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      Republicans Shrug at New Possible Trump Indictment

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      News of a possible indictment related to Jan. 6 brought a muddled response from some of Donald Trump’s 2024 rivals, and familiar attacks on President Biden from his allies in Congress.The indictments of Donald J. Trump — past and pending — are becoming the background music of the 2024 presidential campaign: always there, shaping the mood, yet not fully the focus.Like so much of the Trump presidency itself, the extraordinary has become so flattened that Mr. Trump’s warning on Tuesday that he was facing a possible third indictment this year, this time over his involvement in the events that led to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, drew shrugs from some quarters of his party and a muddled response from his rivals.At one Republican congressional fund-raising lunch on Tuesday in Washington, the news of a likely third Trump indictment went entirely unmentioned, an attendee said. Some opposing campaigns’ strategists all but ignored the development. And on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s allies quickly resumed their now-customary defensive positions.Two and half years ago, the deadly riot that left the nation’s seat of government defiled had threatened to forever tarnish Mr. Trump’s political legacy. His supporters had stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of his defeat, stoked by their leader who had urged them to “fight like hell.” Even long-loyal Republicans broke with him as shattered glass littered the Capitol complex.Yet today, Mr. Trump is the undisputed front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. And the threatened charges relating to Jan. 6 against Mr. Trump were instead turned into attacks on his successor by his Republican defenders on Tuesday.“We have yet again another example of Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice targeting his top political opponent, Donald Trump,” Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 4 House Republican, told reporters on Capitol Hill.When Mr. Trump and Ms. Stefanik spoke by phone on Tuesday, the former president lingered on the line as they discussed ways to use the Republican-led House committees to try to attack the investigations. Mr. Trump also spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who accused the Biden administration of trying to “weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.”Their comments reprised a role that Republicans in Congress played for Mr. Trump twice before when he was impeached, and twice again when he was indicted earlier this year. The first indictment came in March, by the district attorney in Manhattan in connection with hush money payments to a porn star. The second was in June, when he was indicted on charges of keeping top-secret classified documents and obstructing efforts to get them back.Republicans and Mr. Trump’s extended orbit have established a rhythm of how to respond. Yet on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump’s leading rivals continue to struggle to even articulate a response.Chief among them is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s top-polling rival. At a stop in South Carolina, Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday said that Mr. Trump “should have come out more forcefully” against the protesters who stormed the Capitol that day.But after that line was picked up by Trump surrogates to attack Mr. DeSantis, his usually forceful DeSantis War Room Twitter account was anything but warring, accusing those surrogates of taking the governor out of context. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said Mr. Trump “should have come out more forcefully” against the Jan. 6 protesters. Sean Rayford/Associated Press“I hope he doesn’t get charged,” Mr. DeSantis said of Mr. Trump in an interview broadcast later on CNN.The CNN interview was supposed to be an important moment for a candidate who had previously avoided any sit-downs that might legitimize the “corporate media” that he regularly denounces. Instead, the network interrupted its own exclusive recorded DeSantis interview with live updates from outside a courthouse in Florida on one Mr. Trump’s coming trials. The sequence seemed to capture the state of the race that Mr. Trump is dominating.Justin Clark, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2020 and whose firm, National Public Affairs, has conducted polling of the primary race, said the challenge for his rivals is the voters themselves. Data from Mr. Clark’s firm shows that Republicans view an attack on Mr. Trump “as an attack on them,” he said.“That loyalty is not something that is easy to beat in a campaign,” he added. “His opponents see this, too, and that is why they tread very carefully. It’s hard to see how another Republican breaks out when primary voters are rallying around their most recent president and any challengers have to hold their fire.”Mr. Trump on Tuesday revealed that he had received a “target letter” from the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, who is investigating his role in the lead-up to the violence of Jan. 6.“Almost always means arrest and indictment,” Mr. Trump wrote of the target letter on Truth Social.Mr. Smith’s office already indicted Mr. Trump in federal court in June, saying he had possessed reams of national defense material and obstructed the investigation. In the coming weeks, he faces possible indictment in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state.Alyssa Farah Griffin, who had served as Mr. Trump’s communications director before resigning in late 2020 and publicly breaking with her former boss, said, “The most striking thing to me is that most of Trump’s G.O.P. opponents, who are polling double digits behind him, still will not seize this opportunity to denounce his unfit actions.”One reason is that Mr. Trump, and Republican primary voters, have so thoroughly rewritten the history of Jan. 6, 2021. The mere mention of the day is no longer an overwhelmingly clear political loser for the former president, at least in a Republican primary. Mr. Trump, two months after the attack, declared the violence a “love-fest,” and has continued to do so.Indeed, at a rally this year in Texas, Mr. Trump placed his hand on his heart and listened to the song “Justice for All” that featured his voice and those of some Jan. 6 prisoners.“I believe that history will hold him to account for his actions that day,” former Vice President Mike Pence said. Doug Mills/The New York TimesFew prominent elected officials were as directly affected on Jan. 6 as former Vice President Mike Pence. But even he declined to suggest that Mr. Trump should be prosecuted and said the election should be how the matter is arbitrated.