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      Trump Weighs Skipping Primary Debates

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      He took swipes at President Biden, Ron DeSantis and the Reagan presidential library during an event in New Hampshire.Former President Donald J. Trump used a campaign rally on Thursday in New Hampshire to add to his arguments that it was not worth his time to debate his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, casting himself as the party’s undeclared nominee.Standing in front of several hundred supporters in a New England state that was a springboard for his election in 2016, Mr. Trump said that he held a commanding polling advantage in the 2024 Republican primary, months before any voting would begin. He has been posting similar themes on his social media site, Truth Social.He said that giving his G.O.P. rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, an opening on a debate stage made no sense.“Why would you do that?” he told the crowd at a DoubleTree hotel in Manchester. In 2019, then as president, he considered skipping any presidential debates for the 2020 race before ultimately debating the Democrats’ nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr.And on Thursday he jumped straight to the general election, saying, “I do look forward to the debate with Joe.”Mr. Biden declared on Tuesday that he would seek a second term. His predecessor claimed at his rally, without evidence, that the video Mr. Biden released to announce his re-election campaign “took supposedly seven takes to get it right.” The video features a montage of scenes from Mr. Biden’s presidency and only a few short clips where he spoke to the camera.Citing a recent Emerson College poll, Mr. Trump noted that 62 percent of G.O.P. primary voters indicated that they would support him, compared with 16 percent for Mr. DeSantis, who has not yet declared his candidacy. No other Republican was in double digits.“He’s crashing and burning,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. DeSantis, suggesting that he had benefited in the past from his association with Mr. Trump but that he was now struggling to get a foothold on his own.Mr. Trump has never shied away from broadsides against other Republicans, something Ronald Reagan famously frowned upon in what became known as the 11th Commandment. And in New Hampshire, Reagan’s presidential library was a target for Mr. Trump, who questioned its selection as the venue for the second G.O.P. primary debate. He pointed out that Frederick J. Ryan Jr., the publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, another frequent Trump target, was chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute.Representatives for the institute did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and The Post declined to comment.Separately on Thursday in Manhattan, lawyers for Mr. Trump appeared in a federal courtroom to defend him in a case brought by E. Jean Carroll, a former magazine columnist, who has accused Mr. Trump of raping her nearly three decades ago.Mr. Trump, who has denied the accusation, avoided mentioning the trial during the rally. However, he bemoaned his various other legal entanglements and alluded to his indictment this month by a New York grand jury on charges that he had concealed hush-money payments to a former porn star.He faces further legal peril. A federal investigation, in the hands of a special counsel, is investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat at the polls in 2020 and also his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. And a Georgia prosecutor is in the final stages of an investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election results in that state.While Mr. Trump has opened up a polling lead, the Republican field is fluid and appears likely to expand. It includes Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and a United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration; Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas; and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.Another Republican who is entertaining a run is New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, who recently said that Mr. Trump’s losing streak could continue in 2024. He has cited Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020 and Republican midterm losses in 2018 and 2022.Mr. Trump bristled at G.O.P. skeptics, singling out Mr. Sununu, whose name elicited boos from the crowd.“Isn’t he a nasty guy?” Mr. Trump said, criticizing Mr. Sununu’s decision to run for re-election as governor instead of for Senate during last year’s midterm elections.Mr. Sununu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      Major G.O.P. Donor’s Commitment to DeSantis Is Murkier Than Thought

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      The hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, who seemed set to be a powerful financial backer of the Florida governor, is said to still be evaluating the Republican primary race.Nearly six months ago, Kenneth Griffin, the Republican megadonor and hedge fund executive, seemed poised to be a powerful financial backer of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his anticipated run for president.Mr. Griffin had given $5 million to Mr. DeSantis’s re-election effort, and he told Politico that while Mr. DeSantis was not yet a White House candidate, “he has a tremendous record as governor of Florida, and our country would be well served by him as president.”These days, Mr. Griffin is keeping his cards closer to the vest, and his intentions are harder to discern. A person familiar with his thinking, noting that Mr. DeSantis had not yet made his run official, said Mr. Griffin was still evaluating the Republican primary race as it unfolded.The financier and Mr. DeSantis met in Florida in the last two weeks, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting, which came as Mr. Griffin has taken issue in private conversations with some of Mr. DeSantis’s policy moves and pronouncements. In particular, the two people said, Mr. Griffin was deeply troubled by Mr. DeSantis’s statements that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a “territorial dispute” — a remark he later tried to clarify — and that the war was not a vital U.S. interest.Mr. Griffin, who has made clear that he wants to move on from former President Donald J. Trump, was also disconcerted by a six-week abortion ban in Florida that Mr. DeSantis recently signed, according to the people familiar