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      G.O.P. Faces Trump Indictment: Loyalty or Law and Order

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      The candidates challenging Donald Trump have to decide how to run against the indicted former president. And it could determine where the party goes from here.The federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump has left the Republican Party — and his rivals for the party’s nomination — with a stark choice between deferring to a system of law and order that has been central to the party’s identity for half a century or a more radical path of resistance, to the Democratic Party in power and to the nation’s highest institutions that Mr. Trump now derides.How the men and women who seek to lead the party into the 2024 election respond to the indictments of the former president in the coming months will have enormous implications for the future of the G.O.P.So far, the declared candidates for the presidency who are not Mr. Trump have divided into three camps regarding his federal indictment last Thursday: those who have strongly backed him and his insistence that the indictment is a politically driven means to deny him a second White House term, such as Vivek Ramaswamy; those who have urged Americans to take the charges seriously, such as Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson; and those who have straddled both camps, condemning the indictment but nudging voters to move past Mr. Trump’s leadership, such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.The trick, for all of Mr. Trump’s competitors, will be finding the balance between harnessing the anger of the party’s core voters who remain devoted to him while winning their support as an alternative nominee.Mr. Trump is due to appear in court on Tuesday in Florida. The danger for Republicans, after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is that encouraging too much anger could lead to chaos — and to what pollsters call the “ghettoization” of their party: confined to minority status by voters unwilling to let go of the fervent beliefs that have been rejected by the majority.That point was laid bare Sunday by a new CBS News/YouGov poll that found 80 percent of Americans outside the core Republican voter base saw a national security risk in Mr. Trump’s handling of classified nuclear and military documents, while only 38 percent of likely Republican primary voters discerned such a risk.In the same poll, only 7 percent of Republicans said the indictment had changed their view of the former president for the worse; 14 percent said their views had changed for the better; and the majority, 61 percent, said their views would not change. More than three-quarters of Republican primary voters said the indictments were politically motivated.A separate ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 61 percent of Americans viewed the charges as serious, up from 52 percent in April when pollsters asked about the mishandling of classified documents. Among Republicans, 38 percent said the charges were serious, also up, from 21 percent in this spring. But only about half of Americans said Mr. Trump should be charged, unchanged from April.“Base voters see the double standard in politics. I continue to hear, ‘When are they going to indict the Bidens?’” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman and senior adviser to Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. But, he added, “65 percent of our primary voters are just tired of all the drama and I think are looking for a new generation of Republicans to take us out of the wilderness.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, campaigning in Iowa early this year. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMs. Haley has embodied that balancing act, saying in one statement, “This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” and also, “It’s time to move beyond the endless drama.”Mr. Trump’s closest rival for the 2024 nomination, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, captured the same spirit when he mused on Friday that he “would have been court-martialed in a New York minute” if he had taken classified documents during his service in the Navy. He was referring to Hillary Clinton — who has returned as a Republican boogeyman this week — and her misuse of classified material as secretary of state, but the double meaning was clear, just as it was when he said, “There needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody.”Those urging voters to read the charges facing Mr. Trump — the mishandling of highly classified documents on some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and his subsequent steps to obstruct law enforcement — are a lonelier group in the broader Republican Party. Just two former governors running for president — both former prosecutors — Mr. Christie of New Jersey and Mr. Hutchinson of Arkansas, are aligned with a scattering of other leaders like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who was the only Republican senator to vote to remove Mr. Trump from office twice.But their voices are likely to be amplified in the coming days by a media eager to give them a microphone. Mr. Christie will hold a town-hall meeting on CNN on Monday night, while Mr. Hutchinson, the longest of long shots for the nomination, has given a flurry of interviews.“The Republican Party should not dismiss this case out of hand,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. “These are serious allegations that a grand jury has found probable cause on.”On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, weighed in on Fox News Sunday, saying he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were.” “If even half of it is true, he’s toast,” Mr. Barr said. “It is a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt — is ridiculous.”The critics of Mr. Trump also have an appeal that goes to the center of the party’s identity: law and order. Republicans are still attacking Democrats on the rise of street crime after the pandemic even as they attack the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the special prosecutor and the federal grand jury system.“If Congress has the ability to have oversight over the Department of Justice, I encouraged them to do it vigorously and fairly and ask all the questions they need,” Mr. Christie said on CNN. “But what we should also be doing is holding to account people who are in positions of responsibility and saying, if you act badly, there has to be penalties for that. There has to be a cost to be paid.”But voters eager to believe the dark tales spun by Mr. Trump of a nefarious “deep state,” of “Communists” bent on the destruction of America, are receiving encouragement from candidates who are ostensibly Mr. Trump’s rivals. For them, the calculation appears to be capturing the former president’s voters if his legal troubles finally end his political career.“I am personally deeply skeptical of everything in that indictment,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and author, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, adding, “I personally have no faith whatsoever in those vague allegations.”Other candidates were less blunt but equally willing to challenge the integrity of the justice system, a system, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said, “where the scales are weighted” against conservatives.The language of Trump supporters after his indictment last Thursday has alarmed some experts.