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      No Degree? No Problem. Biden Tries to Bridge the ‘Diploma Divide.’

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      President Biden is trying to appeal to working-class voters by emphasizing his plans to create well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.When President Biden told a crowd of union workers this year that every American should have a path to a good career — “whether they go to college or not” — Tyler Wissman was listening.A father of one with a high school education, Mr. Wissman said he rarely heard politicians say that people should be able to get ahead without a college degree.“In my 31 years, it was always, ‘You gotta go to college if you want a job,’” said Mr. Wissman, who is training as an apprentice at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia, where the president spoke in March.As Mr. Biden campaigns for re-election, he is trying to bridge an educational divide that is reshaping the American political landscape. Even though both political parties portray education as crucial for advancement and opportunity, college-educated voters are now more likely to identify as Democrats, while those without college degrees are more likely to support Republicans.That increasingly clear split has enormous implications for Mr. Biden as he tries to expand the coalition of voters that sent him to the White House in the first place. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 61 percent of college graduates, but only 45 percent of voters without a four-year college degree — and just 33 percent of white voters without a four-year degree.“The Democratic Party has become a cosmopolitan, college-educated party even though it’s a party that considers itself a party of working people,” said David Axelrod, a top adviser to former President Barack Obama.Mr. Axelrod added that the perception that Wall Street had been bailed out during the 2008 recession while the middle class was left to struggle deepened the fissure between Democrats and blue-collar workers who did not attend college.The election of Donald J. Trump, who harnessed many of those grievances for political gain, solidified the trend.“There’s a sense among working-class voters, and not just white working-class voters, that the party doesn’t relate to them or looks down on people who work with their hands or work with their backs or do things that don’t require college education,” Mr. Axelrod said.Now, in speeches around the country, Mr. Biden rarely speaks about his signature piece of legislation, a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, without also emphasizing that it will lead to trade apprenticeships and, ultimately, union jobs.“Let’s offer every American a path to a good career whether they go to college or not, like the path you started here,” Mr. Biden said at the trades institute, referring to its apprenticeship program.The White House says apprenticeship programs, which typically combine some classroom learning with paid on-the-job experience, are crucial to overcoming a tight labor market and ensuring that there is a sufficient work force to turn the president’s sprawling spending plan into roads, bridges and electric vehicle chargers.Mr. Biden has offered incentives for creating apprenticeships, with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants for states that expand such programs.“Biden is the first president that’s reducing the need to get a college degree since World War II,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian.Mr. Biden now rarely mentions his investments in infrastructure without citing trade apprenticeships that can lead to union jobs.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s approach is a shift from previous Democratic administrations, which were far more focused on college as a path to higher pay and advancement. Mr. Obama, during his first joint session of Congress, said that the United States should “once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle Obama, started a campaign encouraging Americans to go to college, at one point suggesting in a satirical video that life without higher education was akin to watching painting dry.Democrats have long walked a careful line on the issue. Mr. Biden has been a champion of higher education, particularly community colleges, and one of his most ambitious proposals as president was a $400 billion program to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for individuals who earn under $125,000 a year. Republicans have portrayed that proposal as a giveaway for elites.Mitch Landrieu, the president’s infrastructure coordinator, said Mr. Biden had always believed college was important, but “it is absolutely not the only way to build an economy.”“He sees that men and women like that have been left behind for a long time,” Mr. Landrieu said of people without college degrees. “They’ve always been part of the Democratic Party. It’s not until recently that’s changed.”The shift coincides with a stark political reality.The battleground states that voted for the winning candidate in both 2016 and 2020 rank roughly in the middle on higher-education levels, which means that Mr. Biden’s effort to appeal to those without a degree could make a real difference in 2024, according to Doug Sosnik, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.“You need to both try to mitigate losses with noncollege voters and at the same time try to exploit the advantage in those states with educated voters,” Mr. Sosnik said. “You can’t rely on the diploma divide solely to win. But it’s part of the formula.”Instructors at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia say they have noticed an increase in demand.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesA similar dynamic is playing out nationwide.Gov. Josh Shapiro, Democrat of Pennsylvania, released campaign ads focused on expanding apprenticeships and removing requirements for college degrees for thousands of state government jobs — a pledge he made good on when he entered office. His fellow Democratic governor in New Jersey has also removed similar degree requirements, as have Republicans in Maryland, Alaska and Utah.Gov. Spencer Cox, Republican of Utah, said he was not only hoping to address a stigma attached to those who do not attend college but also appease employers increasingly anxious about persistent worker shortages.“We can’t do any of this stuff if we don’t have a labor force,” Mr. Cox said.Christopher Montague, 29, an Air Force veteran from the Philadelphia suburbs, who trained as an apprentice in drywall instead of going to college, said he had noticed an “awakening” by politicians on the upside of pursuing training in trades.“There is money in working with your hands,” he said.At the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia, instructors say they have noticed an increase in demand. Drew Heverly, an industrial painting instructor, said he typically had 10 apprentices working on construction projects in “a good year.”“We’ve definitely seen the ramp-up and the need for manpower,” Drew Heverly said about industrial painting.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesThis year, he has already sent nearly 40 apprentices to work on projects in Philadelphia that are partially funded by Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package.“We’ve definitely seen the ramp-up and the need for manpower,” Mr. Heverly said.The prospect of pursuing an education in trade while earning money on projects has also gained momentum among high school students, according to the Finishing Trades Institute’s recruitment coordinator, Tureka Dixon. Community colleges in the area are even reaching out to see if they can form joint partnerships to train students on trade.“Whether it’s cranes, high-rise buildings, bridges, that is trade work,” Ms. Dixon said as the apprentices in hard hats listened to a lesson on lead removals. “That is physical labor. That is the country, so I think people need to consider it more.”Mark Smith, 30, who is training as an apprentice at the institute, said learning a trade was not a fallback position for him — it was his preferred career.“School wasn’t for me,” Mr. Smith said. “I did the Marine Corps and then I started right in this. For me it was a waste of money.”Mr. Wissman, who has never voted in a presidential election and identifies as an independent, said he was not sure yet if the recognition from the White House would move him to finally vote in the 2024 election.“I want in office whoever is going to help me put food on my table,” said Mr. Wissman, whose girlfriend is pregnant with their second child. “At the end of the day, that’s all it’s going to come down to.” More