with Mr. Griffin’s thinking, who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. Last year, Mr. Griffin moved his hedge fund, Citadel, to Miami from Chicago, citing crime concerns.The meeting between the governor and Mr. Griffin was, for the most part, one on one, without staff members, one of the people briefed on it said, and it was one of their few direct interactions. Reading Mr. Griffin’s intentions after the meeting has been difficult for some people close to him.One person predicted the financier was still likely to donate to Mr. DeSantis once he made his candidacy official, which could happen as early as next month. But the person said Mr. Griffin might also give to other candidates who seemed able to defeat Mr. Trump.In a statement, Zia Ahmed, a spokesman for Mr. Griffin, ticked off Mr. DeSantis’s “many accomplishments” and mentioned job creation, “increasing the number of quality school options, and prioritizing the safety of our communities.”He went on, “Ken may not agree with all of the governor’s policies, but he appreciates all that the governor has done to make Florida one of the most attractive states to live and work in America.”Kenneth Griffin has made clear that he would like the Republican Party to move beyond former President Donald J. Trump.Mike Blake/ReutersBut Mr. Ahmed declined to address what Mr. Griffin thought about the presidential race. A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.What Mr. Griffin does is being closely watched, after word spread of his unhappiness about how Mr. DeSantis had comported himself early this year.Mr. DeSantis’s supporters say there is still a broad appetite — in the donor community and among prospective voters — for a viable Republican alternative to Mr. Trump.“The money has walked,” said Roy Bailey, a Dallas businessman and longtime Republican fund-raiser for Mr. Trump. “From my conversations with a lot of people from around the country, it has moved to DeSantis. It is a cold, hard fact.”Mr. Bailey disputed the idea that momentum had shifted away from Mr. DeSantis recently.In the first two weeks of May, Mr. DeSantis is set to host a series of small dinners with major donors and supporters from across the country at the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, according to two people with knowledge of his plans.If Mr. DeSantis enters the presidential race as expected, he will be armed with a well-funded super PAC, Never Back Down, which said this month that it had raised $30 million in its first few weeks of fund-raising.Two-thirds of that money, $20 million, came from a single donor, the Nevada hotel magnate Robert Bigelow, Time magazine reported.In private conversations, Mr. DeSantis’s associates have indicated that they have $100 million in commitments to the super PAC, along with roughly $82 million in a Florida committee that will probably be transferred to Never Back Down.Still, some donors who had hoped Mr. DeSantis could stop Mr. Trump have cooled their enthusiasm.Thomas Peterffy, a prominent conservative donor, also cited Florida’s abortion law in explaining why he was withholding support from Mr. DeSantis for now. Mr. Peterffy had supported Mr. DeSantis in his state campaigns, and according to one person familiar with the event, hosted Mr. DeSantis at his house early in his first term as governor. But Mr. Peterffy told The Financial Times this month he was holding still, as were some friends.Some donors have also expressed concern about Mr. DeSantis’s pre-campaign strategy. When his allies made clear this year that he would not enter the race before the end of the legislative session in Florida, Mr. DeSantis effectively gave Mr. Trump three months to define him — and taunt him — before becoming a candidate. More

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      Trump Endorsed by Senator Daines of Montana, a Key Republican Fund-Raiser

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      Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, cited the former president’s accomplishments on issues like immigration.Former President Donald J. Trump has secured one of his most important Capitol Hill endorsements for a 2024 presidential bid: Senator Steve Daines of Montana, the chairman of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.While top Republicans in the Senate have been lukewarm about the prospects of another election cycle dominated by Mr. Trump, the endorsement gives him a foothold with a key party fund-raiser.“I’m proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for president of the United States,” Mr. Daines said during a Monday night appearance on “Triggered,” the podcast of Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son and an occasional hunting buddy for Mr. Daines.He added that the “best four years” he’d had in the Senate was when Mr. Trump was president. And Mr. Daines ticked off a list of accomplishments that he said Mr. Trump had recorded, on issues like immigration.“That’s absolutely awesome,” Mr. Trump Jr. replied.Mr. Trump has notched a string of congressional endorsements, but Mr. Daines, the chairman of the Senate campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has outsize influence. Mr. Daines is in constant contact with the wealthiest donors in Republican politics, who have been reluctant to support Mr. Trump, even as he asserts himself as the clear front-runner less than a year out from the primaries. If Mr. Daines vouches for the former president as he works the donor circuit, it may bolster what has been until now fairly lackluster fund-raising from the Trump campaign.Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, are not on speaking terms, and his supporter in the Senate with the most seniority was Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.Yet for Mr. Daines, the decision was a relatively safe move. With a closer relationship, Mr. Trump could support the Senate candidates backed by Mr. Daines’s committee — or at least avoid attacking the committee’s preferred candidates. Mr. Daines’s relationship with Mr. Trump Jr. is also seen as an important conduit between the Senate and the Trump operation.Mr. Daines and Mr. Trump Jr. began the interview bantering about their past hunting trips but Mr. Daines eventually spoke of how Republicans have a “once a decade” opportunity to pick up seats with a favorable map in 2024. If Republicans failed, he warned, they could remain in the minority “for the rest of the decade.” Before he endorsed Mr. Trump, during the interview, Mr. Daines talked about the power that strength at the top of the ticket could mean in the Senate races.Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has faced some difficulty connecting with potential supporters as he works toward making his candidacy official. Both hopefuls have pushed for endorsements in Congress. While Mr. Trump has collected dozens, Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, has secured just a handful. The people endorsing Mr. Trump have been quick to praise his personal touch.In the 2022 cycle, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Rick Scott, took a largely hands-off approach to the primaries. Mr. McConnell lamented the “candidate quality” of those who had emerged from primaries, and several Republicans aligned with Mr. Trump went on to lose key battlegrounds in November, including Don Bolduc in New Hampshire and Blake Masters in Arizona, both of whom party strategists had predicted would be weak nominees.Mr. Daines has taken a different approach. He has endorsed Representative Jim Banks for an open Senate seat in Indiana and has courted other candidates, including David McCormick, the former hedge fund executive who lost a Senate primary in Pennsylvania last year, to run again.Still, Senate Republicans are facing a gantlet of potential 2024 primaries, and the party leadership is worried that weak potential candidates could yet again hinder Republicans in November, including in Mr. Daines’s home state, Montana.In West Virginia, for instance, national Republicans have wooed Gov. Jim Justice, a billionaire former governor, to run against Senator Joe Manchin III, a Democrat who faces a tough re-election fight in a state that Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in 2020. Mr. Justice is expected to enter the race on Thursday, but Representative Alex X. Mooney, who won a fierce Republican primary in 2022 with Mr. Trump’s endorsement, has already entered the contest.Other states that may feature thorny Republican primaries include Arizona, where the former television newscaster Kari Lake, who lost her 2022 bid for governor, may run for Senate in 2024, and Pennsylvania, where Doug Mastriano, who badly lost a 2022 governor’s race, is looking at a Senate run.“The primary is ours to walk away with,” Mr. Mastriano said in an interview on Monday with the conservative radio host John Fredericks. “We have the base. We are the base.”Mr. Mastriano is the type of nominee Mr. Daines is seeking to avoid. “His last race demonstrated he can’t win a general,” Mr. Daines said last month. More

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      How Democrats Learned to Embrace Biden 2024

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      The president, who is expected to formally announce his re-election campaign this week, has won the full support of his party despite questions about his age and middling approval ratings.As President Biden nears the formal announcement of his 2024 re-election bid, one of the most important developments of the campaign is something that hasn’t happened at all: No serious primary challenger ever emerged.Mr. Biden has all but cleared the field despite concerns about his age — at 80, he is already the oldest American president in history — and the persistent misgivings about the president held by a large number of the party’s voters. Democrats yearn for a fresh face in 2024, according to repeated polls, they just don’t know who that would be.After Democrats won more races than expected in the 2022 midterm elections, any energy to challenge Mr. Biden quickly dissipated. The left has stayed in line even as Mr. Biden has lately made more explicit appeals toward the center. And would-be rivals have stayed on the sidelines.The early entry of Donald J. Trump into the race immediately clarified that the stakes in 2024 would be just as high for Democrats as they were in 2020. The former president has proved to be the greatest unifying force in Democratic politics in the last decade, and the same factors that caused the party to rally behind Mr. Biden then are still present today. Add to that the advantages of holding the White House and any challenge seemed more destined to bruise Mr. Biden than to best him.Plans are now in place for Mr. Biden to formally begin a 2024 campaign as early as Tuesday with a low-key video timed with the anniversary of his campaign kickoff four years ago. It is a rollout that many Democrats are greeting more with a sense of stoicism than enthusiasm.“We need stability,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a progressive who won his seat in 2020 by ousting an older, more moderate incumbent in a primary. “Biden provides that.”“We need stability,” Representative Jamaal Bowman said.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesSkating to a second nomination was not always guaranteed. Mr. Biden, as the incumbent president, was obviously the prohibitive favorite. But people close to the White House have been surprised at the speed with which the full spectrum of the party has gone from hand-wringing about Mr. Biden to almost unanimous acclamation, at least in public.Maria Cardona, a Democratic National Committee member and party strategist, has been confounded by the doubts around Mr. Biden as the Democrats’ best bet, especially against a 76-year-old Mr. Trump, who remains the Republican front-runner.“Regardless of the reservations, regardless of the worry that he is getting up there in age — and he is, and that is going to be a question that he and the campaign are going to have to contend with — when his counterpart is almost as old as he is but is so opposite of what this country deserves, then it’s a no-brainer,” she said.For now, the only announced challengers to Mr. Biden are Marianne Williamson, whose last run amounted to an asterisk in the 2020 campaign, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is leveraging his family name to promote his anti-vaccine views.“Democrats complain that he might be too old,” Ms. Cardona added. “But then, when they’re asked, ‘Well, who?’ There is no one else.”Prominent and ambitious governors, including Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, made clear they would not contest Mr. Biden’s nomination, as did the runners-up from 2020. And many party insiders have soured on the political potential of the next-in-line option, Vice President Kamala Harris.Representative Raúl Grijalva, a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the left was laser-focused on “the fight against the isms: fascism, racism, sexism.” That has overshadowed Mr. Biden’s age, said the 75-year-old Mr. Grijalva: “I think why it hasn’t been a bigger issue is we don’t believe in ageism either.”