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesIn truth, the conservative world is divided. Some figures have, predictably, rallied around Mr. Trump with irresponsible rhetoric that appeared to call for violence.“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.,” said Kari Lake, the failed candidate for governor of Arizona.More surprisingly were the voices on the Trumpist right who have voiced their concerns — over the charges and over their impact on the Republican Party’s future. When Charlie Kirk of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA called for every other Republican candidate for the presidency to drop out of the race in solidarity with Mr. Trump, Ann Coulter, the right-wing bomb thrower, responded, “That’s nothing! I’m calling on EVERY REPUBLICAN TO COMMIT SUICIDE in solidarity with Trump!” — acknowledging that rallying around the former president could send the party to oblivion.Mike Cernovich, a lawyer and provocateur on the right, criticized the indictment as a “selective prosecution,” but also said, “Trump walked into this trap.”How the party, and its 2024 candidates, respond will matter, to the country and to the party’s political fortunes. The core Republican voter might stand with Mr. Trump, but most Americans most likely will not. It is a dilemma, acknowledged Clifford Young, president of U.S. public affairs at the polling and marketing firm Ipsos.“For the average American in the middle, they’re appalled,” he said, “but for the base, not only is support being solidified, they don’t believe what is happening.” “Heck,” he added, “they believe he won the election.” More

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      DeSantis Backhandedly Defends Trump After Indictment

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      Visitors from a foreign planet might think Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had been delivered a tremendous gift this week when his main presidential rival was charged with mishandling the country’s national security secrets.But as Mr. DeSantis’s latest speech showed, this is a turn of events he will need to beware.In an address to Republicans in North Carolina on Friday night, his first public remarks since the unsealing of federal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. DeSantis trod carefully and danced quickly past the subject.Previewing how he might criticize the Justice Department’s case without letting Mr. Trump entirely off the hook, he offered a somewhat backhanded defense of the now twice-indicted former president — whose loyal followers Mr. DeSantis is seeking to avoid angering — by drawing on his own experiences as a Navy lawyer.Seeming to muse aloud, Mr. DeSantis asked what the Navy would have done to him had he taken classified documents while in military service. “I would have been court-martialed in a New York minute,” he said, in a riff on Mr. Trump’s hometown.While Mr. DeSantis made his remark in reference to the fact that Hillary Clinton did not face charges over her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, his comments could just as easily have applied to Mr. Trump. And they suggested that he believed both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton should have faced charges — or neither.“Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president?” he asked. “I think there needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody and make sure we all know the rules.”(A yearslong inquiry by the State Department found that Mrs. Clinton had not deliberately or systemically mishandled classified information.)The nature of Mr. Trump’s federal indictment, which emerged in full view on Friday, left Mr. DeSantis and several other Republican presidential contenders ever more wobbly on the tightrope they are walking, trying to defend a rival accused of cavalierly and illegally keeping sensitive documents about U.S. nuclear programs and the country’s vulnerabilities to military attack.Many of these candidates now find themselves in the difficult position of rallying around Mr. Trump even as they seek to differentiate themselves from his legacy while he continues to dominate them in the polls.“This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador, said on Twitter. “The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”Such caution struck a sharp contrast with the two Republican candidates most willing to criticize Mr. Trump.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called the indictment “devastating,” telling CNN that “the facts that are laid out here are damning.” And in an interview with The New York Times, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas pushed back against claims that Mr. Trump was being treated unfairly and reiterated his belief that he should drop out of the race.“To pejoratively say this is the result of a political prosecution is not in service to our justice system,” Mr. Hutchinson said, adding, “It would be doing a disservice to the country if we did not treat this case seriously.”Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the investigation, urged the public on Friday to understand the “scope and gravity” of the charges.Mr. Trump is expected to appear in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon to face charges including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice. On his Truth Social website, the former president called Mr. Smith “deranged.”Some voters who attended Mr. DeSantis’s speech in Greensboro, N.C., suggested they were growing weary of the controversy surrounding Mr. Trump, even as they expressed a belief that the charges were politically motivated. (Mr. Trump also faces charges in state court in New York for his alleged role in paying hush money to a porn star.)“Even if he gets elected again, they’re never going to leave him alone. So what’s the point?” said Mary Noble, 70, who voted twice for Mr. Trump but has not made up her mind in the 2024 primary. “He’ll never be effective. That’s my fear.”Tom Wassel, who sells air pollution control equipment and also supported Mr. Trump in both previous elections, did not mind that Mr. DeSantis had touched on the indictment only briefly, and not very forcefully.“I want him to talk about what he’s going to run on,” Mr. Wassel, 70, said.Beyond Mr. Christie and Mr. Hutchinson, Republicans running for president were largely supportive of Mr. Trump, with some arguing that the prosecution amounted to an extraordinary and unfair political vendetta and one going so far as to bluntly promise to pardon him.Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who has positioned himself to secure the backing of Mr. Trump’s supporters if the former president’s legal problems derail his political comeback, said, “I commit to pardon Trump promptly on Jan. 20, 2025.”In a radio interview on Friday before the indictment was unsealed, former Vice President Mike Pence seemed to contrast Mr. Trump’s conduct with his own diligent return of classified documents to the National Archives. But he added that he was “deeply troubled to see this indictment move forward” and took a swipe at what he called “years of politicization” of the Justice Department.Meanwhile, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the Republican nominee for president in 2012 and a leading critic of Mr. Trump, was one of the few G.O.P. officeholders to condemn him, saying the former president had “brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.”Jonathan Weisman More

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      Who’s Running in the Republican Presidential Primary?