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      Pence Looks Toward 2024 Run, Using Reagan’s Playbook, Not Trump’s

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      A pro-Pence super PAC is being formed, and so is a plan to barnstorm Iowa. “This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” a G.O.P. operative said.Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to soon declare a long-shot campaign for the White House against the president under whom he served, pitching himself as a “classical conservative” who would return the Republican Party to its pre-Trump roots, according to people close to Mr. Pence.Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and pushing back against Republican efforts to police big business on ideological grounds. He faces significant challenges, trails far behind in the polls and has made no effort to channel the populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.In a sign his campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, a pro-Pence super PAC called Committed to America is being set up. A veteran Republican operative, Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and was the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the group alongside Jeb Hensarling, a close friend of Mr. Pence’s who served with him in Congress.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation. The political profile he built under former President Donald J. Trump was more supplicant than standard-bearer, at least until the rupture in their relationship on Jan. 6, 2021. He would begin far behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in early national and state polls of 2024 Republican primary voters.The Pence team’s bet is that a “Reagan coalition” can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThe Pence candidacy will focus heavily on winning over evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, where the super PAC is already preparing to organize all 99 counties. Iowa’s caucuses are the first contests for Republican presidential contenders early next year.“Iowa feels more like Indiana than any other state in the union,” Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview. “It just feels like home.”On a recent call with reporters, Mr. Reed, who will help lead the pro-Pence super PAC, described the Iowa caucuses as the “defining event” of Mr. Pence’s candidacy and foreshadowed an old-fashioned blitz of retail politics. “We’re going to organize Iowa, all 99 counties, like we’re running him for county sheriff,” he said.If Mr. Trump represents the populist New Right, Mr. Pence is preparing to run for president in the mold of Ronald Reagan. His team’s improbable bet is that a “Reagan coalition” — composed of the Christian right, fiscal conservatives and national security hawks — can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.“We have to resist the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” Mr. Pence said in the interview.In a Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire focused on economics, Mr. Pence is expected to call for “free trade with free nations,” according to a person familiar with the draft.He is casting himself as a “Reagan conservative” and staking out sharply different positions from Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the most important policy questions framing the Republican 2024 race. Still, running against Mr. Trump so directly will force Mr. Pence to confront the contradictions inherent in having served as the president’s yes-man for four years through the turmoil of the Trump administration.“This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” Mr. Reed said. “People know Mike Pence. They just don’t know him well.”It remains to be seen how frequently Mr. Pence will discuss the moment that has defined him for the last two years: his rejection on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to get him to exceed his constitutional authority while President Biden’s Electoral College victory was certified.That issue is not a winning one with the base of the Republican Party. But Mr. Pence’s team believes there are enough Republicans who might be won over by Mr. Pence describing the moment as adhering to constitutional principles.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMr. Pence stands almost alone among the prospective Republican field in advocating views that were once standard issue for his party.Case in point: Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed back as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt. Before Mr. Trump entered national politics in 2015, cutting entitlement programs was Republican orthodoxy. But Mr. Trump changed that. The former president has promised in his third campaign not to cut either program and he has attacked Mr. DeSantis on the issue, claiming the governor would cut those programs.“It is fairly remarkable that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have the same position on fiscal solvency: The position of never going to touch Social Security and Medicare,” Mr. Pence said.Mr. Pence said he would “explain to people” how the “debt crisis” would affect their children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits won’t apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people in retirement today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will pitch ideas to cut spending for people under 40.Mr. Pence is also drawing a stark contrast on foreign policy. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have questioned whether the United States should be supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Pence sees the battle as a modern version of the Cold War.“There’s a bit of a movement afoot in the Republican Party that would abandon our commitment to being the leader of the free world and that questions why we’re providing military support in Ukraine,” Mr. Pence said.Unlike almost every major Republican running for president, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, though he acknowledged in the interview that the “weapons of mass destruction” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.“In the aftermath of September 11th, the president articulated a doctrine that I wholly supported,” Mr. Pence said, “which was that it’s harder for your enemies to project force if they’re running backward.”Mr. Pence supports a national ban on abortion. “For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” he said.Allison Joyce/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Pence is also resisting the anti-corporate furies that are dominating Republican politics today, arguing limited government means not intervening in the private sector. He was one of the first major Republicans to criticize Mr. DeSantis for his fight against Disney.In the view of New Right politicians such as Mr. DeSantis, limited-government conservatives are naïve to the fact that liberals have overtaken major American institutions — academia, Fortune 500 companies, the news media — and conservatives need to use governmental power to fight back.Mr. Pence will run as a staunch social conservative, drawing a contrast with Mr. Trump on abortion policy. In his town hall with CNN last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly refused to say he would support a federal ban on abortion. He has said the issue should be left to the states.Mr. Pence unapologetically endorses a national ban on abortion.“For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” Mr. Pence said. His senior adviser, Marc Short, said Mr. Pence regarded a 15-week national ban as a “minimal threshold” and would support federal efforts to “protect life beginning at conception.”There is little chance Mr. Pence will receive many endorsements from members of Congress. His team insists that Mr. Pence does not need elected officials to vouch for his credentials. Yet, it’s also unclear how many Republican donors will back his bid. An early sign of interest came last week in Dallas when the billionaire Ross Perot Jr., a real estate developer and son of the former presidential candidate, hosted a lunch for Mr. Pence with other major donors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the gathering.Among the hires for the super PAC supporting Mr. Pence is Bobby Saparow, who led the ground game for Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful re-election campaign in Georgia in 2022, one of the few brights spots for Republicans in the midterms. Mr. Saparow promised to “replicate” the effort with Mr. Pence.For now, Mr. Pence is signaling he’s willing to do without a staple of Republican presidential campaigns in the modern era: Mr. Trump’s smash-mouth politics and constant warfare against the media.“People want to see us get back to having a threshold of civility in the public debate,” Mr. Pence said. “And when I say that, when I tell people that I think democracy depends on heavy doses of civility, I get a very visceral response from crowds.” More

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      Whose Version of Christian Nationalism Will Win in 2024?