“If we are eliminating people because of how old they are,” he said, “I don’t think that would be fair and equitable.”“If we are eliminating people because of how old they are,” said Representative Raúl Grijalva, “I don’t think that would be fair and equitable.” Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s poll numbers among Democrats remain middling. An NBC News poll this month said 70 percent of all Americans — including 51 percent of Democrats — felt that Mr. Biden should not run for a second term. If Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wins the Republican nomination, the general election contest could be more difficult for Mr. Biden. Mr. DeSantis, 44, has been polling better than Mr. Trump in a hypothetical November matchup.Privately, some major Biden donors and fund-raisers continue to fret about his durability both in a campaign and a second term. Those who raised or donated $1 million or more in 2020 were invited to a private gathering this Friday with the president.One wealthy donor had considered circulating a letter this year to urge Mr. Biden not to run before the person was dissuaded by associates because it would have been for naught and have served to embarrass Mr. Biden, according to a person familiar with the episode who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Some contributors have described being in a state of suspended and suppressed angst: fully yet nervously behind Mr. Biden.Democrats generally and the White House in particular know well the modern history of presidential re-election campaigns and that nearly all the recent incumbents to lose faced serious primary challenges: George H.W. Bush in 1992, Jimmy Carter in 1980, Gerald Ford in 1976 and, before he withdrew and Democrats ultimately lost, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.Combine that pattern with the specter of a second Trump presidency and Democrats have snapped almost uniformly into a loyalist formation, especially after the party averted a red wave and the kind of losses last fall that many had predicted.“People recognized he was the one candidate who could defeat Donald Trump and protect American democracy,” Representative David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who was previously in the Democratic leadership, said of Mr. Biden’s nomination in 2020. “It’s still the case.”“People recognized he was the one candidate who could defeat Donald Trump and protect American democracy,” Representative David Cicilline said of Mr. Biden.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMr. Biden further smoothed his pathway by pushing through the most substantive change in the Democratic primary calendar in decades. He pushed to shift the first-in-the-nation status on the nominating calendar from Iowa, an overwhelmingly white state with a progressive streak (where Mr. Biden finished in fourth place), to South Carolina, where Black voters resurrected his campaign in 2020.During his first two years, Mr. Biden built up considerable good will among progressives, embracing many of the left’s priorities, including canceling student loan debt, and keeping a far more open line of communication with the party’s left-most flank than the previous two Democratic administrations. He has signed landmark bills that have been progressive priorities, including climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act and a temporary child-tax credit.Some Biden advisers credit the unity task forces created after the 2020 primary as the key starting point. Liberal activists say Ron Klain, the former White House chief of staff, had an unusual open-door policy.“Bernie wasn’t calling up Rahm Emanuel in the early Obama years to talk policy,” said Ari Rabin-Havt, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Bernie Sanders and a Democratic strategist. Of Mr. Biden, he said that most progressives on Capitol Hill would grade him with “an exceeds expectations check mark.”Now Mr. Biden is relying on the left’s residual appreciation as he tacks toward the center. He has talked about the need for deficit reduction in 2023, signed a Republican measure to overturn a progressive local Washington crime law and approved a new oil drilling project in Alaska.“I continue to be frustrated when I see him moving to the center because I don’t see a real need to do that,” said Mr. Bowman, the New York Democrat. “It’s almost like a pandering to a Republican talking point.”“Biden has been on a legislative tear, tackling Democratic priorities that had been unachieved for decades,” Representative Eric Swalwell said.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIn 2020, Representative Eric Swalwell of California briefly ran for president in the Democratic primary and then urged Mr. Biden to “pass the torch” to the next generation. Four years later, Mr. Swalwell is all aboard for a second Biden term, saying the president’s ability to pass significant legislation has bound the party together.“I feared after the 2020 election that it would be impossible for Biden to govern with the thinnest of majorities in the House and Senate,” he said. “Instead, Biden has been on a legislative tear, tackling Democratic priorities that had been unachieved for decades.”Many Democrats see Mr. Biden as the party’s best chance to limit losses among white voters without college degrees — the nation’s biggest bloc of voters — a group that Mr. Trump has pulled away from the Democrats.“Blue-collar workers used to always be our folks,” Mr. Biden lamented to donors at a private residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in January, highlighting his focus on winning back those voters. “A lot of people think we left them behind,” Mr. Biden told the donors. “And it has to do more with attitude and — than it does with policy.”The relative Democratic success in the midterms — picking up a Senate seat and only ceding the House to Republicans by five seats — served as a reminder that despite his own weak polling numbers, Mr. Biden has not hurt his party so far.“Nothing,” Mr. Swalwell said, “unites like success.” More

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      DeSantis Is Letting Trump Humiliate Him

