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      McConnell, Dismissing Health Concerns, Says He Will Finish His Senate Term

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      The Kentucky Republican said he would finish his term as leader, which runs through 2024, and in the Senate, where he was elected to serve through 2026.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longtime Republican leader whose recent medical episodes have raised questions about his ability to continue steering his party in the Senate, declared on Wednesday that he had no intention of relinquishing his top post or leaving Congress ahead of schedule.“I’m going to finish my term as leader and I’m going to finish my Senate term,” Mr. McConnell, wan in appearance and defiant in tone, told reporters at the Capitol as he took questions outside the Senate chamber.In a crowded news conference, Mr. McConnell’s first at the Capitol since two alarming episodes in which he froze midsentence on camera while addressing the media, the 81-year-old minority leader refused to engage with questions about his health or his political future, even as he appeared to leave the door open to giving up his leadership post after 2024.Still, Mr. McConnell, whose seventh term in the Senate lasts through 2026, would say nothing about the spells he experienced on camera in recent weeks that left him staring vacantly into space without speaking, appearing temporarily paralyzed.“Dr. Monahan covered the subject fully,” Mr. McConnell said Wednesday, referring to a letter his office released from Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the attending physician of Congress. Mr. McConnell, who appeared notably thinner since leaving Washington six weeks ago for the summer recess, said the brief statement from Dr. Monahan, which said there was no evidence the senator had a seizure disorder or had experienced a stroke, adequately put to bed any “reasonable questions.”Several medical professionals who watched video of Mr. McConnell’s episodes suggested he had been experiencing focal seizures or mini strokes. They cast doubt on Dr. Monahan’s assessment that the incidents were merely part of a normal recovery from a concussion Mr. McConnell had sustained in March after falling at a Washington hotel.But on Wednesday, after three consecutive questions about his health, Mr. McConnell abruptly ended the news conference.Famously tight-lipped and difficult to read even in his prime, Mr. McConnell offered his colleagues little more detail in the semi-privacy of the weekly Senate Republican lunch, the first time G.O.P. senators had gathered since returning to Washington amid rumblings about a potential change at the top of the leadership ladder.There, he gave his colleagues a rundown of his medical evaluations and said he had been given a clean bill of health, according to Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, as well as others who attended. Mr. McConnell told them that he had only frozen up twice, and simply had the misfortune of doing it both times on camera.The update was enough to reassure most of his colleagues that he was healthy enough to continue leading the conference and that it was time to move on, at least for the moment. They asked him no follow-up questions during the private lunch and later lauded him publicly for what they called a high level of transparency about his condition.“For him, this is unusual,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, one of Mr. McConnell’s potential successors, said after the lunch. “Senator McConnell is famous for keeping his cards close to the vest; he’s very good at it. Usually it serves him well, but not in this case. I think transparency does serve him well.”“I think transparency does serve him well,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, praising Mr. McConnell for updating his colleagues.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesSenator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, described his comments during the lunch as a detailed report of his doctor’s evaluation, and said that Mr. McConnell had his full support. Mr. Graham was one of 10 G.O.P. senators who voted last fall for a change at the top of party leadership, supporting an unsuccessful challenge to Mr. McConnell by Senator Rick Scott of Florida.Senator Todd Young of Indiana said the doctor’s note had reassured him that Mr. McConnell was in “decent health,” though he signaled some uncertainty about how long that would continue.“I trust Senator McConnell will continue to lead our conference in the coming weeks, months, perhaps even years,” Mr. Young said. “But should Republicans have to choose a different leader, I’m confident we’ll settle on positive leadership that places a great emphasis on issues of national security.”Others were more skeptical of the idea that Mr. McConnell would go anywhere anytime soon.“It’ll happen when you see donkeys fly,” Mr. Kennedy said.Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, an ophthalmologist, was one of the few Republicans on Capitol Hill to raise an eyebrow about Dr. Monahan’s brief and carefully worded statements regarding the minority leader’s health, both of which have suggested dehydration might have played a role.“I’m not questioning his ability to be in the Senate,” Mr. Paul said of Mr. McConnell. “My question is with the diagnosis. I think when you have misinformation put out there, like ‘just dehydration,’ it leads to further conjecture, well, maybe there’s something else we’re not telling.”Kayla Guo More

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      Colorado Lawsuit Seeks to Keep Trump Off Ballots Under 14th Amendment

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      The amendment says anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after taking an oath to defend it is ineligible to hold office, and a long-shot effort to employ it is growing.Six Colorado voters filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to keep former President Donald J. Trump off the state’s ballots under the 14th Amendment, which says anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after taking an oath to defend it is ineligible to hold office.The lawsuit, which was filed in a state district court in Denver with the help of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, demands that the Colorado secretary of state not print Mr. Trump’s name on the Republican primary ballot. It also asks the court to rule that Mr. Trump is disqualified in order to end any “uncertainty.”The theory that the 14th Amendment disqualifies Mr. Trump has gained traction among liberals and anti-Trump conservatives since two prominent conservative law professors argued in an article last month that his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol constituted engagement in an insurrection. But it remains a legal long shot. Mr. Trump would surely appeal any ruling that he was ineligible, and a final decision could rest with the Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority that includes three justices he appointed.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said in a statement, “I look forward to the Colorado court’s substantive resolution of the issues, and am hopeful that this case will provide guidance to election officials on Trump’s eligibility as a candidate for office.”The plaintiffs are Republican and unaffiliated voters who argue that Mr. Trump is ineligible and that they will be harmed if he appears on primary ballots. They aim to ensure “that votes cast will be for those constitutionally qualified to hold office, that a disqualified candidate does not siphon off support from their candidates of choice, and that voters are not deprived of the chance to vote for a qualified candidate in the general election,” the suit says.Similar efforts are unfolding in other states. Last month, the liberal group Free Speech for People wrote to the secretaries of state of Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin, urging them not to include Mr. Trump on ballots. And an obscure presidential candidate, John Anthony Castro, a Republican, has sued in New Hampshire.These attempts are separate from the criminal cases against Mr. Trump. They do not depend on his being convicted, and convictions would not trigger disqualification.The legal questions instead include what counts as engaging in an insurrection, who has standing to challenge Mr. Trump’s eligibility and who has the authority to enforce his disqualification if he is disqualified.“Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is old — it has not been truly stress-tested in modern times,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School who specializes in election law. “There are some big forks in the road where you can argue both ways.”The first fork in the Colorado case will be whether individual voters have the right to sue. Challenges to a candidate’s eligibility — on any basis, not just the 14th Amendment — often come from opposing candidates, who are directly affected by the challenged candidate’s presence.Derek Muller, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, emphasized that standing requirements are looser in state courts than in federal courts, especially when it comes to voters’ ability to challenge candidates’ eligibility. But Richard Collins, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Colorado, said that the Colorado Supreme Court had become increasingly restrictive in its interpretation of standing.And beyond standing, Professor Muller said, a big hurdle could be “ripeness”: Because candidates haven’t formally filed for ballot access yet, a judge could decide that the legal questions are not ready for review. More

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      Pence Calls Trump’s Populism a ‘Road to Ruin’ for the G.O.P.