“I believe that history will hold him to account for his actions that day,” Mr. Pence said Tuesday on NewsNation. But of an indictment, he said, “I hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m not convinced that the president acting on bad advice of a group of crank lawyers that came into the White House in the days before Jan. 6 is actually criminal.”There were some exceptions.The low-polling former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, said in a statement that “Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again.”And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey wrote on Twitter that he wants to see the indictment itself before offering his opinion, but added that Mr. Trump’s “conduct on January 6th proves he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.”However, the details laid out in the first federal indictment against Mr. Trump — allegations that he waved material he described as secret government documents in front of people without security clearances at two of his private clubs — barely dented his support. Several Republican elected officials instinctively leaped to support him, and his poll numbers remained high or even rose.Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist in California who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential race, says he believes it will eventually all become too much freight for Mr. Trump to carry to win the nomination.“There’s been the question of electability and as these indictments pile up and details emerge, I don’t think we know yet if voters will stick with him if there appears to be viable competitive alternatives,” Mr. Stutzman said.Mr. Trump’s team has capitalized on his past indictments to raise huge sums of campaign cash. But in Iowa on Tuesday, at a town hall-style interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Mr. Trump dismissed the friendly host’s suggestion that he was able to slough off his latest legal entanglement.“No,” Mr. Trump said, “it bothers me.”Maya King More

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      ‘Gut-level Hatred’ Is Consuming Our Political Life

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      Divisions between Democrats and Republicans have expanded far beyond the traditional fault lines based on race, education, gender, the urban-rural divide and economic ideology.Polarization now encompasses sharp disagreements over the significance of patriotism and nationalism as well as a fundamental split between those seeking to restore perceived past glories and those who embrace the future.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, described the situation this way in an email to me:Because political beliefs now reflect deeply held worldviews about how the world ought to be — challenging traditional ways of doing things on the one hand and putting a brake on that change on the other — partisans look across the aisle at each other and absolutely do not understand how their opponents can possibly understand the world as they do.The reason we have the levels of polarization we have today, Hetherington continued,is because of the gains non-dominant groups have made over the last 60 years. The Democrats no longer apologize for challenging traditional hierarchies and established pathways. They revel in it. Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality, or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it. It’s just something we are going to have to live with until a new set of issues rises to replace this set.Democrats are determined not only to block any drive to restore the America of 1963 — one year before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — but also to press the liberal agenda forward.Toward the end of the 20th century, Republicans moved rightward at a faster pace than Democrats moved leftward. In recent decades, however, Democrats have accelerated their shift toward more liberal positions while Republican movement to the right has slowed, in part because the party had reached the outer boundaries of conservatism.Bill McInturff, a founding partner of the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, released a study in June, “Polarization and a Deep Dive on Issues by Party,” that documents the shifting views of Democratic and Republican voters.Among the findings based on the firm’s polling for NBC News:From 2012 to 2022, the percentage of Democrats who describe themselves as “very liberal” grew to 29 percent from 19.In 2013, when asked their religion, 10 percent of Democrats said “none”; in 2023, it was 38 percent. The percentage of Republicans giving this answer was 7 percent in 2012 and 12 in 2023.The percentage of Democrats who agreed that “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people” grew from 45 percent in 1995 to 67 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in 2021, a 37-point gain. Over the same period, Republican agreement rose from 17 to 23 percent, a six-point increase.“The most stable finding over a decade,” McInturff reports, is that “Republicans barely budge on a host of issues while Democrats’ positions on abortion, climate change, immigration, and affirmative action have fundamentally shifted.”The Democrats’ move to the left provoked an intensely hostile reaction from the right, as you may have noticed.I asked Arlie Hochschild — a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land” who has been working on a new book about Eastern Kentucky — about the threatening policies conservatives believe liberals are imposing on them.She wrote back: “Regarding ‘threats felt by the right’ I’d say, all of them — especially ‘trans’ issues — evoke a sense that ‘this is the last straw.’” In their minds, “the left is now unhinged, talking to itself in front of us, while trying to put us under its cultural rule.”For example, Hochschild continued:When I asked a Pikeville, Ky., businessman why he thought the Democratic Party had become “unhinged,” Henry, as I’ll call him here, studied his cellphone, then held it for me to see a video of two transgender activists standing on the White House lawn in Pride week. One was laughingly shaking her naked prosthetic breasts, the other bare-chested, showing scars where breasts had been cut away. The clip then moved to President Biden saying, “these are the bravest people I know.”The sense of loss is acute among many Republican voters. Geoffrey Layman, a political scientist at Notre Dame, emailed me to say:They see the face of America changing, with white people set to become a minority of Americans in the not-too-distant future. They see church membership declining and some churches closing. They see interracial and same-sex couples in TV commercials. They support Trump because they think he is the last, best hope for bringing back the America they knew and loved.Republican aversion to the contemporary Democratic agenda has intensified, according to two sociologists, Rachel Wetts of Brown and Robb Willer of Stanford.In the abstract of their 2022 paper, “Antiracism and Its Discontents: The Prevalence and Political Influence of Opposition to Antiracism Among White Americans,” Wetts and Willer write:From calls to ban critical race theory to concerns about “woke culture,” American conservatives have mobilized in opposition to antiracist claims and movements. Here, we propose that this opposition has crystallized into a distinct racial ideology among white Americans, profoundly shaping contemporary racial politics.Wetts and Willer call this ideology “anti-antiracism” and argue that it “is prevalent among white Americans, particularly Republicans, is a powerful predictor of several policy positions, and