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      Watching the nascent Republican primary race, I have a sickening sense of déjà vu. As much as I abhor Donald Trump’s opponents, I’m desperate for one of them to prevail. Trump might be easier for Joe Biden to beat, but anyone who gets the Republican nomination has a chance of being elected, and the possibility of another Trump term is intolerable. So it’s harrowing to see Trump abetted, again, by the cowardice of his opponents.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was supposed to stop Donald Trump, is deflating before even entering the race, with his poll numbers softening and donors fretting. Trump, meanwhile, seems more buoyed than hindered by his ever-proliferating scandals, and is racking up endorsements at DeSantis’s expense. There are several explanations for why this is happening, including the backlash to Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s near total lack of charisma, and concern among Republican elites about the sweeping abortion ban he just signed. But there’s another dynamic at work here, and I think it’s the big one: Like Trump’s 2016 rivals, DeSantis is making the mistake of believing that the primary race is about issues, while Trump instinctively understands that it’s about dominance.Dueling super PAC attack ads about Social Security and Medicare illustrate DeSantis’s problem. The ad from the Trump camp is inspired by reporting about DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers on an airplane. Over a nauseating video of a man messily consuming chocolate pudding with his hands, the spot says, “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements.” But the policy argument is just an excuse for the disgusting visuals; the point is not to disagree with DeSantis, but to humiliate him.The ad from DeSantis’s allies misses this point entirely. It attempts to fact-check the claims in the pro-Trump spot with video of DeSantis promising to protect Social Security, then tries to turn the tables by airing a clip of Trump saying that “at some point” he’ll “take a look” at entitlements. “Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Governor DeSantis,” the ad continues — whining about Trump’s aggression rather than countering it.This approach didn’t work in 2016 and it’s not working now. Witness the parade of Florida Republicans turning their back on DeSantis and bending the knee to Trump with their endorsements.Republican attempts to outflank Trump from the right, a strategy tried by Ted Cruz in 2016, are also falling flat again. Before Mike Pence’s speech to the National Rifle Association last week, Politico reported that the former vice president was aiming “to get to the right of Donald Trump on guns, bringing debates the two once had behind closed doors in the White House into the public eye.” Pence ended up getting booed by the crowd and then mocked by his former boss.The upcoming Republican primary race, like the last one, is going to be fought on a limbic level, not an ideological one. It will be about who is weak and who is strong. That’s why, if Republicans want a non-Trump candidate in 2024, they’re going to have to find someone willing to tear him down. I understand that this is made difficult by the fact that Republican primary voters often seem excited by Trump’s most repulsive qualities, including his authoritarianism, rapacious greed, incitements to violence, friendly relations with white supremacists and antisemites, and the corruption that’s already led to multiple felony charges. It’s also hard to tar Trump as a loser when so much of the right-wing base believes the fantasy that in 2020 he actually won.Nevertheless, it’s worth thinking about how Trump would take on a candidate like Trump. I don’t think he’d do it with passive-aggressive sniping, like when DeSantis, while attacking the New York district attorney Alvin Bragg for indicting Trump, worked in a dig about the ex-president paying “hush money to a porn star.” Trump, faced with an opponent who had Trump’s own flaws, would just blast away at them all until he found something that stuck.Trump’s approach to DeSantis’s war on Disney is instructive. Until approximately five minutes ago, DeSantis’s willingness to do battle with ostensibly “woke” corporations — even a giant of Florida tourism like Disney — was part of his appeal. But Trump didn’t try to show that he’d be even harder on Disney than DeSantis has been. Instead, he trolled DeSantis by taking Disney’s side, taunting the governor for getting “destroyed” by Disney and speculating that the company would stop investing in Florida. There is, so far, little sign that this is hurting Trump, even though the right has spent months demonizing Disney, a company Tucker Carlson compared to a “sex offender.” Consistent displays of dominance matter more to Republicans than consistent displays of principle.This doesn’t mean that Republican candidates should try to copy Trump’s insult comic act; they’ll almost certainly fail if they do. But they need to be, to use a Trumpish word, tough. As House speaker, Nancy Pelosi managed to repeatedly emasculate Trump not because she imitated him, but because she treated him like a petulant child. Most of Trump’s would-be Republican rivals, on the other hand, are treating him like an unstable father, fantasizing about supplanting him even as they cower in fear of his wrath.An exception is the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who understands that you can’t beat Trump without fighting him. “I don’t believe that Republican voters penalize people who criticize Trump,” he told Politico, adding, “If you think you’re a better person to be president than Donald Trump, then you better make that case.” Whether Christie can make it is hard to say, given that he’s already abased himself before Trump more than once. But he’s right that no one’s going to defeat Trump until they stop acting scared of him.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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      Christie, in New Hampshire, Reconnects With 2016 Supporters