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      The former vice president used a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday to call on Republicans to choose between conservatism and Donald Trump’s brand of populism.Former Vice President Mike Pence devoted an entire speech on Wednesday to what he called a “fundamental” and “unbridgeable” divide within the Republican Party — the split between Reaganite conservatives like himself and propagators of populism like former President Donald J. Trump and his imitators.Mr. Pence, who is polling in the single digits in the G.O.P. presidential primary race and lags far behind the front-runner Mr. Trump, has been warning about the dangers of populism for nearly a year. But his speech on Wednesday went further than he has gone before, casting Mr. Trump’s populism as a “road to ruin.”“Should the new populism of the right seize and guide our party, the Republican Party as we have long known it will cease to exist,” Mr. Pence said at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “And the fate of American freedom would be in doubt.”In his plea to Republicans to abandon populism and embrace conservatism, Mr. Pence said that “we have come to a Republican time for choosing.” The line echoed his hero Ronald Reagan’s 1964 televised address, “A Time for Choosing,” in which the former Hollywood actor framed that year’s presidential election as a choice between individual freedom and governmental oppression.“Republican voters face a choice,” Mr. Pence said. “I believe that choice will determine both the fate of our party and the course of our nation for years to come.”He asked if the G.O.P. will be “the party of conservatism or will we follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles? The future of this movement and this party belongs to one or the other — not both. That is because the fundamental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable.”Mr. Pence defined Republican populism as a trading away of time-honored principles for raw political power. He said populists trafficked in “personal grievances and performative outrage.” And he said they would “abandon American leadership on the world stage,” erode constitutional norms, jettison fiscal responsibility and wield the power of the government to punish their enemies.He connected Mr. Trump’s populist movement to a long line of progressive populists, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Huey Long, the former governor of Louisiana. He said that progressivism and Republican populism were “fellow travelers on the same road to ruin.”And Mr. Pence named names.“Donald Trump, along with his imitators,” he said, “often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House.”In response to Mr. Pence’s speech, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement, “President Trump’s victory in 2016 exposed the massive divide between voters around the country and the establishment Beltway insiders who made terrible trade deals, allowed our southern border to become overrun and never missed an opportunity to play world cop. The conservative movement and the Republican Party have changed for the better, and nobody wants it to go back to the way it was before.”Mr. Pence, in his speech, also called out Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for using state power to punish corporations for taking political stands he disagreed with — a reference to Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to strip Disney of its special tax status.Mr. Pence said he understood the frustrations that had led to populist movements both on the left and the right. He listed income inequality caused by globalization and increased automation, the opioid epidemic and the cultural demonization of conservatives. He did not include on his list the invasion of Iraq — which, unlike most Republicans, he still defends to this day.But he glossed over his own role in promoting Trumpism as Mr. Trump’s vice president as well as his traveling booster, a role Mr. Pence served throughout the 2016 campaign and all four years of the Trump presidency. Mr. Pence finally broke with him by refusing Mr. Trump’s demand that he overturn the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.In Mr. Pence’s telling, it is Mr. Trump who has changed. He said Mr. Trump ran as a conservative in 2016 and governed as one with Mr. Pence’s help. But that story ignores inconvenient facts, including that the Trump-Pence administration added around $8 trillion to the national debt, enacted a protectionist trade policy and laid the groundwork for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence opposed.The former vice president has woven warnings about populism into many of his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks since at least last October, when he condemned “Putin apologists” in the Republican Party. But at the first Republican debate last month in Milwaukee, the split between New Right populism and Reaganite conservatism came under a brighter spotlight in the onstage clashes between Mr. Pence and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.In recent weeks, Mr. Pence and his team decided the subject was important enough to warrant its own speech, according to a person familiar with the planning, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. His invocation of Mr. Reagan as an inspirational figure — a common theme of Mr. Pence’s speeches but done at length on Wednesday — comes as Mr. Pence and other Republican presidential candidates prepare for their second debate, which will be held on Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.As he extolled his hero, Mr. Pence all but pleaded for Republicans to remember there was a time before Mr. Trump. And that it was a time worth returning to.“The truth is,” he said, “the Republican Party did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015.” More

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      Behold the Free Speech Chutzpah of the Republican Party

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      A solid majority of Republicans continues to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election — evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Virtually all Democrats believe that Trump did, in fact, lose the 2020 election and that Biden won fair and square.Now in an extraordinary display of chutzpah, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, and fellow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have accused Democrats of violating the First Amendment rights of election deniers.In a June 26, 2023, interim staff report, Jordan and his colleagues charged that the Biden administration “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor” those who claimed that Trump won in 2020.The report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded With Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” makes the argument thatThe First Amendment recognizes that no person or entity has a monopoly on the truth, and that the “truth” of today can quickly become the “misinformation” of tomorrow. Labeling speech “misinformation” or “disinformation” does not strip it of its First Amendment protection. As such, under the Constitution, the federal government is strictly prohibited from censoring Americans’ political speech.These civil libertarian claims of unconstitutional suppression of speech come from the same Republican Party that is leading the charge to censor the teaching of what it calls “divisive concepts” about race; the same party that expelled