is strongly associated with — though conceptually distinct from — various measures of anti-Black prejudice.”Sympathy versus opposition to antiracism, they continue, “may have cohered into a distinct axis of ideological disagreement which uniquely shapes contemporary racial views that divide partisan groups.”They propose a three-part definition of anti-antiracism:Opposition to antiracism involves (1) rejecting factual claims about the prevalence and severity of anti-Black racism, discrimination and racial inequality; (2) disagreeing with normative beliefs that racism, discrimination and racial inequality are important moral concerns that society and/or government should address; and (3) displaying affective reactions of frustration, anger and fatigue with these factual and normative claims as well as the activists and movements who make them.The degree to which the partisan divide has become still more deeply ingrained was captured by three political scientists, John Sides of Vanderbilt and Chris Tausanovitch and Lynn Vavreck, both of U.C.L.A., in their 2022 book, “The Bitter End.”Vavreck wrote by email that she and her co-authors describedthe state of American politics as “calcified.” Calcification sounds like polarization but it is more like “polarization-plus.” Calcification derives from an increased homogeneity within parties, an increased heterogeneity between the parties (on average, the parties are getting farther apart on policy ideas), the rise in importance of issues based on identity (like immigration, abortion, or transgender policies) instead of, for example, economic issues (like tax rates and trade), and finally, the near balance in the electorate between Democrats and Republicans. The last item makes every election a high-stakes election — since the other side wants to build a world that is quite different from the one your side wants to build.The Sides-Tausanovitch-Vavreck argument receives support in a new paper by the psychologists Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras and Michael Quayle of the University of Limerick in Ireland. The authors demonstrate not only how ingrained polarization has become, but also how attuned voters have become to signals of partisanship and how adept they now are at using cues to determine whether a stranger is a Democrat or Republican.“Learning a single attitude (e.g., one’s standpoint toward abortion rights),” they write, “allows people to estimate an interlocutor’s partisan identity with striking accuracy. Additionally, we show that people not only use attitudes to categorize others as in-group and out-group members, but also to evaluate a person more or less favorably.”The three conducted survey experiments testing whether Americans could determine the partisanship of people who agreed or disagreed with any one of the following eight statements:1) Abortion should be illegal.2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal.3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country.4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased.5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry.6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment.7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun.8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.The results?“Participants were able to categorize a person as Democrat or Republican based on a single attitude with remarkable accuracy (reflected by a correlation index of r = .90).”While partisan differences over racial issues have a long history, contemporary polarization has politicized virtually everything within its reach.Take patriotism.A March Wall Street Journal/NORC poll at the University of Chicago found that over the 25-year period since 1998, the percentage of adults who said patriotism was “very important” to them fell to 38 percent from 70.Much of the decline was driven by Democrats and independents, among whom 23 and 29 percent said patriotism was very important, less than half of the 59 percent of Republicans.A similar pattern emerged regarding the decline in the percentage of adults who said religion was very important to them, which fell to 39 percent from 62 percent in 1998. Democrats fell to 27 percent, independents to 38 percent and Republicans to 53 percent.Or take the question of nationalism.In their 2021 paper, “The Partisan Sorting of ‘America’: How Nationalist Cleavages Shaped the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Bart Bonikowski, Yuval Feinstein and Sean Bock, sociologists at N.Y.U., the University of Haifa and Harvard, argue that the United States has become increasingly divided by disagreement over conceptions of nationalism.“Nationalist beliefs shaped respondents’ voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” they write. “The results suggest that competing understandings of American nationhood were effectively mobilized by candidates from the two parties.”In addition, Bonikowski, Feinstein and Bock argue, “over the past 20 years, nationalism has become sorted by party, as Republican identifiers have come to define America in more exclusionary and critical terms, and Democrats have increasingly endorsed inclusive and positive conceptions of nationhood.” These trends “suggest a potentially bleak future for U.S. politics, as nationalism becomes yet another among multiple overlapping social and cultural cleavages that serve to reinforce partisan divisions.”Bonikowski and his co-authors contend that there are four distinct types of American nationalism.The first, creedal nationalism, is the only version supported by voters who tend to back Democratic candidates:Creedal nationalists favor elective criteria of national belonging, rating subjective identification with the nation and respect for American laws and institutions as very important; they are more equivocal than others about the importance of lifelong residence and language skills and view birth in the country, having American ancestry, and being Christian as not very important.The other three types of nationalism trend right, according to Bonikowski and his colleagues.Disengaged nationalists, “characterized by an arm’s-length relationship to the nation, which for some may verge on dissatisfaction with and perhaps even animus toward it,” are drawn to “Trump’s darkly dystopian depiction of America.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists both apply “elective and ascriptive criteria of national belonging,” including the “importance of Christian faith.”Restrictive and ardent nationalists differ, according to the authors, “in their degree of attachment to the nation, pride in America’s accomplishments, and evaluation of the country’s relative standing in the world.” For example, 11 percent of restrictive nationalists voice strong “pride in the way the country’s democracy works” compared with 70 percent of ardent nationalists.These and other divisions provide William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings who studies how well governments work, the grounds from which to paint a bleak picture of American politics.