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      Donald Trump’s Quest to Break America’s Democracy

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      What if Mitch McConnell, at the close of his scalding speech on the Senate floor blaming Donald Trump for the riot that occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, had promised to use his every last breath to ensure that Trump was convicted on impeachment charges and could never, ever become president again?What if Melania Trump, after the porn star Stormy Daniels said Trump had unprotected sex with her less than four months after Melania gave birth to their son, had thrown all of Trump’s clothes, golf clubs, MAGA hats and hair spray onto the White House lawn with this note, “Never come back, you despicable creep!”What if the influential evangelical leader Robert Jeffress, after Trump was caught on tape explaining that as a TV star he felt entitled to “grab” women in the most intimate places — or after Trump was found liable by a Manhattan jury of having done pretty much just that to E. Jean Carroll — declared that he would lead a campaign to ensure that anyone but Trump was elected in 2024 because Trump was a moral deviant whom Jeffress would not let babysit his two daughters, let alone the country?Where would statements and actions like those have left Kevin McCarthy, his knuckleheads in the House G.O.P. caucus, and other Republicans who now are defending Trump against the Justice Department indictment? Would they be so eager to proclaim Trump’s innocence? Would they be raging against Tuesday’s hearing in Miami? Would they be claiming, falsely, that President Biden was indicting Trump, when they know full well that the president doesn’t have the power to indict anyone?I doubt it. But I know that all of these questions are rhetorical. None of those people have the character to rise to these ethical challenges and take on Trump and what he has done to break our political system. Trump is like a drug dealer who thrives in a broken neighborhood, getting everyone hooked on his warped values. That is why he is doing everything he can to break our national neighborhood in two fundamental ways.For starters, Trump has consistently tried to denigrate people who have demonstrated character and courage, by labeling them losers and weaklings. This comes easy to Trump because he is a man utterly without character — devoid of any sense of ethics or loyalty to any value system or person other than himself. And for him, politics is a blood sport in which you bludgeon the other guys and gals — whether they are in your party or not — with smears and nicknames and lies until they get out of your way.Trump debuted this strategy early on with John McCain — a veteran, a man who never broke in five-plus years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, a man of real character. Do you remember what Trump said about McCain at a family leadership summit in Ames, Iowa, on July 18, 2015?When McCain ran for president, “I supported him,” Trump told the audience. “He lost. He let us down. But he lost. So I never liked him much after that, because I don’t like losers.” When the audience laughed, the moderator, the pollster Frank Luntz, interjected, “But he’s a war hero!”Trump — who wangled a dubious medical deferment to avoid the Vietnam War draft — then responded: “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” Later that day, Trump retweeted a web post headlined, “Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser.’”So part of the way Trump tries to break our system is to redefine the qualities of a leader — at least in the G.O.P. A leader is not someone like Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, people prepared to risk their careers to defend the truth, serve the country and uphold the Constitution. No, a leader is someone like him, someone who is ready to win at any cost — to the country, to the Constitution and to the example we set for our children and our allies.And when that is your definition of leadership, of winning, people of character like McCain, Cheney and Romney are in your way. You need to strip everyone around you of character, and make everything about securing power and money. That is why so many people who entered Trump’s orbit since 2015 have walked away muddied. And that’s why I knew that all the questions I asked earlier were rhetorical.The second way that Trump is trying to break our system was on display on Tuesday in Miami, where he followed his appearance as a federal criminal defendant with a political meet-and-greet at a Cuban restaurant. There, once again, Trump tried to discredit the rules of the game that would restrain him and his limitless appetite for power for power’s sake.How does he do that? First, he gets everyone around him — and, eventually, the vast majority of those in his party — to stop insisting that Trump abide by ethical norms. His family members and party colleagues have grown adept at running away from reporters’ microphones after every Trump outrage.But precisely because key political allies, church leaders and close family members will not call out Trump for his moral and legal transgressions — which would make his 2024 re-election bid unthinkable and hasten his departure from the political scene — we have to rely solely on the courts to defend the rules of the game.And when that happens, it puts tremendous stress on our judicial system and our democracy itself, because the decision to prosecute or not is always a judgment call. And when those judgment calls have to be rendered at times by judges or prosecutors appointed by Democrats — which is how our system works — it gives Trump and his flock the perfect opening to denounce the whole process as a “witch hunt.”And when such behavior happens over and over across a broad front — because Trump won’t stop at red lights anywhere and just keeps daring us to ignore his transgressions or indict him so he can cry bias — we end up eroding the two most important pillars of our democratic system: the belief in the independence of our judiciary that ensures no one is above the law, and the belief in our ability to transfer power peacefully and legitimately.Just consider one scene in Trump’s indictment. It’s after a federal grand jury subpoenaed him in May 2022, to produce all classified material in his possession. Notes written by his own lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, quote Trump as saying: “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t. … What happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them? Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”“Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”Better for whom? Only one man. And that’s why I repeat: Trump has not put us here by accident. He actually wants to break our system, because he and people like him only thrive in a broken system.So he keeps pushing and pushing our system to its breaking point — where rules are for suckers, norms are for fools, basic truths are malleable and men and women of high character are banished.This is exactly what would-be dictators try to do: Flood the zone with lies so the people trust only them and the truth is only what they say it is.It is impossible to exaggerate what a dangerous moment this is for our country.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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      Just When You Thought There Was Nothing New to Learn About Donald Trump

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat and The New York Times Audio app includes podcasts, narrated articles from the newsroom and other publishers, as well as exclusive new shows — including this one — which we’re making available to readers for a limited time. Download the audio app here.For the second time in recent months, Donald Trump has been indicted. This time, the charges were filed by the special counsel appointed to investigate accusations that the former president took classified documents from the White House and repeatedly resisted efforts to return them.On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss what the 49-page indictment reveals about Trump and his view of the law, and its impact on the Republican primary race.The New York TimesThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com or leave us a voice mail message at (212) 556-7440. We may use excerpts from your message in a future episode.By leaving us a message, you are agreeing to be governed by our reader submission terms and agreeing that we may use and allow others to use your name, voice and message.Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Stephanie Joyce. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

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      Nikki Haley and Tim Scott Show Openness to Criticizing Trump

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      Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, at a campaign event in Des Moines this month.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesSenator Tim Scott of South Carolina during a hearing of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs committee in Washington last month.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhile most of former President Donald J. Trump’s Republican rivals have closed ranks around him since his indictment in the classified documents case, two of them — Nikki Haley and Tim Scott — have begun to move away from solely denouncing the Justice Department.In a Fox News interview on Monday, Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor who was an ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, continued to claim that the Justice Department and F.B.I. had lost credibility with the American people, but she also acknowledged the seriousness of the charges against Mr. Trump.“Two things can be true at the same time,” Ms. Haley said, adding that if the indictment was accurate, “President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.”Ms. Haley’s initial statement on Friday, one day after Mr. Trump’s federal indictment, was an unflagging defense of her onetime boss.“This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” she said at the time on Twitter. “The American people are exhausted by the prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”Mr. Scott, a senator who is also from South Carolina and, like Ms. Haley, significantly trails Mr. Trump in the Republican polls, similarly shifted his tone.During a campaign appearance on Monday in Spartanburg, S.C., Mr. Scott acknowledged the gravity of the charges against Mr. Trump while accusing the Justice Department and President Biden of targeting Republicans for prosecution.He described it as a “serious case with serious allegations,” according to The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston, S.C.But in Mr. Scott’s initial reaction on Thursday, on Fox News, he focused solely on claiming that the Justice Department had become weaponized against Republicans.“Today what we see is a justice system where the scales are weighted,” Mr. Scott said then.Their stances are still far removed from that of another 2024 contender, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has sought to position himself as the candidate most willing to attack Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie laced into Mr. Trump again during a CNN town-hall event on Monday night, calling him “angry” and “vengeful” and saying that he believed the indictment was “a very tight, very detailed, evidence-laden indictment, and the conduct in there is awful.” More

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      Christie Attacks Trump in CNN Town Hall, Calling Conduct Detailed in Indictment ‘Awful’

