Republican Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Chris Christie Is Doing Something Very, Very Important

      by

      Chris Christie made a complete fool of himself back in 2016, fan-dancing obsequiously around Donald Trump, angling for a crucial role in his administration, nattering on about their friendship, pretending or possibly even convincing himself that Trump could restrain his ego, check his nastiness, suspend his grift and, well, serve America. But then Christie, the former two-term governor of New Jersey, had plenty of company. And he never did style himself as some saint.It’s all water under the George Washington Bridge now. The Chris Christie of the current moment is magnificent. I don’t mean magnificent as in, he’s going to win the Republican presidential nomination. I don’t mean I’m rooting for a Christie presidency and regard him as the country’s possible salvation.But what he’s doing in this Republican primary is very, very important. It also couldn’t be more emotionally gratifying to behold. He’s telling the unvarnished truth about Trump, and he’s the only candidate doing that. A former prosecutor, he’s artfully, aggressively and comprehensively making the case against Trump, knocking down all the rationalizations Trump has mustered and all the diversions he has contrived since his 37-count federal indictment.None of the other candidates comes close. They’ve for the most part gagged themselves or decided to play laughable word games about who Trump is, what he has done and what he may yet do.It’s as if they’re looking at this wild and repugnant hyena, it has democracy in its jaws, and they know they should call it what it is and acknowledge what it’s poised to devour, but they’ve decided that merely hinting at that is candor and courage enough: “I think it might be nice if we Republicans gave an herbivore a crack at the presidency”; “Let’s think about what a post-scavenger era for the Republican Party would look like.”Then there’s Christie: “That’s one nasty, second-rate carnivore with no place on our savanna.” Never has a statement of the bestially obvious been so revolutionary.In a poll released on Friday by The New Hampshire Journal, Christie had pulled into third place among Republicans in the state, far behind Trump, who had 47 percent of the vote, but not far behind Ron DeSantis, who had just 13. Christie had 9, followed by Mike Pence with 5. That partly reflects Christie’s decision to make his initial stand, so to speak, in New Hampshire. But it also reflects something else: He’s excellent at this.Christie is to DeSantis what a Roman candle is to a scented votive. He explodes in a riot of color. DeSantis, on his best days, flickers.My enchantment with Christie’s fireworks makes me a cliché. In an observant and witty analysis in The Atlantic on Monday with the headline “Chris Christie, Liberal Hero,” David Graham inventoried the adoring media coverage Christie has garnered, noting that while there’s zero evidence that Christie could actually win the contest he has entered, “pundits are swooning.”But the swoon isn’t about Christie’s prospects. It’s about the hugely valuable contrast to other Republican presidential candidates that he’s providing. And about this: The health of American democracy hinges on a reckoning within the Republican Party, and that won’t come from Democrats saying the kinds of things that Christie is now. They’ve been doing that for years. It’ll come — if it even can — from the words and warnings of longtime Republicans who know how to get and use the spotlight.Did you see Christie’s CNN town hall last week? Have you watched or listened to any of his interviews? He’s funny. He’s lively. He’s crisp. And he’s right. Over the past few weeks, he has described Trump’s behavior as “vanity run amok.” Trump himself is “a petulant child.”At the town hall: “He is voluntarily putting our country through this. If at any point before the search in August of ’22 he had just done what anyone, I suspect, in this audience would have done, which is said, ‘All right, you’re serious? You’re serving a grand jury subpoena? Let me just give the documents back,’ he wouldn’t have been charged. Wouldn’t have been charged with anything even though he had kept them for almost a year and a half.”Other candidates, who prefer not to talk about the charges against Trump, are reportedly worried that his indictment will mean ceaseless chatter about him and extra difficulty promoting their own (muted and muddled) messages. Josh Barro, on his Substack newsletter Very Serious, nailed the absurdity of that, pointing out that Trump’s front-runner status and enormous lead over all of them guarantee that he’ll always monopolize the conversation, indictment or no indictment.“The Republican nomination campaign cannot — and will not — be about anything but Donald Trump, and the media is not going to invite them on TV to talk about topics other than Donald Trump,” Barro wrote. “So, since they are going to talk about Donald Trump all the time, they had better talk about why he should not be nominated.” Christie is getting invitations and attention because he is doing precisely that. Maybe, just maybe, some of them will take note and wise up.To the conundrum of what, if Christie qualifies for the Republican primary debates, he’ll do about the required pledge that he support whoever winds up getting the party’s nomination, he has apparently found a solution that’s suited to Republicans’ willful and nihilistic captivity to Trump, the stupidity of the pledge and the stakes of the race: He’ll sign what he must and later act as he pleases.“I will do what I need to do to be up on that stage to try to save my party and save my country,” he told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning.Chris Christie, superhero? He has his own supersize vanity. He is arguably playing the only part in the crowded primary field available to him. And those dynamics may have as much to do with his assault on Trump as moral indignation does. Even so, saving his party and country agrees with him.DeSantis, Pence, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and other Republican presidential candidates are clearly telling themselves that they can’t do any good down the road if at this intersection they provoke Trump and run afoul of his supporters. Where have we heard that before? It’s a version of what Christie said to himself in 2016. He now sees the folly of that fable.For the Love of SentencesLaurence Olivier in the 1948 movie version of “Hamlet.”Everett CollectionSeveral Shakespeare-conscious, pest-minded lines in Maureen Dowd’s “To Jail or Not to Jail” column in The Times constituted perhaps the most-nominated passage of writing in this newsletter feature’s history: “We can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.” (Thanks to Phyllis Wolf of Albuquerque, N.M., and Avon Crawford of Norwalk, Iowa, among many, many others, for shining a spotlight on that.)In The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Andrew Coyne assessed the current Trumpian crossroads: “So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice — as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly.” Coyne also commented on how Trump, in the wake of his federal indictment, is trying “to bring the whole U.S. justice system down around him.” “This is not the reaction of a normal person,” he continued. “It is not even the reaction of a mob boss. It is the reaction of a Batman villain.” (Stella Deacon, Toronto, and Julie Fleming, Toronto)In The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland wrote: “The three tenors of showman populism, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Silvio Berlusconi, reached the top through a combination of telegenic clownishness, ‘I alone can fix it’ braggadocio and a shared strain of narcissistic nationalism — and now one faces the judgment of the courts, another has fled the judgment of his peers, while the third contemplates the judgment of the heavens.” (Harriette Royer, Rochester, N.Y.)Let’s pivot from Trump and Trump analogues to Trump sycophants. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols described how J.D. Vance, who once spoke with such disparaging and devastating accuracy about Trump, did a self-serving about-face in his 2022 Senate race in Ohio and, reprogrammed by that victory, never looked back: “What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, ‘we are what we pretend to be.’” (Debbie Landis, Garrison, N.Y.)On to books! John Williams noted in The Washington Post that most of the novels of Cormac McCarthy, who died last week, were “quite Old Testament in spirit — the purpose of evil is none of your business, keep suffering — until, arguably, ‘The Road,’ a story of a father and son at the end of the world with increasingly loud echoes of Christian symbology. ‘All the Pretty Horses’ made McCarthy literary famous; ‘The Road’ made him Oprah Winfrey famous.” (Jim Osteen, Washington, D.C.)Also in The Post, in a review of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, “I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home,” Ron Charles explained that for Moore, the hospice is “a mordant metaphor for human existence, a place where laughter isn’t the best medicine, it’s the only medicine: All we’ve got left is a collection of bedpans and deadpans.” (John Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass.)In The Salt Lake Tribune, Courtney Tanner fashioned a clever start to her article about one of the more unexpected recent examples of book banning: “In the beginning, a parent filed a challenge to have the Bible removed from Davis School District libraries, citing passages describing sex and violence. The district said let there be a review of the book. And it was so.” (Yoram Bauman, Salt Lake City)In The Times, Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell wrote: “Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is being fragile and in formation — a human construction site.” (Virginia Wise, Woodstock, Vt.)And Amy Nicholson reviewed the new movie “Elemental,” calling it “the latest Pixar premise to feel like someone laced the cafeteria’s kombucha keg with ayahuasca.” (Abigail Kent, Alameda, Calif.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.On a Personal NoteGetty ImagesI’ve never been one for watching movies on planes, at least not on one of those shrunken screens embedded in the back of the seat in front of me. (My iPad is a different matter.) The picture quality is awful. The audio is mush. Together they’re barely an approximation of the director’s and the cast members’ intents. It’s like reading an aggressively abridged novel in which every adjective has been deleted and blackberry jam smudged across parts of every other page. You get the gist, but in a soulless, messy fashion.I am, however, a fervent guesser of movies on planes: I half-watch the movies chosen by passengers in seats near me, trying to figure out what’s going on, filling in the blanks with assumptions and imagination, doing a bit of amateur lip-reading, doing a lot of detective work.What might Drew Barrymore be telling Adam Sandler? Across several flights, I’ve seen disconnected, out-of-order scenes from their rom-com “50 First Dates,” so I have some ideas about the movie and of course an opinion of it without knowing whether either is remotely on the mark. I sort of like the nebulousness and irresolution of that. They match the dull images and fuzzy sound. I’m not doing a disservice to the experience of the movie in a proper setting. I’m turning it into something entirely different, part Rorschach, part game.Ben Affleck is preternaturally grave in “The Accountant,” which seems like great, tense fun. While I’ve assembled probably 60 percent of “50 First Dates” from the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of my oblique angle, soundless perusals of it, I’ve put together at least 80 percent of Affleck’s thriller. I mean, I’m confident it’s a thriller. There are firearms, chases, ominous shots of important rooms and august buildings in Washington, D.C.When you half-watch a movie this way, without the soundtrack nudging you or the plot points lucidly laid out, you develop a new appreciation for the different editing rhythms, visual compositions and palettes of different genres. You know the emotional key in which the movie is being played even if you deduce little else about it. For a true movie lover, that’s a peculiar delight.Hey, we all have our viewing quirks. It turns out that a big fraction of Americans watch everything with the subtitles turned on, and by everything I’m including and principally mean movies and shows in English. It’s not translation they’re looking for. It’s — I don’t know — reassurance, extra clarity. Devin Gordon explored and explained that phenomenon in a terrifically engaging recent article in The Atlantic, and I’m happy to report that he was as baffled and unsettled as I am.What I do on planes is the opposite of that. Instead of beating back confusion, I embrace it. Or, really, take advantage of it. That line that Drew just delivered must have been hilarious. That encounter Ben just had was surely terrifying. Half-watched, quarter-understood movies are like trailers: They’re all promise and no letdown, which is a welcome inversion of much of life. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      The Life and Courage of Daniel Ellsberg, ‘a True American Hero’

      by

      More from our inbox:Setbacks in the Fight Against Maternal MortalityA Trump Victory in 2024 Would Be ‘a Dark Day for Us All’‘A Small Slice of Hope’Diversity in OrchestrasDaniel Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia. His disclosure in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers and its fallout left a stamp on history that defined the bulk of his life.Donal F. Holway/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Daniel Ellsberg, 1931-2023: Whistleblower Who Unveiled U.S. Deceit in Pentagon Papers” (obituary, front page, June 17):Thank you for the excellent obituary recounting the life, career and legacy of Daniel Ellsberg.I had the pleasure and honor of meeting Mr. Ellsberg in 2010 during one of the Portland, Ore., screenings of the documentary film about him, “The Most Dangerous Man in America.”After the Q. and A., I approached him and began to thank him, but even as I was about to tell him that I was born in Saigon during the Tet offensive of 1968, I began to lose my composure and eventually broke down in front of the entire crowd.Through my tears, gasps for air and apologies, I tried to convey my gratitude for a life that might have been drastically altered if it were not for his acts of courage, which I believe helped bring about the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. With a patient smile, one palm gently placed on my shoulder, and the other still engaged in our handshake, he whispered his response, “Thank you.”It’s impossible to know where I would have ended up as the half-American child of a U.S. soldier if the U.S. had not gotten out of Vietnam a couple of years after the Pentagon Papers were released.Where would my mother and I have found ourselves, as well as those thousands of U.S. service personnel and millions of refugees and noncombatants whose destinies were tethered to the clandestine decisions of bureaucrats, politicians and war planners?It’s really hard to calculate, but fortunately in part because of Mr. Ellsberg, I’ll never have to do the math.Mien YockmannVancouver, Wash.To the Editor:The obituary of Daniel Ellsberg is a heroic story of