’s leaders.“As long as you’re talking about fighting — regardless of whether you have a strategy to land a punch or win a round — you never actually have to win, because that’s what gets the most attention,” Mr. Heye continued. “And that means Republicans are now sort of always talking between ourselves, and the rest of the country we either don’t engage or hold in contempt.”What’s new is how ingrained such instincts have become among Republicans. Impractical purity tests are creating new divisions in an already fragmented party, like an uncontrollable mitosis damaging nearby tissue with potentially fatal consequences.That means the challenge for one of the nation’s two major political parties is whether it can find a way to thrive when it is powered by a strain of conservatism that somehow grows more potent in defeat.This quandary was articulated by Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana, a far-right Republican weighing a Senate bid against Jon Tester, the Democratic incumbent. Mr. Rosendale recently told donors that while his party had anticipated a wave of victories in last year’s midterm elections, he had been “praying each evening for a small majority.”“Because I recognize that that small majority was the only way that we were going to advance a conservative agenda, and that if it was the right majority, that if we had six or seven very strong individuals, we would drag the conference over to the right — and we were able to do that,” Mr. Rosendale said in a video of the meeting posted by The Messenger.Mr. McCarthy’s ouster on Tuesday was carried out by just eight Republican members of the chamber, including Mr. Rosendale and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Floridian who sat next to Mr. Rosendale during the donor event.Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump White House strategist who interviewed the two congressmen during the fund-raiser, said, “Matt Gaetz gave me that lecture in July of 2022 about the smaller majority — and you are correct, sir.”While Mr. Bannon, now a podcast host, helped orchestrate Mr. McCarthy’s downfall, other conservative media personalities — including Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro — blasted the move.But this antagonistic partisanship has proved successful only for the most provocative members of the party who represent the most gerrymandered districts, which leave them accountable only to primary voters. Republicans following this playbook in battleground states or more competitive districts have shouldered the blame for the party’s underperformance in recent years.So far, many Republicans seem uninterested in mitigating their electoral misery.Far from viewing the gag order as an embarrassment, the Trump campaign sensed an opportunity. It blasted the news to supporters in an email that aimed to launder grievances into cash for his presidential bid.In many ways, the courtroom is the new campaign trail for Mr. Trump, who wasn’t required to appear at the trial but opted to do so anyway — and has repeatedly addressed the news media at the courthouse.Even after dozens of criminal charges piled up against him this summer, Mr. Trump has widened his lead in the presidential primary race by portraying himself as the victim of political persecution, and vowing revenge on his perceived enemies if voters return him to the White House.The tactics have rallied his base of supporters, and there is nothing to suggest Mr. Trump will shift that strategy as his trial dates collide with some of the most important milestones on the Republican primary calendar.The party’s first nominating contest is in Iowa on Jan. 15, the same day Mr. Trump’s civil trial is scheduled to begin into whether he owes the writer E. Jean Carroll damages for defaming her after she accused him of raping her.On March 4, Mr. Trump is set to stand trial over federal criminal charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. The next day, Republicans hold their “Super Tuesday” primaries.Two more trials will unfold during the primary season — one later in March over 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, stemming from a hush money payment made to a porn star in 2016, and another in May over charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents.Then, in July, Republicans hold their presidential nominating convention.But if Mr. Trump and other Republicans come up short on the first Tuesday in November 2024, the events that unfolded during the first week of October 2023 may begin to explain those failures. More

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      Trump Announces $45.5 Million Fund-Raising Haul, Tripling DeSantis