two Democratic members of the Tennessee state legislature who loudly called for more gun control after a school shooting; the same party that threatens to impeach a liberal judge in North Carolina for speaking out about racial bias; the same party that has aided and abetted book banning in red states across the country.In other words, it is Republicans who have become the driving force in deploying censorship to silence the opposition, simultaneously claiming that their own First Amendment rights are threatened by Democrats.One of the most egregious examples of Republican censorship is taking place in North Carolina, where a state judicial commission has initiated an investigation of Anita Earls, a Black State Supreme Court justice, because she publicly called for increased diversity in the court system.A June 2 Law360 piece examined the racial and gender composition of the North Carolina judiciary and found “that out of 22 appellate jurists — seven state Supreme Court justices and 15 Court of Appeals judges — 64 percent are male and 86 percent are white.”The article then quoted Earls: “It has been shown by social scientists that diverse decision-making bodies do a better job. … I really feel like everyone’s voice needs to be heard, and if you don’t have a diverse judicial system, perspectives and views are not being heard, you’re not making decisions that are in the interests of the entire society. And I feel like that’s wrong.”On Aug. 15, the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission notified Earls that it was opening an investigation “based on an interview you since gave to the media in which you appear to allege that your Supreme Court colleagues are acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias in some of their decision-making.”Earls’s interview, the notification letter continued, “potentially violates Canon 2A of the Code of Judicial Conduct which requires a judge to conduct herself ‘at all times in a manner which promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.’”On Aug. 29, Earls filed suit in federal court charging that there is “an ongoing campaign on the part of the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission to stifle” her First Amendment free-speech rights “and expose her to punishment that ranges from a letter of caution that becomes part of a permanent file available to any entity conducting a background check to removal from the bench.”At the center of Republican efforts to censor ideological adversaries is an extensive drive to regulate what is taught in public schools and colleges.In an Education Week article published last year, “Here’s the Long List of Topics Republicans Want Banned From the Classroom,” Sarah Schwartz and Eesha Pendharkar provided a laundry list of Republican state laws regulating education:Since January 2021, 14 states have passed into law what’s popularly referred to as “anti-critical race theory” legislation. These laws and orders, combined with local actions to restrict certain types of instruction, now impact more than one out of every three children in the country, according to a recent study from UCLA.Schwartz and Pendharkar also noted that “many of these new bills propose withholding funding from school districts that don’t comply with these regulations. Some, though, would allow parents to sue individual educators who provide banned material to students, potentially collecting thousands of dollars.”What’s more, “Most prohibited teaching a list of ‘divisive concepts,’ which originally appeared in an executive order signed by then-President Donald Trump in fall 2020.”The Trump order, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” included prohibitions on the following “divisive concepts”:That an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; that any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or that meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.The censorship effort has been quite successful.In a February 2022 article, “New Critical Race Theory Laws Have Teachers Scared, Confused and Self-censoring,” The Washington Post reported that “in 13 states, new laws or directives govern how race can be taught in schools, in some cases creating reporting systems for complaints. The result, teachers and principals say, is a climate of fear around how to comply with rules they often do not understand.”Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard who is a professor of economics there, argued in an email that issues of free speech are not easily resolved.The problem, Summers wrote, “comes from both sides. Ron DeSantis’s efforts to limit what he regards as critical race theory is deplorable as are efforts on Ivy League campuses to discredit and devalue those with unfashionable beliefs about diversity or the role of genes or things military.”But, Summers continued,It’s sometimes a bit harder than the good guys make out. What about cultures of intolerance where those who, for example, believe in genetic determinism are shunned, and graduate students all exhibit their academic freedom rights to not be the teaching fellows of faculty with those beliefs. Does ideological diversity mean philosophy departments need to treat Ayn Rand with dignity or biology departments need to hear out creationism?“What about professional schools where professional ethics are part of what is being instilled?” Summers asked:Could a law school consider hiring a lawyer who, while in government, defended coercive interrogation practices? Under what circumstances should one accept, perhaps insist on university leaders criticizing speech? I have been fond of saying academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism but when should leaders speak out? Was I right to condemn calls for divesting in Israel as antisemitic in effect, if not intent? When should speech be attacked?There is, at this moment, a nascent mobilization on many campuses of organizations determined to defend free speech rights, to reject the sanctioning of professors and students, and to ensure the safety of controversial speakers.Graduates of 22 colleges and universities have formed branches of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance “to support free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity.”At Harvard, 133 members of the faculty have joined the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, dedicated to upholding the free speech guidelines adopted by the university in 1990:Free speech is uniquely important to the university because we are a community committed to reason and rational discourse. Free interchange of ideas is vital for our primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning.Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at the school and a founder of the group, wrote in an email that achieving this goal is much tougher than generally believed:To understand the recent assaults on free speech, we need to flip the question: Not why diverse opinions are being suppressed, but why they are tolerated. Freedom of speech is an exotic, counterintuitive concept. What’s intuitive is that the people who disagree with me are spreading dangerous falsehoods and must be stifled for the greater good. The realization that everyone feels this way, that all humans are fallible, that however confident I am in my beliefs, I may be wrong, and that the only way we can collectively approach the truth is to allow opinions to be expressed and then evaluate them, requires feats of abstraction and self-control.The example I cited at the beginning of this column — the charge that the Biden administration “colluded with big tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor” the claims of election deniers — has proved to be a case study of a successful Republican tactic on several fronts.Republicans claimed the moral high ground as the victims of censorship, throwing their adversaries on the defensive and quieting their opponents.On June 6, The Washington Post reported, in “These Academics Studied Falsehoods Spread by Trump. Now the G.O.P. Wants Answers,” thatThe pressure has forced some researchers to change their approach or step back, even as disinformation is rising ahead of the 2024 election. As artificial intelligence makes deception easier and platforms relax their rules on political hoaxes, industry veterans say they fear that young scholars will avoid studying disinformation.One of the underlying issues in the free speech debate is the unequal distribution of power. Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, raised a question in reply to my email: “I wonder if the century-long standard for why we defend free speech — that we need a fairly absolute marketplace of ideas to allow all ideas to be heard (with a few exceptions), deliberated upon, and that the truth will ultimately win out — is a bit dated in this modern era of social media, algorithms and most importantly profound corporate power.”While there has always been a corporate skew to speech, Frymer argued,in the modern era, technology enables such an overwhelming drowning out of different ideas. How long are we hanging on to the protection of a hypothetical — that someone will find the truth on the 40th page of a Google search or a podcast with no corporate backing? How long do we defend a hypothetical when the reality is so strongly skewed toward the suppression of the meaningful exercise of free speech?Frymer contended thatWe do seem to need regulation of speech, in some form, more than ever. I’m not convinced we can’t find a way to do it that would enable our society to be more just and informed. The stakes — the fragility of democracy, the increasing hatred and violence on the basis of demographic categories, and the health of our planet — are extremely high to defend a single idea with no compromise.Frymer suggested that ultimatelyWe can’t consider free speech without at least some understanding of power. We can’t assume in all contexts that the truth will ever come out; unregulated speech does not mean free speech.From a different vantage point, Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email that the censorship/free speech debate has run amok:It certainly has gone haywire. The way I understand it is that freedom of speech has not been a principled commitment, but has been used instrumentally to attain other political ends. The very folks who were so active in demanding freedom of speech in universities have turned around and imposed unconscionable censorship on schools and libraries. The very folks who have demanded a freedom of speech for minority groups have sought to suppress offensive and racist speech.The framing in the current debate over free speech and the First Amendment, Post contends, is dangerously off-kilter. He sent me an article he wrote that will be published shortly by the scholarly journal Daedalus, “The Unfortunate Consequences of a Misguided Free Speech Principle.” In it, he notes that the issues are not just more complex than generally recognized, but in fact distorted by false assumptions.Post makes the case that there is “a widespread tendency to conceptualize the problem as one of free speech. We imagine that the crisis would be resolved if only we could speak more freely.” In fact, he writes, “the difficulty we face is not one of free speech, but of politics. Our capacity to speak has been disrupted because our politics has become diseased.”He specifically faults a widely read March 2022 Times editorial, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” that warnedAmericans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.Post observes thatNo such right exists in any well-ordered society. If I walk into a room shouting outrageous slurs, I should expect to be shamed and shunned. Only a demoralized community would passively accept irresponsibly hurtful speech.People constantly “balance self-restraint against the need for candor.”Arguments that the protection of free speech is crucial to the preservation of democracy, Post maintains, “encourage us to forget that the fundamental point of public discourse is the political legitimation of the state. Our public discourse is successful when it produces a healthy public opinion capable of making state power answerable to politics.”In Post’s view, polarization “is not a simple question of speech. It is the corrosive dissolution of the political commitments by which Americans have forged themselves into a single nation. If we conceptualize public discourse as a social practice, we can see that its failures stem from this fundamental problem.”In this context, Post concludes,Politics is possible only when diverse persons agree to be bound by a common fate. Lacking that fundamental commitment, politics can easily slide into an existential struggle for survival that is the equivalent of war. We can too easily come to imagine our opponents as enemies, whose victory would mean the collapse of the nation.In such circumstances, Post continues,Political debate can no longer produce a healthy and legitimate democratic will. However inclusive we may make our public discourse, however tolerant of the infinite realms of potential diversity we may become, the social practice of public discourse will fail to achieve its purpose so long as we no longer experience ourselves as tied to a common destiny.“We cannot now speak to each other because something has already gone violently wrong with our political community,” Post writes. “The underlying issue is not our speech, but our politics. So long as we insist on allegiance to a mythical free speech principle that exists immaculately distinct from the concrete social practices, we shall look for solutions in all the wrong places.”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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      Wrestling With Inequality, Some Conservatives Redraw Economic Blueprint

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      A growing number of Republican politicians and theorists are challenging party orthodoxy on pocketbook issues, corporate power and government’s role.More Republicans are coming to the view that economic inequality, or a lack of social mobility, is a problem in the United States — and that more can be done to enable families to attain or regain a middle-class life.Though discussions about inequality tend to be most visible among liberals, about four in 10 Republican or Republican-leaning adults think there is too much economic inequality in the country, according to a Pew Research survey. And among Republicans making less than about $40,000 a year who see too much economic inequality, 63 percent agree that the economic system “requires major changes” to address it.But a growing debate among conservative thinkers, politicians and the party base — online, in books and in public forums — reveals a group divided about how, in practice, to address pocketbook issues and the extent to which the government should be involved.