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      Kristi Noem’s Book: Four Takeaways

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      After a rough start to the rollout of her memoir, the South Dakota governor has continued to defend shooting her dog and to deflect on a false story about meeting Kim Jong-un.In one sense, Kristi Noem has had a wildly successful rollout of her new book: America can’t stop talking about it.But all the chatter is not for the reasons Ms. Noem, the conservative governor of South Dakota, might have expected when she finished “No Going Back,” a memoir that recounts her political career. The book appears aimed at raising her profile as a MAGA loyalist while former President Donald J. Trump weighs his choices for running mate. Just a month ago, Ms. Noem had been widely seen as a contender.Instead of talking up her conservative bona fides, however, Ms. Noem has spent the last week on national television defending a grisly account in the book in which she shoots her dog in a gravel pit. The killing of the dog, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket, has drawn bipartisan criticism and scrutiny.The book, published on Tuesday, includes a number of other noteworthy details, some of which Ms. Noem has discussed in recent interviews. Here are four takeaways.At one point in Ms. Noem’s book, she describes a phone conversation she had with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate. Ms. Noem claims the exchange was threatening, which Ms. Haley’s spokeswoman denied.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesNoem has a lot of criticism for other Republicans.Ms. Noem’s account of her time in office — first as South Dakota’s sole House representative and then as governor — includes many stories that broadly criticize Republicans for their electoral failures, while also targeting figures who have drawn the ire of Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Not as Powerful as She Thinks She Is

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      In an interview last week, NewsNation’s Blake Burman asked Speaker Mike Johnson about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and before Burman could finish his question, Johnson responded with classic Southern scorn. “Bless her heart,” he said, and then he told Burman that Greene wasn’t proving to be a serious lawmaker and that he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her.Strangely enough, Johnson’s dismissal of Greene — on the eve of her potential effort to oust him from the office he won in October — spoke as loudly as his decision to put a vote for Ukraine aid on the floor in the first place. In spite of the Republican Party’s narrow majority in the House and the constant threat of a motion to vacate the chair, he will not let MAGA’s most extreme lawmaker run the place.To understand the significance of this moment, it’s necessary to understand the changing culture of the MAGAfied Republican Party. After eight years of Donald Trump’s dominance, we know the fate of any Republican politician who directly challenges him — the confrontation typically ends his or her political career in the most miserable way possible, with dissenters chased out of office amid a hail of threats and insults. Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are but a few of the many Republicans who dared to defy Trump and paid a high political price.But there’s an open question: Does the MAGA movement have the same control over the Republican Party when Trump isn’t directly in the fray? Can it use the same tactics to impose party discipline and end political careers? If the likes of Greene or Steve Bannon or Matt Gaetz or Charlie Kirk can wield the same power, then the transformation of the party will be complete. It won’t be simply in thrall to Trump; it will be in thrall to his imitators and heirs and perhaps lost to the reactionary right for a generation or more.I don’t want to overstate the case, but Johnson’s stand — together with the Democrats’ response — gives me hope. Consider the chain of events. On April 12, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago and received enough of a blessing from Trump to make it clear that Trump didn’t want him removed. Days before a vote on Ukraine aid that directly defied the MAGA movement, Trump said Johnson was doing a “very good job.”Days later, Johnson got aid to Ukraine passed with more Democratic votes than Republican — a violation of the so-called Hastert Rule, an informal practice that says the speaker shouldn’t bring a vote unless the measure is supported by a majority within his own party. Greene and the rest of MAGA exploded, especially when Democratic lawmakers waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor. Greene vowed to force a vote on her motion to end Johnson’s speakership. She filed the motion in March as a “warning” to Johnson, and now she’s following through — directly testing her ability to transform the House.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Talk of Escape: Trump’s Possible Return Rattles D.C.

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      At Washington dinner parties, dark jokes abound about where to go into exile if the former president reclaims the White House.It has become the topic of the season at Washington dinner parties and receptions. Where would you go if it really happens?Portugal, says a former member of Congress. Australia, says a former agency director. Canada, says a Biden administration official. France, says a liberal columnist. Poland, says a former investigator.They’re joking. Sort of. At least in most cases. It’s a gallows humor with a dark edge. Much of official Washington is bracing for the possibility that former President Donald J. Trump really could return — this time with “retribution” as his avowed mission, the discussion is where people might go into a sort of self-imposed exile.Whether they mean it or not, the buzz is a telling indicator of the grim mood among many in the nation’s capital these days. The “what if” goes beyond the normal prospect of a side unhappy about a lost election. It speaks to the nervousness about a would-be president who talks of being a dictator for a day, who vows to “root out” enemies he called “vermin,” who threatens to prosecute adversaries, who suggests a general he deems disloyal deserves “DEATH,” whose lawyers say he may have immunity even if he orders the assassination of political rivals.“I feel like in the past two weeks that conversation for whatever reason has just surged,” said Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who became a vocal critic of the former president. “People are feeling that it’s very obvious if a second Trump terms happens, it’s going to be slash and burn.”That’s all fine with Mr. Trump and his allies. In their view, Washington’s fear is the point. He is the disrupter of the elite. He is coming to break up their corrupt “uniparty” hold on power. If establishment Washington is upset about the possibility that he returns, that is a selling point to his base around the country that is alienated from the people in power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Donor Retreat, Trump Calls Biden Administration the ‘Gestapo’