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      The former New Jersey governor is testing a campaign as Donald Trump’s most vocal critic in the Republican field.Don’t ask Chris Christie what “lane” there is for him in the Republican primary. Don’t ask how someone polling at 1 percent, who is sharply critical of Donald J. Trump, could possibly win the 2024 nomination when the party base has no tolerance for attacks on the former president.“I think there’s this fiction about lanes,” Mr. Christie said on Thursday in New Hampshire, his second exploratory visit in a month. “There is one lane, OK? There are not multiple lanes. At the front of that lane right now is Donald Trump. If you want to win the Republican nomination for president, you have to beat Donald Trump and get to the front of that lane.”Mr. Christie, the former two-term governor of New Jersey and unsuccessful 2016 presidential candidate, was visiting the Republicans’ first primary state as part of a trial period that he said would culminate by mid-May in a decision about a 2024 run.He spoke to a small group of reporters who came to observe him in a discussion with a dozen people at a residential treatment program for drug-addicted pregnant women. Addiction is an issue Mr. Christie has long been passionate about, and he visited the same program, Hope on Haven Hill, eight years ago while running for president. “I thought before Covid that this is the public health crisis of our generation, and I’m even more convinced now the Covid has passed that it is,” he told the group.Afterward, he portrayed the visit as an exercise in reconnecting with people who had supported his 2016 campaign, which ended abruptly after his sixth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary, despite intensive campaigning in the state. He also met this week in Washington with former donors and campaign employees to gauge their reactions to a new run.It’s clear that Mr. Christie sees potential in being the most outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, whom he has bashed over 2020 election lies as well as for Republican defeats in the past three national elections.But that tack may be a losing proposition. Republicans have been abandoning the most prominent Trump alternative, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, to rally around the former president. A poll this week of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center showed Mr. DeSantis falling to 22 percent, from 43 percent in a January survey by the same pollster. Mr. Trump far outdistanced rivals, at 42 percent. Mr. Christie was at 1 percent.“I don’t think that anybody is going to beat Donald Trump by sidling up to him, playing footsie with him and pretending that you’re almost like him,” Mr. Christie said. “I’m going to tell people the facts about his presidency and about his conduct. If they decide they want that again, that’s up to them.”Later on Thursday, Mr. Christie held a town hall-style event at New England College in Henniker, N.H. He spoke to about 100 students and a smattering of adults seated in a semicircle of white folding chairs.He ran through a menu of what he identified as Mr. Trump’s policy failures in office, then took aim at his urging supporters to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which Mr. Trump passively watched on TV. “And when he saw that, you know what he did? He ate his well-done cheeseburger, and sat there and did nothing.”He expressed disgust that Republicans would think of renominating Mr. Trump. “Donald Trump is a TV star. Nothing more, nothing less,” Mr. Christie said. “And let me suggest to you that if we put it back to the White House, the reruns will be worse than the original show.”Mr. Christie, who was one of the most combative governors of the modern era — eager to joust with lawmakers, hecklers or New Jersey residents who confronted him in forums — claimed, nonetheless, that what the country needed is a return to civility, and he was just the one to restore it.It did not prevent him, though, from getting in a jab at President Biden’s age. Should the president win a second term, Mr. Christie suggested, he might well die in office and be succeeded by his vice president. “A vote for Donald Trump,” he said, implying that he would surely lose, “is a vote for Kamala Harris.”Taking questions, Mr. Christie was asked by a teenager whether, given Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy, he would have voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Mr. Christie demurred. He still would have supported Mr. Trump, he said, because he preferred his policies.Afterward, voters said that they appreciated Mr. Christie’s candor but that it was too early to commit to backing him.“I hope he runs. I think it’d be good to see him in the mix this year,” said J.P. Marzullo, a retiree and former Republican state representative from Deering, N.H., who supported Mr. Christie in 2016. But he wanted to play the field. “I’m still looking at some other people right now,” he said.Josh Merriam, 19, a student from Gilford, N.H., said the evening was “the first presidential hearing-thing I’ve ever been to,” and said his interest was piqued by Mr. Christie. “I do like Trump,” he said, but then he quoted back Mr. Christie’s warning that a Trump vote was akin to a vote for Ms. Harris. That was not a prospect he cared to contemplate. More

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      DeSantis’s Electability Pitch Wobbles, Despite G.O.P. Losses Under Trump

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      The former president’s rivals are seeking to tap into Republican frustration with recent election disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024, but it is proving to be a tough sell.Ron DeSantis knows the statistics by heart.He ticks them off as he contrasts his sweeping re-election as Florida governor with Republican losses nationwide last fall: a flip of traditionally “very blue” Miami-Dade County; the narrowness of his 2018 victory versus his landslide in 2022; the remarkable Republican voter registration gains in the state on his watch.“There is no substitute for victory,” Mr. DeSantis said last week during his first trip to New Hampshire in his still-undeclared presidential bid. He denounced the “culture of losing” that he said had engulfed Republicans in recent years, swiping at Donald J. Trump in all but name.