Ramaswamy, Vivek (1985- )

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      How Vivek Ramaswamy Made the Fortune Fueling His Presidential Run

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      On the campaign trail, as he lays out why he is a different kind of presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy calls himself a Harvard-trained “scientist” from the lifesaving world of biotechnology.“I developed a number of medicines,” Mr. Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and conservative writer, told a gathering at a construction firm this month in Davenport, Iowa. “The one I’m most proud of is a therapy for kids, 40 of them a year, born with a genetic condition who, without treatment, die by the age of 3.”The reality of Mr. Ramaswamy’s business career is more complex, the story of a financier more than a scientist, and a prospector who went bargain hunting, hyped his vision, drew investment and then cashed out in two huge payouts — totaling more than $200 million — before his 35th birthday.Mr. Ramaswamy’s enterprise is best known for a spectacular failure. As a 29-year-old with a bold idea and Ivy League connections, he engineered what was at the time the largest initial public offering in the biotechnology industry’s history — only to see the Alzheimer’s drug at its center fail two years later and the company’s value tank.But Mr. Ramaswamy, now 37, made a fortune anyway. He took his first payout in 2015 after stirring investor excitement about his growing pharmaceutical empire. He reaped a second five years later when he sold off its most promising pieces to a Japanese conglomerate.The core company Mr. Ramaswamy built has since had a hand in bringing five drugs to market, including treatments for uterine fibroids, prostate cancer and the rare genetic condition he mentioned on the stump in Iowa. The company says the last 10 late-stage clinical trials of its drugs have all succeeded, an impressive streak in a business where drugs commonly fail.Mr. Ramaswamy’s resilience was in part a result of the savvy way he structured his web of biotechnology companies. But it also highlights his particular skills in generating hype, hope and risky speculation in an industry that feeds on all three.“A lot of it had substance. Some of it did not. He’s a sort of a Music Man,” said Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat and former health secretary during the Obama administration who advised two of Mr. Ramaswamy’s companies.For his part, Mr. Ramaswamy said that criticism that he overpromised was missing the point. Although he promoted the potential of the doomed Alzheimer’s drug, he now says he was actually selling investors on a business model.“The business model was to develop these medicines for the long run. That’s the punchline, that’s the most important point,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s wealth is now underwriting a long-shot run for the Republican nomination that includes a campaign jet, plush bus and $10.3 million of his own money and counting. On the campaign trial, he sells what he calls “anti-woke” capitalism, skewering environmental, social and corporate governance programs and dismissing debates about racial privilege.He is the child of Indian immigrants, and “privilege,” he said recently in Iowa, “was two parents in the house with a focus on education, achievement and actual values. That gave me the foundation to then go on to places like Harvard and Yale and become a scientist.”With an undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard, Mr. Ramaswamy isn’t really a scientist; he made his name in the world of hedge funds and his graduate work was a law degree from Yale.Along the way, he invested in biotech and became enamored with an idea for developing high-risk prescription drugs: scour the patents held by pharmaceutical giants, searching for drugs that had been abandoned for business reasons, not necessarily for lack of promise. Buy the patents for a song, and bring them to market.Mr. Ramaswamy made his name in the world of hedge funds and his graduate work was a law degree from Yale.Forbes MagazineIn 2014, Mr. Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences — incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda and backed by nearly $100 million in funding from investors including QVT, a hedge fund that employed Mr. Ramaswamy after college.Using his connections and his confidence, Mr. Ramaswamy assembled a star-studded, bipartisan advisory board. A friend from Harvard helped him recruit Democrats, including Ms. Sebelius; Tom Daschle, a former Senate majority leader; and Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.The Republicans included former Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine and Mark McClellan, a prominent former health regulator.Ms. Sebelius said she was swayed by Mr. Ramaswamy’s promises of bringing critical drugs to market affordably.“It was an entrepreneurial view of how to lower drug prices,” she said of his pitch. “We shared a lot of the mission and vision.”But in making his pitch to a different crowd, Mr. Ramaswamy was blunt about Roivant’s chief aim.“This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry,” he boasted in a cover story in Forbes.The “Roi” in the company’s name stands for return on investment.In late 2014, the Roivant subsidiary that would be called Axovant bought for $5 million upfront — pocket change in the biotech industry — an Alzheimer’s drug that GlaxoSmithKline had given up on after four failed clinical trials.Mr. Ramaswamy speaking in 2015 at the Forbes Under 30 Summit.Lisa Lake/Getty ImagesSix months later, before starting any new clinical trials for the drug, Mr. Ramaswamy took Axovant public in a debut that sent the company’s market value to nearly $3 billion.Around that time, the company reported it had just eight employees, including Mr. Ramaswamy’s mother and brother, both of them physicians.Mr. Ramaswamy was a powerful salesman. He talked up the Alzheimer’s drug, intepirdine, as a potential breakthrough that “could help millions” of people. “The potential opportunity is really tremendous for delivering value to patients,” he said on CNBC.Patrick Machado, a former director of Roivant and Axovant, described Mr. Ramaswamy as “brilliant and audacious.” Others said Mr. Ramaswamy was overpromising.Thanks to the public stock offering, Mr. Ramaswamy held a large and suddenly extraordinarily valuable stake in Axovant through its parent company Roivant, which was still privately held and controlled about 80 percent of Axovant.With the drug headed into a crucial clinical trial, he set out to raise more money to finance his broader ambitions with Roivant.In late 2015, Mr. Ramaswamy sold off a portion of his Roivant shares to an institutional investor, Viking Global Investors, that wanted in. The sale was a major payday: On his 2015 tax return, Mr. Ramaswamy claimed more than $37 million in capital gains.In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said he cashed out only to make room for Viking, not to hedge his bets ahead of intepirdine’s clinical trial.