“Issues of individual and group identity — especially along the dimensions of race and gender — have moved to the center of our politics at every level of the federal system,” Galston wrote by email. “The economic axis that defined our politics from the beginning of New Deal liberalism to the end of Reagan conservatism has been displaced.”How does that affect governing?When the core political issues are matters of right and wrong rather than more and less, compromise becomes much more difficult, and disagreement becomes more intense. If I think we should spend X on farm programs and you think it should be 2X, neither of us thinks the other is immoral or evil. But if you think I’m murdering babies and I think you’re oppressing women, it’s hard for each of us not to characterize the other in morally negative terms.Despite — or perhaps because of — the changing character of politics described by Galston, interest in the outcome of elections has surged.Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, cited trends in polling data on voter interest in elections in an email:In 2000, only 45 percent of Americans said that it really matters who wins that year’s presidential election. Since then, increasing shares of Americans say that who wins presidential elections has important consequences for addressing the major issues of the day: about 63 percent of registered voters provided this response in each of the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections, which then increased to 74 percent in 2016 and 83 percent in 2020.Why?As the parties have become increasingly differentiated over the last several decades, and as presidential candidates have offered increasingly distinct political visions, it is no surprise that greater shares of Americans perceive greater stakes in which party wins the presidential election.Where does all this leave us going into the 2024 election?Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, provided the following answer by email: “When partisan conflict is no longer primarily about policies, or even values, but more about people’s basic worldviews, the stakes do feel higher to partisans.”Weiler cited poll data showing:In 2016, 35 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral than Democrats and 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral. In 2022, those numbers had jumped dramatically — 63 percent of Democrats said Republicans were more immoral, and 72 percent of Republicans said Democrats were more immoral.In this context, Weiler continued:It’s not that the specific issues are unimportant. Our daily political debates still revolve around them, whether D.E.I., abortion, etc. But they become secondary, in a sense, to the gut-level hatred and mistrust that now defines our politics, so that almost whatever issue one party puts in front of its voters will rouse the strongest passions. What matters now isn’t the specific objects of scorn but the intensity with which partisans are likely to feel that those targets threaten them existentially.Perhaps Bill Galston’s assessment was not bleak enough.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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      What Trump’s G.O.P. Rivals Are Saying About a Third Potential Indictment

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      As news broke Tuesday morning that former President Donald J. Trump was likely to be indicted in a third criminal case, the reaction from his rivals in the 2024 Republican primary was notably muted.Mr. Trump still had defenders — including his top competitor in polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who cast him as a victim of “politicization” of the Justice Department. But the tenor was subtly different. Some candidates seemed visibly tired of having to continually respond to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles at the expense of talking about anything else, and some did not say anything at all.Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump and is now running against him, sounded exasperated when asked on Fox News about the investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She called it a “distraction” from important issues like foreign policy, border security and the national debt.“The rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump: it’s going to be about lawsuits; it’s going to be about legal fees; it’s going to be about judges; and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction,” Ms. Haley said. “And that’s why I am running, is because we need a new generational leader. We can’t keep dealing with this drama.”She notably did not repeat what she said when Mr. Trump was indicted last month for his retention of classified documents: that the charges were evidence of “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”Mr. DeSantis, for his part, said that any indictment would be part of “an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” while also saying that Mr. Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, speaking before a campaign event in New Hampshire, denounced what he described as “the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political enemies,” he quickly turned to naming non-Trump-related examples. Pressed further on Mr. Trump, he said, “The voters will decide the next president of the United States.”In other corners, silence reigned. The campaigns of Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota did not respond to requests for comment. And a spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence — who, by certifying the election results on Jan. 6, made an enemy of his former boss — said that Mr. Pence had nothing to say Tuesday morning.But, in a nod to the political inescapability of Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, the spokesman, Devin O’Malley, added that Mr. Pence would be making television appearances later in the day and would probably be asked about it then.The restraint was not universal.A candidate who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most forceful defenders, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, went so far last month as to urge every 2024 contender to pledge to pardon him if elected. On Tuesday, he initially took a less fiery tack, saying he “would have made very different judgments than President Trump did, but a bad judgment is not a crime.” But not long after, he issued a conspiratorial statement, suggesting without evidence that the possible indictment was part of a plot to disqualify Mr. Trump from office under the 14th Amendment.“It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its chief political rivals,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. He added that he had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence for his belief that President Biden ordered the Justice Department and the special counsel to indict Mr. Trump. He ended the statement by promoting an upcoming campaign event.Three other low-polling candidates who, unlike Mr. Ramaswamy, have sought out the anti- Trump lane of the primary field reacted predictably.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Twitter that he would not comment on the potential legal case until an indictment was released, but that Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 proved “he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.” And former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas reiterated his call for Mr. Trump to suspend his campaign.“I have said from the beginning that Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a statement. He added, “Anyone who truly loves this country and is willing to put the country over themselves would suspend their campaign for president of the United States immediately.”The third candidate, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, was scathing: “Losing to Joe Biden was so humiliating to Donald Trump that he was willing to let people die for his lies about a stolen election,” he said in a statement. He added, “Trump’s inaction then, and now being a target in the investigation, proves he’s not fit for office.” More