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      Last week the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist roadshow co-founded by the former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, rolled up to the Trump National Doral Miami resort. Two speakers who’d appeared at other stops on the tour, the online streamers Scott McKay and Charlie Ward, were jettisoned at the last moment because of bad publicity over their praise of Hitler. (“Hitler was actually fighting the same people that we’re trying to take down today,” said McKay, not inaccurately.) But as of this writing, the tour’s website still includes McKay and Ward, along with Eric Trump, as featured speakers at an upcoming extravaganza in Las Vegas.ReAwaken America’s association with anti-Semites did not stop Donald Trump from calling into the rally to offer his support. “It’s a wonderful hotel, but you’re there for an even more important purpose,” he told a shrieking crowd, before promising to bring Flynn back in for a second Trump term. Flynn is exactly the sort of figure we can expect to serve in a future Trump administration — a MAGA die-hard uninterested in restraining Trump. So it’s worth paying attention to how he has changed since he was last on the national stage.Flynn has long been a paranoid Islamophobe, and toward the end of Trump’s presidency, he emerged as a full-fledged authoritarian, calling on Trump to invoke martial law after the 2020 election. Now he’s become, in addition to an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and QAnon adherent, one of the country’s most prominent Christian nationalists. “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” he said at a 2021 ReAwaken America event. “One nation under God and one religion under God, right?”A major question for Republicans in 2024 is whether this militant version of Christian nationalism — one often rooted in Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on prophecy and revelation — can overcome the qualms of more mainstream evangelicals. The issue isn’t whether the next Republican presidential candidate is going to be a Christian nationalist, meaning someone who rejects the separation of church and state and treats Christianity as the foundation of American identity and law. That’s a foregone conclusion in a party whose state lawmakers are falling over themselves to pass book bans, abortion prohibitions, anti-trans laws, and, in Texas, bills authorizing school prayer and the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.What’s not yet clear, though, is what sort of Christian nationalism will prevail: the elite, doctrinaire variety of candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or the violently messianic version embodied by Flynn and Trump.ReAwaken America’s Miami stop had just concluded when Trump ran afoul of some more traditional evangelical leaders in his effort to set himself apart from DeSantis. In a Monday interview with The Messenger, he criticized the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed in Florida, even as he would not say whether he’d sign a similar one himself. “He signed six weeks, and many people within the pro-life movement feel that that was too harsh,” said Trump.Of course, lots of people believe that the Florida law is too harsh, but they’re not generally members of the anti-abortion movement, where Trump’s statement was poorly received. Rebuking Trump, Bob Vander Plaats, probably the most influential evangelical leader in Iowa, tweeted, “The #IowaCaucus door just flung wide open.” The right-wing Iowa talk show host Steve Deace tweeted that he was “potentially throwing away the Iowa Caucuses on the pro-life issue.”There is an obvious opening for DeSantis here. He is fluent in the language of the religious right, and strives to check all its policy boxes. “Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes,” he said at the Christian Hillsdale College last year, substituting the “left’s schemes” for the “devil’s schemes” of Ephesians 6:11. In addition to the abortion ban and his war on “woke” education, he will almost certainly sign a recently passed bill intended to keep trans people from using their preferred bathrooms in government buildings, including schools.But it remains to be seen whether rank-and-file religious conservatives care more about consistency or charisma. For the religious following that Trump has nurtured, he’s less a person who will put in place a specific Christian nationalist agenda than he is the incarnation of that agenda. Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the organizer of Christians against Christian Nationalism, attended the ReAwaken America event at Trump Doral. She described a type of Christian nationalist fervor that was “very much tied to the political future of Donald Trump and nothing else.”Tyler didn’t hear any of the ReAwaken speakers talk about abortion. Instead, she said, they spoke about “spiritual warfare.” There was also “a lot of talking about guns, about this sense that you’re put here for this time and this place.”If DeSantis treats Christianity as a moral code he’d like to impose on the rest of us, Trump treats it as an elevated status that should come with special perks. That’s how he can slam DeSantis for being “sanctimonious” even as he wraps his own campaign in biblical raiment. If a Republican wins in 2024, the victor will preside over a Christian nationalist administration. The question is whether that person will champion an orthodoxy or a cult.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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      How Much Did Election Denial Hurt Republicans in the Midterms?