courage, character and determination, when those virtues are sorely missing on the current American political scene. His efforts leaked the story of government deception and led to a Supreme Court decision in favor of a free, uncensored press, and to the Watergate crimes and the fall of President Richard Nixon.What a difference between Mr. Ellsberg’s unauthorized possession of classified documents and that of our ex-president, who did not risk his freedom for the American people, but for his vulgar self-interest.Robert S. AprilNew YorkTo the Editor:Thanks for your excellent obituary of Daniel Ellsberg. His speaking truth to power has been a powerful gift to humanity!I was a good friend of Dan’s and had the privilege of being arrested and going to jail with him for protesting nuclear weapons and the wars in Central America, Iraq and Afghanistan. He devoted his life to speaking out and acting to prevent and stop wars and the suicidal nuclear arms race.Preparing for and threatening nuclear war is unconscionable. Inspired by Dan’s life, we need to step up to the plate and work to stop this crime against humanity before it is too late. Hopefully others will be inspired by Dan’s courage to become whistleblowers and speak truth in the face of the lies and half-truths by politicians and the mass media.Thanks, Dan, for inspiring us to continue the good work you had been doing.David HartsoughSan FranciscoThe writer is a co-founder of World Beyond War and Nonviolent Peaceforce.To the Editor:As I read about Daniel Ellsberg, my first reaction was gratitude. A man willing to speak truth to power, whatever cost he might personally pay. A true American hero. One can only wish there were more like him today.Lisa DickiesonWashingtonSetbacks in the Fight Against Maternal MortalityYeabu Kargbo, 19, rests post-delivery at a rural health center in northern Sierra Leone.Photographs by Malin Fezehai for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Sierra Leone Is Giving Me Hope,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, June 4):Mr. Kristof is right to highlight the achievements in improving maternal and child health and reducing extreme poverty. Too much “doom and gloom” can mask all the good we have achieved and can drive donor fatigue and complacency.Yet even as we celebrate those achievements, the combination of Covid-19, humanitarian crises, climate change and the rising cost of living have been rolling back progress. The decline in maternal deaths by an average of 2.7 percent per year between 2000 and 2015 has paused: Maternal mortality did not decline globally between 2016 and 2020.Donor aid for reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health, which shot up by 10 percent from 2016 to 2017, has been on a downward trend, with a 2.3 percent decline between 2019 and 2021.And still today, seven of every 10 maternal deaths are in Africa, and Black women in America are almost three times more likely to die in childbirth than non-Hispanic white women.We can be proud of progress earlier this century, but a series of crises has shown us how fragile that was. We need new commitments, action and strong advocacy to reverse the recent negative trends.Helen ClarkAuckland, New ZealandThe writer is a former prime minister of New Zealand and the chair of the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.A Trump Victory in 2024 Would Be ‘a Dark Day for Us All’ Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Allies Plan to Stifle Justice Dept.” (front page, June 16):For me, the scariest thing about the former president’s candidacy is not Donald Trump himself — there have always been demagogues in American politics. Nor is it the craven politicians who enable his anti-American views for their own gain, or even the tens of millions of Americans who fervently support these views. The scariest thing is the quiet preparation in the Republican Party to take actions based on these views if Mr. Trump becomes president again.Last time, Mr. Trump chose underlings like Jeff Sessions and William Barr — well-known figures who possessed at least a shred of honor, and who refused his most extreme demands. He won’t make that mistake if elected a second time.Mr. Trump has always brought out the worst in people, and he has bent and twisted the Republican Party into something unrecognizable. A Trump victory in 2024 would allow him similarly to twist all of America into something nightmarish. It would be a dark day for us all.Tim ShawCambridge, Mass.‘A Small Slice of Hope’A photograph taken with a prism lens of a television image of Donald Trump after his federal court arraignment. Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “I Won’t Let Trump Invade My Brain,” by David Brooks (column, June 16):It is difficult to retain a sense of optimism about the future these days when surrounded by the narcissism of our politicians, the angry voices of our fellow citizens and our decaying planet.Mr. Brooks’s column brought me some comfort and a small slice of hope that maybe there are still enough of us who believe in ethical behavior and a real commitment to the common good that there is some hope for our planet and our collective future.Chris HarringtonPortland, Ore.Diversity in OrchestrasSaul Martinez for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Diversity Improves, but Not for All” (Arts, June 17):So orchestras are now eager to find more Black players? For generations, while these orchestras were using cronyistic and outright discriminatory hiring practices, Black musicians found greater meaning and commercial success in their own traditions, from the blues and jazz to soul and hip-hop.If orchestras are now truly intent on supporting Black Americans, rather than simply making their own enterprises appear more visibly inclusive, perhaps they could consider programming more Black music.Ben GivanSaratoga Springs, N.Y.The writer is an associate professor of music at Skidmore College. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      What Republicans Say About Their Risky Balancing Act on Abortion

      by

      The historic Dobbs ruling has hurt the party electorally, but G.O.P. lawmakers are still moving to pass more restrictive laws. These two realities represent the defining political fallout of the end of Roe v. Wade.In the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, one of the country’s most emotionally charged issues has come to be defined by two seemingly contradictory political realities.In competitive general elections, abortion rights emerged as among the greatest electoral strengths for Democrats and, often, a clear liability for Republicans: Americans say at record levels that they support at least some access to the procedure, and the issue has fueled Democratic victories across the nation.At the same time, Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved rapidly to sharply limit or ban access to abortion. Activists are demanding that G.O.P. presidential candidates make firm commitments about federal restrictions, and are urging ever-further-reaching legislation in the states.This headlong rush into risky territory for the national Republican Party — and the extraordinary backlash against some of those measures — represents the enduring political fallout of the Supreme Court decision, which transformed a partisan standoff 50 years in the making.Anti-abortion activists and some Republican strategists applaud the approach of many state legislatures, arguing that voters expect their lawmakers to deliver on upholding one of the core tenets of the conservative movement.“If you can, you must,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the major anti-abortion rights group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “To fail to do that would, politically, would be a disaster for pro-life voters who put them in office.”Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said Republican candidates needed to be “very clear on what it means to be ambitious for life.” Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesBut as the anniversary of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe arrives on Saturday, interviews with more than a dozen Republican lawmakers, strategists and anti-abortion activists paint a portrait of a party still struggling to find a consensus on abortion policy, and grappling with how to energize core base voters on the issue without alienating swing voters.Many observers see the wave of new restrictions, which vary in gestational limit and exceptions and have sometimes been held up in court, as a function of several factors: years of promises and pent-up energy on the right; deeply held convictions about when life begins; and gerrymandering that has often left Republican lawmakers more worried about far-right primary challenges than about turning off moderate voters in general elections.But for a critical slice of Republicans — those who represent competitive districts in state legislatures or in Congress, who support some degree of abortion rights, or, in some cases, presidential candidates — the issue presents a particularly difficult balancing act.Their decisions and calculations are at the heart of the tensions over the abortion debate within the Republican Party in the post-Roe era.“I was hearing from both sides strongly,” said State Representative Mike Caruso of Florida, a Republican who opposed a measure — ultimately signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — that forbids abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with a few exceptions. “It was pretty much a ban on abortion.”“I’ve got seven children, been through nine pregnancies,” he added. “I don’t think I ever knew, we ever knew, that we were pregnant prior to six weeks.”But, demonstrating the vastly different views on the issue within the party, State Representative Mike Beltran of Florida said that while he voted for the measure, “frankly, I don’t think it goes far enough.”“All these bills were huge compromises,” said Mr. Beltran, who said he personally opposed abortion rights without exception, suggesting that if a mother’s life was in danger, barring ectopic pregnancies, the answer could often be to deliver the fetus, even months prematurely. “We should suffer electoral consequences if we don’t do what we said we would do.”State Representative Mike Beltran of Florida opposes abortion rights without exception.Tori Lynn Schneider, via SipaAnti-abortion activists and lawmakers have vigorously made a version of that argument to Republican candidates, sometimes citing polling to show lawmakers what they believe voters in a particular state will accept. (Some of these surveys are commissioned by abortion opponents, and their findings can be at odds with public polling.)“It’s a fundamental issue to Republicans to protect life,” said Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition. She supported the state’s new ban on most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, though she wants restrictions that go much further, calling a six-week ban “step two.”“A candidate needs the pro-life voters in order to win,” she added.In an interview this month, Ms. Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony urged candidates to be “very clear on what it means to be ambitious for life” while seeking to draw contrasts with Democrats on the issue, warning of the risks of being defined by the other side.This is not a “theoretical messaging moment,” she said. “This is real life.”In the presidential contest, though, some of the candidates have tried to skirt questions about what national restrictions they would support. Contenders including former President Donald J. Trump — who helped muscle through Supreme Court justices who made overturning Roe possible — have indicated that they think the issue should be resolved by the states, though Mr. Trump has also been vague on the issue.“Their hesitancy to communicate has been frustrating,” Ms. Dannenfelser said, referring broadly to the field. But the debate stage, she said, is “going to be where the rubber meets the road, and our bright-red line saying that you must have a 15-week or better limit or we can’t support you.”Yet when Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina last year proposed a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy with some exceptions, he ignited immediate resistance from numerous fellow Republicans, evidence that some in the party see political peril in a national ban.Senator Lindsey Graham last year proposed a federal ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy, and faced immediate resistance.Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersAnd polling has shown that most Americans support at least some abortion rights, especially early in pregnancy.A Gallup survey released last week found that a record-high 69 percent of Americans, including 47 percent of Republicans, believed that abortion should generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy.“That just makes me wonder if maybe there is some room for nuance there within the party,” said Lydia Saad, the director of U.S. social research at Gallup. “But nuance isn’t generally very successful in politics.”In some states, Republican lawmakers have cast bans with some exceptions that begin after 12 weeks, toward the end of the first trimester, as something of a middle ground. And from Nebraska to South Carolina, there have indeed been lawmakers who said they could not back a six-week ban but indicated that they were more comfortable with 12 weeks, even as such proposals have drawn condemnation from some in local business and medical communities.In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed the 12-week ban. He and other abortion rights supporters warned that the measure would interfere with critical medical decisions and create dangerous barriers for women seeking abortions.But Republicans, who recently gained narrow veto-proof majorities in North Carolina, quickly sought to override Mr. Cooper’s move. The effort forced some of their members into contortions.Republicans in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a 12-week abortion ban.Kate Medley for The New York TimesState Representative Ted Davis Jr., a Republican, indicated during his campaign last year that he backed the state’s law allowing abortions up to 20 weeks of pregnancy. When the state legislature took up the 12-week measure, he skipped the vote.But citing factors including loyalty to his caucus, frustration with the other side and constituents who, he said, seemed split on the veto override, he ultimately joined fellow Republicans to override the veto, helping to ensure that the more restrictive measure prevailed.Still, he tried to draw a distinction between the two votes.“What concerns me is what’s going to happen in the future as far as access to abortion,” he said. “Are Republicans now going to try to restrict it even further?”Other lawmakers have sought to punish women who seek abortions, or those who help them. Some Republican lawmakers in South Carolina moved — unsuccessfully — to treat abortion at any stage of pregnancy as homicide, which can carry the death penalty.That measure would have given “more rights to a rapist than a woman who’s been raped,” said Representative Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican who flipped a seat from a Democrat in 2020. “That’s where the conversation has gone.”Abortion-rights supporters protesting outside the Supreme Court last June on the day Roe was overturned.Shuran Huang for The New York Times“They listen to some of the extreme voices, and they operate and vote and legislate out of fear,” she said. “They’re not hearing from the rest of the electorate, the 95 percent of the folks who vote in elections. They’re hearing from the 5 percent who say, ‘You’re not Republican if you don’t want to ban abortions with no exceptions.’”Even in her conservative state, there were pockets of Republican resistance to efforts to pass a near-total abortion ban. A six-week ban passed the legislature but is now tied up in court.“I probably will draw a primary challenger,” conceded State Senator Katrina Shealy, who opposed that measure, with its many requirements for women seeking abortions. She has already been censured by a local Republican county party.Some on the far right, she suggested, “don’t want people to wear masks. They don’t want people to get vaccines.”They believe, she said, that “they should have full rights — but don’t let women make this decision. And that’s not right.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Donald Trump Says ‘Secret’ Document He Described on Tape Referred to News Clippings