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      Whenever I want to put myself to sleep at night, I run through the names of all the former vice presidents. OK, sorta peculiar. It might be time for a break. Maybe I’ll just try making a list of Republican candidates for president.Back when Donald Trump announced it all seemed sorta life-as-usual, but now the race is definitely on. There are currently somewhere between 12 and 400 Republicans eyeing the White House.All the major names are men except Nikki Haley, who’s arguing that “it’s time to put a badass woman in the White House.” Well, yeah. There’s very little chance Haley’s campaign is going anywhere, but I think we can all agree she could really perk things up.We’re also expecting some energy from the newly announced candidate Chris Christie. Rather than dodging the whole Donald Trump matter whenever possible, Christie stresses that he’s running to save the country from a former close colleague who he now calls a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog.”And that’s just the beginning! On Wednesday we acquired Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota. His great claim to fame is having built a software company that he sold for over $1 billion. Warning: Do not call Burgum a billionaire. (“Not even close!”) He’s really not into that. You’ll hurt his feelings.Vivek Ramaswamy doesn’t have that problem since he’s reportedly worth only $600 million or so (biopharmaceuticals). Still, he’s invested at least $10 million in the race so far and it’s gotten … well, hey, we’re talking about him.Ramaswamy, who’s 37, went to Harvard around the same time as Pete Buttigieg and has claimed that Buttigieg is “like the Diet Coke to my Coca-Cola.” Where do you think he came up with that one? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.OK, and let’s see … there’s Perry Johnson. Ever heard of Perry Johnson? He did run for governor of Michigan last year but got thrown off the Republican primary ballot for invalid petition signatures. Which must have been a little embarrassing for someone who made his fortune building a firm that promises to help your company meet business quality standards.Johnson used a pinch of his money running an ad during the Super Bowl celebrating, um, himself. (“Perry Johnson: Quality guru. Governor for a perfect Michigan.”) Fans who lost interest in the game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals were free to contemplate the suggestion that they give thanks to Johnson “when your car door closes just right.”Didn’t work. But they do say he’s a really great bridge player. Just remember him that way. Perry Johnson … I bid two no-trump.You don’t need any previous government experience in your bio to be on the campaign trail. Ryan Binkley of Texas is out meeting and greeting in Iowa, and he’s never done anything remotely like this before. Although he claims he started thinking about running for president around eight years ago. So it’s not like he hasn’t been mulling.Binkley bills himself as a pastor and — wait for the shock — super fiscal conservative. He’s also the chief executive and co-founder of Generational Group, an investment banking firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions.Are you picking up on a theme here, people? We have a very crowded field of superrich candidates. (Don’t call them billionaires!) And while sitting on piles of cash will not necessarily make you president, it sure does help open a lot of doors.There actually are some candidates who don’t seem to have a ton of money. We haven’t gotten to Larry Elder, a California talk radio host who did very well against other Republicans in the Gov. Gavin Newsom recall election. Which was certainly a great triumph for Elder except for the part about Newsom beating the entire recall idea back by huge margins.Or Asa Hutchinson, the 72-year-old former governor of Arkansas. OK, not necessarily a new broom. But you will so impress your friends when you say, “… And let’s not forget about Asa Hutchinson.”I guess Senator Tim Scott really ought to be up higher. He is the best known Black candidate in the field so far and he is having adventures. Got into a fight on TV over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, much to the audience’s irritation. (“Do not boo. This is ‘The View,’” urged Whoopi Goldberg.)Mike Pence is a sorta interesting challenge. You will remember that when Trump lost the 2020 election, Pence had an allegedly ceremonial role certifying the results. Which he did, guaranteeing a normal transfer of power and getting to hear the Jan. 6 crowd of rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Should we be grateful? I mean, yeah, sure, when it comes to writing his obituary. But do you want to root for Pence this time around? He’s extremely conservative, especially on social matters. (“Well, I think defending the unborn first and foremost is more important than politics. I really believe it’s the calling of our time.”)Sigh. Will the Republican field get any bigger? Or is it going the other way? I was watching one of the TV news channels the other day and suddenly a headline flashed:“Breaking News: Sununu Passes on Presidential Campaign.”Yes — shocker of the week! — the governor of New Hampshire has decided he’s not going to try for the nomination. Possibly the highest-ranking Republican in the country who definitely doesn’t want to give it a shot.Guess you’ll all have to stop saying, “Yeah, but wait until Chris Sununu gets in there.”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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Mike Pence Hasn’t Grown Less Conservative, but Republicans Have Shifted

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      The polls say the former vice president, who announced his 2024 candidacy in a video on Wednesday, has little chance. But he is driven by his faith.Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency. The former vice president wants abortion banned from the point of conception. He’s the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has the most hawkish foreign policy, especially on confronting Russia.Being the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.Not anymore.The president Mr. Pence served under, Donald J. Trump, transformed the G.O.P. electorate, making the path to a Pence presidency visible only to the truest of true believers. Mr. Pence has not really changed all that much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different G.O.P., and it’s a different G.O.P. because of his former boss.The Republican Party’s intense focus on character and morality during the Bill Clinton years has been replaced by a different credo — articulated by a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey B. Clark, during a recent Twitter squabble over Mr. Trump’s fitness for office.