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign announced on Wednesday that it had raised $45.5 million from July through September, an enormous sum that tripled what his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, had revealed raising earlier in the day.The Trump haul, which was built in part by an outpouring of money after his mug shot in Georgia became public following his fourth indictment, gives the former president a critical financial edge at the most important juncture of the campaign.Mr. Trump’s campaign said that he entered October with $37.5 million on hand, $36 million of which was eligible to be spent on the 2024 primary race. Top aides to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign had said earlier on Wednesday that his operation had raised $15 million in the quarter and entered October with only $5 million on hand that could be spent in the primary.The Trump campaign said in a statement that the figures were “a grave indication that Ron’s candidacy may not live to see the Iowa caucuses in January, or even the end of this month.”No other campaigns have announced their fund-raising for July, August and September; any numbers released by the campaigns cannot be independently verified until the filing of public reports, which are due on Oct. 15.The Trump campaign’s fund-raising has risen each quarter this year. Mr. DeSantis raised less in the most recent quarter than in the previous one, as his campaign has slipped in the polls and faced a barrage of coverage of its shortcomings and struggles, including two rounds of staff layoffs over the summer.The DeSantis team told staff members on Wednesday that about a third of them would be relocating from the current Tallahassee headquarters in Florida to Iowa, the kickoff state where he is increasingly trying to make a stand against Mr. Trump.In some polls, Mr. DeSantis has fallen behind a third rival, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in two of the other early states, New Hampshire and South Carolina.A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Steven Cheung, said the $45.5 million haul did not include any refunds that the former president’s political action committee might have received from an allied super PAC.Mr. Trump’s PAC, which has covered his legal fees as he fends off his four indictments, requested a refund of a $60 million transfer it had given the super PAC last year. It gave back more than $12 million in the first half of the year. More

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      DeSantis Gets a $15 Million Cash Infusion and Moves Staff Into Iowa