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      A former federal prosecutor, Chris Christie said he expected the government had much more evidence in its case against the former president.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey laced into Donald J. Trump on prime-time television on Monday night, casting the former president as an “angry” and “vengeful” man who bears responsibility for thrusting the nation into another extraordinarily divisive moment, after Mr. Trump became the first former president in American history to face federal charges.During a roughly 90-minute CNN town hall in New York, a high-energy and often-polished Mr. Christie leaned on his background as a former federal prosecutor, saying he believed the indictment was “a very tight, very detailed, evidence-laden indictment, and the conduct in there is awful.” Mr. Christie, who is running for president against Mr. Trump in a Republican primary field the former president dominates, said he believed prosecutors had more evidence than had been put forward so far.Mr. Trump faces 37 criminal counts related to issues including withholding national defense information and concealing possession of classified documents.“This is vanity run amok,” Mr. Christie told the moderator, Anderson Cooper. “He is now going to put this country through this, when we didn’t have to go through it.”“He’s saying, ‘I’m more important than the country,’” Mr. Christie said at another point, as he questioned why Mr. Trump had, according to prosecutors, refused to turn over critical government documents. He suggested the former president missed the “trappings of the presidency.”“We’re in a situation where there are people in my own party who are blaming D.O.J.,” he said, referring to the Justice Department. “How about, blame him? He did it. He kept — he took documents he wasn’t supposed to take.”When he was not tearing into the current Republican front-runner, Mr. Christie could sound like a pre-Trump-era politician. He emphasized the importance of finding common ground and played up his credentials as a blue-state executive, even when some in the audience were plainly skeptical of the idea of compromise.“With all due respect to these governors from red states who have Republican legislatures — man, I’m telling you, I would have given my own right arm to have a Republican legislature for a week,” Mr. Christie said at one point, seeming to draw an implicit contrast with Gov. Ron DeSantis, the powerful and pugnacious Florida Republican and another 2024 candidate who enjoys a supportive legislature in Tallahassee. “But what I learned was that, sometimes, getting 60 percent of what you want isn’t bad.”In Washington, he continued, “you’re going to want somebody tough, who’s a fighter, but who fights to get to an end, to accomplish something for you. We can all fight to get headlines.”He also noted that even with a Republican-controlled Congress for part of his tenure, Mr. Trump failed to deliver on a central campaign promise of securing the southern border.“Not one piece of legislation to change our immigration laws,” he said, bashing Mr. Trump as a “bad executive.” “It is an abject failure, and now he blames Joe Biden for it. But what the heck did you do to make it better?”For the most part, Mr. Christie, who announced his campaign last week, has tried to reintroduce himself to the nation as the Republican candidate most willing to forcefully confront Mr. Trump.But Mr. Christie, who ran a short-lived campaign for president in 2016, has gained little traction in available polling this year and has a more unfavorable rating among Republican voters than any other candidate, according to a recent Monmouth University poll. And he occupies a relatively lonely lane. Most of the other 2024 hopefuls have shied away from much direct criticism of Mr. Trump.“It was like he was Voldemort from ‘Harry Potter’ — nobody wanted to mention his name,” he said of a recent Republican campaign event, adopting a mocking voice. “Like, say his name, man, say his name.”Mr. Christie was once a key adviser to Mr. Trump, and was a relatively early endorser of his 2016 campaign after his own bid collapsed. But he has since condemned Mr. Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for his incitement of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.In the town hall, Mr. Christie compared Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen election to how a child might try to explain away a bad grade, by offering a litany of dubious or false excuses.“It’s a child’s reaction. And I just — I beg you to think about this,” he told the Republican-leaning audience. “Don’t allow the showmanship to obscure the facts. The facts are, he lost to Joe Biden. And he lost to Joe Biden, in my opinion, because he lost independent voters.”Mr. Trump lashed out last week in response to Mr. Christie’s earlier criticism, mocking Mr. Christie’s weight and writing on his Truth Social platform, “Hard to watch, boring, but that’s what you get from a failed Governor (New Jersey) who left office with a 7% approval rating and then got run out of New Hampshire.”Mr. Christie made few waves when questioned on issues unrelated to Mr. Trump, but offered a striking admission when a man whose son was killed in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre asked how he would reduce the enormous number of mass shootings in the United States.His response was effectively: I don’t know.“I’m mad because I don’t have a great answer,” he said, after saying that law enforcement needed to be more attentive to warning signs from potential attackers, but that he did not believe restrictions on guns would make a difference — in part because Americans already own hundreds of millions of them. He also said that reducing gun violence was in “tension” with the Second Amendment.When reminded that early in his political career he supported an assault weapons ban, he called that “naïveté” and said he no longer believed it was appropriate.On abortion rights, Mr. Christie declined to take a firm position on gestational limits — or whether he would sign a national ban, should he become president and one were to reach his desk — arguing that the matter was better left up to the states for now.And on Social Security, he reiterated his support for means-testing the program, as he proposed during his 2016 campaign.Time and again, Mr. Christie reinforced a central argument of his campaign: that he would be more responsible than Mr. Trump, but also more productive.“Look, I think the single biggest thing I can contribute to unifying this country is to get rid of Joe Biden and get rid of Donald Trump,” he said. “They are past their sell-by dates, OK? It’s done. It’s time.” More