      by

      “There was no document,” the former president said on Fox News as he gave some of his most expansive remarks on the case that led to his federal indictment.Former President Donald J. Trump claimed to a Fox News anchor in an interview on Monday that he did not have a classified document with him in a meeting with a book publisher even though he referred during that meeting to “secret” information in his possession.The July 2021 meeting — at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — was recorded by at least two people in attendance, and a transcript describes the former president pointing to a pile of papers and then saying of Gen. Mark A. Milley, whom he had been criticizing: “Look. This was him. They presented me this — this is off the record, but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”On the recording, according to two people familiar with its contents, Mr. Trump can be heard flipping through papers as he talks to a publisher and writer working on a book by his final White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Mr. Trump and the people in the meeting do not explicitly say what document the former president is holding.According to the transcript, Mr. Trump describes the document, which he claims shows General Milley’s desire to attack Iran, as “secret” and “like, highly confidential.” He also declares that “as president, I could have declassified it,” adding, “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”But in the interview on Monday, with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Mr. Trump denied that he had been referring to an actual document and claimed to have simply been referring to news clippings and magazine pieces.“There was no document,” Mr. Trump insisted. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”Apparently playing down the information from the recording, he added, “I don’t think that I’ve ever seen a document from Milley.”The audio recording is a key piece of evidence in an indictment charging Mr. Trump with illegally holding on to 31 sensitive government documents, some of which were highly classified and included information about U.S. nuclear and military capabilities. The indictment was filed this month by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, in Federal District Court in Miami. The indictment also accused Mr. Trump of conspiring with one of his aides, Walt Nauta, to evade a grand jury subpoena issued last May for all classified material in his possession.General Mark A. Milley testifying during a budget hearing in Congress this year. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesA description of a typewritten document by General Milley appears in Mr. Meadows’s book, unattributed and stated as fact.Criminal defendants usually avoid speaking publicly about details of any charges in their case, for fear of their remarks being used against them. The interview was broadcast on the same day that a federal magistrate judge in Mr. Trump’s case issued a protective order instructing him not to reveal any evidence that had been turned over to his legal team as part of the discovery process.While the interview did not seem to violate that order, his remarks represented some of his most expansive comments about the nearly two years that federal officials spent trying to retrieve material from his presidency that belongs to the government. The comments were also the latest in a string of shifting stories that he and his allies have offered since it became public that officials at the National Archives and Records Administration recovered 15 boxes of material from Mr. Trump in January 2022.Earlier in the interview with Mr. Baier, Mr. Trump appeared to concede that even after the Justice Department issued a subpoena last year for all classified documents in his possession, he delayed complying with it in order to separate any personal records that might have been among them.“Before I send boxes over, I have to take all of my things out,” Mr. Trump said. “These boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things.”Mr. Trump also acknowledged that he did not immediately comply with an earlier request to return government records to the archives, telling Mr. Baier that he gave the archives “some” and maintaining, “I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen.”A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In February 2022, after the public learned that Mr. Trump had returned classified material to the archives, the former president directed aides to issue a statement saying he had returned everything to the government. The final statement the Trump team released did not make this claim.But the draft version of that statement became a focus of prosecutors who were entering evidence and hearing testimony before a grand jury in Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024, and his allies have offered evolving explanations for his possession of classified material and repeated refusals to return it. He has insisted the documents all belonged to him as personal records. He has also claimed that he declassified everything he removed before it left the White House, through a so-called standing order that material was declassified when it left the Oval Office to go to the White House residence. Former senior White House officials said no such order existed.And last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote a letter to Congress saying that his staff “quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida,” leaving the impression that Mr. Trump himself did not go through the material and was unaware of what was in the boxes when they were packed.The indictment contradicted that claim, with prosecutors saying that Mr. Trump was “personally involved in this process” and “caused his boxes, containing hundreds of classified documents, to be transported from the White House to the Mar-a-Lago club.”In his interview with Mr. Baier, the former president indicated that he did sort through some boxes after they were sent from Washington to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.At one point, Mr. Baier asked Mr. Trump why he did not simply hand the material over.“I want to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out,” Mr. Trump said. “I don’t want to hand that over to NARA yet.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Raises Cash in California and Pokes at Newsom

      by