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      Michigan Charges 16 in False Elector Scheme to Overturn Trump’s 2020 Loss

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      The Michigan attorney general announced felony charges on Tuesday against 16 Republicans for falsely portraying themselves as electors from the state in an effort to overturn Donald J. Trump’s 2020 defeat there.Each of the defendants was charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery, on accusation that they had signed documents attesting falsely that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president.“They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it,” Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said in announcing the charges. “They carried out these actions with the hope and belief that the electoral votes of Michigan’s 2020 election would be awarded to the candidate of their choosing instead of the candidate that Michigan voters actually chose.”The charges, the first against false electors in a sprawling scheme to hand the electoral votes of swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Mr. Trump, add to the rapidly developing legal peril for Mr. Trump and those who helped him try to overturn the results of the election. They came the same day that Mr. Trump said federal prosecutors had told him that he is a target of their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and other schemes he and his allies used to try to maintain power.Those charged in Michigan included Meshawn Maddock, 55, who went on to serve for a time as the co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Ms. Maddock, who has close ties to former President Donald J. Trump and is married to Matt Maddock, a state representative, accused Ms. Nessel of “a personal vendetta.”“This is part of a national coordinated” effort to stop Mr. Trump, she added.Wright Blake, a lawyer representing Mayra Rodriguez, 64, another elector who is a lawyer, said in an interview: “I’m very disappointed in the attorney general’s office. This is all political, obviously. If they want to charge my client, how come they didn’t charge Trump and the Trump lawyers that he sent here to discuss with the delegates what to do?”While a similar investigation in Atlanta has pulled in witnesses from across the country and has led to legal battles with Mr. Trump himself, thus far the Michigan inquiry has focused on residents of the state. It is not clear whether that will remain the case.“This remains an ongoing investigation, and our department has not ruled out potential charges against additional defendants,” Ms. Nessel said Tuesday of her inquiry.Others among the electors who were charged included Kathy Berden, 70, a member of the Republican National Committee, and Marian Sheridan, 69, the state party’s grass-roots vice chair. Neither responded to requests for comment.Documents released Tuesday by Ms. Nessel’s office laid out a scheme in which many of the Trump electors convened at the Republican Party state headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, after being turned away from the State Capitol. The real electors who were certified by the Board of State Canvassers did meet at the Capitol, as required by law. Yet the Republican group falsely claimed they were the rightful electors and had met at the Capitol.Michigan is one of three states, along with Georgia and Arizona, where there are ongoing investigations relating to the use of false electors by the Trump team in 2020. Another investigation in Michigan, being conducted by a special prosecutor, concerns a network of right-wing activists — including Matthew DePerno, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Ms. Nessel last year — who are suspected of breaching voting machines in search of evidence of election fraud.In total, allies of Mr. Trump pushed to convene slates of fake electors in seven swing states that Mr. Biden won. The plan was to create the illusion of a dispute over which slates — the fake Trump ones or the real Biden ones — were legitimate, and to have members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence certify the fake Trump slates, thus handing the election to Mr. Trump in defiance of the will of voters.Ms. Nessel began investigating the matter in early 2021, but referred it to the Justice Department in January 2022. She said at the time that while there were grounds to bring criminal charges, because there appeared to be “a coordinated effort between the Republican parties in various different states, we think this is a matter that is best investigated and potentially prosecuted by the feds.”A few months later, she posted on Twitter: “If we don’t hold the people involved in the alternate elector scheme accountable, there is literally nothing to stop them from doing this again because there will have been no repercussions for it.”But by January of this year, federal prosecutors had taken no apparent action. So Ms. Nessel announced that “we are reopening our investigation, because I don’t know what the federal government plans to do.”In recent weeks, investigators have collected evidence and interviewed witnesses who have been affiliated with the state party.Since Ms. Nessel reopened her investigation, federal prosecutors have become increasingly active in Michigan and appear to be treading similar ground. A number of elections officials and lawmakers — including the secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson — have reportedly been interviewed in recent months by federal prosecutors.Both the federal and Michigan investigations are part of a reckoning over the conspiracy theories Mr. Trump and his allies have promoted about the election. More

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      DeSantis, in Rare CNN Interview, Defends His Struggling Campaign