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is relocating a significant portion of his presidential campaign staff from Tallahassee to Des Moines, according to his top deputies, redeploying his team to the leadoff state after a $15 million fund-raising haul that advisers said had helped stabilize his campaign.The push into Iowa highlights the state’s make-or-break status for Mr. DeSantis’s long-shot effort to defeat former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. DeSantis hopes a surprise victory in Iowa’s caucuses, the first voting state of the Republican nominating contest, will make enough voters see that Mr. Trump is beatable — motivating them to quickly rally around Mr. DeSantis as the only candidate able to stop him.About a third of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign staff, including senior political and communications advisers, were informed on Wednesday morning that they would be expected to move into short-term housing in Iowa and work from offices in the state. His campaign now employs 56 people, including four Iowa staffers — a number that will soon grow to nearly two dozen, making Iowa a de facto second headquarters.The relocation completes a monthslong retooling of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign, which was in dire financial straits this summer — with delayed bills and unpaid invoices piling up — and had to do two rounds of mass firings in order to remain solvent.Top campaign officials said they had stabilized the situation, thanks to the $15 million infusion from donors that came in the third quarter, from July through September. That money was raised across the three committees associated with Mr. DeSantis: his main presidential campaign account, a political action committee and a fund-raising committee that feeds into those two other accounts. His campaign entered October with $13.5 million in available cash, according to top aides, although some of those funds had not yet been transferred to the campaign account.James Uthmeier, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, said in a statement that the third-quarter haul “shuts down the doubters who counted out Ron DeSantis for far too long.”Aides acknowledged that only $5 million of those funds were eligible to spend in the primary season, meaning that money remains tight for a campaign that has yet to air any television ads. The strapped campaign has left advertising, and most other campaign operations, to a well-funded outside group.Mr. DeSantis has a mountainous task ahead. Even in his chosen state of Iowa — where he is campaigning relentlessly, having already visited more than half of the state’s 99 counties — he remains some 30 points behind Mr. Trump in polling. The $15 million sum is less than the $20 million Mr. DeSantis brought in during the previous quarter, and some of this quarter’s haul is earmarked for his new PAC.Still, the DeSantis team believes it is planting the seeds of a comeback, and that by moving his campaign’s center of gravity to Iowa it can better compete in the increasingly do-or-die state where organizing more than 1,600 independent caucus locations is essential and labor-intensive. Mr. Trump seems to have recognized the threat and has begun traveling to Iowa more frequently.“We are redeploying many of our assets so we can further take the fight directly to Donald Trump in Iowa,” said David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager.Mr. DeSantis’s all-in investment in an early state aims to repeat the comeback effort of former Senator John McCain of Arizona, who in 2008 revived his collapsing presidential campaign by slashing his staff and pouring what remained of his resources into touring New Hampshire town by town.But the comparison ends there. Unlike Mr. DeSantis, who has alienated moderate voters with his hard-line socially conservative positions, Mr. McCain hadn’t narrowed himself ideologically. And Mr. McCain faced nothing like the challenge Mr. DeSantis confronts in running against such an overwhelming front-runner as Mr. Trump, who has been dominating polling and news media coverage. The Republican electorate appears to be treating Mr. Trump as almost an incumbent president.The DeSantis campaign’s public financial paperwork will be released by the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 15, allowing for a more detailed picture of its books. The last report, in July, resulted in a series of cost-cutting measures. Those cuts, which helped keep the campaign afloat, included turning over key functions, such as organizing events, to a pro-DeSantis super PAC and giving up on the idea of running a national race against Mr. Trump.Heading into the fall, the DeSantis campaign has re-emerged as a leaner operation focused on prevailing in Iowa while also drawing a more aggressive contrast with Mr. Trump and gaining attention by giving frequent interviews to the mainstream press. Mr. DeSantis’s efforts have been buoyed by two solid performances in the Republican presidential debates, which reassured donors. His campaign said he raised roughly $1 million in the 24 hours after the first debate in Milwaukee and a similar figure in the 24 hours after the second one.The DeSantis campaign probably would not have survived without its super PAC, Never Back Down, which was financed chiefly by a $82.5 million cash transfer from Mr. DeSantis’s state committee. Never Back Down — which is barred by campaign finance laws from coordinating strategy with either Mr. DeSantis or his campaign team — has been running the DeSantis campaign’s bus tours and has even been handling outreach to voters, including calls and door knocking.The campaign is now being helmed by two new leaders: Mr. Uthmeier, who was Mr. DeSantis’s chief of staff in the governor’s office and is now the campaign manager, and Mr. Polyanksy, a former official at Never Back Down. The hiring of Mr. Polyanksy revealed much about the new direction of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign: He is a veteran of the Iowa caucuses and played an important role in two victorious Republican campaigns there — Ted Cruz’s in 2016 and Mike Huckabee’s in 2008.Among the new Iowa staff’s duties will be organizing caucus sites and setting up events and appearances by surrogates who can drive news media coverage and attention.The daunting nature of running against Mr. Trump, who skipped the debates, is that his online fund-raising apparatus continues to bring in contributions from small donors almost as if on autopilot.In the first six months of the year, he reported more than $250,000 raised, on average, every day — a pace that is roughly the equivalent of $22.5 million in a quarter. And while that average was boosted heavily by indictment-fueled surges, his median day still brought in $153,000 online, according to federal records.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign declined this week to say how much of his fund-raising came from the small donors who fuel campaigns with repeated contributions. But his online haul is nowhere close to Mr. Trump’s.The DeSantis team is banking on the notion that an upset victory in Iowa would shatter the former president’s aura of inevitability and that Republicans would suddenly rush behind Mr. DeSantis as the only viable alternative. The problem with that theory is that former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina is increasingly competitive with Mr. DeSantis and has no apparent incentive to drop out of the race. And Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is also likely to have enough cash to stay in the race and divide up the anti-Trump vote.Still, Mr. Trump has responded to the Florida governor’s efforts in Iowa. The former president has made several appearances in the state and his super PAC purchased more television time there this week. In Mr. DeSantis’s view, that is an early sign that his strategy is working.The former president “is currently spending money against me in Iowa,” Mr. DeSantis said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday. “He is campaigning in Iowa. And that’s an indication — you can tell campaigns by what they do.”Over the past few months, Mr. DeSantis has also changed his style of campaigning. Until the summer, he took pride in refusing to engage with the mainstream media that he derisively called the “corporate media.”But as Mr. Trump widened his lead in national polls, the governor threw out that strategy. He began talking to the press almost constantly and sitting for interviews with all the major television networks — unimaginable venues for the Fox-centric early-2023 version of Mr. DeSantis, who was still riding high off his 20-point re-election win in Florida and enjoying the luxury of picking and choosing between fawning conservative media interviews.“Let’s face it, Ron — if this campaign was going well you wouldn’t be on this show,” Bill Maher told Mr. DeSantis in an interview last week.“Oh, that’s not true,” Mr. DeSantis replied halfheartedly.Maggie Haberman More