“I don’t think just having a bigger government is a solution to a lot of these problems,” said Inez Stepman, a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and a fellow with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank widely credited with giving Trumpism an intellectual framework. “But I do think that we could stand to think a little bit more on the right about how to make that 1950s middle-class life possible for people.”These yearnings and ideological stirrings have picked up as both whites without college degrees and the broader working class have grown as a share of Republican voters. (Hillary Clinton won college-educated white voters by 17 percentage points in her 2016 race against Donald J. Trump; four years earlier, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, carried that group.)A notable swipe against longtime Republican economic thinking has come from Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative who served as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal and the opinion editor of The New York Post. The metamorphosis of his worldview is laid out in a recently published book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It.”“I was writing editorials preaching the gospel of low taxes, free trade, et cetera,” Mr. Ahmari said in an interview. But Mr. Trump’s election inspired him to research how “American life in general for the lower rungs of the labor market is unbelievably precarious,” he said, and his politics changed.Mr. Ahmari recently endorsed a second term for Mr. Trump, but he has written that “while ferociously conservative on cultural issues,” he is also “increasingly drawn to the economic policies of the left — figures like Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.”In their own ways, Republican presidential primary candidates are jostling for ways to validate the populist energy and financial unease that Mr. Trump tapped into with a mix of pronouncements and policy promises. Some have set out economic goals that, according to many experts, are hard to square with their promises to reduce public debt and taxes and make deep cuts to government programs — especially now that many Republicans have backed away from calls to cut entitlement benefits.In a campaign speech in New Hampshire this summer called “A Declaration of Economic Independence,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican presidential contender, sharply critiqued China, diversity programming, “excessive regulation and excessive taxes” — a familiar set of modern conservative concerns. Yet he also echoed complaints and economic goals often heard from the left.“We want to be a country where you can raise a family on one sole income,” he told the crowd.“We cannot have policy that kowtows to the largest corporations and Wall Street at the expense of small businesses and average Americans,” he added. “There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism.”Critics on the left and the right argue that Mr. DeSantis has failed to clearly define how he would achieve those goals. The DeSantis campaign declined to comment for this article, but he has cited pathways to broader prosperity that include bringing industrial jobs back from abroad, increasing work force education and technical training, removing “red tape” faced by small businesses and aiming for annual U.S. economic growth of at least 3 percent.Though the fissures on the right over economic issues were evident when Mr. Trump upended the political scene eight years ago, the realignments are maturing and deepening, causing fresh tensions as factions disagree on the extent to which inequality, globalization and growing corporate power should be seen as problems.Some conservatives remain more concerned with the trajectory of federal spending and unlocking greater overall prosperity, rather than its distribution.Last year, Phil Gramm, a Republican who steered the passage of major tax cuts and deregulation during his time representing Texas in Congress from the 1970s to the early 2000s, published a book with his fellow economists Robert Ekelund and John Early called “The Myth of American Inequality.” The book — filled with alternative tabulations of impoverishment and living standards — argues that inequality is not high and rising as “the mainstream” suggests.It argues that when including welfare transfers, income inequality has been more stable than government figures suggest, and that the share of Americans living in poverty fell from 15 percent in 1967 to only 1.1 percent in 2017.“The point of the book is to get the facts straight,” Mr. Gramm said in an interview, adding that “we’re having these debates” with numbers that are “verifiably false.” (Some scholars have vehemently disagreed with the authors’ analysis.)Scott Lincicome, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, said that he largely agreed with Mr. Gramm’s thesis and that Americans were mostly wrestling with “keeping up with the Joneses,” not a loss of economic traction.“In general, folks at the bottom, up to the median, are doing better,” Mr. Lincicome concluded. “They’re not winning the game, but they’re doing better than the same group was 30-plus years ago.”He added: “You know, economists can debate all day long whether we’re better off, worse off overall or whatever. But when you factor in all the factors, I personally think things are fine.”To the extent that these debates have popular reach, the most public face of the revisionist camp may be Oren Cass, an adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 campaign, who has become immersed in a collective project among some right-leaning thinkers to “rebuild capitalism.”Mr. Cass and his allies want to use government spending and power to promote economic mobility with traditionalist goals in mind — like reducing the cost of living for the heads of married, two-parent households.Mr. Cass praised Mr. Ahmari’s book as one that “bravely goes where few conservatives dare tread, to the ideologically fraught realm in which the market appears inherently coercive and capitalism appears in tension with economic freedom.” (Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, is talking at a book event with Mr. Ahmari this month at the National Press Club in Washington.)Many economists and political scientists contend that the ideological realignment on the right is overblown, confused with a broader, hard-to-quantify loyalty to Mr. Trump rather than an explicit ideology giving life to Trumpism.“In a way,” Mr. Ahmari said, his critics — “the people who say, ‘Yeah, sure, you’re just a couple of guys: you, Oren, and a few others at magazines and think tanks’” — are “not wrong institutionally,” as there is little donor support for their efforts.“But they are wrong in terms of voters,” he added.Ms. Stepman of the Claremont Institute says she is personally “more traditional right” than thinkers like Mr. Ahmari but agrees they are tapping into something real.