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      Hillary Clinton’s Emails: A Nation Struggles to Unsubscribe

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      As Donald Trump made history by becoming the first former president to face federal charges, many Republicans tried to change the subject by renewing an eight-year-old controversy.It is the topic the nation just can’t delete from its political conversation: Hillary Clinton’s emails.In the days since Donald J. Trump became the first former U.S. president to face federal charges, Republicans across the ideological spectrum — including not only Mr. Trump and his allies, but also his critics and those who see prosecutors’ evidence as damaging — have insistently brought up the eight-year-old controversy.They have peppered speeches, social media posts and television appearances with fiery condemnations of the fact that Mrs. Clinton, a figure who continues to evoke visceral reactions among the Republican base, was never charged.The two episodes are vastly different legal matters, and Mrs. Clinton was never found to have systematically or deliberately mishandled classified information. Still, Republicans have returned to the well with striking speed, mindful that little more than the word “emails” can muddy the waters, broadcast their loyalties and rile up their base.“Lock her up,” chanted a woman at last weekend’s Georgia Republican Party state convention, where Mr. Trump sought to revive the issue of Mrs. Clinton’s email use. “Hillary wasn’t indicted,” he said in a speech at the event. “She should have been. But she wasn’t indicted.”Campaigning in North Carolina, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida bashed Mrs. Clinton’s email practices while being far more circumspect in alluding to Mr. Trump, his top rival for the Republican nomination.Even former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has made criticizing Mr. Trump a central theme of his presidential campaign, said on CNN recently that the Justice Department “is at fault for not charging Hillary Clinton,” while casting the facts laid out against Mr. Trump as “damning.”“The perception is that she was treated differently,” Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor, a 2024 presidential candidate and Trump critic, said in an interview on Monday. “Perception can become a reality very quickly.”Mr. Hutchinson, once a chief Clinton antagonist from former President Bill Clinton’s home state — he helped guide impeachment proceedings against Mr. Clinton — said he saw distinctions between Mrs. Clinton’s email episode and the charges Trump faced. But, he added, “If the voters say it’s relevant, it becomes relevant politically.”Taken together, the moment offers a vivid reminder of the ways the ghosts of the 2016 campaign continue to shape and scar American politics.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, campaigning in North Carolina, criticized Mrs. Clinton’s email practices.Kate Medley for The New York Times“There are few politicians on the Democratic side of the aisle that raise the ire of Republicans more than Hillary Clinton,” said Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican pollster.Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, of course, have not forgotten the email saga. After Mr. Trump’s indictment, the episode to many of them serves as a symbol of a political system and a mainstream news media often focused on the superficial at the expense of the substantive.Clinton backers now make light of what they view as comparatively flimsy and unproven accusations she faced about her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state. And some relish the fact that the man who crowed about “Crooked Hillary” finds himself facing a range of serious charges and the prospect of prison if he is convicted.Speaking on Monday with the hosts of the “Pod Save America” podcast at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Mrs. Clinton laughed when a host noted the tendency of some Republicans to make parallels to her emails.“When in doubt, right?” she said. “I do think it’s odd, let’s just say, to the point of being absurd, how that is their only response. You know, they refuse to read the indictment, they refuse to engage with the facts.”On Friday, Mrs. Clinton posted an edited photo of herself on Instagram wearing a black baseball hat that reads, in pink letters, “BUT HER EMAILS.” That three-word phrase has become something of a shorthand among Democrats for frustration at the grief she received for how she handled classified correspondence compared with the blowback Mr. Trump confronted for all the legal and ethical norms he busted while in office.She included a link to buy the hat for $32 on the website of her political group. (Asked about that decision, Nick Merrill, who served as a longtime spokesman for Mrs. Clinton and remains an adviser, replied, “We’re seven years past what was widely viewed as, at worst, a stupid mistake. And reminding people that a piece of merchandise exists in order to raise money to preserve our democracy is something I’m very comfortable with.”)Substantively, there are many clear differences between the episodes.A yearslong inquiry by the