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      Ramaswamy Aims to Capture Voters Opposed to a Chinese Company in Michigan Visit

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      Vivek Ramaswamy will make a swing through Michigan on Tuesday as he seeks to capture voters in a swing state seen as a battleground for blue-collar workers.Both President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump visited the state just days apart last week — Mr. Biden joined the picket line with striking members of the United Automobile Workers, while Mr. Trump spoke at a nonunion factory.Mr. Ramaswamy’s return to the Great Lakes State on Tuesday will close with a rally opposing plans for an electric vehicle battery factory that has become a flashpoint in the state, heightening U.S.-China-related tensions.Gotion, a Chinese subsidiary, has sought to a build $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery factory spanning 270 acres in Green Charter Township, a rural Michigan town. Despite the factory’s potential to bolster the local economy, “No Gotion” signs have popped up as residents fear an infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party — though the company insists it has no ideological ties to China or affiliations with political parties.Several Republican presidential candidates, including Mr. Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur, have argued against allowing Chinese companies to purchase American land. Criticism of electric vehicle production has also become standard in the race.Wednesday will be Mr. Ramaswamy’s second visit to the state in as many weeks. He attended the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in September.His first stop Wednesday will be a breakfast rally in Saginaw, followed by a town hall in Flint. The rally “opposing China’s Gotion electric battery plant” will be in Big Rapids.Other G.O.P. candidates have focused more of their energy on Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, states with primaries that will be held before Michigan’s.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will campaign in South Carolina on Wednesday for the first time in months, after his last scheduled trip there in August was derailed by Hurricane Idalia.And Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina will be in Van Cleve, Iowa, hosting a town hall as he tries to ramp up support while his poll numbers dwindle. More

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      GOP Candidates Split Over Kevin McCarthy’s Ouster as House Speaker

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      The ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on Tuesday exposed sharp divisions among the Republican presidential field, with at least one candidate saying that the power move by right-wing caucus members had been warranted — but others bemoaned the turmoil, and some stayed silent.Several hours before the House voted to vacate the speakership, former President Donald J. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he was fed up with the infighting within the G.O.P.“Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?” he wrote.But Mr. Trump did not weigh in directly after Mr. McCarthy was removed from his leadership post.His differences with Mr. McCarthy had been simmering in the open, including over a federal government shutdown that was narrowly averted Saturday when the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for another 45 days.Mr. Trump publicly egged on far-right House members to dig in, telling them in an Oct. 24 social media post, “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” He accused Republican leaders of caving to Democrats during negotiations over the debt ceiling in the spring, saying that they should use the shutdown to advance efforts to close the southern border and to pursue retribution against the Justice Department for its “weaponization.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was the only Republican presidential candidate openly welcoming the discord as of Wednesday morning.“My advice to the people who voted to remove him is own it. Admit it,” he said in a video posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday. “There was no better plan of action of who’s going to fill that speaker role. So was the point to sow chaos? Yes, it was. But the real question to ask, to get to the bottom of it, is whether chaos is really such a bad thing?”Mr. Ramaswamy, who had previously argued that a temporary government shutdown would not go far toward dismantling the “administrative state,” said that the status quo in the House was untenable.“Once in a while, a little chaos isn’t such a bad thing,” he said. “Just ask our founding fathers. That’s what this country is founded on, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is now running against his former boss for the party’s nomination, lamented the revolt against Mr. McCarthy. Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, he said that he was disappointed by the outcome.“Well, let me say that chaos is never America’s friend,” Mr. Pence, a former House member, said.But earlier in his remarks, he downplayed the fissure between Republicans in the House over Mr. McCarthy’s status and fiscal differences. He asserted that a few G.O.P. representatives had aligned themselves with Democrats to create chaos in the chamber, saying that on days like this, “I don’t miss being in Congress.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida questioned the motivations of Representative Matt Gaetz, a fellow Floridian who is Mr. McCarthy’s top antagonist in the House. During an appearance on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis suggested that Mr. Gaetz’s rebellion had been driven by political fund-raising.“I think when you’re doing things, you need to be doing it because it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It shouldn’t be done with an eye towards trying to generate lists or trying to generate fund-raising.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also criticized Mr. Gaetz on Tuesday, telling Forbes that his overall approach did “a lot of damage.” Of the efforts to oust Mr. McCarthy, he added: “It’s not helpful. It certainly doesn’t help us focus on the issues that everyday voters care about.”And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey chimed in Wednesday morning, denouncing the hard-right rebels and expressing concern about the electoral implications. In an appearance on CNBC, he said their actions had given voters “more of a concern about our party being a governing party, and that’s bad for all of us running for president right now.”Mr. Christie said the roots of the chaos lay with Mr. Trump, who he said “set this type of politics in motion.” He also blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s disappointing showing in the midterms, which gave Republicans only a narrow House majority and made it possible for a handful of people like Mr. Gaetz to wield such outsize influence.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador who has been rising in some polls, appeared to keep silent in the hours after Mr. McCarthy was ousted. A spokeswoman for her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Trump Campaign Puts Out Baseless Claim of Plot to ‘Steal’ Election