“There is a very underserved part of the political spectrum that is genuinely left of center on economic issues, right of center on cultural issues,” she said, pointing to issues including immigration, gun laws, education, gender norms and more.Gabe Guidarini is one of them.Growing up in Lake Bluff, Ill., in a working-class household where MSNBC often played in the background at night, Mr. Guidarini felt his view that “the status quo in this country is corrupt” was validated by the “anti-establishment” voices of both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. But he came to the view that “you can’t get away with” social views that stray from progressive orthodoxy and still be accepted by Democrats. Now, at 19, he is the president of the University of Dayton College Republicans.In 2022, he worked as a campaign intern for J.D. Vance — the author of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” who aligned himself with Trumpism after his 2016 book was credited for providing a “reference guide” for Mr. Trump’s electoral success. Mr. Vance, an Ohio Republican, was elected to the U.S. Senate.In line with Tucker Carlson and some other conservatives, Mr. Guidarini thinks the party “should be taking policy samples from Viktor Orban in Hungary, and what he’s doing with family policies that aim to increase family creation, increase childbirth and make it easier to live a decent life as a working or middle-class taxpayer,” he said. “That’s what’s going to return the American dream for so many people, because to young people — and I feel like a lot of other people in America today — the American dream feels dead.”Mr. Guidarini, like many on the right, is wary of achieving those goals by increasing taxes on the wealthy. But according to Pew Research, more Republican or Republican-leaning adults support raising tax rates for those with incomes over $400,000 (46 percent) than say those rates should go unchanged (29 percent) or be lowered (24 percent). And more than half of low-income Republicans support higher taxes on the highest earners.For now, though, all economic debates are “tangential,” said Saagar Enjeti, a conservative millennial who is a co-host of two podcasts that often feature competing voices across the right.“‘What are we going to do when the Trump tax cuts expire?’ These are not the fights that are happening,” Mr. Enjeti said. “I wish they were, but they’re not. They’re just not.”With consensus on policy solutions elusive and “the culture wars” in the campaign forefront, Mr. Enjeti said, Republicans will mostly rally around what he believes will be Mr. Trump’s simple economic message: “Make America 2019 Again” — a time when unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates were low and, for all of life’s challenges, at least cultural conservatives were in the White House. More

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      Gloria Johnson Announces Bid for Marsha Blackburn’s Senate Seat

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      Gloria Johnson, who barely avoided expulsion for her role in a gun control rally in the State Legislature, is hoping to unseat Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Gloria Johnson, a Democratic state representative from Tennessee who narrowly avoided being expelled from the Legislature in April after taking part in a gun control protest on the statehouse floor, announced plans on Tuesday to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Ms. Johnson, 61, received a flood of national attention after she joined two other Democrats, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, to interrupt debate on the floor of the Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives and rally for stricter gun control measures in late March, just days after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville that killed six people.In retribution, Republicans moved to expel the three Democrats — sometimes called the Tennessee Three — from the Legislature. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were both ousted. Ms. Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments but avoided expulsion by just one vote. (Both men were later voted back into their positions.)Last week, the State Legislature held an emotional and chaotic special session meant to be devoted to public safety that ended without agreement on any significant new restrictions on firearm access.In a video announcing her Senate campaign, Ms. Johnson led with that issue, playing clips of news coverage of the Nashville shooting and highlighting her involvement in the gun control protest.“When my friends and I believed mothers and fathers who lost children at Covenant deserved a voice, and we fought for it, they expelled them,” she says in the video.Ms. Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville, was first elected to the Tennessee House in 2012, then lost subsequent elections in 2014 and 2016 before again winning in 2018. For the 2024 Senate race, she is running in a contested Democratic primary against Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice activist who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2020.Both hope to unseat Ms. Blackburn, 71, who in 2018 became the first woman elected to represent Tennessee in the Senate.In her video, Ms. Johnson suggested that Ms. Blackburn was beholden to “extremists and billionaires,” criticizing her views on abortion.Senator Blackburn’s campaign spokeswoman, Abigail Sigler, accused Ms. Johnson in a statement of being a “radical socialist” who “would be a puppet” for President Biden and progressive Democrats. More

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      The Everlasting Pain of Losing a Child

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      More from our inbox:Clarence Thomas’s EthicsPolitical NovicesDon’t Kill the LanternfliesIgnoring the Truth About Trump Karlotta FreierTo the Editor:Re “Life After Loss Is Awful. I Need to Believe It’s Also Beautiful,” by Sarah Wildman (Opinion, Aug. 27):I just read your essay, Ms. Wildman, about your daughter Orli, and I know everything you are saying and am crying with you and for you and for myself.I know what it is to look for your child everywhere, in a rainstorm, in trees and butterflies. I even looked for my son, Jack, in an exhibit of Goya paintings, seeing him in a young man of about his age and size, even though the clothes and setting were of another era.I used to pretend, as long as I could, that the person coming toward me on the trail near our house was Jack. When I hugged his friends, I’d pretend I was hugging him. Unlike you, we lost Jack suddenly, and we had him for what I think of as a third of a life, 26 years. He died skiing in an avalanche in Montana in 1999, almost as long ago as he got to live.That longing ache, the feeling of having failed him, that I should have tamped down his physical daring — I know those too. I am so sorry for your loss that nothing can make go away.We used to say: “We’ve been really good and grieved well. Can we have him back now?” I guess we were saying it to the universe.Bonnie GilliomChapel Hill, N.C.To the Editor:There is overwhelming grace and dignity to this piece and to its earlier companion in the aftermath of Sarah Wildman’s daughter’s death (“My Daughter’s Future Was Taken From Her, and From Us,” May 21).A palpable cascading sadness and grief, resting side by side with a longing to remain attached to what was beautiful in Orli’s universe and what remains so even now that she has passed. Two universes colliding, a mother trying to reconcile these impossibly irreconcilable differences.I am thankful that Ms. Wildman has allowed us into her world. That she has given us permission to see and feel what such devastating loss looks like, how it manifests itself, how to try to manage it even as it cannot be managed.There can be no greater pain, no greater loss than that of watching a child slip through one’s grasp as you try desperately to hold on. But Orli will remain forever present through the words of her mother.And though she may no longer be able to protect her daughter, Ms. Wildman has been able to preserve her and her memory. It is a mother’s last loving gift to her wonderful child.Robert S. NussbaumFort Lee, N.J.To the Editor:I have finished reading Sarah Wildman’s essays on the loss of her daughter. I too have lost a child, although he was 42 years old. I still weep at times that have no connection to losing him. He was my “baby,” and there are days when I can still feel his presence even though he died almost six years ago.Ms. Wildman’s articulation of the grief as ever-changing but everlasting was heartbreaking, but consoling as well. Just knowing that other parents have felt the soul-wrenching pain of this awful loss and continue on with their lives as I have feels like a warm hug.I don’t ever have to end this grieving of my loss. I can allow the memories I hold of him to live with me. I often want to tell family and friends that talking about my son doesn’t have to be off limits. Remembering him for the loving, sensitive and funny person he was is a way to honor and celebrate his memory.Patricia KoulepisPhoenix, Md.Clarence Thomas’s EthicsJustice Clarence Thomas had requested a 90-day extension for his financial disclosures.