“If the election of 2024 is a referendum on Joe Biden and his failed policies — and we provide a fresh vision for American renewal — Republicans will win the White House, the House and the U.S. Senate,” he told the crowd. “So we cannot get distracted, and we cannot afford to lose, because freedom is hanging in the balance.”Electability has emerged as one of the early pressure points in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.That amorphous, ill-defined, eye-of-the-beholder intangible — the sense of whether voters believe a politician can actually win — was supposed to be one of Mr. DeSantis’s strengths, tapping into the genuine Republican frustration with years of ballot box disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024. Republicans lost with Mr. Trump, the argument goes, but can win with Mr. DeSantis.But there are growing questions about Mr. DeSantis’s own ability to win over the independent and suburban voters who delivered the White House to President Biden, and whether the hard-line stances the governor has taken, including on abortion, will repel the very voters he promises to win back. His feuding with Disney — including an offhand remark this week suggesting he would put a state prison next to Disney World — has raised alarms, even among would-be allies.For years, electability has been the fool’s gold of Republican politics.Since the rise of the Tea Party more than a decade ago, Republican primary voters have consistently cast ballots with their hearts, sneering at so-called experts to select uncompromising hard-liners as nominees. Even as losses in winnable races have mounted, the mere perception of running as electable has repeatedly backfired, giving off for many Republicans the stench of the reviled establishment.Core to Mr. DeSantis’s particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not shifting to the middle.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“It has sounded like an excuse to get conservative voters to support somebody they don’t really want, even though the argument may very well be true,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. Citing G.O.P. losses while Mr. Trump has defined the party — in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 — Mr. Ayres added of the former president and the G.O.P. 2024 front-runner, “There is no education in the fifth kick of a mule, and yet it appears that’s where we’re headed.”For Mr. Trump’s rivals, hitting him as an electoral loser is central to chiseling away at the crucial bloc of voters who liked his presidency but might be willing to move on. It also allows them to create contrast without directly crossing him; Nikki Haley, for instance, talks about the need for a “new generation” to win.Core to Mr. DeSantis’s particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not tacking to the middle: that voters, in other words, can have both a fighter and a winner.But his recent signing of a six-week abortion ban puts him on the far right on an issue that Democrats have used to mobilize their base with great success since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And congressional Republicans, who have had a front-row seat to the party’s Trump-era struggles, have pointedly delivered far more endorsements to Mr. Trump, including from Mr. DeSantis’s home state delegation during his visit to Washington this week, in a sign of the governor’s slipping traction.Mr. Trump’s team has pushed an electability case against Mr. DeSantis. A Trump-allied super PAC has run ads warning that Mr. DeSantis would go after Social Security and Medicare, touchstone issues that Democrats have used to defeat Republicans nationwide.“If anyone thinks throwing seniors under the bus is a winning argument, they are seriously out of touch,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman. “There is only one electable candidate in 2024, and that is President Trump.”The DeSantis team did not respond to a request for comment.Sarah Longwell, a Republican who holds regular focus groups with G.O.P. voters, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm losses, many Republicans had come to view Mr. Trump as an electoral loser.“Baggage is the word you’d hear,” she said.Mr. DeSantis was the beneficiary, rising as voters looked for a less polarizing alternative. “Trump with a mute button,” one voter memorably described a dream Republican candidate, she recalled.Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive, said the belief that electability would carry the day in 2024 was “somewhere between a wish and a mirage.”Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThat trend, however, has dissipated of late, said Ms. Longwell, who is involved with several groups that oppose Mr. Trump.“The electability pitch really only works if there is lots and lots of polling showing Trump losing by a wide margin,” she said. In a 50-50 nation, Mr. Trump remains competitive with Mr. Biden in almost every public poll, even if Mr. DeSantis often performs marginally better.Then there are the known unknowns of 2024 for Republican voters. If Mr. Trump loses the primary, would he sabotage the winner? And what would be the impact of further potential criminal indictments?Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive running a long-shot Republican presidential campaign, said the belief that electability would carry the day in 2024 was “somewhere between a wish and a mirage.”“It is fatally hubristic for anybody to think they can run that math equation,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview aboard his campaign bus, adding that whoever was strongest would shift with debates and world events in the coming months.Mr. Trump’s pundit-defying victory in 2016 has uniquely inoculated him from charges that he cannot win. And as Mr. Trump’s rivals in 2016 learned — like when Jeb Bush called him the “chaos candidate” — it can be especially hard to press a case about electability when trailing badly in the polls, as Mr. DeSantis does now.In interviews, Trump supporters note that he only narrowly lost in 2020 despite a pandemic that crippled American life for months, circumstances that almost certainly won’t repeat. For all the turbulence Mr. Trump creates, they say he has been tested on the national stage in a way his opponents have not.The who-can-win debate plays out strikingly differently between the two parties. In 2020, Democratic primary voters obsessed over electability before nominating Mr. Biden, who made his strength against Mr. Trump a centerpiece of his candidacy.In New Hampshire, interviews with Republican voters, activists and party officials revealed both the fertile ground for and the challenges of any electability campaign against Mr. Trump. Mr. DeSantis arrived in the state for his first appearance on Friday, headlining a dinner for the state party that the chairman said had broken fund-raising records. More than 500 people attended, arriving from across New Hampshire and beyond, as Trump loyalists waved flags outside the downtown Manchester hotel.“If I had a magic wand, I would like Trump,” said Sue Higgins, 53, a dental hygienist from Belknap County, a conservative stronghold in central New Hampshire. “He’s the only person who has the chutzpah to save America. But I’m not sure he’s the most electable.” As she waited for Mr. DeSantis to speak, she said she might support Mr. Trump again anyway.Trump supporters at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this year.