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      The NewsDenying the results of the 2020 election and casting doubts about the nation’s voting system cost statewide Republican candidates 2.3 to 3.7 percentage points in the midterms last year, according to a new study from States United Action, a nonpartisan group that promotes fair elections.Why It Matters: Consequential races were close.Even at the lowest end of the spectrum, 2.3 percentage points would have been enough to swing several critical midterm races that Republicans lost, including the contests for governor and attorney general in Arizona and the Senate elections in Nevada and Georgia.In each of those races, the Republican nominee had either expressed doubts about the 2020 election or outright rejected its legitimacy.And as former President Donald J. Trump illustrated at a town-hall event last week, election denialism is very much alive within the Republican Party.But spreading such conspiracy theories again could hamper Republicans as they look to take back the Senate in 2024.“The problem for a lot of Republicans right now is that the gap between what the base wants and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten very long,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist.Background: A series of losses for election deniersIn the midterms, a slate of election-denying candidates ran together as the America First coalition. These candidates, organized in part by Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, sought to take over critical parts of the nation’s election infrastructure by running for secretary of state, attorney general and governor in states across the country.But in every major battleground state, these candidates lost.“What we found was lying about elections isn’t just bad for our democracy, it’s bad politics,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Action.The group arrived at the 2.3 to 3.7 percentage-point “penalty” number by comparing election-denying candidates in 2022 with Republicans who did not espouse similar views, and then comparing the 2022 performance to that of 2018.On the whole, 2022 was a better year for Republicans than 2018 was. As expected, in statewide races with no election denier, Republicans did much better in 2022 than in 2018 on average, but the same did not hold true for election-denying candidates.What’s Next: Big Senate races in 2024Several candidates who were a core part of the election denial movement have signaled an intent to run again in 2024, including Mr. Marchant in Nevada. Others, including Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano, who lost races for governor in Arizona and Pennsylvania, are reportedly considering bids for Senate.And as Mr. Trump continues to demand fealty to such beliefs and hold sway over Republican primaries, the issue is likely to linger in G.O.P. politics.Most battleground states are not holding contests for governor and secretary of state until 2026, but several marquee Senate races next year will determine control of the chamber.“What’s really interesting is that the results there are different from the results for congressional races and state legislative races,” Ms. Lydgate said. “We think that’s because in these statewide races for governor, state attorney general, secretary of state, voters really came to understand that those are the people who oversee voting. Those are the people who are in charge of your freedom to vote.” More

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      DeSantis Impresses Voters and Trolls Trump in Iowa Swing

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      The former president canceled a rally in Des Moines, citing a storm warning. The Florida governor made the most of his rival’s absence, as DeSantis allies taunted Mr. Trump.For the first time in months, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday showed the aggressive political instincts that his allies have long insisted he would demonstrate in a contest against former President Donald J. Trump.After headlining two successful political events in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis made an unscheduled stop in Des Moines — a move aimed at highlighting the fact that Mr. Trump had abruptly postponed a planned Saturday evening rally in the area because of reports of possible severe weather.Mr. Trump’s explanation for postponing the event drew skepticism from local Iowa officials and derision from DeSantis allies about the “beautiful” weather. And Mr. DeSantis — who has avoided direct conflict with Mr. Trump — essentially kicked sand in the former president’s face by coming to an area that Mr. Trump claimed to have been told was too dangerous for him to visit.After wrapping up his events on Saturday evening elsewhere in the state, Mr. DeSantis headed to Jethro’s BBQ Southside, where he and his wife, Casey DeSantis, stood on a table outside and spoke to a cheering crowd. The barbecue joint was a short drive from where Mr. Trump had planned to host his own rally.“My better half and I have been able to be all over Iowa today, but before we went back to Florida we wanted to come by and say hi to the people of Des Moines,” a grinning Mr. DeSantis said. “So thank you all for coming out. It’s a beautiful night, it’s been a great day for us.”Mr. DeSantis’s pointed pit stop was a clear rebuke to Mr. Trump, who has tried to torment the Florida governor for months, mocking him for his falling poll numbers and perceived dearth of charisma. Mr. DeSantis’s resistance to hitting back while not a declared candidate as he finished the state’s legislative session, combined with a handful of unforced errors, had allowed the former president to take control of the race for 2024 and frustrated some of Mr. DeSantis’s allies. But as he prepares to take on Mr. Trump, who has dominated every Republican he has campaigned against in the past, Mr. DeSantis moved to show he doesn’t intend to suffer the same result. “If someone’s punching you in the face, you better punch them back,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — a race in which Mr. Rubio was criticized for not fighting back enough against Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has been outflanked by Mr. Trump’s team at various turns until now. Saturday was the first time Mr. DeSantis has taken advantage of an opportunity to show up Mr. Trump over a perceived misstep. Mr. DeSantis needs to string together many more days like Saturday in a campaign that will rely heavily on winning the Iowa caucus early next year. But Republican activists in the state say there is an opening with caucus-goers for someone other than Mr. Trump. And the visit Saturday, where he also traveled to Sioux Center — populated by Christian conservatives whose support he must gain — was seen as a positive development by Republicans who want to defeat Mr. Trump but have been dismayed by Mr. DeSantis’s stumbles as he steps onto the national stage.Casey DeSantis mingled with attendees at the event in Cedar Rapids on Saturday.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesDespite the unforeseen — albeit indirect — jab at Jethro’s, the governor is unlikely to criticize Mr. Trump directly until after he formally announces his campaign, according to two people familiar with his political operation. And even when he does jump into the race, which is expected to happen imminently, he will largely focus on contrasting his record with Mr. Trump’s — particularly on issues like the coronavirus pandemic — while making the case that he is the candidate better equipped to defeat President Biden in a general election. It’s a strategy that avoids relitigating Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, and one the governor is foreshadowing as he barnstorms Republican events around the country. It also positions Mr. DeSantis — who is decades younger than the 76-year-old Mr. Trump, who was recently indicted and faces the possibility of additional ones in other investigations — as interested in the future and not the past.“If we make this election about a referendum on Joe Biden and his failed policies, and we provide a positive alternative to take America in a new direction, I think Republicans will win across the board,” Mr. DeSantis said at a Saturday evening fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Iowa in Cedar Rapids. That event was shown on Fox News during time that Mr. Trump had claimed Fox News was reserving to show his rally. Mr. DeSantis’s message is already appealing to some voters, including Amy Seeger, who traveled from Milwaukee to see him speak earlier in the day at a picnic in Sioux Center.“I would vote for a shoe over Trump,” Ms. Seeger said in an interview. “It is time to move forward. Trump is very wrapped up in 2020 and playing the victim.”Mr. DeSantis also used the Iowa trip to show off the sometimes enigmatic lighter side of his personality, flipping burgers at the picnic and talking about his life as a family man with his wife at the evening fund-raiser in Cedar Rapids.At that second event, Ms. DeSantis joined her husband on stage for an interview conducted by the state Republican Party chair, Jeff Kaufmann, following remarks from the governor. Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech focuses almost exclusively on policy, leaving out the biographical details that politicians are generally expected to supply. His wife seemed to try to fill in those gaps, telling personal stories about Mr. DeSantis’s childhood in Florida, his military service, and their three young children.“When he gets home, don’t think for a second that he goes and goes right to bed,” she said. “I hand three small kids over to him and I go to bed.”The moment resonated with the crowd. “There was a tender side to him, a family side, that I didn’t really have an appreciation for,” said Bob Carlson, a physician from Muscatine who was in the audience.Mr. DeSantis greeted supporters after making an unscheduled visit to the Jethro’s BBQ Southside in Des Moines on Saturday.Bryon Houlgrave/USA Today NetworkAs Mr. DeSantis builds toward an announcement, he is beginning to show other signs of political strength in ways that matter beyond having financial backing. The outing to Iowa — where he is expected to make a return visit fairly soon — came as a super PAC backing his all-but-official presidential campaign announced support from 37 state lawmakers. Local elected officials tend to pay less attention to national polls than members of Congress, who have been slower to endorse the governor.In contrast, Mr. Trump — who had scheduled a rally to try to blot out Mr. DeSantis’s visit by appearing on the same day — abruptly called off his own event in the middle of the afternoon, citing a tornado watch.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the Iowa event was sold out but that “due to the National Weather Service’s Tornado Watch in effect in Polk and surrounding counties, we were unfortunately forced to postpone the event. We will be there at the first available date.”But although it rained heavily at points, it was sunny mid-afternoon and no severe weather such as a tornado materialized, which raised questions among Iowans about whether Mr. Trump was concerned he would fail to draw the crowd he had anticipated. The lack of dangerous storms was noted by local activists who want to see the party move on from Mr. Trump. “We’re all outside on a nice night,” the influential podcast host Steve Deace wrote on Twitter from the scene of Mr. DeSantis’s barbecue victory lap. “Pretty big crowd too. No severe weather in sight. Planes landing and taking off as scheduled.”While Mr. Trump canceled his Iowa appearance, he later called in to an event hosted by the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist, far-right movement led by Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the QAnon promoter and national security adviser who Mr. Trump forced out early in his term. The group, which helps promote conspiracy theories, paid one of Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida, the Doral, to hold it there. Mr. DeSantis’s hope for a win in the Iowa caucuses involves uniting a careful coalition of social conservatives who backed candidates like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee in 2016, along with suburban moderates who went for Mr. Rubio.Yet Mr. DeSantis may be poised to pick up support from enough corners of the state to increase his support. For instance, the influential social conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats has met with the governor and has praised him publicly.Mr. DeSantis’s day was also punctuated with appearances with Senator Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds, both Iowa Republicans. Those visits don’t necessarily mean endorsements from those officials are in the offing, but they do indicate a willingness in the state to support someone other than Mr. Trump and less concern than once existed about retribution from the former president.Bret Hayworth contributed reporting from Sioux Center, Iowa. More