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      As legal cases against former President Donald J. Trump churn forward on at least five fronts, two of them related to his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, his campaign is advancing baseless claims that the 2024 election, too, is on track to be stolen from him.In a statement on Monday, two advisers to Mr. Trump’s campaign — Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — called on the Republican National Committee to “immediately cancel the upcoming debate in Miami and end all future debates in order to refocus its manpower and money on preventing Democrats’ efforts to steal the 2024 election.”They declared that if the R.N.C. proceeded with the debate, it would prove that “national Republicans are more concerned about helping Joe Biden than ensuring a safe and secure election.”Mr. Trump refused to attend the first two debates. The third is scheduled for Nov. 8. A Trump campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita did not cite any evidence in their statement to support their claim that Democrats are trying to steal the 2024 election.A spokeswoman for the R.N.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The committee is formally neutral in the primary; Mr. Trump’s campaign is effectively asking it to abandon that neutrality and turn its focus to the general election before any votes are cast.The statement follows a playbook that Mr. Trump used in both 2016 and 2020, pre-emptively suggesting that the upcoming elections would be rigged against him. He repeatedly planted in his supporters’ minds the idea that he could not possibly lose a fair vote and that, therefore, if he did lose, it would be evidence of fraud in and of itself.Trust in the security of U.S. elections among Republicans has plunged. Supporters of Mr. Trump, many of whom believed his lie that the 2020 race was stolen from him, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to block the formalization of President Biden’s victory. Election officials have faced harassment and violent threats. More

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      Trump Targets Nikki Haley as She Climbs in the Polls

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      Until recently, former President Donald J. Trump mostly ignored Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and his onetime United Nations ambassador turned rival in the 2024 presidential race. No longer.After two strong debate performances, Ms. Haley has seen a jolt of momentum, and in polls of the early voting states New Hampshire and South Carolina, she has leapfrogged Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the runner-up to Mr. Trump. On Friday, after the second debate of Republican candidates at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California that Mr. Trump skipped, the former president attacked her as “birdbrain” on his social media site, Truth Social. Over the weekend, his campaign appeared to escalate by sending a bird cage and seed to her hotel.A handwritten note attached to the bars of the bird cage said it came from the Trump campaign, according to a post that Ms. Haley shared on Sunday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Ms. Haley has taken the shift in his attention as a sign that Mr. Trump now sees her as a real threat.Betsy Ankney, her campaign manager, called the behavior “weird, creepy and desperate.” “It’s more proof that it’s time to leave the drama behind,” she said in a statement. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.The bitter exchanges are the latest twist in the long relationship between Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump, who still leads Ms. Haley and all of his other primary rivals by double digits in the polls.On the trail, Ms. Haley has walked a fine line between praise and criticism of her former boss: She has said that Mr. Trump uplifted the voices of rural Americans and handled the U.S.-Mexico border better than President Biden. But she has also called Mr. Trump “thin-skinned and easily distracted” and criticized his administration’s spending. She has said that unlike Mr. Trump, she believes that Jan. 6, 2021, the day the U.S. Capitol was violently ransacked by a pro-Trump mob intent on disrupting the formalization of Mr. Biden’s election win, was “a terrible day.”Mr. Trump has mostly been silent on Ms. Haley since she first began her campaign in February. At the time, he called her an “overly ambitious” person who “just couldn’t stay in her seat.” Some critics viewed his comments as sexist.When Ms. Haley first won the Republican primary for South Carolina governor in 2010, Mr. Trump mailed her “a campaign contribution in a gold-trimmed envelope,” she writes in her memoir, “With All Due Respect.” The two met in New York several times when she was there on business, and he seemed to follow her career — and even cheer her on, she said. He occasionally sent her news clips that mentioned her, and after she was re-elected in 2014, he faxed her his congratulations: “Nikki — You’re a winner!”That did not stop Ms. Haley from endorsing Senator Marco Rubio of Florida over Mr. Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Mr. Trump still went on to pick her for U.N. ambassador — and gave her a glowing review upon her departure. More