“We were forced to sell,” he said, “and in some ways it’s a regret because the shares would be more valuable today if they hadn’t been sold.”In 2017, Mr. Ramaswamy made his pitch to Masayoshi Son, the founder of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank who runs the world’s largest tech investment fund. His presentation included slides mimicking ones Mr. Son is known for, with charts showing an arrow shooting up and to the right, according to a person familiar with Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch who was not authorized to speak publicly.In August 2017, SoftBank led an investment of $1.1 billion in Roivant. The investment wasn’t about getting in on Axovant; SoftBank thought intepirdine was unlikely to succeed, the person said. But SoftBank was seeking to invest in Mr. Ramaswamy’s wider drug portfolio, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.SoftBank declined to comment.A few weeks later, the Alzheimer’s drug’s clinical trial failed. The stock price plunged, losing 75 percent of its value in a single day. The stock slid further in the months that followed and never recovered before the company was dissolved this year.Mr. Ramaswamy declined to disclose how much he lost on paper because of the drug’s failure.Thanks to the way he structured his biotechnology empire, he did not hold a direct stake in Axovant. His personal stake was through Roivant, allowing Mr. Ramaswamy to weather the storm. QVT, the hedge fund where Mr. Ramaswamy once worked, had also invested in Roivant, insulating it from much of the fallout. QVT did not respond to a request for comment.But some investors lost real money on Axovant. One large public pension fund, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, sold its stake months later, when it was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in the days leading up to the disappointing clinical trial news. (The fund declined to comment.)But for many Axovant shareholders who lost money, many of whom were sophisticated institutional investors, the loss was one missed gamble on a high-risk, high-reward stock within a large portfolio of safer bets.Mr. Ramaswamy campaigning in Iowa this month. On the campaign trail, he sells what he calls “anti-woke” capitalism, skewering environmental, social and corporate governance programs and dismissing debates about racial privilege.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWith intepirdine’s failure, Mr. Ramaswamy ran into the hard reality of biology, said Derek Lowe, a longtime pharmaceutical researcher and industry commentator. “The patients’ diseased cells that you’re trying to treat don’t really care how hard-charging you are,” he said.“I think whipping people up into thinking this was a wonder drug was unconscionable,” he said. (Mr. Lowe bet against Axovant’s stock and made about $10,000 from the drug’s failure, he said.)Mr. Ramaswamy has expressed regret for years about the failure of his drug for Alzheimer’s, a disease that has long bedeviled researchers. And the criticism that he profited while his investors lost angers him, he said.“On a personal level, it grates on me a little bit,” he said. “The business model of Roivant was to see these drugs through the market, and we could have cashed out big, and employees could have cashed up big, but that was not the business model.”But Mr. Ramaswamy did eventually cash out on Roivant.In 2019, Roivant sold off its stake in five of its most promising spinoff companies to Sumitomo, a giant Japanese conglomerate.That proved to be Mr. Ramaswamy’s biggest payday. His 2020 tax return included nearly $175 million in capital gains.In recent years, Mr. Ramaswamy has stepped back from Roivant, leaving his roles as chief executive in 2021 and chairman in February. He remains the sixth largest shareholder in the company, with a stake currently valued at more than $500 million. (He has yet to file personal financial disclosures for his presidential run, but he has released 20 years of tax returns, which were provided to The Times by Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, two Yale Business School academics who have studied Mr. Ramaswamy’s business record. The candidate has also called for his competitors in the Republican race to do the same.)Mr. Ramaswamy’s pitch that his business model would lead to affordable drug prices has not come to pass. One example is the product for which he has said he is most proud, a one-time implant for children with a rare and devastating immune ailment. When Enzyvant, the Roivant spinoff company by then controlled by Sumitomo, won regulatory approval in 2021, it set a sticker price of $2.7 million.Sumitomo declined to comment. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is ‘a Hint of the Future’: Our Writers on His 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 Vivek Ramaswamy, a hedge fund analyst turned biotech executive. More

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      Few of Trump’s G.O.P. Rivals Defend Justice Dept. Independence

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      The evolution of the Republican Party under the influence of former President Donald J. Trump calls into question a post-Watergate norm.Donald J. Trump has promised that if he wins back the presidency he will appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.But he’s not the only Republican running for president who appears to be abandoning a long-established norm in Washington — presidents keeping their hands out of specific Justice Department investigations and prosecutions.Mr. Trump, who leads the G.O.P. field by around 30 percentage points in public national polls, wields such powerful influence that only a few of his Republican rivals are willing to clearly say presidents should not interfere in such Justice Department decisions.After Mr. Trump’s vow to direct the Justice Department to appoint a “real” prosecutor to investigate the Bidens, The New York Times asked each of his Republican rivals questions aimed at laying out what limits, if any, they believed presidents must or should respect when it comes to White House interference with federal law enforcement decisions.Their responses reveal a party that has turned so hard against federal law enforcement that it is no longer widely considered good politics to clearly answer in the negative a question that was once uncontroversial: Do you believe presidents should get involved in the investigations and prosecutions of individuals?Mr. Trump’s closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has flatly said he does not believe the Justice Department is independent from the White House as a matter of law, while leaving it ambiguous where he stands on the issue of presidents getting involved in investigation decisions.Mr. DeSantis’s spokesman, Bryan Griffin, wrote in an email that comments the governor made on a recent policy call “should be instructive to your reporting.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said the president can lawfully exert more direct control over the Justice Department and F.B.I. than has traditionally been the case.Jason Henry for The New York TimesIn the comments, Mr. DeSantis says that “the fundamental insight” he gleans from the Constitution is that the Justice Department and F.B.I. are not “independent” from the White House and that the president can lawfully exert more direct control over them than traditionally has been the case.“I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”But the context of Mr. DeSantis’s remarks was mostly about a president firing political appointees and bureaucrats at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., not about a president ordering them to target specific people with investigations and prosecutions. Mr. Griffin did not respond when asked in a follow-up on this point.Mr. Trump has portrayed his legal troubles as stemming from politicization, although there is no evidence Mr. Biden directed Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Mr. Trump. Under Mr. Garland, Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and on Tuesday secured a guilty plea from Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, on tax charges.Especially since Watergate, there has been an institutional tradition of Justice Department independence from White House control. The idea is that while a president can set broad policies — directing the Justice Department to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes, for example — he or she should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions except in rare cases affecting foreign policy.This is particularly seen as true for cases involving a president’s personal or political interests, such as an investigation into himself or his political opponents.But even in his first term, Mr. Trump increasingly pressed against that notion.William P. Barr, left, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, refused Mr. Trump’s baseless demand that he say the 2020 election had been corrupt.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn the spring of 2018, Mr. Trump told his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, that he wanted to order the Justice Department to investigate his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and James B. Comey Jr., the former head of the F.B.I. Mr. McGahn rebuffed him, saying the president had no authority to order an investigation, according to two people familiar with the conversation.Later in 2018, Mr. Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into officials involved in the Russia investigation. The following year, Attorney General William P. Barr indeed assigned a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, John Durham, to investigate the investigators — styling it as an administrative review because there was no factual predicate to open a formal criminal investigation.Mr. Trump also said in 2018 and 2019 that John F. Kerry, the Obama-era secretary of state, should be prosecuted for illegally interfering with American diplomacy by seeking to preserve a nuclear accord with Iran. Geoffrey S. Berman, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan whom Mr. Trump fired in 2020, later wrote in his memoir that the Trump Justice Department pressured him to find a way to charge Mr. Kerry, but he closed the investigation after about a year without bringing any charges.And as the 2020 election neared, Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham to file charges against high-level former officials even though the prosecutor had not found a factual basis to justify any. In his own memoir, Mr. Barr wrote that the Durham investigation’s “failure to deliver scalps in time for the election” eroded their relationship even before Mr. Barr refused Mr. Trump’s baseless demand that he say the 2020 election had been corrupt.Where Mr. Trump’s first-term efforts were scattered and haphazard, key allies — including Jeffrey B. Clark, a former Justice Department official who helped Mr. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election — have been developing a blueprint to make the department in any second Trump term more systematically subject to direct White House control.Against that backdrop, Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the long-shot G.O.P. challengers, has pledged to pardon Mr. Trump if Mr. Ramaswamy wins the presidency. He said that as a constitutional matter, he thinks a president does have the power to direct prosecutors to open or close specific criminal investigations. But he added that “the president must exercise this judgment with prudence in a manner that respects the rule of law in the country.”Vivek Ramaswamy said he would respect the post-Watergate norm regarding Justice Department independence.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAsked if he would pledge, regardless of his views on what the law may technically allow presidents to do, to obey the post-Watergate norm, Mr. Ramaswamy replied: “As a general norm, yes.”Two Republican candidates who are both former U.S. attorneys unequivocally stated that presidents should not direct the investigations or prosecutions of individuals. Tellingly, both are chasing votes from anti-Trump moderate Republicans.Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor who was a U.S. attorney in the George W. Bush administration, said he knew “just how important it is to keep prosecutors independent and let them do their jobs.”“No president should be meddling in Department of Justice investigations or cases in any way,” Mr. Christie added. “The best way to keep that from happening is with a strong attorney general who can lead without fear or favor.”And Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and congressman who served as a U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration, said that “preserving an independent and politically impartial Department of Justice in terms of specific investigations is essential for the rule of law and paramount in rebuilding trust with the American people.”A spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence, Devin O’Malley, was terse. He said a president could remove senior law enforcement officials and expressed some support for Justice Department independence. But he declined to add further comment when pressed.“Mike Pence believes that the president of the United States has the ability to hire and fire the attorney general, the F.B.I. director, and other D.O.J. officials — and has, in fact, pledged to do so if elected — but also believes the D.O.J. has a certain level of independence with regard to prosecutorial matters,” Mr. O’Malley said.Mr. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, through a spokesman, expressed some support for Justice Department independence.John Tully for The New York TimesMost other candidates running against Mr. Trump landed in what they apparently deemed to be a politically safer space of blending general comments about how justice should be administered impartially with vague accusations that the Biden-era Justice Department had targeted Republicans for political reasons.Many did not specifically point to a basis for those accusations. Among a broad swath of conservatives, it is taken as a given that the F.B.I. and Justice Department must be politically motivated against them on a variety of fronts, including the scrutiny over the 2016 Trump campaign’s links to Russia, the prosecution of people who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the Trump documents case.Matt Gorman, a senior communications adviser for Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, declined to say whether or not Mr. Scott believed presidents should interfere in specific investigations. He pointed only to Mr. Scott’s comments on the most recent “Fox News Sunday” appearance.In those remarks, Mr. Scott said: “We have to clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J. Today, we want to know that in our justice system, Lady Justice wears a blindfold and that all Americans will be treated fairly by Lady Justice. But today, this D.O.J. continues to hunt Republicans while they protect Democrats.”Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, also provided an ambiguous answer through her spokeswoman, Chaney Denton. She pointed to two specific conservative grievances with law enforcement: Seven years ago, Hillary Clinton was not charged over using a private email server while secretary of state, and the Trump-era special counsel, Mr. Durham, wrote a report this year criticizing the Russia inquiry.“The Department of Justice should be impartial, but unfortunately it is not today,” Ms. Denton said. “The Durham Report, the non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton, and other actions make it clear that a partisan double standard is being applied. The answer is not to have both parties weaponize the Justice Department; it’s to have neither side do it.”“The Department of Justice should be impartial,” a spokeswoman for Nikki Haley said, without getting into specifics.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhen specifically pressed, Ms. Denton declined to say whether Ms. Haley believes presidents should get involved in prosecutions or investigations of individuals.One recent entrant to the race, Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, disavowed the post-Watergate norm, putting forward a premise that law enforcement officials are currently politically biased and so his White House interference would be to correct that purported state of affairs.“I certainly would not promise that I would allow a biased department operate independently,” he said in part of a statement. “I believe it is the president’s responsibility to insist that justice is delivered fairly without bias or political influence.”A spokesman for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Lance Trover, was even more vague.“Gov. Burgum believes that citizens’ faith in our institutions is the foundation of a free and just society and will not allow them to be a political enforcement extension of the party in power as we have seen in failed countries,” he said. “If Americans have distrust in the Justice Department when he takes office, he will do what it takes to restore the American people’s faith in the Department of Justice and other bedrocks of our democracy.” More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Is Offering a Strong Defense of Trump, While Also Running Against Him