“We’re not a congregation voting for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the one senior Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. “We’re voting for a leader of the nation.”By this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married only once and is so determined to honor his vows that he doesn’t allow himself to dine alone with a woman who is not his wife. Nor does it matter how many affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether he paid hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump silences all of that, in a way, with one blunt social media post: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”Mr. Pence, who announced his candidacy in a video early Wednesday, hours before a planned rally in a Des Moines suburb, is given little chance by anybody outside of his core team. Republican pollsters and strategists have written him off. Faced with Mr. Pence’s situation — being both dominated and burdened by Mr. Trump — most politicians would have concluded, after reviewing polls and focus groups, that there was no “theory of the case” for him to win the nomination.But Mr. Pence appears to have no use for statistical analysis.Mr. Pence in Des Moines on Saturday. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, he polls around just 5 percent.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“Our country’s in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Pence says in his nearly three-minute-long announcement video, accusing “President Joe Biden and the radical left” of weakening America “at home and abroad.”Citing “runaway inflation,” a looming recession, a southern border “under siege,” unchecked “enemies of freedom” in Russia and China “on the march,” and what he calls an unprecedented assault on “timeless American values,” he promises to deliver what he says the nation sorely needs.“We’re better than this,” Mr. Pence says. “We can turn this country around. But different times call for different leadership. Today our party and our country need a leader that’ll appeal, as Lincoln said, to the better angels of our nature.”Whereas some Republican politicians use God as a talking point and have little acquaintance with the Bible, Mr. Pence makes every decision through the filter of Scripture. When he says he has prayed on a decision, he means it, and that includes running for president. Throughout his political career, according to people who have worked for him, Mr. Pence has gathered around his staff and his family in frequent prayer. If his theory of the case in this race seems to rely more on faith than data — that’s because it does.Mr. Pence served as Mr. Trump’s yes-man for three years and 11 months. In that final month, Mr. Pence refused to follow a presidential order that was plainly unconstitutional: to single-handedly overturn the 2020 election. His loyalty to the Constitution was rewarded with people in a pro-Trump mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol, while Mr. Pence and his family rushed to a barely secure room.Instead of punishing Mr. Trump for how he treated Mr. Pence, Republican voters have made him their front-runner. More than 50 percent of Republicans support the former president in national polls. Mr. Pence draws around 4 percent. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, where Mr. Pence is staking his candidacy, he polls around 5 percent.Mr. Pence and Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, began certifying the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Pence has no trouble explaining his policy positions. He will run for president as a national security hawk, a staunch social conservative, a free-trader and a fiscal conservative. Nobody who knows him well doubts his sincerity on any of these issues. He may be running the least poll-tested campaign in the Republican field.The problem is that the Mike Pence known to most Republicans is a man whose job for four years was to cheer Mr. Trump through policies and actions that often contradicted his professed principles. If Mr. Pence, in a moment of introspection, wonders why the party he has long aspired to lead no longer seems interested in being led by someone like him, he may shoulder some portion of the blame himself.The Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration had a trade policy that, for the most part, delighted protectionist Democrats. So much for free trade. And while Mr. Trump spent his first three years in office largely listening to his more conventional national security advisers, in his final year he laid the groundwork for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence did not support.Mr. Trump’s current articulation of his “America First” foreign policy — which involves dropping U.S. support for Ukraine and musing about giving away chunks of Ukrainian land to the Russians — could not be further removed from Mr. Pence’s Reaganite vision of America defending freedom across the globe.But it’s not just Mr. Pence’s anti-populist policies that hobble him. It’s that Republican voters have sharply different expectations of their leaders than they did during Mr. Pence’s political rise as a member of Congress and then governor of Indiana.For the past seven years, Mr. Trump has trained Republican voters to value a different set of virtues in their candidates. He has trained them to value Republicans who fight hard and dirty, using whatever tactics are necessary to vanquish their opponents. He has also trained them to avert their gazes from behaviors that were once considered disqualifying.Mr. Pence averted his gaze for four years as Mr. Trump’s vice president, sticking with him through various controversies.Al Drago for The New York TimesFor four years, Mr. Pence, too, averted his gaze. He stuck with Mr. Trump through numerous controversies including the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia. He vouched for Mr. Trump’s character with skeptical evangelicals with whom Mr. Trump ultimately forged his own relationship.When Mr. Trump, as president, showered praise on the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his vice president, bound by loyalty, stayed silent. Yet recently on the campaign trail, after Mr. Trump had congratulated Mr. Kim for his country’s readmission to the World Health Organization’s executive board, Mr. Pence scolded his former boss for “praising the dictator in North Korea.”Mr. Pence may finally feel liberated to tell voters what he really thinks about Mr. Trump. His problem is that most Republicans don’t want to hear it. More

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      Chris Christie: Columnists and Writers Discuss His 2024 Candidacy.