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      Despite rising scrutiny, the Florida governor stuck to the same strategy — including by defending his top rival, Donald Trump, in the face of new legal troubles.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, with his poll numbers sagging and his opponents circling, defended his struggling campaign on Tuesday, saying on CNN that he had been “taking fire nonstop” but was putting together the political operation he needed to win the early nominating states next year and vault to the presidency.His afternoon appearance in a rare interview in the mainstream news media seemed intended to reset his White House campaign after weeks of second-guessing from critics who have failed to see much progress in catching his main rival, Donald J. Trump. But a major shift in tone or strategy from Mr. DeSantis, either toward the former president or in the issues he focuses on, did not appear in the offing.He remained deferential to Mr. Trump even after the front-runner signaled on Tuesday morning that he could soon be indicted for a third time, in this instance on federal charges stemming from his efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. Speaking with the CNN host Jake Tapper in an interview recorded earlier in the day, Mr. DeSantis dodged questions on his support for a national abortion ban, whether he would commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan and how to end the war in Ukraine.But he expressed confidence that he was laying the groundwork for victory in the Iowa caucuses in January, and that he, as the only military veteran in the race, would win South Carolina, a military-heavy state that comes third in the primary process.“I’ll be the first president elected since 1988 that served in a war,” Mr. DeSantis, who served in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps in Iraq, said outside South Carolina’s capital building in Columbia. Simply appearing on CNN appeared to be an acknowledgment that Mr. DeSantis needs to change his approach after confining his interviews to conservative news outlets and relying on allies to take on the former president. Mr. Trump has comfortably led polls nationally and in the Palmetto State for months.And Mr. DeSantis’s newly released fund-raising figures, although strong overall at $20 million, showed that his campaign has been spending hand over fist and is dangerously dependent on large donors, who could be looking elsewhere for a Trump alternative. His campaign has also begun cutting its staff, in another worrying sign.Still, mindful of alienating core Republican voters who are sympathetic to Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis pulled his punches on Tuesday. After news broke that Mr. Trump had received a “target letter” from the special counsel, Jack Smith, the Florida governor said Mr. Trump “should have come out more forcefully” on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the rioting at the Capitol.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has mostly held interviews with friendly conservative news outlets, not mainstream organizations.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressBut Mr. DeSantis added that criminal charges would fit a pattern of weaponization of political institutions against conservatives.“I think what we’ve seen in this country is an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” he said during a campaign event in West Columbia, S.C.Mr. DeSantis’s social media team, in fact, pushed back on the suggestion that the governor was insufficiently supportive of the former president.How such deference might undermine Mr. Trump’s lead was unclear. Two Republican candidates from South Carolina, Senator Tim Scott and former Gov. Nikki Haley, are also hoping to capitalize on Mr. Trump’s legal peril and Mr. DeSantis’s stumbles and present themselves as the new alternative to the former president.For Mr. DeSantis, a drastic reboot of his campaign is not obvious.On Monday night in Tega Cay, S.C., on the North Carolina border, he stuck to his well-worn talking points: the supposed “indoctrination” of children by “leftist” educators; mobilizing the military to the southern border to stop “our country being invaded”; and his disappointment in Mr. Trump for failing to fire Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who helped lead the Covid-19 response.On Tuesday morning, Mr. DeSantis discussed military policy in an airplane hangar outside Columbia. He filed the paperwork formally declaring his candidacy in the state that morning.His remarks were heavy on themes he has hit since he joined the race: railing against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and what he called “woke operating policies” like drag shows, which the Defense Department ended last month. He also proposed to reinstate the Trump administration’s ban on transgender sailors, soldiers and marines, and promised to end funding for transition care for active-duty service members.Pressed by Mr. Tapper on how the roughly one million transgender adults in the United States would live under a DeSantis administration, the governor said military readiness took precedence over what he characterized as individual life choices.Beyond the military, he said, “I would respect everybody, but what I wouldn’t do is turn society upside down” to accommodate “a very, very small percentage of the population.”Mr. DeSantis also said he would reinstate service members who had been relieved of duty for declining to take the Covid-19 vaccine, a move that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III instituted a year ago.Although the Trump administration broadly moved against transgender rights throughout the federal government, the DeSantis campaign has framed Mr. Trump as weak on his opposition to rolling back L.G.B.T.Q. rights. It may be having an impact.Elizabeth James, 69, a retiree and self-proclaimed “grandmama for DeSantis” who lives in the Columbia area, said she supported Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but soured on him after he “waffled” on transgender issues. She applauded Mr. DeSantis’s plans to end military funding for service members’ transition surgeries and said she believed that too few Republican voters knew enough about Mr. Trump’s record on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.“They’re just holding over from him in 2020 without re-examining where he is now,” she said of the former president. “I think he shifted a lot from where he was.”By holding the CNN interview, the governor had most likely hoped to quiet detractors who say he cannot handle the heat of a critical press.Mr. Tapper pressed Mr. DeSantis on whether he would sign a national ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, mirroring the ban he signed in Florida. He said he saw no evidence Congress could pass a national abortion ban.On committing to send U.S. troops to beat back a theoretical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, again, he dodged: “We’re going to deter that from happening.”And on the hot-button Republican issue of continued U.S. military support for Ukraine, he was even more vague.“The goal should be a sustainable, enduring peace in Europe, but one that does not reward aggression,” he said.The DeSantis political operation may be strengthening its jabs against Mr. Trump. The DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down confirmed on Tuesday that a new advertisement from the group had used artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of Mr. Trump as if it were attacking Iowa’s popular conservative governor, Kim Reynolds. Politico reported on the ad on Monday evening.Mr. Trump’s feud with Ms. Reynolds over her refusal to endorse him is real, and began with an attack on his social network, Truth Social. And it could hurt the former president’s chances in Iowa.But the ad falsely purports to catch Mr. Trump on tape. The super PAC said, “Our team utilized technology to give voice to Donald Trump’s words and Truth Social post attacking Gov. Reynolds.”The Trump campaign evinced no fear.“The DeSantis campaign doesn’t know how to turn things around with their current candidate,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. More