      The Florida governor made a fund-raising stop in Sacramento not far from the home of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The two are in the midst of a mutually beneficial feud.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, took his campaign into the backyard of his most vocal Democratic critic on Monday, courting donors at an event near the home of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California weeks after sending two planeloads of migrants to California’s capital.The $3,300-a-plate fund-raiser, hosted by a Republican real estate developer at a suburban country club in Sacramento, was closed to the press, and Mr. DeSantis did not make a public statement. But the location itself underscored the tit-for-tat that has escalated for more than a year between the two governors, who have increasingly used each other as political foils.Florida officials acknowledged this month that the state had orchestrated the abrupt relocation of some three dozen Latin American asylum seekers from Texas to Sacramento. Mr. DeSantis, who for months has been moving migrants, mostly from Texas, into Democratic-run towns and cities, has said the initiative is intended to equalize the burden of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.Mr. Newsom suggested the moves were tantamount to “kidnapping” and denounced them as callous political stunts, noting that California, too, shares a stretch of the Mexican border. An investigation by the California attorney general’s office is underway.Days after the migrants’ flights, Mr. Newsom made a rare appearance on Fox News, the conservative network, assertively defending California policies and assailing those of governors such as Mr. DeSantis. He told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would be “all in — count on it” for a debate about the issues with Florida’s governor.Mr. DeSantis later retorted at a news conference that Mr. Newsom should “stop pussyfooting around” and run for president if he wanted to air their differences on a debate stage.“Are you going to get in and do it?” he demanded. “Or are you just going to sit on the sidelines and chirp?”“So … debate challenge accepted? Or do you need your notes for that, too?” California’s governor retorted, posting a video of Mr. DeSantis at a podium apparently glancing down at a crib sheet before making the “pussyfooting” challenge.Although Mr. Newsom has said he has “subzero” interest in running for president and has energetically supported President Biden’s re-election, he is widely viewed as a potential contender for the White House after the 2024 election.Mr. DeSantis has been regarded as Donald J. Trump’s leading rival for the Republican nomination in 2024, but even as the former president faces a federal indictment, national polls have consistently shown Mr. DeSantis running some 30 points behind Mr. Trump.“Look, DeSantis needs to poke Gavin the Bear,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant in California. “He needs to keep that fire going — it’s the main thing that gives him oxygen.”But, he added, the feud also elevates Mr. Newsom’s profile.“This fight over the cultural direction of the country is in many ways being spearheaded by Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, and it serves both of their interests,” said Mr. Madrid, who did not attend the fund-raiser.True to form, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign signaled his arrival in California on Monday by tweeting that “the debate is already settled” and posting a new campaign ad describing California as plagued with population loss and homelessness and strewn with “needles and feces.”“California’s liberal governance is a disaster,” the DeSantis campaign declared.The Florida governor’s appearance, in a county where more than 60 percent of voters supported President Biden in 2020, drew no protesters and filled the small parking lot at the Del Paso Country Club with supporters from the capital area’s more conservative precincts.It was one of several stops planned for Mr. DeSantis in California on Monday, including a second event at the Harris Ranch in Coalinga, in Fresno County. It was also among a flurry of visits to California by White House contenders as momentum gathers for the 2024 presidential race.President Biden was in Silicon Valley on Monday — with Mr. Newsom — to announce some $600 million in federal funding for climate resilience at a marshland preserve in Palo Alto. Mr. Biden also was scheduled to appear at two private fund-raisers for his re-election campaign.Other Republican presidential candidates stopping in California in recent days included Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Tim Scott, a U.S. senator from South Carolina.California is the most populous state in the nation, with an economy larger than that of most countries, and candidates in both parties regard it as a major source of political funding.Although President Biden carried the state by an overwhelming margin in 2020, more than six million Californians also voted for Mr. Trump, who received more votes from California than from any other state. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Some Top Republicans Embrace Early Voting, Reversing After Years of Claiming Fraud

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump has said that until Republicans gain power and can change the law, they have “no choice” but to support voting by mail.After years of deriding early and mail-in voting, claiming they lead to fraud and help Democrats to steal elections, top Republicans are changing their position, leading to a split in the party as the 2024 election approaches.The converts atop the party warn that they must adapt or risk further electoral setbacks, especially in key states where early and mail balloting are in place. However, the entrenched foes within Republicans’ election-denier ranks could muddle the party message on voting.The Republican National Committee recently announced that it had created a program to promote early voting, both by mail and in person. The effort, called Bank Your Vote, further calls for Republicans to take advantage of “ballot harvesting” where it is legal, a practice that allows a third party to collect voters’ completed ballots.“To win close elections, we need to close the gap on pre-Election Day voting,” Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chair, said in a rollout video for the program.The reversal is a concession to math and the realities of the moment, as the popularity of mail-in voting shows few signs of receding, three years after the pandemic began and accelerated its use. It also is a grudging recognition that Republicans have failed to gain traction with their baseless claims that mail voting compromises election integrity.While Donald Trump has said Republicans should accept mail voting, he also continues to claim it encourages fraud.Jon Cherry for The New York TimesEven former President Donald J. Trump, whose lies and conspiracy theories about his 2020 election loss heightened the party’s distrust of mail voting, has been saying for months that Republicans have “no choice” but to embrace the method, at least until the party has the power to change voting laws.As Mr. Trump seeks the Oval Office for a third time, his soft-pedaled shift illustrates the divide between the party’s candidates, who want to avoid adding to the string of defeats in 2020 and 2022, and his fervent base of supporters.Still, Mr. Trump and some of the party’s other standard-bearers have tried to straddle both sides of the issue, sometimes in awkward ways, further confounding their voters.While headlining the Georgia Republican Party convention this month in a state that doomed his 2020 re-election and is the center of a criminal inquiry into his attempts to subvert his loss, Mr. Trump again sowed distrust of voting by mail.“Mail-in ballots, by the way, will always be dishonest,” he said.Mr. Trump, who has regularly voted by mail, falsely claimed that chain-of-custody issues involving mail ballots compromised election integrity.