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      Vivek Ramaswamy is the lone Republican rival of Donald Trump to wholeheartedly claim the federal indictment is a Democratic attempt to jail the political opposition.In the overheated basement of the Thunder Bay Grille in Davenport, Iowa, on Thursday night, Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur turned Republican presidential candidate, tried out a new opening for his well-practiced stump speech.“Although it would be easier for someone like me to win this primary or win this election if certain people like Donald Trump were not in the race, that’s not how I want to win,” the biotech millionaire told the Scott County Republican faithful who packed the room on the outskirts of this Mississippi River city.“That’s not how we do things in America,” he continued. “We are not a country where the party in power should be able to use police force to indict its political opponents. And I stand not on the politics but on principle.”It was a portentous broadside for a man running to be president, one that questioned the integrity of a justice system that had just brought the first federal charges against a former president. And it is something that Mr. Ramaswamy admits he has wrestled with, given that his assertions could undermine the rule of law that he says he stands by firmly.The comments drew cheers from an audience not ready to repudiate Mr. Trump, but perhaps looking for an alternative.“I admire Trump for what he did for our country; I admire him immensely,” said Linda Chicarelli Renkes, from Rock Island, Ill., just across the Mississippi, who had praised Mr. Ramaswamy for his promise to pardon the former president if elected. “But I’m tired.”The indictment of Mr. Trump on charges that he mishandled some of the nation’s most sensitive military and nuclear secrets, then flagrantly obstructed law enforcement’s efforts to retrieve them, has put Republican political leaders at a moment of choosing between their oft-stated allegiance to law and order and their sensitivities to the passions of their voters.“Although it would be easier for someone like me to win this primary or win this election if certain people like Donald Trump were not in the race, that’s not how I want to win,” Mr. Ramaswamy said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMore than any other presidential candidate not named Trump, Mr. Ramaswamy has staked an uncompromising position assailing the charges facing the Republican primary’s front-runner. He has not called the indictment “devastating,” as former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has. He has not called for Mr. Trump to drop out of the race, as former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has.He has not attempted the contortions of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, denouncing federal overreach even while suggesting that anyone mishandling classified documents should be prosecuted. He has not even allowed that the special counsel Jack Smith’s accusations are serious, as have former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott and former Gov. Nikki Haley, both of South Carolina.Instead, Mr. Ramaswamy has said that while Mr. Trump may have shown some errors of judgment, the Biden administration has dangerously abused its power in order to block the comeback of a political rival. In Davenport, he denounced what he called the “politicized persecution through prosecution” of the enemies of the Biden administration, and promised to pardon Mr. Biden’s victims en masse, whether they be “peaceful protesters” incarcerated for the attack on the Capitol or Mr. Trump.Mr. Ramaswamy polling numbers remain in the very low single digits, and though he has captured some attention for his broadsides against the justice system, he has alienated others with his aggressive rhetoric.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesFor an outsider with no political experience beyond his cable news appearances and his “anti-woke” jeremiads against corporate liberalism, Mr. Ramaswamy is showing some staying power.His poll numbers aren’t great — Mr. Trump’s own pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, released a survey after the indictment putting Mr. Ramaswamy at 2 percent in Iowa, behind five other candidates. But he has received the 40,000 individual donations to qualify for the Republican primary debates, and as of now, has the requisite 1 percent in national polling for the first debate on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.He also has deep ties to Republican power sources, including the tech financier Peter Thiel and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.But his run to the right, which had already alienated some of his business partners and financial backers, raises a new question: Are Republicans like Mr. Ramaswamy risking the stability of the country for their own political fortunes?While Mr. Ramaswamy is the longest of long shots when it comes to winning the nomination, some fear that the aggressive rhetoric he and other Republicans regularly use — both in defense of Mr. Trump and in attacking the justice system — could cause lasting damage.In an interview on his well-appointed campaign bus, the candidate was circumspect. He agreed that his call for every candidate to pre-emptively promise a pardon to Mr. Trump could breed lawlessness, though he concluded that his offer was defensible because it was narrowly tailored to only the charges laid out in the special counsel’s indictment. If other offenses, such as the transmission of national security secrets to foreign powers, emerged in trial, the deal would be off.He also said he wanted to make “sure that I’m not contributing to a problem that I worry deeply about,” the erosion of the rule of law.Mr. Ramaswamy traveled to Miami this week to hold a news conference outside the courthouse after former President Donald J. Trump’s arraignment. Christian Monterrosa for The New York Times“The thought crosses my mind, but I think the facts are plain,” he said: President Biden has indicted the front-running challenger of the opposing party to thwart his rise.Mr. Biden did no such thing. A federal grand jury brought the indictment, at the behest of a special counsel, named by the attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, precisely to insulate the legal investigation of Mr. Trump from any perceived or real pressure from the president or his political appointees.Mr. Ramaswamy said he was not willing to accept that version of events. He flew to Miami on the morning of Mr. Trump’s arraignment to announce before the television crews assembled at the federal courthouse that he had submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for any and all communications between the White House and the Justice Department’s leadership, and between Justice Department leadership and Mr. Smith.Mr. Ramaswamy does have a law degree from Yale, though he made his wealth not in law but in finance and biotechnology. Nonetheless, he speaks with absolute certainty when he rails against the validity of the federal grand jury’s indictment, which he said “reeks of politicization.” The Presidential Records Act, not the Espionage Act, is the governing legal authority over former presidents, he said, and the records act gives broad latitude to former presidents to retain documents from their years in the White House.Iowans watched a speech by Mr. Ramaswamy in Dubuque, Iowa, on Tuesday. Mr. Ramaswamy argues that many Republican voters already believe his extreme version of how the country’s justice system operates.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesThat reasoning has been dismissed by more experienced Republican legal minds, such as Mr. Trump’s own attorney general, William P. Barr, and the retired appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig. Judge Luttig wrote on Twitter on the day of Mr. Trump’s arraignment, “There is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president.”Asked about those judgments, Mr. Ramaswamy said he would have to examine the words of people like Mr. Barr and Mr. Luttig more closely. But he offered another defense of his attacks on the legal system: Republican voters already believe them.