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey.Candidate strength averagesRon DeSantis: 6.1Tim Scott: 4.6Nikki Haley: 3.5Mike Pence: 3.0Asa Hutchinson: 2.3Chris Christie: 2.0How seriously should we take Chris Christie’s candidacy?Frank Bruni Medium seriously, not for his minuscule potential to be the nominee but for his somewhat greater potential to diminish Donald Trump and to scramble the overall picture. Among Trump’s challengers, he has a singular combination of meanness and keenness, and he’s not vying for veep. He won’t walk on eggshells. He’ll do some vengeful, spiteful Jersey jitterbug on them.Jane Coaston Mildly.Michelle Cottle As a potential president, not very. As someone who could rough up Trump for the entire field — a political picador of sorts — he has potential.Ross Douthat Unless he invents a time dial that spins us back to 2012, the year he probably should have run for president, not seriously at all.David French There’s a distinction between Chris Christie’s presence in the race and his candidacy. His candidacy isn’t serious. There is zero path to victory. But his presence might matter, just as it did when he demolished Marco Rubio’s candidacy in a 2016 primary debate.Nicole Hemmer Chris Christie is a deeply unpopular politician, but he’s also a man on a mission: to take out Trump. Understood in that light, he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see which of Trump’s weaknesses he’s able to exploit.Katherine Mangu-Ward He’s having fun with it. So should we.Daniel McCarthy He’s not a plausible contender. But he must sense that he’s not any less plausible than the other alternatives to Donald Trump, so why not run?What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Bruni He’s not fashioning himself as Trump-plus, Trump-minus or any other improved version of Trump. He’s the anti-Trump, imploring Republicans to grapple with who Trump is and how far the party has staggered from its supposed principles. That’s a noble play even if it’s a self-aggrandizing ploy.Coaston He believes that there is a way to be a Republican that isn’t Trumpian, and he believes that Americans will respond to that version of the G.O.P.Cottle Well, someone needs to experiment with going hard at the MAGA king. If he can muster the will, Christie has skill.Douthat There’s a narrative in which having played a crucial role in Donald Trump’s 2016 ascent — shivving Trump’s rivals on the debate stage and then offering him an early endorsement — Christie will now play a crucial role in his downfall, by attacking Trump with the gusto he once brought to taking down Marco Rubio. But I’m not sure that Christie will even qualify for the debate stage; if he does, I suspect he’ll be strongly tempted to attack his non-Trump rivals as often as he swings at Trump; and even if he attacks Trump, I don’t think he’s particularly well positioned to prosecute the case.French Christie is a guided missile aimed rhetorically right at Trump.Hemmer Christie bullies well. In the 2016 primaries, he relished eviscerating Senator Rubio. He failed to do the same to Trump at the time, but seven years later, he has plenty of new material to work with.Mangu-Ward The conventional wisdom holds that Christie can take a bite out of Trump’s support by getting in some one-liners at the debates. But that gives too much weight to the debates themselves. There is simply no zinger zingy enough to bring down Trump — or to overcome Christie’s mixed record as a smart, accomplished governor whose pragmatism too often bleeds into the appearance of opportunism or even corruption.McCarthy He’ll make other not-Trumps seem bland by comparison. Christie’s ridicule won’t stop the ex-president but could maim anyone else unlucky enough to be its target.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Bruni Well, he’s wagering that America is better than Trump — that a critical mass of Republicans can finally grasp the Trump threat and see the Trump damage. I’m inspired by that possibility, no matter how remote.Coaston I don’t find his vision — a particular kind of American stasis — particularly inspiring or unsettling.Cottle Does he have one? Does it matter?Douthat Nothing in particular, since I don’t think he’s offering one yet.French By far the most inspiring aspect of Christie’s candidacy is his vision for a Trump-free G.O.P. By far the most unsettling is Christie’s previous sycophantic capitulation to the same man he attacks today. How much can any voter trust that Christie has learned his lesson?Hemmer People run for president for all sorts of reasons other than to become president: to promote new policies, break glass ceilings, increase book sales. Some mix of genuine concern for the party and vengeance (Trump booted Christie as transition chair in 2016 and most likely gave him a grave case of Covid in 2020) isn’t the worst reason to run.Mangu-Ward Christie’s vision of America seems to be one where Donald Trump is not president. For some, perhaps that is inspiring enough.McCarthy His vision for America is New Jersey, and most Republicans, at least, find that unsettling.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Christie candidacy?Bruni By the Iowa caucuses, Trump could be under multiple indictments and in such a flamboyant mental tailspin that Republicans must listen seriously to his rivals. Are they really going to prefer DeSantis’s whine to Christie’s roar?Coaston New Jersey normalcy.Cottle Takes a bully to smack a bully.Douthat Don’t want Trump? The rules are clear: Only a tristate-area Republican can defeat another tristate-area Republican.French No one is more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.Hemmer You want a straight-talking, no-holds-barred candidate who will pummel your enemies but stop short of fomenting an insurrection? Christie’s your guy.Mangu-Ward Spicy words, bland policies.McCarthy Wouldn’t it be fun to see him debate Joe Biden?Ross Douthat and David French are Times columnists.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer.Michelle Cottle (@mcottle) is a member of the Times’s editorial board.Jane Coaston is a Times Opinion writer.Nicole Hemmer (@pastpunditry) is an associate professor of history and director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” and “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review.”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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Doug Burgum, Wealthy North Dakota Governor, Enters Presidential Race