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Thomas Defends His Private Trips With Billionaire” (front page, Sept. 1):Justice and ethics both require adherence to what is morally right. In his flagrant disregard for such principles, Justice Clarence Thomas has done irreparable harm to a once respected institution.The Supreme Court may never regain the public trust it once held, but Chief Justice John Roberts could make a small beginning by urging Justice Thomas to resign. The perks that Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia, have already enjoyed should be enough for a lifetime.He could do a great service to history and to his own legacy by doing the just, ethical and statesmanlike thing: a graceful resignation in the interest of the court and the country.Fran Moreland JohnsSan FranciscoThe writer is an author and activist.Political NovicesWhen asked about some past comments, Vivek Ramaswamy has denied ever making them or claimed to have been misquoted, even as those denials have been refuted.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Ramaswamy’s Repeated Aversion to the Facts Mirrors Trump’s Pattern” (news article, Aug. 31):The idea has taken hold that a person with no government experience, particularly a successful businessman, can be president. You wouldn’t want a neophyte to remove your gallbladder or give you a haircut, but apparently a lot of people feel differently about picking a president.Donald Trump — with no legislative, foreign policy or executive branch experience, little knowledge of history or government, and little understanding of the powers of the president — was elected and is still wildly popular with his party.What Donald Trump taught us is that the skill and experience it takes to become president, to get the job, and the skill and experience it takes to be president, to do the job, are not the same. It isn’t that they are not exactly the same; it is that they are totally different. The Venn diagram circles, Mr. Trump has taught us, do not intersect. He has also taught us that the second skill doesn’t have to be on your résumé to get the job.At least one person, Vivek Ramaswamy, has learned this lesson. If this works, it is democracy’s Achilles’ heel.Clem BerneSouth Salem, N.Y.Don’t Kill the LanternfliesEncouraging the public to kill spotted lanternflies can help raise awareness of the problem while scientists seek a lasting solution, experts said. These lanternflies were flattened by a photographer.Ali Cherkis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:New York City’s lanternfly bloodsport is sending our children the wrong message. “Swatting and Stomping in a Lanternfly Summer” (news article, Sept. 3) encourages us to continue the killing despite its obvious futility.First, it’s absurd to think that we can control the pest population one stomp at a time. Second, you don’t have to be a follower of ahimsa (the ancient Indian principle of nonviolence) to see that encouraging our children to destroy a life is problematic, even, or especially, a small and annoying one. Third, it teaches our children that the lanternfly is the problem while ignoring the root problem: us.Humanity’s sprawling globalization, ignoring its effects on nature, created the pest by introducing it into a new environment. Perhaps a better lesson for our children would be to point out the lanternfly as an unintended consequence of human practices and to teach them to be a better steward of our planet than we were.Ari GreenbaumTeaneck, N.J.Ignoring the Truth About TrumpTo the Editor:Remember when we were kids and someone was going to say something that we didn’t want to hear? We’d stick our fingers into our ears or make a lot of noise to drown out the anticipated comment.Isn’t this essentially what Matt Gaetz and other Republicans are doing in their proposal to defund Jack Smith’s investigation of former President Donald Trump?Yeah, growing up can be hard. We often hear things we’d prefer to remain ignorant of. For some, ignorance is still bliss.Robert SelverstoneWestport, Conn. More

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      Nikki Haley Has a Playbook for Winning Tough Races, but 2024 Is Different

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      Still pitching herself as a political outsider, Ms. Haley now has a political résumé that includes a stint in the Trump administration. Then there’s Mr. Trump himself.Nikki Haley was polling in the low digits, fighting for oxygen among better-known and better-funded rivals in a contest clouded by scandal and involving the man whose job they all sought.This was 2009, and Ms. Haley was the underdog candidate for governor of South Carolina. At the state Republican Party’s convention that year, she was the last contender to speak. Before she took the podium, Katon Dawson, then the state party’s chairman, handed her a rust-coated nail from a jar collected from an old building in Orangeburg.“‘Honey, this is a tenpenny, rusty nail,’” Mr. Dawson recalled he told Ms. Haley. “‘You’re going to need to be meaner and tougher than that to get through this.’”In Mr. Dawson’s telling, Ms. Haley was unfazed, responding: “‘No problem, I’m going to be governor.’”More than a dozen years later, Ms. Haley — who did become governor, went on to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and is now running for president — hopes to replicate the kind of surprise success that made her a conservative star. As in prior races, she’s on a tight budget, spending conservatively, and keeping up a grueling schedule of appearances. As in campaigns past, her allies view the debate stage as crucial to building name recognition and buzz, and her poll numbers have climbed since her breakout performance onstage in Milwaukee.But the 2024 contest, in which Ms. Haley still trails former President Donald J. Trump as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in national surveys, presents different challenges in a vastly altered political landscape.Though she is still pitching herself as an outsider who can take on the establishment, Ms. Haley now has a lengthy political résumé that includes a stint in the Trump administration. And much of the grass-roots support that helped power her victories in South Carolina has rallied behind her former boss, Mr. Trump.“The craziest, toughest, wildest, most stressful day working or running on a statewide gubernatorial campaign — that is three times a day, every day on a presidential,” said Kevin Madden, a former Republican operative who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 and 2008 presidential campaigns.Ms. Haley with former President Donald J. Trump when he accepted her resignation as ambassador to the U.N. in 2018.