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAllison Chaffee, 36, who drove up two hours from Massachusetts to see Mr. DeSantis, described herself as an emissary “from the group that sways elections: suburban moms.” And her message was to move on.“I hear what the moms say,” she said. “They are speaking Republican and then they vote Democrat. They only just hate Trump.”But Lynda Payette, 68, of Bethlehem, N.H., waved away any talk of Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities. “I believe that God placed him there and no man is going to take him down,” she said. “He’s electable, same as 2015.”Then she turned the electability question on Mr. DeSantis, pointing to his decision to sign a six-week abortion ban, which she called extreme. “I really think we’ve got to give a little on this abortion thing,” she said, as a friend nodded in agreement.For the sizable faction of the G.O.P. that has swallowed Mr. Trump’s falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen, electability is a particularly moot argument. They don’t think he lost.If an anti-Trump electability message were to gain ground anywhere, it might be New Hampshire, where multiple competitive seats were fumbled away in 2022 by Republican candidates whom party leaders had warned were out of the mainstream, including in a marquee Senate race.The state’s governor, Chris Sununu, who has teased a possible 2024 bid of his own, warned that Don Bolduc, the Republican who ran for Senate in New Hampshire, was a “conspiracy-theory type” candidate who would lose. Mr. Bolduc won the primary and lost in November.“What I hear from some of our activists is we’re tired of losing,” said Christopher Ager, who took over the chairmanship of the New Hampshire Republican Party in a contested fight.Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman, is less sanguine. He is the lone elected Republican on the City Council in Dover, where he needs to win over Democratic voters in a ward carried by Mr. Biden.“I don’t see any signs of pragmatic, strategic voting among primary voters,” said Mr. Cullen, a critic of Mr. Trump. “I fully believe he has the ability to get the lemmings to follow him off the cliff again, no matter how far down it goes.” More

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      Republicans Hit DeSantis Over Disney Feud

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      As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalates a fight against his state’s largest private employer, his potential rivals for the White House see an opening to attack.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is taking heat from fellow Republicans over his feud with Disney, as his potential rivals for the White House see an opportunity to call him out as flouting traditional conservative values.Former President Donald J. Trump this week slammed the governor’s efforts as a “political stunt” and said Mr. DeSantis was being outplayed by the company.“DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday on Truth Social, his media site, using a dismissive nickname for the governor. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey also took a shot, suggesting Mr. DeSantis’s talk of punishing a business defied principles about small government.“I don’t think Ron DeSantis is conservative, based on actions towards Disney,” he said at an event on Tuesday hosted by the news outlet Semafor. “Where are we headed here now that, if you express disagreement in this country, the government is now going to punish you? To me, that’s what I always thought liberals did, and now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor.”The criticism reflects a growing effort by Mr. Trump and other prospective candidates to try to undermine the core argument of Mr. DeSantis’s case for the nomination: that he is the Republican most likely to win a general election. Advisers to Mr. Trump and other possible rivals believe moves like going after Disney will be damaging in a general election, if not necessarily in the G.O.P. primary.Some Republican strategists even argued that the move risked turning off the party’s primary voters, saying they were confused by Mr. DeSantis’s decision to dig into a fight against a company with broad appeal and considerable resources to fight back.The dispute between Mr. DeSantis and Disney — Florida’s largest private employer and corporate taxpayer — started when company officials criticized a bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law last year. The law, which critics called a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, curtails instruction and discussion of gender and sexuality in some elementary school grades. (It was extended to cover all grades, including high school, on Wednesday.)In response to the criticism, Mr. DeSantis moved to exert greater control over the company through a district board, but officials at the company quietly found a way to strip that board of power. Mr. DeSantis has since moved to try to take control again, and floated the possibilities of imposing new taxes on Disney — which would most likely be passed along to people using Disney’s park — as well as building a state prison nearby.A spokesman for the governor said Mr. DeSantis believed Disney had “an unfair special advantage” over other businesses in the state.“Good and limited government (and, indeed, principled conservatism) reduces special privilege, encourages an even playing field for businesses, and upholds the will of the people,” said Bryan Griffin, the governor’s press secretary.In his post, Mr. Trump suggested that the threats could backfire and that the company could respond by pulling out of Florida. “Watch!” he wrote. “That would be a killer. In the meantime, this is all so unnecessary, a political STUNT!”The former president himself has never shied away from attacking companies he doesn’t like.Despite a steady stream of criticism from fellow Republicans — former Vice President Mike Pence, who is considering a campaign of his own, chided Mr. DeSantis on the issue in February — it’s not clear that Mr. DeSantis’s actions have hurt him uniformly on the right.The Wall Street Journal editorial board, on Tuesday evening, criticized the governor for the arc of the feud with Disney but took greater issue with Mr. Trump for his attack.“You’d think the former president would be critical of Disney’s woke turn, but his only abiding political conviction is personal advantage,” the board wrote. More