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      GOP Voters Show Appetite for Calls to Use Military Force Against Mexican Cartels

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      G.O.P. candidates on the trail have used the idea as both an effective applause line and a solution for what many Republicans see as an unchecked border.Iowa is more than 1,000 miles from the U.S. border with Mexico. But Republican primary voters in the Midwestern state have embraced what has become almost orthodoxy among the G.O.P. candidates vying for their votes: deploying military forces to fight drug cartels and secure the border.Just years after former President Donald Trump mused about it in the Oval Office, the idea of using the country’s military might at the border — without the consent of the Mexican government — has made its way into barns, diners and other haunts along the campaign trail. The Times reported Tuesday on Mr. Trump’s plans to make the idea a reality in 2025 should he ultimately win the White House.At a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Orange City, Iowa, last month, Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that the United States should “use our own military to secure our own southern border.” He drew cheers before he finished the line: “and if necessary, our northern border, too.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina received claps for his border policy pronouncements at the Iowa State Fair in August, during which he said, “We have to crush the cartels.” He added that the United States had “the available military-grade technology to stop the fentanyl flow across our borders.”And one of the most reliable applause lines for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who frequently promises military strikes against Mexican drug cartels and deadly force against people crossing the border — has involved a declaration that his administration would leave drug traffickers “stone-cold dead.”A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around two-thirds of Republicans support the idea of military intervention to take on cartels, though that percentage dropped when respondents were asked whether the United States should do so without Mexico’s permission.Unilaterally sending U.S. troops into Mexico is a nonstarter for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said the move would constitute “an offense to the people of Mexico.” Policy experts and even senior aides in the Trump administration also decried the prospect as an extreme escalation.But that hasn’t stopped G.O.P. presidential candidates from using the threat of taking out cartel members abroad through military force as both an effective rallying cry and a solution for what many Republicans see as an unchecked border and an opioid epidemic, even if promises of military intervention may prove difficult to keep.The line has received a warm welcome in other early voting states, too. Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, often pledges to send special military operations “to take out the cartels in Mexico.”At an event in Hampton, New Hampshire, last month, it really landed. “If Mexico is not going to do it, we will do it,” she told a crowd outside a cozy bed-and-breakfast, who began clapping before she finished her delivery. The small state has been ravaged by fentanyl. Few candidates have offered alternate thoughts. Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who once led the Drug Enforcement Administration, has rebutted the idea of military intervention — a response that might partly explain why Mr. Hutchinson did not even make the G.O.P. debate stage last week.“It doesn’t make sense, as some candidates say, that we ought to start dropping bombs or invade Mexico,” Mr. Hutchinson said at a Republican tailgate for an Iowa-Iowa State football game in September. “Mexico is still a friendly country to the United States and economic partner, and you don’t invade another country.”The crowd didn’t seem convinced: Many resumed chatting or searched for refreshments during his remarks.Nicholas Nehamas More