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      As the leader of a deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has promoted staunchly conservative policies, signing into law a near-total ban on abortion.Gov. Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota who rose from a chimney sweep to become one of the richest men in the state, announced a campaign for president on Wednesday, entering an increasingly crowded race in which he faces exceedingly long odds.“We need a new leader for a changing economy,” Mr. Burgum wrote in an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that focused heavily on his business acumen. He plans to appear at an event around midday in Fargo, N.D.The size of the field signals that former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has not scared off many challengers. But he has also yet to fully consolidate support behind his candidacy, and numerous rivals apparently see a path to the nomination, no matter how narrow it might be.As the leader of his deep-red state, Mr. Burgum has overseen a period of significant economic expansion and promoted staunchly conservative policies.This year, Mr. Burgum signed into law a near-total ban on abortion and created significant restrictions on gender transition care, including banning any requirements that teachers or school administrators use a student’s preferred pronouns.He is the second sitting governor to enter the race, after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has staked out aggressively conservative social policy positions and attracted the national spotlight for dust-ups with major corporations like Disney.Yet Mr. Burgum’s aides say he is planning a campaign less focused on social issues and more on his business background and fiscal stewardship of the state, which included cuts to both local property taxes and state income taxes. He is set to emphasize the economy, energy and national security in his early campaigning, viewing the current debate as too focused on social issues and not on voters’ biggest concerns.In a recent interview with the editorial board of The Fargo Forum, a local news outlet, Mr. Burgum said he believed that 60 percent of American voters had been neglected as the fringes dominated political debate.“All the engagement right now is occurring on the edge,” he said. “There’s definitely a yearning for some alternatives right now.”Though his national media appearances have been scarce, Mr. Burgum has been able to break through during debates over energy policy, offering a window into how he might frame his proposals in contrast to those of Republican rivals and of President Biden. In March, he told Fox News that the Biden administration’s economic plan was “disconnected from economics, it’s disconnected from physics and it’s disconnected from common sense.” He argued that Japan and other Asian countries were ripe markets for American energy exports.On Monday, his campaign sought to address his scant national name recognition with a glossy biography video in which the governor tells his life story, set to sweeping vistas of North Dakota bluffs and energy fields. His campaign’s confidence that he can rise from a relative unknown to legitimate candidate derives from his own political career in North Dakota. When Mr. Burgum announced his bid for governor in 2016, he was an outsider with little name recognition outside Fargo, and his main opponent, Wayne Stenehjem, the state attorney general, received the North Dakota Republican Party’s endorsement.But with ample resources and a campaign that ran to the right — Mr. Burgum endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in May 2016 — he cruised to a 20-percentage-point victory that The Bismarck Tribune proclaimed “upended the North Dakota Republican Party establishment.” He has not been seriously challenged in North Dakota since.“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” Mr. Burgum told The Fargo Forum. “That’s a competitive advantage.”As the only candidate not from the East Coast and with an upbringing deeply rooted in the rural Midwest, Mr. Burgum is likely to focus most of his efforts in Iowa, a state with an extensive agricultural community. Mr. Burgum grew up in Arthur, N.D., a town of barely 300 where his family owned the only grain elevator.While attending North Dakota State University as an undergraduate, Mr. Burgum began a chimney sweeping service in Fargo out of a friend’s pickup truck. His newfound business attracted the attention of local newspapers, who ran photos of a soot-laden Mr. Burgum clad in a tuxedo hopping from roof to roof, picking up roughly $40 per chimney.Mr. Burgum attached those newspaper clips to his applications for business school, and he soon enrolled in Stanford Business School. After earning his M.B.A. at Stanford, Mr. Burgum joined Great Plains Software, a Fargo company that specialized in accounting software, and quickly rose to chief executive.Far from the more fertile tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Mr. Burgum built Great Plains Software into a major industry player, eventually selling to Microsoft for $1.1 billion. He would then serve as a senior vice president at Microsoft until 2007.Mr. Burgum’s worth stretches into nine figures, certainly enough to help finance a nascent presidential run, and his aides expect his business network to help pull in major donors as well. But as of the start of his campaign, no super PAC or outside group has emerged supporting Mr. Burgum’s candidacy. More

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      Do Christie and Pence Make It 2016 Again? Not Yet.