State Department into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server found that while it increased the risk of compromising classified information, “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”The indictment against Mr. Trump, by contrast, accuses him of not only mishandling sensitive national security documents found at his Mar-a-Lago club, but also willfully obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. He has been charged with 37 criminal counts related to issues including withholding national defense information and concealing possession of classified documents.Robert K. Kelner, a Republican lawyer and Trump critic who is a partner in the white-collar defense and investigations practice group at Covington & Burling, said Mr. Trump most likely would not have been indicted had he cooperated with the government’s requests to return classified documents he took from the White House.“There were lots of things to criticize about the way the Hillary Clinton investigation was handled — none of which, however, in any way to my mind, suggests that the case against Donald Trump is unfounded,” Mr. Kelner said.Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted Mr. Trump, seemed to anticipate efforts to bring up Mrs. Clinton’s emails. The indictment cited five statements Mr. Trump made during his 2016 campaign about the importance of protecting classified information.“Hillary wasn’t indicted,” Donald J. Trump said in a speech in Georgia. “She should have been. But she wasn’t indicted.”Jon Cherry for The New York TimesFor veterans of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, the Republican attempt to resurface their old boss’s email server to defend Mr. Trump’s storage of boxes of classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and other places would be comical had their 2016 defeat not been so painful.“The best evidence that Trump’s actions are completely indefensible is the Republican Party’s non-attempt to defend it and instead rehash seven-year-old debunked attacks on somebody who is no longer even in politics,” said Josh Schwerin, a former Clinton campaign spokesman who for years after the 2016 election had a recording of Mr. Trump saying his name as his voice mail greeting.Mr. Merrill said that if there was a single word for “particularly acute hypocrisy,” it would apply to Republicans now.For Republicans, “whether you believe she was cavalier, or you believe that she should be tried for treason for the risky position she put Americans in by sending correspondence about yoga or whatever,” he said, “Donald Trump has done the most severe possible thing. It’s not a close call with him.”Trump acolytes are now delighting at the prospect of reviving one of their favorite boogeywomen.“Republicans believe there’s been an unequal application of justice,” said former Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who as chairman of the House Oversight Committee investigated myriad Clinton episodes leading up to the 2016 election. He added, “What is it that Donald Trump did that was worse than Hillary Clinton? Nothing, nothing, nothing.”Timothy Parlatore, a criminal defense lawyer who quit the Trump legal team last month, said he did not believe that Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump or President Biden — who has cooperated with a special counsel’s investigation into his own handling of classified documents after his tenure as vice president — should have been charged for their handling of classified information.Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had four years to prosecute Mrs. Clinton and did not. Mr. Parlatore said that Mr. Trump no longer saw her as a threat — and instead called for an investigation into Mr. Biden and his son.“Here is a big difference,” Mr. Parlatore said. “The Trump administration wasn’t looking at Hillary as being a presidential candidate. The Biden administration is looking at Trump in a different way.”In Boston, Rebecca Kaiser, a political consultant, has worn her “BUT HER EMAILS” hat regularly since she received it as a gift.Sophie Park for The New York TimesFor now, the most devoted Clinton supporters are following her lead and wearing “BUT HER EMAILS” hats as a badge of honor. They appeared in recent days at dog parks, soccer tournaments and Pride events as a sort of celebration of Mr. Trump’s comeuppance.In Boston, Rebecca Kaiser, a political consultant, has worn her “BUT HER EMAILS” hat regularly since she received it as a gift the day before Mr. Trump was indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in Manhattan in April.Since then, at Little League and soccer games, the supermarket, the beach and during dates with her wife, Ms. Kaiser has sported the black hat with pink letters, which she said served as a conversation starter about an election that many other Democrats would rather forget.“There are definitely people who notice the hat and very quickly avert their eyes,” Ms. Kaiser said. “There are other people who look at the hat and just roll their eyes. And honestly, I think there are a good amount of people who have no idea what it’s referencing.”Anjali Huynh More

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      Where Presidential Hopes Go to Die