“To actually recognize a reality that other leaders are reluctant to recognize, I think that is actually net trust-enhancing for our institutions,” he said.Though he may be following the passions of the voters, not leading them, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his stand was principled, not political.“I will be deeply disappointed if Donald Trump is unable to run because of these politicized charges against him,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy’s denunciation of the indictment is only the latest stand in a campaign predicated on his belief that the former president’s “America First” agenda does not belong to Mr. Trump, but to the American people — and that he has the intelligence and guts to take it much farther than Mr. Trump ever could.If Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and Mr. Trump’s closest competitor, is “Trumpism without Trump,” Mr. Ramaswamy is putting himself forward as Trumpism squared.The appeal has its limits, especially with ardent Trump supporters who still want the real deal.Some are considering Mr. Ramaswamy as they seek an alternative to Mr. Trump, but it is a difficult pitch while Mr. Trump is still in the race.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“I haven’t seen anything that Vivek says and Donald Trump says that aren’t aligned perfectly,” said Clint Crawford, 48, of Eldridge, Iowa, after watching the candidate at a session at the Estes Construction offices four floors over downtown Davenport. With the former president bent on staying in the race, Mr. Crawford said, he’s not switching.But there is a chance that Mr. Trump won’t make it through a potential federal trial, another possible trial in New York on felony charges surrounding a hush money to a porn star, a looming indictment out of Georgia for efforts to overturn the 2020 election results there, and more to come from Mr. Smith.If Mr. Trump drops out, Mr. Ramaswamy intends to be the alternative.“It’s so ongoing with Trump — it’s our past, it’s our present, and it’s not going to stop,” said Penny Overbaugh, 77, who had stood up in Bettendorf, Iowa, on Thursday to praise Mr. Ramaswamy for his performance in Miami on arraignment morning. As for the younger challenger, “the fact that he could see the hypocrisy of the two-sided justice system, he has conviction.” More

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      GOP Rivals See Trump Indictment Stealing Spotlight

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      An all-indictment, all-the-time news diet could swallow the summer, denying attention to other Republican candidates who need it like oxygen.Former President Donald J. Trump faces 37 federal charges that could send him to prison for the remainder of his life, but it’s the rest of the Republican field that’s in the most immediate political trouble.Advisers working for Mr. Trump’s opponents are facing what some consider an infuriating task: trying to persuade Republican primary voters, who are inured to Mr. Trump’s years of controversies and deeply distrustful of the government, that being criminally charged for holding onto classified documents is a bad thing.In previous eras, the indictment of a presidential candidate would have been, at a minimum, a political gift for the other candidates, if not an event that spelled the end of the indicted rival’s run. Competitors would have thrilled at the prospect of the front-runner’s spending months tied up in court, with damaging new details steadily dripping out. And they still could be Mr. Trump’s undoing: If he does not end up convicted before November 2024, his latest arrest is not likely win him converts in the general election.But Mr. Trump’s competitors — counterintuitively, according to the old conventional political wisdom — are actually dreading what threatens to be an endless indictment news cycle that could swallow up the summer. His rivals are desperate to get media coverage for their campaigns, but since the indictment became public last Thursday, as several advisers grumbled, the only way they can get their candidates booked on television is for them to answer questions about Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump is making full use of the trappings of his former office: the big, black sport utility vehicles; the Secret Service agents in dark glasses; the stops at grocery stores and restaurants with entourages, bodyguards and reporters in tow, said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman who works on Nikki Haley’s campaign.“That is powerful stuff when you’re campaigning against it,” Mr. Dawson said.And there’s no end in sight for indictment season. This was the second time Mr. Trump has been indicted in two months, and he may be indicted at least once more this summer, in Georgia, for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The Georgia prosecutor leading that investigation signaled the timing when she announced last month that most of her staff would work remotely during the first three weeks of August — right when Republican presidential candidates will be preparing for the first debate of the primary season, on Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.Mr. Trump arrived at Wilkie Ferguson Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, making full use of the trappings of his former office.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesIn Mr. Trump’s federal case, in South Florida, it is possible that the former president could face trial in the middle of the primary campaign season.One Republican candidate who has gotten some airtime, Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and author, did so by flying to Miami from Ohio and addressing journalists gathered outside the courthouse to record Mr. Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday. He promised to pardon Mr. Trump if he gets elected president. He railed against a “donor class” that he asserted was urging him to spurn Mr. Trump, knocked the news media and demanded that every other G.O.P. candidate sign a pledge to pardon Mr. Trump if elected.“Half the battle is showing up,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview Tuesday night on his way to Iowa. “I am getting my message out, at least the part of it that relates to the events of the day.”Most of Mr. Trump’s other rivals have tied themselves in knots trying to fashion responses to the indictments that would grab media attention without alienating Republican voters who remain supportive of Mr. Trump.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida came down on Mr. Trump’s side but with little enthusiasm. He subtly rebuked Mr. Trump’s conduct, raising Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents as a stand-in for Mr. Trump’s when he said he would have been “court-martialed in a New York minute” had he taken classified documents during his service in the Navy.But Mr. DeSantis has also used the opportunity to give Republican voters what they mostly want: He has defended Mr. Trump and attacked President Biden and his Justice Department, saying they unfairly target Republicans. On Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis began to roll out his plan to overhaul the “weaponized” F.B.I. and Justice Department. And the main pro-DeSantis super PAC released a video attacking the “Biden D.O.J.” for “indicting the former president.”Before the indictment was released, former Vice President Mike Pence said on CNN that he hoped Mr. Trump would not be charged because it would “be terribly divisive to the country.”Then Mr. Pence read the indictment. On Tuesday, he told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, “These are very serious allegations. And I can’t defend what is alleged. But the president is entitled to his day in court, he’s entitled to bring a defense, and I want to reserve judgment until he has the opportunity to respond.”Mr. Pence went on to denounce the Biden administration’s Justice Department as politicized — in large part because of its treatment of Mr. Trump — and promised that as president he would clean it up.