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesMs. Haley first stunned her party in 2004 when she ran for the State Legislature in a conservative district in Lexington County. She unseated Larry Koon, the longest-serving member in the South Carolina House of Representatives at the time and a fellow Republican with deep familial roots in the state.The daughter of Indian immigrants, Ms. Haley, 51, was an accountant helping her mother expand her international clothing shop. She had no political experience, and top consultants spurned her. She lagged in fund-raising and spent most of the race polling in the single digits. Even so, she was the target of ugly, racist attacks.Ms. Haley took those in stride, her friends said. She countered with the aggressive campaign schedule and retail politics that have become her signature, knocking on doors and passing out doughnuts.“I was discounted because I was a girl,” she writes of that first campaign in her memoir, “Can’t Is Not an Option.” “I was discounted because I was Indian. I was discounted because I was young.”Without leaning into any of those identities, Ms. Haley beat Mr. Koon by more than 9 percentage points.In the state House, Ms. Haley initially had few friends but soon earned the respect of colleagues for her work ethic and focus on policy. On the debate floor, she could be searing and was known to pick fights on issues she believed in.“I vividly remember her being active on several floor debates, and she was already a leader — that’s unusual for freshmen,” said David Wilkins, then the state House speaker who later led Ms. Haley’s transition team when she became governor and is now one of her presidential campaign donors.She turned a legislative dispute with Republican leadership — she wanted to hold more roll call votes — into a major policy issue of transparency in her first campaign for governor.As a freshman legislator, Ms. Haley quickly earned the respect of colleagues for her work ethic and focus on policy.Erik Campos/The State, via Associated PressMr. Dawson said that none of the “good ol’ boys” in South Carolina politics — himself included, at first — believed she had a real shot in that race. Her primary opponents were political heavyweights: Henry McMaster, a former state attorney general who is now governor; Gresham Barrett, then a popular U.S. Congress member; and André Bauer, then the state’s lieutenant governor.The race was complicated by Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican ally who had all but officially endorsed Ms. Haley before he was swept up in a scandal over an extramarital affair. She faced more racist attacks. A conservative political blogger claimed he had an affair with Ms. Haley, which she vehemently denied.But she stuck to her playbook. Allies recalled her campaigning across the state on a shoestring budget while saving the little money she had for television ads. She drew the endorsements of powerful Republican allies who helped her thread the needle between big Republican donors and grass-roots Tea Party supporters. Among those allies were Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who was looking ahead to a second presidential run, and Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican Party vice-presidential nominee.She also had the support of Mr. Sanford’s wife, Jenny Sanford McKay, a popular figure in the state. The women had been acquainted ever since Ms. Haley’s first state House bid, when Mr. Dawson suggested Ms. Sanford McKay call and give the candidate weathering derogatory and racist attacks a pep talk. Ms. Haley did not really need it, she recalled.“She knew what she was doing, she knew why she was running and she seemed very confident,” Ms. Sanford McKay, who is now a Haley campaign donor, said in an interview.Ms. Haley celebrating with her family after winning the primary election for the South Carolina governor race in 2010.Travis Dove for The New York TimesOn the debate stage in Milwaukee, Ms. Haley did not surprise those who had watched her tussle with opponents in the past. Both allies and detractors have observed her talent for seizing opportunities — and for navigating changes to her own positions amid shifting political terrain, such as when she eventually supported removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol.As governor, Ms. Haley had initially expressed little to no interest in discussing the removal of the flag. But she changed her mind in 2015, after a white supremacist killed nine Black parishioners at an African American church in Charleston, S.C., including the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a state senator. Joel Lourie, a former Democratic state senator who considered Mr. Pinckney a friend, said he had been one of Ms. Haley’s harshest critics until she “rose to the occasion.”“She is as tactical, talented and ambitious of a politician you will ever meet,” he said of Ms. Haley.Still, what worked for Ms. Haley in the past may not be enough in 2024, as she positions herself as both a friend to Mr. Trump, and the candidate best able to move the party beyond him in order to beat President Biden.“I can understand why she might have supreme confidence in her ability to win right now,” said Adolphus Belk, a political analyst and political science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., recalling her strong performances at campus forums during her first bid for governor and later as governor.But the same Tea Party wave Ms. Haley tapped as part of her rise — grass-roots energy with deep strains of racism and white racial grievance that Ms. Haley and other Republican presidential candidates have continued to downplay — created the space for Mr. Trump’s climb to the White House and has allowed him to retain his dominance in the party and presidential field, Mr. Belk said.One striking example of how Republican politics has changed: Support from Mr. Romney, now a U.S. senator from Utah and a fierce critic of Mr. Trump’s, would be unlikely to help endear Ms. Haley to the primary voters she needs to woo.“She has managed to be pretty effective at contradiction over the years,” said Chip Felkel, a longtime South Carolina G.O.P. strategist. “But this is a bigger stage.”Ms. Haley sparring with Vivek Ramaswamy during a breakout performance in the first Republican primary debate last month in Milwaukee.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThis time around, a bright spot has been a robust network of donors, and Ms. Haley raised more than $1 million in less than 72 hours after the debate, according to her campaign. She has held more than 90 events in the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and Ms. Haley’s campaign says the plan now is to keep up the pace. A super PAC backing her candidacy has started to pour money into advertising, with more than $9 million planned in spending in Iowa and New Hampshire from July to October, according to an analysis by AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. She has qualified for the second G.O.P. debate, which is scheduled for Sept. 27.Still, with months to go before the first nominating contest, Mr. Trump’s grip on the race has only appeared to tighten. He remains the top choice for G.O.P. voters nationally and in South Carolina, where Ms. Haley has been neck and neck for third or fourth place with her home state rival, Senator Tim Scott.“I’ll just say — take a deep breath,” Mr. Wilkins, one of Ms. Haley’s donors, said when asked about her position in the race. “She’s coming.” More