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      Gail Collins: Bret, before we get to Donald Trump’s big mess — how many times have I said that? Well, before we get to you-know-who, one minute on the smoke that filled the city last week. Were you in town?Bret Stephens: I was. For a few hours there, the Manhattan sky looked like something out of “Apocalypse Now” or “Blade Runner.”Gail: When I was outdoors, with a mask on, I was tempted to stop some of the young people walking past and apologize for having screwed up their future with global warming. Joe Biden’s trying hard to deal with this, but his plans aren’t nearly enough given the scope of the problem.We need, among many, many things, to end tax breaks for fossil fuel production. Is it fair to complain that Republican resistance to the very idea of climate change is a huge culprit here?Bret: You’re asking whether it’s fair to complain that Republicans are causing forest fires in Canada, a country that’s been governed by Justin Trudeau and his left-of-center coalition for the past eight years?Gail: We can certainly bemoan Canada’s ineptitude in timber management, but this is hardly the only place where we’ve seen a mess of forest fires in the last few years.Admit it. Climate change is a stupendous global crisis and everybody has to join together to fight it.Bret: I was being just a tad flip, Gail: You know I had a Damascene — or Greenlandic — conversion last year.That said, we can’t wait for China and India to wean themselves off coal to find an effective solution to the remediable problem of forest fires. The answer is good forest management, particularly by doing more to remove dead trees and use controlled burns — something, as The Times reported last week, Canada doesn’t do nearly enough of. This is why Western states run by Democrats are now looking at states like Florida, Georgia and other areas in the Southeast for tips on how to avoid giant fires.But speaking of forest fires, shall we get to that latest Trump indictment?Gail: We’re obviously in history-making territory — first former president indicted in a criminal case brought by the federal government. And this one, which involves trying to stash away official papers he’d been told were government property, is certainly a classic Trump combination of shocking and stupid.Bret: Or sinister and self-serving. I’m still not sure.Gail: Wow, the pictures of those boxes of classified documents piled up around the toilet …Bret: Really puts a new spin on the term “anal retentive.”Gail: I did sorta hope we’d start the cosmic Trump prosecutions with one of the other big charges — trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election by pressing the Georgia secretary of state to “find” more votes and encouraging the Jan. 6 insurrection do seem more … important.You?Bret: Three thoughts, Gail. The first is that Jack Smith, the special counsel, has produced irrefutable proof that Trump knew that he possessed, as the former president himself put it, “secret information” that he could have declassified when he was in office but didn’t. That may be about as close to a slam dunk, legally speaking, as we’re ever going to get in a case like this.Gail: True, but I want shockingly terrible besides terribly illegal. Go on.Bret: The second thought is that a special counsel appointed by President Biden’s attorney general is bringing a criminal case against the president’s presumptive opponent in next year’s election. To many Republicans, this will smack of a bald attempt to politicize justice and criminalize politics — the very thing Trump was accused of doing in his first impeachment. Trump will surely use this to his political advantage and, as the writer Damon Linker noted in a perceptive guest essay last week, will probably see his primary poll numbers jump yet again.Gail: Yeah, at least temporarily.Bret: The third thought comes from a tweet by the conservative writer Erick Erickson: “Take the crime out of it — do you really want to put a man back in the White House who shows off highly classified military documents to randos?”Gail: Reasonable conclusion. Yet most of Trump’s would-be Republican opponents are dodging this whole, deeply startling, issue. Or pretending it’s a Democratic plot.Bret: Pathetic. As usual.Gail: Your fave Nikki Haley attacked the Justice Department for “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.” And no candidate apart from Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, was willing to really say gee, this is the kind of thing we want to avoid in our nominee.Explain, please …Bret: You get the sense that most of these Republican Lilliputians are running to be Trump’s veep pick or his pet rock. Or they’re trying to ingratiate themselves with Trump’s base and to present themselves as a slightly more responsible version of the 45th president, which is like trying to sell a fentanyl addict on the merits of pot gummies.The only Republicans in the race who seem to have gotten it right are Christie and Hutchinson. They understand that the way to beat Trump is to go after him hammer-and-tongs.Gail: Where does that leave you? Holding out hope for Chris Christie? I must confess it’s hard to imagine Hutchinson as any kind of contender.Bret: I respect his willingness to stand up clearly and strongly against Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election.Gail: Sounds good — and the last time I looked, Hutchinson was doing at least as well as, um, Ted Cruz.Does the need for big money worry you? It’s impressive to be a super-successful business person, but I’m not sure it’s as important as, say, running a state the way so many of the Republican candidates have.Bret: I was extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of a Mike Bloomberg presidency. Generally speaking, I prefer politicians who make their money before going into politics, the way Bloomberg did, as opposed to politicians who trade on their celebrity to make money after being in politics, the way the Clintons did.But back to Christie: Don’t be surprised if his campaign catches fire. People will be more than willing to forgive Bridgegate or his lackluster second term as governor if he can make things interesting in the G.O.P. contest. Which, merely by opening his mouth, he definitely can.Gail: Bret, I have to admit I will be surprised. But I would love, love to see Christie qualify for the Republican debate in August. Think there’s a chance?Bret: All Christie needs is 1 percent support in three polls, 40,000 campaign contributors and a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, along with some other stipulations. I