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, both initially greeted the indictment with condemnation of what they called unequal justice — harsh for Republicans, lenient for Democrats — before tacking on their assessment that the accusations against Mr. Trump were grave and should be taken seriously.Then, on Tuesday, Ms. Haley volunteered that if elected she, too, would consider pardoning Mr. Trump.All of those contortions offer an opening to candidates with simpler messages, either for or against Mr. Trump’s prosecution.“I don’t think they know what they think yet,” said Mr. Ramaswamy of the candidates he called the “finger-in-the-wind class.” Some candidates “tend to serve as mouthpieces for the donors who fund them and the consultants who advise them, and the donors and consultants haven’t figured out their advice yet.”All of this presumably is music to Mr. Trump’s ears: So long as the news media and his rivals are fighting each other and obsessing about him, he must be winning.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is so far the only Republican rival of Mr. Trump’s to make full-throated statements condemning the former president for the actions detailed in the indictment.John Tully for The New York TimesThe only Republican presidential candidate so far to speak clearly and forcefully against Mr. Trump over the actions documented in the indictment was former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. He condemned Mr. Trump and showed contempt for Republicans who were directing blame elsewhere.“We’re in a situation where there are people in my own party who are blaming D.O.J.,” Mr. Christie said on Monday night in a CNN town hall meeting. “How about blame him? He did it.”He also implored his fellow competitors to focus on the front-runner, not each other, saying 2024 is playing out as a rerun of 2016 when a large field, which included Mr. Christie, sniped at each other and let Mr. Trump gallop away with the nomination.Tucker Carlson, who was taken off air by Fox News but remains influential with the Republican base, put out a video on Twitter on Tuesday night that captures what Mr. Trump’s rivals are up against. Mr. Carlson sought to portray the federal indictment as proof that Mr. Trump was “the one guy with an actual shot of becoming president” who was feared by the Washington establishment. The clip is an implied rebuke of Mr. DeSantis and comes close to an endorsement of Mr. Trump.It is too soon after the indictment to draw solid conclusions about how Republican voters are processing the news. But the early data bodes well for Mr. Trump and ominously for his opponents. In a CBS News poll released on Sunday, only 7 percent of likely Republican primary voters said the indictment would lower their opinion of Mr. Trump. Twice as many said the indictment would change their view of him “for the better.”An adviser to one of Mr. Trump’s rivals, speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid, admitted he was depressed at how Republican voters were receiving the news of what he considered to be devastating facts unearthed by the special counsel, Jack Smith.“I think the reality is there’s such enormous distrust of the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. after the Hillary years and the Russiagate investigation that it appears that no other fact set will persuade Republican voters otherwise right now,” the adviser said.Mr. Dawson, who is backing Ms. Haley, said Mr. Trump’s poll numbers were likely to rise in the coming weeks, along with the sentiment that the government cannot be trusted.The other candidates are gambling that they have the luxury of time.Mr. Christie has stepped up to bloody the former president with his attacks, which are unlikely to help Mr. Christie’s standing but may help other Republicans in the race: those who are refraining but “drafting” behind Mr. Christie, as one adviser put it, perhaps wishfully, using a horse-racing term.As more information spills out ahead of the former president’s trial, especially about the specifics of what was contained in the classified documents that Mr. Trump held onto — details of battle plans and nuclear programs — the severity of what crimes the former president is charged with may slowly seep in.That’s the hope, at least, for Mr. Trump’s rivals who languish far behind him in polls.“Let that little pop blow up, then get out of here, let the voters read the term paper, and let it sink in,” Mr. Dawson said. He added, of Mr. Trump: “People are going to start questioning his sanity.” More

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      No Proud Boys at Trump Arraignment, but Colorful Crowds Show Up

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      In the days leading up to his arraignment in Miami, former President Donald J. Trump and several of his allies called on supporters to rally to his side.Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser, called for protests, insisting that they should be peaceful. A Miami chapter of the Proud Boys — long associated with Mr. Stone — echoed the invitation, posting a flier on its Telegram page last week advertising an event at the federal courthouse on Tuesday morning.All of this raised the level of concern among civic leaders in the city, who issued calls for protesters to remain peaceful. In the end, their fears did not materialize. It did not appear that any Proud Boys showed up and about 500 people, including one with a pig’s head on a spear, answered Mr. Trump’s call to action.The atmosphere outside the building was circuslike. There was the Uncle Sam who sped around the courthouse grounds on a two-wheeled hoverboard singing pro-Trump songs, the woman with a unicorn horn affixed to her forehead who wore an “Aunt-ifa” shirt and chanted derisively about the former president, and the man in a black-and-white jail jumpsuit carrying a sign that read, “Lock Him Up.”That man in the jumpsuit later instigated the most hectic moment of the day, when he ran in front of Mr. Trump’s S.U.V. as it left the courthouse. The man, who was not immediately identified, was pushed out of the way by the police and later taken into custody. As officers took him away, a crowd of Trump supporters used the message on his sign to taunt him: “Lock him up!”As he left, Mr. Trump, sitting in the back seat of the S.U.V., flashed a thumbs up to supporters, some of whom sprinted after the vehicle as they cheered. He headed to the famous Cuban restaurant Versailles, where a smaller crowd of supporters awaited him, a rabbi and minister prayed for him and he briefly shook hands and posed for photos.It was the second time this year that Mr. Trump had called for protests at a court appearance, only to have his summons receive a kind of fizzled response. When he was arraigned in a separate case in April in Manhattan, the New York City Police Department mobilized in force over concerns about unrest, but the chaos never occurred.In Miami, too, on a blazingly hot day thick with humidity, the crowd was calmer than some had feared. Miami’s police chief, Manuel Morales, faced tough questions from reporters a day earlier on whether he was doing enough to keep the area safe during the court proceeding and why he did not plan to separate anti-Trump and pro-Trump demonstrators.“We know there is a potential of things taking a turn for the worse, but that’s not the Miami way,” he said in response.The Proud Boys, who were founded during Mr. Trump’s first campaign for office, have rallied for years on his behalf, often violently. During the 2020 election, Mr. Trump notably called out the group, urging them during a presidential debate to “stand back and standby.”Scores of Proud Boys took part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and federal investigators cracked down hard on them in the aftermath. The group’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, who is from Miami, was convicted of seditious conspiracy along with three of his lieutenants for their role in the attack. Dozens of other Proud Boys have either been charged or questioned by the authorities.It is possible that the group never intended to take part in an event in Miami. It is also possible that the group has simply had enough of supporting Mr. Trump and suffering the consequences. After the violence at the Capitol, some high-ranking Proud Boys disavowed Mr. Trump, expressing anger at him for having left them standing on a limb.As temperatures reached nearly 90 degrees by lunchtime, trucks circled around the courthouse with flags and loudspeakers, and several people on foot with selfie sticks broadcast live video streams to thousands of viewers while weaving in and out of the crowds.