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      A bigger field in the G.O.P. primary could chip away at DeSantis’s chances of overtaking Trump.A crowded field could help Donald Trump, as it did in 2015-16. Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressIt’s been feeling a bit like 2016 lately.Back then, the opposition to Donald J. Trump was badly divided. The party couldn’t coalesce behind one candidate, allowing Mr. Trump to win the Republican primary with well under half of the vote.With Mike Pence and Chris Christie bringing the field up to 10 candidates this week, it’s easy to wonder whether the same conditions might be falling into place again. Despite high hopes at the start of the year, Ron DeSantis has failed to consolidate Trump-skeptic voters and donors alike. Now, the likes of Mr. Pence and Mr. Christie — as well as Tim Scott and Nikki Haley — are in the fray and threatening to leave the Trump opposition hopelessly divided, as it was seven years ago.In the end, Mr. Pence or Mr. Christie might well break out and leave the opposition to Mr. Trump as fractured as it was in 2016. But it’s worth noting that, so far, the opposition to Mr. Trump has been far more unified than it ever was back then. It’s not 2016, at least not yet.So far this cycle, polls have consistently shown Mr. DeSantis with the support of a majority of Republican voters who don’t support Mr. Trump. Nothing like this happened in that past primary, when at various points five different candidates could claim to be the strongest “not-Trump” candidate, and none came even close to consolidating so much of the opposition to Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz got there eventually, but only after a majority of delegates had been awarded and it was down to him and John Kasich.Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. DeSantis’s share of not-Trump voters has remained constant, even though his own support has dropped. This suggests Mr. DeSantis has mainly bled support to Mr. Trump, not to another not-Trump rival. It also suggests that the other not-Trump candidates may have bled support to Mr. Trump over the last half year as well.Consolidation of Not-Trump Voters More

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      How Christie and Trump’s Friendship Flourished, Then Deteriorated

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      The two men had a relationship that could be genuinely warm, and at other times transactional. Now they are vying for the presidency in open hostility.Their friendship began after an introduction through Donald J. Trump’s sister. It ended nearly 20 years later, when Mr. Trump refused to concede the 2020 election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.In between, Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and Mr. Trump had a relationship that could be genuinely warm, with chats about politics and current events, and at other times transactional.Mr. Christie gave Mr. Trump a boost by endorsing his 2016 candidacy after ending his own bid for the Republican nomination, and then coached him for debates and led his initial presidential transition team. In return, Mr. Trump passed him over for the roles of vice president and attorney general.Mr. Trump eventually turned back to Mr. Christie for other advice during his term. But by the midway point of the presidency, Mr. Christie seemed content to be on the outside.Their last exchange was in August 2021, according to a person briefed on the matter, when the former president had an aide send Mr. Christie a testy message.Now, they have entered a new chapter: open hostility. Mr. Christie announced his second presidential campaign on Tuesday in New Hampshire, aiming to stop Mr. Trump from a second term in the White House.“I think he’s a coward and I think he’s a puppet of Putin,” Mr. Christie, speaking recently to the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, said of the man he once supported.Here’s a look back at how their relationship grew, thrived and then wilted.Casual Acquaintances, Then Presidential RivalsMr. Christie was a United States attorney in New Jersey, where Mr. Trump still had casinos, when the two men first dined together.That May 2002 introduction over dinner came through an intermediary, Maryanne Trump Barry, Mr. Trump’s older sister, who was a federal judge in the state at the time and described Mr. Trump to Mr. Christie as “my little brother.” In Mr. Christie’s 2019 memoir, “Let Me Finish,” he wrote about his first impressions of Mr. Trump, who in two years would begin his run as the star of the reality TV show “The Apprentice.”“Donald was opinionated,” Mr. Christie wrote. “He was bombastic. He was entertaining. He talked about his business with infectious enthusiasm and considerable detail. I came away with the impression that public Donald and the private Donald were pretty much one and the same.”It was soon clear that Mr. Christie could end up as a candidate for governor someday. He won the office in his first attempt, in 2009, two years before Mr. Trump considered running for the White House against President Barack Obama.Mr. Christie won the governorship in 2009 alongside Kim Guadagno, who served as lieutenant governor.Jeff Zelevansky/ReutersBoth men knew each other in the way that prominent people in the New York media market tend to: casually, with paths that periodically crossed.In 2015, both Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump ended up declaring presidential candidacies.Mr. Christie, by then hobbled by the “Bridgegate” political retribution scandal, had nonetheless fashioned a national political brand as a straight-talking candidate.By contrast, some viewed Mr. Trump as a sideshow who would eventually fade, even as he was leading in the polls. At the time, Mr. Trump told Mr. Christie privately that he didn’t expect his campaign to last beyond October 2015.Their relationship began to be tested. Two months after Mr. Trump’s entrance into the race, Mr. Christie told Fox News that the New York businessman didn’t have the “temperament” or experience to be president. Mr. Trump taunted Mr. Christie for being absent from New Jersey, where he was still governor.Ultimately, Mr. Trump overshadowed his newfound rival — and all other rivals — with an endless stream of inflammatory pronouncements, including a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country.Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump traded barbs after they both entered the race for their party’s presidential nomination.