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      No Playing Ostrich With Trump

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      As Sun Tzu says, ‘Know the enemy.’WASHINGTON — My brothers Michael and Martin attended baseball’s opening day at the old Griffith Stadium in April 1951, with the Senators (as our team was then called) playing the Yankees. President Harry Truman had been invited to throw out the first pitch, and the stadium erupted in boos; Truman had just fired the extremely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur as commander of the Far East, and the crowd was irate.When the boys got home, Martin confessed to our father that he had stood up to boo the president before Michael pulled him down.“Dad told me that President Truman was a great man,” Martin later recalled. “He said that if Truman fired MacArthur, he must have his reasons and that I should never boo another president. I never did.”It seems so quaint now, the idea of respecting the president. Gallant has vanished; gladiatorial is in. Patriotism is no longer a premier American virtue. And to a large degree, we have Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch to thank for that.Trump always ridiculed people, but when he brought that into the presidential arena, it was like injecting a virus of cruelty into the political bloodstream.When I flip on Fox News at night, I cringe at the way they make fun of President Biden, the sick delight they take in sniping at any perceived infirmity.Mitt Romney brought some rare Republican rectitude to the Capitol when he was asked about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll trial.“He just is not suited to be president of the United States and to be the person who we hold up to our children and the world as the leader of the free world,” Romney told CNN’s Manu Raju. (The Utah senator also earlier chided Representative George Santos, saying, “You don’t belong here.”)Todd Young, the mild-mannered conservative senator from Indiana, made it clear Thursday, after Trump’s brazen performance at the CNN town hall, that he’d had enough.He told reporters on the Hill that he would not be supporting the former president as the Republican nominee. Asked why, he replied, “Where do I begin?” — a bracing echo of Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” line to that earlier bully boy Joe McCarthy.As a video circulates of Trump celebrating his CNN performance by dancing to “Macho Man” by the pool at Mar-a-Lago, we see Trump unplugged. The existential threat is aiming to get back in the Oval, this time without anyone trying to keep him from going completely off the rails, and with the scary new world of superevolved A.I. chatbots to help him lie and smear. (Trump posted a doctored video on Friday of Anderson Cooper saying “That was President Donald J. Trump ripping us” a new one “here on CNN.”)Trump is spiraling into even more of a self-deluded narcissist, if that’s possible. And he’s even more obsessed with numbers — if that’s possible. When he was asked by the terrific Kaitlan Collins if he regretted his actions on Jan. 6, he began rhapsodizing about, and exaggerating, the size of the crowd that day.“I have never spoken to a crowd as large as this,” he said, adding: “They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable — and it was a beautiful day.”He called one of the most heinous days in American history “a beautiful day.” He called the Black Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt, who was trying to break into the House chamber, a “thug.”New Hampshire voters in the audience were cheering on Trump, and many even laughed when he crudely re-defamed E. Jean Carroll.The town hall was enlightening — and frightening. But we needed that reminder to be on full alert, because Trump is not just an unhinged and dangerous extremist; he is also a cunning and dominating insurgent.The argument that the media should ignore Trump and keep him under a bushel basket is ridiculous. You can’t extinguish Trump by not talking to him. He’s always going to find a platform.Sun Tzu stressed that victory depends on knowing the enemy — “Force him to reveal himself.” Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, did a skillful job of letting Trump convict himself in the deposition.President Biden needs to see what he’s up against. There are only so many times Biden can say “C’mon, man!” in a debate. The more he sees Trump in action, the less likely he is to be steamrolled. Biden’s team has been blithely underestimating the opponent. The cascading indictments allow Trump to play the gilt-dipped martyr on an even larger scale.The task is to challenge Trump and expose him, not to put our fingers in our ears and sing “la, la, la.”“It strikes me as fundamentally wrong to deny voters a chance to see candidates, and particularly front-running candidates, answering challenging questions from journalists and citizens in open forums,” David Axelrod told me Friday. “You can’t save democracy from people who would shred its norms by shredding democratic norms yourselves.”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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      in Elections