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      Super PAC Backing Tim Scott Plans $40 Million Ad Campaign

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      The ads will give Senator Tim Scott a significant boost as he draws attention from rival campaigns in the Republican presidential race.A super PAC supporting Senator Tim Scott’s presidential campaign said on Tuesday that it was reserving $40 million in television and digital advertising from the fall through January, the largest sum booked so far for any presidential candidate and a blitz of ads that could reshape the 2024 Republican field.The group, called the Trust in the Mission PAC, or TIM PAC, said the ad buy would cover Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Mr. Scott’s home state — the first three states that will vote in 2024 — as well as national cable channels starting in September.To put the $40 million figure in perspective, that is more money than the super PACs supporting Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida have spent so far — combined — on television in the first six months of 2023.The coming ad blitz, which follows a previously announced $7.25 million buy, will provide a significant boost for Mr. Scott. In polling, Mr. Scott has not yet broken out of the pack of Republican candidates trailing those two front-runners.But he has increasingly begun to attract the attention of the DeSantis campaign. In a memo to donors this month, the DeSantis team said it expected Mr. Scott to receive “appropriate scrutiny in the weeks ahead.”The timing of the ad reservation — days after the super PAC said it had only $15 million in cash on hand at the end of June — suggests a major donor most likely contributed a huge sum in recent days. The timing will allow the donor’s identity to remain undisclosed until early 2024.For years, one of Mr. Scott’s biggest benefactors has been Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle. Mr. Ellison had already put $35 million into a different Scott-aligned super PAC, the Opportunity Matters Fund, between 2020 and 2022. A spokeswoman for Mr. Ellison did not respond to a request for comment on any pro-Scott contributions he may have made this year.Mr. Ellison attended Mr. Scott’s presidential kickoff event in May and received a shout-out from the senator onstage. “I thank God Almighty that he continues to provide me with really cool mentors,” Mr. Scott said. “One of my mentors, Larry Ellison, is with us today, and I am so thankful to have so many different mentors in the house.”Rob Collins, a Republican strategist who is the co-chair of Trust in the Mission PAC, said that Mr. Scott’s personal history — “Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” Mr. Scott declared in his 2020 convention speech — would resonate with Republican primary voters.“Tim is the biggest threat to Joe Biden and the far left because Tim’s life story and accomplishments undermine decades of Democrat lies about America,” Mr. Collins said in a statement.The early ad buy will make Mr. Scott’s super PAC the first of the 2024 campaign to reserve television time into the fall and winter, which will lock in somewhat lower advertising rates that are likely to rise as more and more campaigns go on the airwaves. Super PACs pay more than candidates but the later they book the steeper the premium.“As prices skyrocket in the coming weeks, we will have a stable plan that will allow us to efficiently communicate our message, conduct a well-rounded campaign and better manage our cash,” Mr. Collins said.The super PAC also announced that Mr. Scott had begun a door-knocking campaign in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, an operation that includes a dozen staff members and almost 100 canvassers, a majority of whom are paid.The pro-DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, has reported raising $130 million in the first half of 2023 and spent nearly $15 million so far on television ads. The group has outlined plans to hire 2,600 field staff members who will focus on door-knocking across the early states. More

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      It’s Getting Really Awkward for Speaker Kevin McCarthy

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      Some days, Speaker Kevin McCarthy must look out over his House conference in awe and think: Are you maniacs trying to lose us the majority?Thursday may well have been one of those days, as hard-right crusaders larded up the National Defense Authorization Act with divisive, culture-warring amendments taking aim at abortion access, transgender medical care and diversity training. The annual N.D.A.A. usually garners solid bipartisan support, passing without excessive turbulence for the past 60 years. Last week, the House Freedom Caucus and its allies labored to insert more poison pills into the package than a back-alley fentanyl mill. After much drama, and much futile pleading by Mr. McCarthy with his right flank, the House passed the bill Friday, 219-210, on a mostly party-line vote.Rest assured, the spectacle is far from over.The odds of the bill’s extreme measures passing muster with the Democratic Senate and White House are worse than Mike Pence’s odds of winning the presidency next year. So, less than zero. But House conservatives aren’t aiming to make serious policy gains here — at least, not the ones who understand how a divided government works. They are looking to make trouble, to prove they are loud, uncompromising fighters for the conservative cause. They are also looking to make a point, one directed in no small part at Mr. McCarthy, with whom they remain spitting mad over the debt-ceiling deal he negotiated with Democrats in May. And if they need to imperil their nascent majority to make that point, then so be it. Life is full of difficult trade-offs.Mr. McCarthy’s debt-deal machinations this spring won plaudits from many political watchers: What leadership skill! Maybe we underestimated him! Maybe he really can keep his conference in line! But his hard-liners raged that he had sold them out and promptly committed to making the House as dysfunctional as possible, even if it meant bogging down their own team’s policy goals. Their hostage-taking and acting-out have been a warning to Mr. McCarthy: Fool us once, and we’ll turn this chamber into a do-nothing freak show just to teach you a lesson. Try to fool us twice, and things will get really dark and weird.This purity-over-progress approach isn’t just making life awkward for the speaker. It is making the entire Republican conference look like a pack of obstructionist zealots. This may play well in deep-MAGA districts, but not so much in battleground areas. Those are, admittedly, increasingly rare. But with a majority this scrawny, House conservatives are playing with fire. All Democrats need to do is flip a handful of seats to snatch the gavel from Mr. McCarthy’s hand. They could, say, claw back some of the ground unexpectedly lost to Republicans in New York in the midterms (starting with George Santos’s district). And they could pick up a seat or two thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act that may lead to various Southern states redrawing their congressional districts to address sketchy gerrymandering. (Alabama has already been given its marching orders.)Even if Republicans hold on to the House — where, to be fair, a certain level of crazy has come to be expected — the wingers’ shenanigans are doing nothing to help the party’s brand. Many, many Americans are weary of political chaos and performative jerkiness. And many are particular tired of it on the issue of abortion, which drew key numbers of swing voters to Democrats in last year’s midterms. But time and again, Mr. McCarthy’s troops seem dead set on signaling that the G.O.P. is a pack of bomb-throwing fringe-dwellers actively trying not to govern. Swing voters aren’t generally all that keen on posturing, do-nothing Congresses, either.Some Republican House members are cheesed off over these political games. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, for instance, was overheard Thursday dropping all kinds of colorful language, including an “f” bomb or two, about people being forced to vote on the abortion amendment, according to Politico. Though Ms. Mace did not bother abbreviating her pejorative. Nor, it should be noted, did she risk voting against the offending amendment, much less the overall bill. “It’s not going to pass the Senate anyway; it doesn’t matter,” she told The Hill.It doesn’t matter. Well, except that, going forward, Ms. Mace can expect the situation to get so much worse. However much blood and tears get shed in passing the N.D.A.A., they are nothing compared to the carnage anticipated in the coming cage match over funding the government. Already, the hard-liners have made clear that they are going to cause as much trouble as possible in pursuit of their outside-the-mainstream aims. In protest of the debt deal, a pack of conservatives ground action on the House floor to a halt for several days in June while lobbying (or, if you prefer, blackmailing) the speaker to give them more power — including more leeway to slash spending beyond the levels set in the debt-ceiling agreement. With the conservative knife at his throat, Mr. McCarthy has been allowing the conference to move ahead with appropriations proposals that do just that.Ramping up the drama, a passel of conservative members sent a letter to Mr. McCarthy last week, laying out their conditions, including much lower spending levels, for funding the government. Spoiler alert: None were aimed at making the process easier or more efficient.But, after getting crosswise with his wingers on the debt deal, the speaker now seems to have retreated back into a policy of appeasement. This bodes ill for keeping the government running smoothly in the coming months — and for any future legislative efforts.There is no point in feeling sorry for Mr. McCarthy. He’s a political creature. Coming into this job, he knew the risks of negotiating with, and bowing to, ideological terrorists. And he was apparently cool with that. His party is earning whatever electoral comeuppance it gets. But it is shameful that the rest of America may wind up forced to pay a price as well.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. 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      Ramaswamy Looks to Supreme Court in Effort to Appeal to Conservatives

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      The long-shot Republican presidential candidate is releasing a list of potential justices to highlight his bona fides with key voters.Vivek Ramsawamy, an entrepreneur running for the Republican presidential nomination, on Monday will release a list of potential choices for the U.S. Supreme Court, in an effort to highlight his conservative credentials to early-state voters who may be skeptical of a candidate without a political background.The move echoes one made by Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, at a time when he was still facing questions from Republican voters about his past as a Democrat from New York who had once supported abortion rights and had appeared more moderate on certain issues.Mr. Ramaswamy’s list, reported earlier by Axios, includes jurists who have ruled on various aspects of the Republican culture wars, including religious issues, free speech, vaccine mandates and transgender rights. In a statement, Mr. Ramaswamy sought to contrast his approach to that of President Biden, who vowed during his campaign to appoint the first Black woman to the highest court, which he did when he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson. Mr. Ramaswamy dismissed that move as “purely skin-deep diversity.”“What each of the individuals I would appoint share is their unwavering dedication to the principles of originalism and commitment to a constitutionalist judicial philosophy,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “Our courts are the last line of defense against an administrative state that rules by fiat, legislates from the bench, stifling freedom and truth.”Mr. Ramaswamy said he, his staff and what aides describe as “third-party organizations” went over all the writings and decisions of the nine judges on his list, focusing on originalism — the judicial philosophy that relies on the words of the Constitution when it was written as opposed to an interpretation based on current views — and a “commitment to a constitutionalist judicial philosophy.”Mr. Ramaswamy is polling well behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in national surveys and early-state polls. But Mr. Ramaswamy has devoted extensive time to Iowa, where his list of judges for a potential open Supreme Court seat could matter.His list includes Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Lee was on Mr. Trump’s initial list in 2016. Mr. Cruz has been mentioned on lists of prospective conservative jurists, but his decision to object to certifying the 2020 election’s Electoral College outcome would raise hackles among Democrats, who may cite other objections as well.Judge James Ho, who serves on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which includes Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, is also on the list. A member of the conservative Federalist Society and a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, Judge Ho has been a vocal opponent of the right to an abortion.Another jurist, Judge Lawrence Van Dyke of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, was nominated for that position by Mr. Trump in 2019. At the time, the American Bar Association said in a letter that it had concerns that he would not be fair to L.G.B.T.Q. people.Others on the list include Judge Lisa Branch, a member of the Federalist Society who sits on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit; Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general; Judge Thomas M. Hardiman of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who was on Mr. Trump’s initial short list to replace Justice Antonin Scalia; Judge Justin R. Walker of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; and Judge John K. Bush of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. More