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Trump saved his most hostile barbs for candidates other than Mr. Christie. In turn, the governor trained his most aggressive fire on Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during a debate in New Hampshire shortly before the state’s primary, mocking him for a “memorized 25-second speech.”But after staking his candidacy on New Hampshire, Mr. Christie finished a dismal sixth and dropped out of the race.A Key Ally, Up to a PointWhen Mr. Trump won the South Carolina primary, Mr. Christie told allies the writing was on the wall — it was clear Mr. Trump was on track to become the nominee.“I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump for president of the United States,” Mr. Christie said at an endorsement event in Florida in February 2016, as astonished reporters watched him praise Mr. Trump’s candidacy. After Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Christie was one of the first prominent Republicans to endorse Mr. Trump at a time when the party’s leadership was still trying to stop his ascent.Soon, Mr. Christie was a key adviser to Mr. Trump. He was also for a time considered as a potential running mate, but some of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including members of his family, argued against it. (Mr. Christie had also prosecuted the father of Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner years earlier, and Mr. Kushner was opposed to the selection of Mr. Christie.)After Mr. Christie endorsed Mr. Trump, he became a member of Mr. Trump’s inner circle and helped lead his transition to the White House.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesMr. Trump ultimately chose Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, who had been introduced to Mr. Trump through Mr. Christie.Mr. Trump tried to keep Mr. Christie on the hook, the former governor wrote in his memoir, insisting in a phone call to Mr. Christie that he hadn’t decided on his running mate yet, even as he made plans to fly Mr. Pence to New York for a news conference.Mr. Christie led Mr. Trump’s preparations for the general-election debates against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. But after the October 2016 release of a recording in which Mr. Trump described grabbing women by their genitals, Mr. Trump privately griped that Mr. Christie had not more vocally backed him.Mr. Christie also served as the head of his transition team, a job from which he was dismissed shortly after Election Day by Mr. Kushner; Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist for Mr. Trump; and Reince Priebus, who would become Mr. Trump’s first White House chief of staff.Behind the Scenes, DistancingMr. Trump asked Mr. Christie to lead a task force on opioids, an issue Mr. Christie had been concerned about as governor. Mr. Christie was also said to be a personal favorite of Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania.As president, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Christie to lead a task force on opioids but passed over Mr. Christie for other roles in his administration.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump decided against giving him the job of attorney general, which went to Mr. Sessions. Instead, Mr. Christie has said, the president offered him various roles at different points, including labor secretary and secretary of the Homeland Security Department.Mr. Trump also took a suggestion from Mr. Christie as to who could replace the fired F.B.I. director, James A. Comey. It was Mr. Christie’s lawyer during the Bridgegate scandal, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed and remains atop the agency. Mr. Trump soon started complaining that Mr. Wray was not doing what he wanted at the agency, and blamed Mr. Christie for a nomination that Mr. Trump had put forward.Mr. Christie took himself out of consideration to succeed John F. Kelly as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff at the end of 2018 after Mr. Trump had offered the job to Mr. Christie. By then, it had become clear that Mr. Trump was cycling through staff members and firing them at a rapid clip.In February 2020, Mr. Trump pardoned a former software chief executive whose clemency Mr. Christie had lobbied for.That year, Mr. Christie wrote Mr. Trump a lengthy memo instructing him how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. It was ignored.Mr. Christie’s relationship with the president grew increasingly strained and later severed after the 2020 presidential election, when Mr. Christie said he advised Mr. Trump to concede to Joseph R. Biden Jr.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Trump brought Mr. Christie in for debate preparations once again, and some of his aides faulted Mr. Christie when Mr. Trump’s initial debate against Mr. Biden was disastrous. (Mr. Trump appeared physically unwell at the debate and may have already been affected by the coronavirus; the news of his Covid diagnosis came days later.)When both Mr. Trump and Mr. Christie were hospitalized with serious bouts of Covid shortly after that debate, Mr. Trump called his debate coach at the hospital. “Are you going to say you got it from me?” Mr. Trump asked Mr. Christie, the former governor later recounted in his second book, “Republican Rescue.” They both recovered, but Mr. Christie made clear he thought he should have worn a mask at the prep sessions, angering Mr. Trump.BreakupHours after Election Day ended, when Mr. Trump delivered a speech claiming widespread fraud, Mr. Christie, by then a contributor for ABC News, said on air that Mr. Trump needed to offer proof.In an interview with The New York Times in November 2022, Mr. Christie said he had last spoken with Mr. Trump in December 2020, after the president saw him deride Mr. Trump’s legal team on television. Mr. Christie told him he should concede the election to Mr. Biden and host the president-elect in the White House.“He told me he would never, ever, ever, ever do that,” Mr. Christie said. “And that was the last time we spoke.”In 2021, Mr. Trump described Mr. Christie as an “opportunist” to a reporter. Four months later, he had an aide send Mr. Christie a printout of a tweet by Mr. Christie related to the pardon that he had sought for the former software executive. “Chris,” he wrote, according to the person briefed on it, “How quickly people (some) forget – Best Wishes,” with his signature.Mr. Christie responded cordially, wishing Mr. Trump well.Shane Goldmacher More