“This is craaaazy,” shouted one pro-Trump streamer, Rafael Gomez, as he walked among the palm trees in front of the tall, shimmering courthouse. “Welcome to the banana republic of Miami!”Also seeking to capture an audience were more established conservative figures, such as the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who held a news conference in front of the courthouse defending Mr. Trump and said that he would pardon his campaign rival if elected.In an interview after his news conference, Mr. Ramaswamy said that despite his defense, he would not have done what Mr. Trump is accused of. “I wouldn’t have taken the boxes,” he said. “I’m not a memento guy. Not my style.”The police largely stayed out of the way of the demonstrators, observing from close by while a helicopter circled overhead and jumping into the crowd only a few times when more hostile arguments sprouted up.At one point, however, Homeland Security and Miami Police Department officers urgently closed in and began clearing a large area of the courthouse grounds. They investigated a large TV that had been affixed to a pole on the sidewalk and that bore a message criticizing what it called “the Communist-controlled news media.” About an hour later, the police removed the television and reopened the area.Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, a Republican who is mulling his own presidential bid, arrived in the early afternoon wearing a Miami Police Department polo shirt. He hugged several Trump supporters before shaking hands with a line of police officers. “I think, up until now, it’s a peaceful demonstration for people exercising their constitutional rights to express themselves, which we love about this country,” he said.Nearby, Carlos Brito, 66, sold American flags for $5. Mr. Brito, who immigrated from Cuba in 1980, said he supported Mr. Trump and criticized President Biden for sending money to support Ukraine while Americans struggled financially. “Look how much a cup of coffee costs here,” he said. “We need help here at home.”Scott Linnen, 61, a Trump critic from Miami, said he came to the courthouse because he had grown distraught over the direction of the country. As a gay man, he said he had seen a rise in anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric, hate speech and extremist behavior on the right.“This man tried to overthrow the 247-year-old American experiment,” he said of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “I don’t understand why more people’s hair isn’t on fire.”Luke Broadwater More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Wants Candidates to Commit to Pardoning Trump in 2025

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and activist who is running against Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination, told reporters outside the courthouse in Miami on Tuesday that he had reached out to other presidential candidates to urge them to commit to pardoning the former president if they win in 2024.Mr. Ramaswamy, who has been among Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters since the indictment, said he had floated the idea of such a pledge to Mr. Trump’s main Republican rivals, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, as well as Democrats challenging President Biden, like Robert Kennedy Jr.Speaking outside the federal court building where Mr. Trump was scheduled to appear hours later, Mr. Ramaswamy was often drowned out by competing chants between Trump supporters and demonstrators who had come to celebrate the indictment.Mr. Ramaswamy said that even though he could benefit politically from the case, he believed the prospect of the Republican front-runner facing an extended prosecution and possibly jail time was dangerous for democracy.“It would be a lot easier for me in this race if he were eliminated,” he said.He also announced that he had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking communications between Mr. Biden, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Jack Smith, the special counsel in the documents case, to search for evidence of wrongdoing.Mr. Ramaswamy claimed, without evidence, that the news media had been remiss in not investigating any improper ties between the White House and the Justice Department. He said it was “a shame” that a competitor in the race had to do so.While Mr. Ramaswamy repeatedly struggled to speak over the crowd, several of Mr. Trump’s supporters who gathered to watch yelled at Mr. Ramaswamy to drop out, while others hurled taunts about his business career and his ties to corporate donors.At one point, an aide handed Mr. Ramaswamy a microphone, which did not work. Moments later, a large group watching peeled away to watch a confrontation between demonstrators. More

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      How Trump Plans to Beat His Indictment, Politically

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      The former president keeps consolidating Republican support, but the legal peril is the greatest he has ever faced and adds to his challenges with independent voters.Donald J. Trump will make his first appearance in federal criminal court on Tuesday. But the former president has been pleading his case for days in a far friendlier venue — the court of Republican public opinion, where he continues to dominate the 2024 field.For Mr. Trump and his team, there has been a sense of familiarity, even normalcy, in the chaos of facing a 37-count indictment in the classified documents case. After two House impeachments, multiple criminal investigations, the jailing of his business’s former accountant, his former fixer and his former campaign manager, and now two criminal indictments, Mr. Trump knows the drill, and so do his supporters.The playbook is well-worn: Play the victim. Blame the “Deep State.” Claim selective prosecution. Punish Republicans who stray for disloyalty. Dominate the news. Ply small donors for cash.His allies see the indictment as a chance to end the primary race before it has even begun in the minds of Republican voters by framing 2024 as an active battle with President Biden. Until now, the main pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Inc., has focused heavily on Mr. Trump’s chief Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in its $20 million of ad spending. But that messaging has shifted after the indictment, with a new commercial already being shown that pits Mr. Trump directly against Mr. Biden.The intended effect, said a person familiar with the strategy, is to present Mr. Trump as the party’s leader and the presumptive nominee who has already entered a head-to-head battle with Mr. Biden and his Justice Department, making Mr. Trump’s Republican opponents look small by comparison.Mr. Trump, who flew to Florida on Monday ahead of his Tuesday appearance, is determined to serve as narrator of his own high-stakes legal drama. He posted on Truth Social to reveal he had been indicted minutes after his lawyer had called to alert him last week.“The only good thing about it is it’s driven my poll numbers way up,” Mr. Trump told the Georgia Republican Party in a combative speech on Saturday.So far, the indictment fallout appears to be moving along two parallel tracks in different directions, one political, the other legal.Politically, Mr. Trump has continued to consolidate Republican support. In a CBS News poll on Sunday, only 7 percent of likely Republican primary voters initially said the indictment would change their view of Mr. Trump for the worse — and twice as many said it would change their view “for the better.” A full 80 percent of likely Republican voters said Mr. Trump should be able to serve even if convicted.Mr. Trump will make his first appearance in the federal criminal court in Miami on Tuesday.