“It’s going to be corrupt, whether it’s — I would never say this about our mailmen because we love our mailmen — but whether it’s the mailmen or all the many people who touch those ballots,” he said. “They find them in rivers. They find them in streams. They find them all over the place. Many people got many ballots.”Kari Lake, a Trump ally whose repeated legal challenges of her 2022 loss in Arizona’s governor’s race have been denied by the courts, has also thawed on mail balloting.“While you know how I feel about mail-in ballots, if this is the game we have to play, if we’ve got to work in their rigged system, we’ll work in their rigged system,” Ms. Lake said in late May.In Arizona, the 2022 Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has lost repeated lawsuits challenging her loss. She now says she will encourage mail voting in her likely next race.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesMs. Lake had been speaking at a news conference after the dismissal of her latest election lawsuit, which had claimed that Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, had neglected to review voters’ signatures on mail ballots. Now, she said, she would focus on banking mail-in votes as she teases a potential run for the Senate in 2024.Just days after entering the 2024 presidential race, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief G.O.P. rival, said Republicans had hurt themselves in 2020 with their assault on absentee voting.“I think telling people not to send in a mail ballot is a huge mistake, and it ends up reducing the pool of prospective voters,” Mr. DeSantis said during a May 26 radio appearance with the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.But the mistrust of early voting that Mr. Trump planted still permeates the G.O.P., leaving many holdouts among election deniers, who called the acceptance of mail-in ballots misguided.“They are 100 percent wrong,” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally who has been a leading voice in pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, said in a text message. “Same-day voting!”Mr. Lindell also renewed calls for elections to be conducted entirely using paper ballots that would be counted by hand, not electronic tabulators.Since the 2020 election, Republican attacks on mail voting have been unrelenting. Some declared absentee voting as “un-American,” including Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas and a Trump ally, who termed mail-in ballots a “threat to democracy” in a 2020 online commentary.But in a review prepared by the Republican National Committee after the party’s underwhelming showing in last year’s midterm elections, G.O.P. leaders acknowledged that opposition to voting by mail was a flawed strategy.A demonstration in November 2020 in Philadelphia celebrating Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesKarl Rove, the G.O.P. strategist who has been a target of Mr. Trump’s barbs, said in an interview that the former president’s repeated calls for Republicans to eradicate mail-in and early voting once they gain power were delusional.“It’s fanciful,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”Mr. Rove said that failing to turn out early votes in Arizona and Georgia in 2020 hurt the party’s chances — Mr. Trump lost both states narrowly — and he described the effort to simultaneously embrace and attack mail-in voting as “not helpful” for Republicans.Even so, Republican state lawmakers and governors have continued to press for legislation that makes it harder to vote by mail, to mixed results.In Nebraska, a push by two Republican senators to require most people to vote in person stalled this year in the unicameral legislature. In Arkansas, Republicans used their power monopoly this year to ban ballot drop boxes, in a state that does not use them.Tyler Dees, a G.O.P. state senator who was the bill’s main sponsor, suggested that drop boxes in other states were prone to being vandalized and facilitated illegal ballot harvesting, claims that have been refuted by independent election monitors and studies.“They act as a beacon of mistrust,” Mr. Dees said of drop boxes during a February floor speech. “They do not encourage a fair and equal process.”But the party’s pragmatists point to the success Democrats have demonstrated by taking advantage of laws that allow voting for a longer period, rather than just on Election Day.“We need to treat this more like Lent and less like Halloween,” said Jeff Roe, a longtime G.O.P. strategist who is advising a super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his presidential bid and has worked on Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for Virginia governor, Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid and a lengthy list of other campaigns.Andy Reilly, a Republican National Committee member from Delaware County, Pa., next to Philadelphia, said the strength of Democrats’ early voting operation was difficult to match.“You better have a damn good Election Day operation,” he said. “There’s no such thing as Election Day operations now. It’s election season that they have to embrace.”Mr. Reilly said Republicans had not grasped that unforeseen events can arise on Election Day that keep voters from going to the polls.“Life gets in the way,” he said, adding that it was a mistake to limit voting to one day. “It is, in essence, suppressing the Republican vote.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Ron DeSantis Is Young, Has Little Kids and Wants America to Know It

      by

      At 44, he is more than three decades younger than Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He is subtly playing up that age gap, even if his right-wing views leave him out of step with many younger voters.As top-tier presidential candidates go, Ron DeSantis is something of a rarity these days. He was born after the Vietnam War, he came of age when computers were common in American homes and he still has young children of his own, rather than enough grandchildren to fill a basketball team.Mr. DeSantis would be 46 on Inauguration Day if elected, younger than every president since John F. Kennedy. It’s a fact he doesn’t state explicitly, but his campaign has set out to make sure voters get it.The Florida governor talks frequently about having the “energy and discipline” needed for the White House, keeping a busy schedule of morning and evening events. He and his wife, Casey DeSantis, often speak about their young children, who are 6, 5 and 3 and have joined their parents on the campaign trail. One of the few candidates with kids still at home, Mr. DeSantis regularly highlights his parental worries about schools and popular culture as he presses his right-wing social agenda.When he signed the state budget on Thursday, he joked that a tax break on one of parenthood’s most staggering expenses — diapers — had come too late for his family, though not by much.