      Why Ron DeSantis Is Limping to the Starting Line

      by

      In November, Representative Byron Donalds scored a coveted speaking slot: introducing Gov. Ron DeSantis after a landslide re-election turned the swing state of Florida deep red. Standing onstage at a victory party for Mr. DeSantis in Tampa, Mr. Donalds praised him as “America’s governor.”By April, Mr. Donalds was seated at a table next to another Florida Republican: Donald J. Trump. He was at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club, for a multicourse dinner with nine other House Republicans from Florida who had spurned their home-state governor to endorse the former president’s 2024 run. Red “Make America Great Again” hats decorated their place settings.In six short months from November to May, Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 run has faltered before it has even begun.Allies have abandoned him. Tales of his icy interpersonal touch have spread. Donors have groused. And a legislative session in Tallahassee designed to burnish his conservative credentials has instead coincided with a drop in the polls.His decision not to begin any formal campaign until after the Florida legislative session — allowing him to cast himself as a conservative fighter who not only won but actually delivered results — instead opened a window of opportunity for Mr. Trump. The former president filled the void with personal attacks and a heavy rotation of negative advertising from his super PAC. Combined with Mr. DeSantis’s cocooning himself in the right-wing media and the Trump team’s success in outflanking him on several fronts, the governor has lost control of his own national narrative.Now, as Mr. DeSantis’s Tallahassee-based operation pivots to formally entering the race in the coming weeks, Mr. DeSantis and his allies are retooling for a more aggressive new phase. His staunchest supporters privately acknowledge that Mr. DeSantis needs to recalibrate a political outreach and media strategy that has allowed Mr. Trump to define the race.Mr. DeSantis, on his book tour in Iowa in March, has made a series of missteps that has cost him the support of some donors and lawmakers.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesChanges are afoot. Mr. DeSantis is building a strong Iowa operation. He has been calling influential Republicans in Iowa and is rolling out a large slate of state legislator endorsements before a weekend trip there.“He definitely indicated that if he gets in, he will work exceptionally hard — nothing will be below him,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa evangelical leader whom Mr. DeSantis hosted recently for a meal at the governor’s mansion. “I think he understands — I emphasized that Iowa’s a retail politics state. You need to shake people’s hands, look them in the eye.”Still, his central electability pitch — MAGA without the mess — has been badly bruised.A book tour that was supposed to have introduced him nationally was marked by missteps that deepened concerns about his readiness for the biggest stage. He took positions on two pressing domestic and international issues — abortion and the war in Ukraine — that generated second-guessing and backlash among some allies and would-be benefactors. And the moves he has made to appeal to the hard right — escalating his feud with Disney, signing a strict six-week abortion ban — have unnerved donors who are worried about the general election.“I was in the DeSantis camp,” said Andrew Sabin, a metals magnate who gave the Florida governor $50,000 last year. “But he started opening his mouth, and a lot of big donors said his views aren’t tolerable.” He specifically cited abortion and Ukraine.Three billionaires who are major G.O.P. donors — Steve Wynn, Ike Perlmutter and Thomas Peterffy, a past DeSantis patron who has publicly soured on him — dined recently with Vivek Ramaswamy, the 37-year-old long-shot Republican.The early months of 2023 have exposed a central challenge for Mr. DeSantis. He needs to stitch together an unwieldy ideological coalition bridging both anti-Trump Republicans and Trump supporters who are nonetheless considering turning the page on the past president. Hitting and hugging Mr. Trump at the same time has bedeviled rivals since Senator Ted Cruz tried to do so in 2016, and Cruz veterans fill key roles in Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and his super PAC.Allies of both leading Republicans caution that it’s still early.“The Murdochs encapsulated him in a bubble and force-fed him to a conservative audience,” Steve Bannon said of Mr. DeSantis. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis has more than $100 million stored across various pro-DeSantis accounts. He is building good will with state party leaders by headlining fund-raisers. He remains, in public polls, the most serious rival to Mr. Trump. And a supportive super PAC called Never Back Down is staffing up across more than a dozen states, has already spent more than $10 million on television ads and has peppered early states with direct mail.DeSantis supporters point to polls showing that the governor remains well-liked by Republicans.“The hits aren’t working,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down. “His favorability has not changed.”The DeSantis team declined to provide any comment for this story.Six months ago, as Republicans were blaming Mr. Trump for the party’s 2022 midterm underperformance, a high-flying Mr. DeSantis made the traditional political decision that he would govern first in early 2023 and campaign second. The rush of conservative priorities that Mr. DeSantis has turned into law in Florida — on guns, immigration, abortion, school vouchers, opposing China — is expected to form the backbone of his campaign.“Now, the governor can create momentum by spending time publicly touting his endless accomplishments, calling supporters and engaging more publicly to push back on the false narratives his potential competitors are spewing,” said Nick Iarossi, a lobbyist in Florida and a longtime DeSantis supporter.A turning point this year for Mr. Trump was his Manhattan indictment, which Mr. DeSantis waffled on responding to as the G.O.P. base rallied to Mr. Trump’s defense.Yet Mr. Trump’s compounding legal woes and potential future indictments could eventually have the opposite effect — exhausting voters, which is Mr. DeSantis’s hope. A jury found Mr. Trump liable this week for sexual abuse and defamation. “When you get all these lawsuits coming at you,” Mr. DeSantis told one associate recently, “it’s just distracting.”