think he’ll manage that. The bigger question is whether Trump will agree to the final requirement — something he refused to do in 2016.Gail: You know, I was wondering that about Christie too, since he’s said he wouldn’t support Trump as the nominee. My cynical view is that anybody will get into the debate who wants to, which means that Christie — if he can meet the other requirements — will be there even if he has to fudge a bit. And that Trump will dodge the whole event no matter what the rules are.Bret: To do another town hall on the Collapsing News Network?Gail: Which would leave me with the hope of spending the dog days of summer watching Christie take on Ron DeSantis ….Bret: Something tells me he’ll be more circumspect about going hard against the Florida governor, just in case DeSantis becomes president and he wants the job of attorney general.Gail: Eww.Bret: Can we get back to CNN for a moment? Big news last week with the departure of its ill-starred president, Chris Licht. Any advice for whoever succeeds him?Gail: Well, there’s the rule that you shouldn’t go into a big interview with the assumption that you’re so charming that any writer who’s hanging out with you will just want to be pals.Bret: Much less give that reporter a sense of your workout routine. Gives a whole new meaning to the truism, “Never let them see you sweat.”Gail: But on a more cosmic level, Bret, I worry and wonder all the time about the future of the media in a wireless world. Very hard to make money doing critical chores like covering state and local government. Or even just pursuing hard news.Crossing fingers that the next CNN head will find a way to attract a big audience in search of serious reporting.You?Bret: I’m rooting for the network to return to its hard-news roots. Licht had the right idea, he just went about it badly. Instead of losing a lot of weight and getting rid of people, he should have taken another piece of timeless advice: “Leave the gun, take the cannolis” — as in, eat more, fire less.Gail: Wow, think that’ll work for the presidential candidates wandering around Iowa summer fairs?Bret: Everyone in Iowa ought to know “The Godfather” by heart. It’s the state where most presidential hopes go to die.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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      Trump’s Candidacy: Evaluated by 11 Opinion Writers

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Donald Trump, the former president. More

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      G.O.P. Faces Trump Indictment: Loyalty or Law and Order

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      The candidates challenging Donald Trump have to decide how to run against the indicted former president. And it could determine where the party goes from here.The federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump has left the Republican Party — and his rivals for the party’s nomination — with a stark choice between deferring to a system of law and order that has been central to the party’s identity for half a century or a more radical path of resistance, to the Democratic Party in power and to the nation’s highest institutions that Mr. Trump now derides.How the men and women who seek to lead the party into the 2024 election respond to the indictments of the former president in the coming months will have enormous implications for the future of the G.O.P.So far, the declared candidates for the presidency who are not Mr. Trump have divided into three camps regarding his federal indictment last Thursday: those who have strongly backed him and his insistence that the indictment is a politically driven means to deny him a second White House term, such as Vivek Ramaswamy; those who have urged Americans to take the charges seriously, such as Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson; and those who have straddled both camps, condemning the indictment but nudging voters to move past Mr. Trump’s leadership, such as Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.The trick, for all of Mr. Trump’s competitors, will be finding the balance between harnessing the anger of the party’s core voters who remain devoted to him while winning their support as an alternative nominee.Mr. Trump is due to appear in court on Tuesday in Florida. The danger for Republicans, after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is that encouraging too much anger could lead to chaos — and to what pollsters call the “ghettoization” of their party: confined to minority status by voters unwilling to let go of the fervent beliefs that have been rejected by the majority.That point was laid bare Sunday by a new CBS News/YouGov poll that found 80 percent of Americans outside the core Republican voter base saw a national security risk in Mr. Trump’s handling of classified nuclear and military documents, while only 38 percent of likely Republican primary voters discerned such a risk.In the same poll, only 7 percent of Republicans said the indictment had changed their view of the former president for the worse; 14 percent said their views had changed for the better; and the majority, 61 percent, said their views would not change. More than three-quarters of Republican primary voters said the indictments were politically motivated.A separate ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 61 percent of Americans viewed the charges as serious, up from 52 percent in April when pollsters asked about the mishandling of classified documents. Among Republicans, 38 percent said the charges were serious, also up, from 21 percent in this spring. But only about half of Americans said Mr. Trump should be charged, unchanged from April.“Base voters see the double standard in politics. I continue to hear, ‘When are they going to indict the Bidens?’” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman and senior adviser to Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. But, he added, “65 percent of our primary voters are just tired of all the drama and I think are looking for a new generation of Republicans to take us out of the wilderness.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, campaigning in Iowa early this year. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMs. Haley has embodied that balancing act, saying in one statement, “This is not how justice should be pursued in our country,” and also, “It’s time to move beyond the endless drama.”Mr. Trump’s closest rival for the 2024 nomination, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, captured the same spirit when he mused on Friday that he “would have been court-martialed in a New York minute” if he had taken classified documents during his service in the Navy. He was referring to Hillary Clinton — who has returned as a Republican boogeyman this week — and her misuse of classified material as secretary of state, but the double meaning was clear, just as it was when he said, “There needs to be one standard of justice in this country. Let’s enforce it on everybody.”Those urging voters to read the charges facing Mr. Trump — the mishandling of highly classified documents on some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and his subsequent steps to obstruct law enforcement — are a lonelier group in the broader Republican Party. Just two former governors running for president — both former prosecutors — Mr. Christie of New Jersey and Mr. Hutchinson of Arkansas, are aligned with a scattering of other leaders like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who was the only Republican senator to vote to remove Mr. Trump from office twice.But their voices are likely to be amplified in the coming days by a media eager to give them a microphone. Mr. Christie will hold a town-hall meeting on CNN on Monday night, while Mr. Hutchinson, the longest of long shots for the nomination, has given a flurry of interviews.“The Republican Party should not dismiss this case out of hand,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. “These are serious allegations that a grand jury has found probable cause on.”On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr, weighed in on Fox News Sunday, saying he was “shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were.” “If even half of it is true, he’s toast,” Mr. Barr said. “It is a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning. This idea of presenting Trump as a victim here — a victim of a witch hunt — is ridiculous.”The critics of Mr. Trump also have an appeal that goes to the center of the party’s identity: law and order. Republicans are still attacking Democrats on the rise of street crime after the pandemic even as they attack the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the special prosecutor and the federal grand jury system.“If Congress has the ability to have oversight over the Department of Justice, I encouraged them to do it vigorously and fairly and ask all the questions they need,” Mr. Christie said on CNN. “But what we should also be doing is holding to account people who are in positions of responsibility and saying, if you act badly, there has to be penalties for that. There has to be a cost to be paid.”But voters eager to believe the dark tales spun by Mr. Trump of a nefarious “deep state,” of “Communists” bent on the destruction of America, are receiving encouragement from candidates who are ostensibly Mr. Trump’s rivals. For them, the calculation appears to be capturing the former president’s voters if his legal troubles finally end his political career.“I am personally deeply skeptical of everything in that indictment,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and author, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, adding, “I personally have no faith whatsoever in those vague allegations.”Other candidates were less blunt but equally willing to challenge the integrity of the justice system, a system, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said, “where the scales are weighted” against conservatives.The language of Trump supporters after his indictment last Thursday has alarmed some experts.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesIn truth, the conservative world is divided. Some figures have, predictably, rallied around Mr. Trump with irresponsible rhetoric that appeared to call for violence.“If you want to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and 75 million Americans just like me. And most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.,” said Kari Lake, the failed candidate for governor of Arizona.More surprisingly were the voices on the Trumpist right who have voiced their concerns — over the charges and over their impact on the Republican Party’s future. When Charlie Kirk of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA called for every other Republican candidate for the presidency to drop out of the race in solidarity with Mr. Trump, Ann Coulter, the right-wing bomb thrower, responded, “That’s nothing! I’m calling on EVERY REPUBLICAN TO COMMIT SUICIDE in solidarity with Trump!” — acknowledging that rallying around the former president could send the party to oblivion.Mike Cernovich, a lawyer and provocateur on the right, criticized the indictment as a “selective prosecution,” but also said, “Trump walked into this trap.”How the party, and its 2024 candidates, respond will matter, to the country and to the party’s political fortunes. The core Republican voter might stand with Mr. Trump, but most Americans most likely will not. It is a dilemma, acknowledged Clifford Young, president of U.S. public affairs at the polling and marketing firm Ipsos.“For the average American in the middle, they’re appalled,” he said, “but for the base, not only is support being solidified, they don’t believe what is happening.” “Heck,” he added, “they believe he won the election.” More