“I came home, and my wife’s like, ‘Why didn’t you do that in 2019 when our kids were still in diapers?’” Mr. DeSantis said.The evident goal is to draw a stark contrast with his main rivals, President Biden, 80, and former President Donald J. Trump, who just turned 77, both grandfathers who have sons (Hunter and Don Jr.) older than Mr. DeSantis. Voters have expressed concern about the age and fitness of both men, especially Mr. Biden.Roughly two-thirds of registered voters believe Mr. Biden is too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president, according to a national poll conducted by Quinnipiac University last month. Only 36 percent of registered voters said the same of Mr. Trump, suggesting that Mr. DeSantis’s relative youth might be more of an advantage in a general election than in the primaries.Still, Mr. DeSantis, 44, rarely talks directly about his age, and the party he represents — older and whiter than the country at large — has never been known for nominating young presidential candidates who ride a wave of energy to the White House, as Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did.Mr. DeSantis rarely talks directly about his age, and his views are out of step with many in his own generation. He relies on subtler means to remind voters of his relative youthfulness.David Degner for The New York TimesHis conservative views on abortion, climate change and how race is taught — among other issues — have left Mr. DeSantis out of step with many members of his own generation. Majorities of voters in his age bracket want abortion to be legal in all or most cases, think climate change is a very serious problem and support the Black Lives Matter movement. Only about one in four voters between the ages of 35 and 49 have a favorable view of Mr. DeSantis, according to the Quinnipiac poll.Mr. DeSantis also hardly seems to have a natural knack for capturing youthful enthusiasm in the way that Mr. Obama did. The last major candidate to run on a platform of generational change, the 44th president was able to count on the support of young and influential cultural icons, including hip-hop artists.Other than railing against “wokeness,” Mr. DeSantis scarcely mentions cultural influences like television shows, movies, music or social media. One of his attempts to reach younger people — announcing his campaign on Twitter with Elon Musk — went haywire when the livestream repeatedly glitched out. His rally soundtrack is a generic mix of country and classic rock, augmented by a DeSantis tribute anthem to the tune of “Sweet Home Alabama.” He doesn’t talk much about his love of golf or discuss his hobbies. His references to parenthood are often prompted by his wife.But his children — Madison, Mason and Mamie — are highly visible. Neat stacks of toys, including baseball bats and a bucket of baseballs, are usually arrayed on the front porch of the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee, visitors say.No presidential family has raised children as young as the DeSantis brood since the Kennedys, prompting hopes among supporters of a conservative Camelot at the White House. The comparison is one Ms. DeSantis especially seems to be leaning into. The elegant gowns and white gloves she sometimes favors have seemed to evoke the wardrobe of Jacqueline Kennedy.The couple’s family-centric image has softened views of Mr. DeSantis among some Democrats in Florida. “I don’t like him as a politician,” Janie Jackson, 52, a Democratic voter from Miami who runs a housekeeping business, said in an interview this past week. “But I think he’s a good father and husband.”Mr. DeSantis handed one of his daughters to wife, Casey, at a rodeo in Ponca, Okla., this month. His young family is core to his image as a presidential candidate.Thomas Beaumont/Associated PressMr. Trump, who is twice divorced and has five children with three different women, could be particularly vulnerable to such comparisons.“Engaging with his family helps humanize him,” Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist, said of Mr. DeSantis. “He’s a dad. People can relate to that. It gives him credibility to talk about family issues.”But voters can sniff out shtick, Mr. Carney added. “There’s a balance,” he said. “You don’t want your kids to seem like a prop.”Younger Republicans do seem to be responding to Mr. DeSantis. A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov found that the governor received his highest level of support from Republicans and Republican leaners aged 18 to 29, although he was still trailing Mr. Trump by 39 percent to 27 percent in that group.At almost every stop on their swings through the early nominating states, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. DeSantis, who often joins her husband onstage to deliver her own remarks, mention their young family.On a recent trip to Iowa, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, 42, arrived at the state fairgrounds with their children in tow. All three were wearing DeSantis-branded shirts with a “Top Gov” logo on the back. They signed a bus belonging to a pro-DeSantis super PAC — his son did so while wearing a baseball glove — as Ms. DeSantis, sporting a black leather “Where Woke Goes to Die” jacket despite the heat, knelt down to help. Their eldest, Madison, wrote her name in red and drew a heart above it.“Did you guys write your stuff on there?” Mr. DeSantis asked, after wading through attendees while lifting up one daughter. The kids then moved on to an ice cream giveaway organized by the super PAC.“Want me to hold you?” Mr. DeSantis asked his son, Mason, before picking him up as the boy continued to eat ice cream.On the stump, Mr. DeSantis usually talks about his children to emphasize policy points, particularly on education, or to accentuate his long-running feud with Disney, which he accuses of indoctrinating children.“My wife and I just believe that kids should be able to go to school, watch cartoons, just be kids, without having some agenda shoved down their throats,” Mr. DeSantis said on a visit to New Hampshire. “So we take that very seriously, and we’ve done an awful lot to be able to support parents.”Ms. DeSantis, who has played a prominent role in her husband’s campaign, usually prompts him to open up about their children. Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s approach to family issues appeals specifically to conservative Republicans and has been criticized by Democrats and civil rights activists. He has signed legislation banning abortions after six weeks, outlawing gender-transition care for minors, imposing punishments on businesses that allow children to see performances like drag shows and further limiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.On the campaign trail, the DeSantises often try to temper the polarizing nature of his political persona with tales of family life.Ms. DeSantis usually coaxes her husband to open up about their kids, including his adventures taking them for fast food at a restaurant populated by inebriated college students and, in a sign of the couple’s religiosity, having them baptized with water from the Sea of Galilee in Israel.At one stop in New Hampshire, Ms. DeSantis apologized to the crowd for her raspy voice, suggesting she had strained her vocal cords in an effort to protect the furniture in the governor’s mansion from one of her daughters.“I had a very long, in-depth conversation with that 3-year-old as to why she cannot color on the dining room table with permanent markers,” she said.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis usually talks about his children to emphasize policy points, particularly on education, and temper the polarizing nature of his political persona.Thomas Beaumont/Associated PressNow, Mr. DeSantis has competition from another youthful, if far less known, candidate from his home state: Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, 45, whose campaign announcement video this past week shows him jogging through the city and mentioning his children.Another lesser-known rival, Vivek Ramaswamy, has promoted himself as the first millennial to run for president as a Republican. Mr. Ramaswamy, 37, also has young children, sons ages 11 months and 3 years who have joined him on the trail. Campaigning with kids sometimes requires special accommodations, Mr. Ramaswamy said in a recent interview. His campaign bus, for instance, features two car seats and a diaper-changing table.At the end of an event in New Hampshire this month, he turned away from the crowd to thank his older son, Karthik, for behaving so well during his speech.“He got a bigger round of applause than I did,” Mr. Ramaswamy recounted.Shane Goldmacher More