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesLegally, the specificity and initial evidence presented in the charging document that was unsealed on Friday showed the gravity of the case.That evidence includes a recording of Mr. Trump claiming to have a classified document in front of him and acknowledging he no longer had the power to declassify it, photographs of documents strewn across a storage room floor — which Mr. Trump was particularly rankled by — surveillance footage, reams of subpoenaed texts from his own aides and notes from his own lawyer. “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast,” Bill Barr, who served as attorney general under Mr. Trump, said on Fox News. “It’s very, very damning.”As he headed to Miami, Mr. Trump was working to reassemble a legal team shaken by two major resignations on Friday as the special counsel who brought the charges, Jack Smith, said he would push for a “speedy trial.”For Mr. Trump, who has long blurred public-relations woes and legal peril, his 2024 campaign began in part as a shield against prosecution, and victory at the ballot box would amount to the ultimate acquittal. Still, few political strategists in either party see running while under indictment as a way to appeal to the independent voters who are crucial to actually winning the White House.But Mr. Trump has rarely looked past the task immediately in front of him, and for now that is the primary. The CBS poll showed him dominating his closest rival, Mr. DeSantis, 61 percent to 23 percent.“The only good thing about it is it’s driven my poll numbers way up,” Mr. Trump told the Georgia Republican Party on Saturday.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesOn Sunday night, the chief executive of the MAGA Inc. super PAC, Taylor Budowich, sent a memo of talking points to surrogates that tellingly does not mention Mr. DeSantis at all, only Mr. Biden.Another person familiar with the super PAC’s strategy said that the fundamentals of the political race had not changed even as the indictment has brought Mr. Trump the gravest legal threat he’s ever faced. And the PAC would eventually continue attacking Mr. DeSantis, while also elevating other Republican candidates to shear off some of Mr. DeSantis’s support.The uncomfortable initial posture of Mr. Trump’s rivals was captured in a video released by Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC attacking the “Biden DOJ” for “indicting the former president.” Mr. Trump’s team was delighted to see it, even if the ad cast Mr. DeSantis as the man to clean house inside the federal government. Forcing rivals to rally around Mr. Trump, as they see it, is a reaffirmation of the former president’s place at the head of the G.O.P.Yet on Monday, there was a slight shift in tone from solely denouncing the Justice Department. “Two things can be true,” Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, said on Fox News, adding if the indictment was accurate “President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina called it a “serious case with serious allegations” during a campaign stop in his home state, according to The Post and Courier.The arc of how Mr. Trump has bent the Republican Party and its voters to his interests is not new. He famously joked that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support in his 2016 campaign.He survived a succession of scandals as president — including the long-running investigation by a previous special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that sent some Trump advisers to prison — that few others could. One reason, his advisers and allies say, is that Republican voters have become inured to the various accusations he has faced, flattening them all into a single example of prosecutorial and Democratic overreach, regardless of the specifics.Jack Smith, the special counsel who charged the former president, said he would push for a “speedy trial.”Kenny Holston/The New York Times“Most people on my side of the aisle believe when it comes to Donald Trump, there are no rules,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Mr. Trump’s most ardent Republican defenders, said on ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday. “And you can do the exact same thing or something similar as a Democrat and nothing happens.”The New York Post captured the sentiment succinctly with a tabloid banner on Monday that read, “What About the Bidens?”One Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, noted that most politicians would assume a defensive crouch when facing a federal indictment. But not Mr. Trump, who delivered two speeches on Saturday, has posted dozens of times on his social media site and is determined to use the national spotlight to drive a proactive message of his own. “It is Trump 24/7, wall-to-wall — why not use that to your advantage?” the adviser said, referring to the blanket media coverage Mr. Trump has been receiving after his indictment.On Monday evening, Mr. Trump did three straight radio interviews, including one with Americano Media, where the host, Carines Moncada, told Mr. Trump that the charges against him had echoes of “persecution” of conservative leaders in Latin America. “I think maybe one of the reasons they like me, so many people have been so hurt in Colombia, in other countries in Latin America, South America,” Mr. Trump replied.The charges, however, could pose a long-term political challenge. An ABC/Ipsos poll from the weekend found that more independents thought Mr. Trump should be charged than thought he should not. And 61 percent of Americans found the charges either very or somewhat serious.In the CBS poll, 69 percent of independent voters said they would consider Mr. Trump’s possession of documents about nuclear systems or military plans a national security risk (46 percent of Republicans said the same, suggesting a potential fracture in the party over that point).On Tuesday, Mr. Trump will fly to New Jersey after his hearing, commandeering the cameras again to deliver prime-time remarks that his team hopes will be televised.Mr. Trump’s advisers took note that some cable and broadcast networks gave live coverage on Monday to the departure of his motorcade as it headed for the airport. On Twitter, the Trump adviser Jason Miller noted that even Fox News, which has generally shied away from extensive live Trump coverage, broadcast footage the motorcade. Mr. Miller had mocked Fox News over the weekend for not carrying Mr. Trump’s appearances live.The Trump operation said it had raised $4 million in the first 24 hours after his previous indictment by the Manhattan district attorney in March. But the campaign has yet to disclose the sum this time.Trump supporters outside Mar-a-Lago on Sunday. Saul Martinez for The New York TimesIn a major fund-raiser that was in the works before the indictment, Mr. Trump is gathering top donors on Tuesday evening at Bedminster, his private club. Those who raise at least $100,000 are invited to attend a “candlelight dinner” after his address to the media.The indictment news has blotted out other developments on the campaign trail. The announcement over the weekend by Mr. DeSantis of his first endorsement from a fellow governor, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, was barely a blip. And when Mr. Trump turns himself in at a Miami courthouse on Tuesday, it will keep the attention on the former president.Roughly 15 different groups are trying to galvanize Trump supporters to come to the Miami courthouse for his hearing, according to one person briefed on the plans. The juxtaposition in Mr. Trump’s own language about the stakes, legally and politically, can be jarring.“This is the final battle,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday.But aware of the violence that broke out on Jan. 6, 2021, when Mr. Trump urged supporters to march on the Capitol, he was more cautious on Sunday when speaking to Roger J. Stone Jr., his longest-serving adviser, in an interview for Mr. Stone’s radio show.Mr. Trump said they should join that final battle while protesting “peacefully.” More