‘So God Made a Fighter’The DeSantis team seemed to buy its own hype.Days before the midterms, the DeSantis campaign released a video that cast his rise as ordained from on high. “On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector,’” a narrator booms as Mr. DeSantis appears onscreen. “So God made a fighter.”For years, the self-confident Mr. DeSantis has relied on his own instincts and the counsel of his wife, Casey DeSantis, who posted the video, to set his political course, according to past aides and current associates. Mr. DeSantis has been written off before — in his first primary for governor; in his first congressional primary — so both he and his wife have gotten used to tuning out critics.Today, allies say there are few people around who are willing to tell Mr. DeSantis he’s wrong, even in private.In late 2022, the thinking was that a decision on 2024 could wait, and Mr. Trump’s midterm hangover would linger. Mr. DeSantis published a book — “I was, you know, kind of a hot commodity,” he said of writing it — that became a best seller. And Mr. DeSantis was on the offensive, tweaking Mr. Trump with a February donor retreat held only miles from Mar-a-Lago that drew Trump contributors.But it has been Mr. Trump who has consistently one-upped Mr. DeSantis, flying into East Palestine, Ohio, after the rail disaster there, appearing with a larger crowd in the same Iowa city days after Mr. DeSantis and swiping Florida congressional endorsements while Mr. DeSantis traveled to Washington.Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, praised Mr. DeSantis as “America’s governor” in November 2022. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesOne Trump endorser, Representative Lance Gooden of Texas, backed the former president only hours after attending a private group meeting with Mr. DeSantis. In an interview, Mr. Gooden likened Mr. DeSantis’s decision to delay entry until after a legislative session to the example of a past Texas governor, Rick Perry, who did the same a decade ago — and quickly flamed out of the 2012 contest.“He’s relied, much like Rick Perry did, on local political experts in his home state that just don’t know the presidential landscape,” Mr. Gooden said.‘I’ve Said Enough’Mr. Trump has insinuated, without providing evidence, that Mr. DeSantis had inappropriate relationships with high school girls during a stint as a teacher in the early 2000s and that Mr. DeSantis might be gay.His team has portrayed Mr. DeSantis as socially inept, and a pro-Trump super PAC distributed a video — dubbed “Pudding Fingers” — playing off news articles about Mr. DeSantis’s uncouth eating habits.People close to Mr. Trump have been blunt in private discussions that the hits so far are just the start: If Mr. DeSantis ever appears poised to capture the nomination, the former president will do everything he can to tear him apart.Beginning with his response to the coronavirus outbreak, Mr. DeSantis’s national rise has been uniquely powered by his ability to make the right enemies: in academia, in the news media, among liberal activists and at the White House. But Mr. Trump’s broadsides and some of his own actions have put Mr. DeSantis crosswise with the right for the first time. It has been a disorienting experience for the DeSantis operation, according to allies.For the past three years, Mr. DeSantis has had the luxury of completely shutting out what he pejoratively brands the “national regime media” or “the corporate media” — though Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation does not, in his view, count as corporate media.This strategy served Mr. DeSantis well in Florida. But avoiding sit-down interviews with skeptical journalists has left him out of practice as he prepares for the most intense scrutiny of his career.“The Murdochs encapsulated him in a bubble and force-fed him to a conservative audience,” said Steve Bannon, a former strategist for Mr. Trump. “He hasn’t been scuffed up. He hasn’t had these questions put in his grill.”Even in friendly settings, Mr. DeSantis has stumbled. In a February interview with The Times of London, a Murdoch property, Mr. DeSantis cut off questions after the reporter pushed him on how he thought President Biden should handle Ukraine differently.The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was so irked by Mr. DeSantis’s evasion that he sent a detailed questionnaire to potential Republican presidential candidates to force them to state their positions on the war, according to two people familiar with his decision.In a written response, Mr. DeSantis characterized Russia’s invasion as a “territorial dispute.” Republican hawks and some of Mr. DeSantis’s top donors were troubled. In public, the governor soon cleaned up his statement to say Russia had not had “a right” to invade. In private, Mr. DeSantis tried to calm supporters by noting that his statement had not taken a position against aid to Ukraine.While Mr. DeSantis has stuck to his preferred way of doing things, Mr. Trump has given seats on his plane to reporters from outlets that have published harsh stories about him. And despite having spent years calling CNN “fake news,” Mr. Trump recently attended a CNN town hall.DeSantis allies said the governor would begrudgingly bring in some of the “national regime media.” Some early proof: The governor’s tight-lipped team invited a Politico columnist to Tallahassee and supplied rare on-the-record access.‘I Was a Bit Insulted’Not long after Mr. DeSantis had won in a landslide last fall, the incoming freshman Representative Cory Mills, a Florida Republican, called the governor’s team to try to thank him for his support. Mr. Mills had campaigned on the eve of the election with Casey DeSantis and had appeared with the governor, too. “I called to show my appreciation and never even got a call back,” Mr. Mills said in an interview. “To be honest with you, I was a bit insulted by it.”The lack of relationships on Capitol Hill became a public headache in April when Mr. Trump rolled out what eventually became 10 Florida House Republican endorsements during Mr. DeSantis’s trip to Washington.People who have recently met with Mr. DeSantis say he has been far more engaged, a sign that he is responding to criticism.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDonors who contributed to Mr. DeSantis’s previous campaigns tell stories of meetings in which the candidate looked as though he would rather be anywhere else. He fiddled with his phone, showed no interest in his hosts and escaped as quickly as possible. But people who have recently met with Mr. DeSantis say he has been far more engaged. At recent Wisconsin and New Hampshire events, the governor worked the room as he had rarely done before.The governor and his team have had internal conversations acknowledging the need for him to engage in the basics of political courtship: small talk, handshaking, eye contact.For his part, Mr. Trump recently relished hosting the Florida House Republicans who had endorsed him.On one side of him was Mr. Mills. On the other was Mr. Donalds, who had introduced Mr. DeSantis on election night and who had been in Mr. DeSantis’s orbit since helping with debate prep during Mr. DeSantis’s 2018 run for governor.Mr. Donalds declined an interview. But footage of those private debate-prep sessions, first reported by ABC News, show Mr. DeSantis trying to formulate an answer to a question that will define his imminent 2024 run: how to disagree with Mr. Trump without appearing disagreeable to Trump supporters.“I have to frame it in a way,” Mr. DeSantis said then, “that’s not going to piss off all his voters.” More

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      in Elections

      We’re Asking the Wrong Questions About the Trump Town Hall

      by

      As a former executive of Fox News, I never expected to write this: CNN performed a valuable journalistic service this week by hosting a spirited town hall with Donald Trump.Like it or not, Mr. Trump is one of the two people who are most likely to win the presidency next year. He should be questioned by journalists at every opportunity, whether those be news conferences, live interviews, taped interviews, debates and, yes, town halls. Far too often, presidential candidates stick to scripted events, safe audiences and saturation advertising; days, even weeks, go by with a candidate — or a sitting president — not facing a single tough question.We’ve heard a lot of naysayers deriding the recent town hall or even the idea of mainstream media interviews with Mr. Trump as “platforming” a monster. Monster or not, Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination (he is about 30 points ahead of his nearest rival) and a central figure in some of the most high-profile political and legal debates in this country. Are we better off as a society if, after shunting Mr. Trump into his own MAGA bubble, we wake up in November 2024 and find that he has been elected president?With the first Republican primary debate scheduled for August, we need to confront this and some other uncomfortable questions now. Is American democracy so fragile that we cannot metabolize the outlandish views of a presidential candidate? If a candidate is the subject of serious investigations, shouldn’t the news media ask him about that? Are our ideas of journalism so degraded that providing airtime to a candidate is tantamount to an endorsement?When a reporter holds a politician’s feet to the fire by asking him tough questions, that does not mean she or the network endorses the politician’s answers. We need to reflect on why televising a town hall with a leading candidate, no matter how abhorrent he is to a portion of the country, could inspire not just outrage at his performance but also fundamental questions about a television network’s decision to host the candidate. The Constitution does not bar Mr. Trump from running and our democracy does not bar him from running — yet CNN should not ask him tough questions?Since the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television networks have played a role in our country’s politics. Television is second only to the internet in its ability to concentrate the country’s attention. The United States is a mature democracy. We must trust voters to assess candidates and the media to provide more, not less, information.Some Democrats think that Mr. Trump’s performance at the town hall will hurt him among swing voters, making it less likely that he will win in 2024. That may be so: Many swing voters have spent less time thinking about Mr. Trump these last two years because they don’t obsess about politics like partisans do. So it was a journalistic service to interrogate Mr. Trump’s brand of politics in a forum that allowed voters to assess the former president.I have spent a lot of time thinking about what motivates Americans to vote, and I wonder if there’s more driving the hyperventilating about the town hall than just providing a platform to a monster. Could Democrats be worried that Mr. Trump’s brio and showmanship might strike a chord with some voters? Could Mr. Trump’s performance remind some independents that while they may not be overtly pro-Trump, they are more than a little anti-anti-Trump?Having spent part of my career helping prepare news anchors to question presidential candidates in debates and town halls, I tip my hat to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Under enormous pressure, Ms. Collins kept her composure and, crucially, never made it about herself. Furthermore, she elicited responses from the candidate that made news on topics from abortion to Ukraine.Mindful of Ms. Collins’s strong performance, critics have instead focused their ire on the town hall format, lamenting that it allowed Republican audience members to cheer on Mr. Trump’s insults and falsehoods. But not all the people in the room were pro-Trump — just the noisy ones. Besides, news organizations have been using town hall formats for years, rightfully reasoning that it’s important for candidates to hear from likely primary voters.Should we ban all town halls because the audience might side with the candidate? Should we ban live interviews because it’s too difficult to fact-check a candidate in real time? Or should we just ban Donald Trump altogether and get it over with, as many of his critics would prefer?We should do none of these things. That would be a journalistic disservice to a pluralistic society and electorate that is entrusted with listening, assessing and judging our leaders. Town halls like this one help Americans to think for themselves. It wasn’t so long ago that journalists were able to report hard truths and conduct tough interviews without worrying about upsetting some segment of their viewers. CNN deserves a lot of credit for attempting to return to a baseline that I always considered Journalism 101, but which now feels downright old-fashioned.Bill Sammon is the former managing editor of the Washington bureau of Fox News.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