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      Fresh from his criminal trial in New York, Donald J. Trump delivered a frustrated and often obscene speech, lasting roughly 75 minutes, at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, attacking one of the prosecutors pursuing him and comparing President Biden’s administration to the Nazis.“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Mr. Trump told donors who attended the event at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”Before making the comparison, Mr. Trump baselessly insisted that the various indictments against him and his allies in several states were being orchestrated by the Biden administration.He said that, before his indictment, he was gentler on Mr. Biden, despite the outcome of the 2020 election. “You have to respect the office of the presidency,” Mr. Trump said. “And I never talk to him like this.”Mr. Trump entered the event to the recording of the national anthem that he made with a group of people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral college win. Mr. Trump praised the song.In his speech, he complained repeatedly about the criminal trial in Manhattan, to which he will return on Monday, insisted that Democrats use “welfare” to cheat in elections and said he would need an attorney general with “courage” as he mocked his former attorney general, William P. Barr, who recently endorsed Mr. Trump after having spoken critically of him since the administration ended.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Refuses to Commit to Accepting Election Outcome in Milwaukee Interview

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      Former President Donald J. Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that he would not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, as he again repeated his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Mr. Trump said, according to The Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”In an interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday, he also dismissed questions about political violence in November by suggesting that his victory was inevitable.When pressed about what might happen should he lose, he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”Mr. Trump’s insistent and fraudulent claims that the 2020 election was unfair were at the heart of his efforts to overturn his loss to President Biden, and to the violent storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters who believed his claims. Mr. Trump now faces dozens of felony charges in connection with those events.Mr. Trump’s vow to “fight for the right of the country” also echoes his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, where he told his supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” before urging his supporters to march to the Capitol.As he campaigns in battleground states this year, Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to sow doubt about the integrity of the fall election, while repeating many of the same lies that he used to assail the integrity of the 2020 election. Months before any voting has taken place, Mr. Trump has regularly made the baseless claim that Democrats are likely to cheat to win.“Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, but we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election — the most important day of our lives — in 2024,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Freeland, Mich.The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Mr. Trump has for years promoted the lie that he won Wisconsin in 2020, and he did so again in the Journal Sentinel interview. Even after Jan. 6, 2021, and years after his exit from office, he has repeatedly pressured Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the top Republican in the State Legislature, to help overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the state and to impeach the state’s nonpartisan chief of elections.More than 1,250 people have been charged with crimes in connection to the Jan. 6 attack — and hundreds of people have been convicted. Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every person convicted on charges related to the storming of the Capitol. A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with that attack.The former president and his allies have also installed election deniers in influential positions in his campaign and in Republican Party institutions. In March, Trump allies newly installed to the leadership of the Republican National Committee appointed Christina Bobb, a former host at the far-right One America News Network, as senior counsel for election integrity. A self-described conspiracy theorist, she has relentlessly promoted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Bobb was indicted in Arizona last week, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf in that state and others, on charges related to what the authorities say were attempts by the defendants to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona.The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have made an aggressive approach to “election integrity” — a broad term often used by Republicans to cast doubt on elections that the party lost — central to their efforts heading toward November.Last month, the committee announced a plan to train and dispatch more than 100,000 volunteers and lawyers to monitor the electoral process in each battleground state and to mount aggressive challenges.On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said at the rally in Freeland that his campaign and national and state Republican parties would put together “a team of the most highly qualified lawyers and other professionals in the country to ensure that what happened in 2020 will never happen again.”“I will secure our elections because you know what happened in 2020,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Waukesha, Wis., on Wednesday.Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes. More

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      New Progressive PAC Targets 8 Key House Races in California

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      Democrats nearly pulled off the impossible in the 2022 midterms.In the final weeks of the campaign, with an unpopular president in his first term, polls forecast a red wave that would sweep the country and flip control of the House and the Senate — prompting alarm from Democrats and predictions from Republicans of a decisive victory.But that wave never materialized, a mirage of bad polling and inflated expectations. Democrats came close to maintaining a national trifecta, but Republicans eked out a thin majority in the House — prevailing in a handful of seats in New York and California, each by just a few thousand votes.Now, a new coalition of progressive groups in California has formed a super PAC aiming to bolster Democratic candidates in a state that the party sees as crucial to winning control of the House this fall.The super PAC, Battleground California, says it aims to spend $15 million this year on eight competitive House races, seven with Republican incumbents — in Northern California, Orange County, the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, the Central Valley and Los Angeles — as well as the seat left open by Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat who is not running for re-election after a failed Senate campaign.It is an ambitious effort, one that seeks to establish a durable progressive machine in California — advised and supported by local activists and community organizations — to lift swing district Democratic candidates through an extensive field operation, including marathon door-knocking campaigns aimed at driving turnout among minority groups.“Trusted messengers from the community are a very critical element,” said Steve Phillips, a co-founder of the California Donor Table, the group leading the Battleground California PAC, adding that those residents are not only more trusted by voters but are better able to provide feedback on what messages work and what messages don’t.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Greene Says She Will Demand Vote Next Week on Removing Johnson

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      Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing Republican from Georgia, excoriated the House speaker for working with Democrats to push through major bills. She said she would move ahead despite all but certain defeat.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said on Wednesday that she would demand a vote next week on a motion to remove Speaker Mike Johnson, moving forward in the face of all but certain defeat with a second attempt during this Congress to depose a Republican speaker.In a morning news conference at the Capitol, Ms. Greene excoriated Mr. Johnson for working with Democrats to push through major legislation and said it was time for lawmakers to go on the record about where they stood on his speakership.“I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may,” Ms. Greene said. “And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate.”The move comes just over a week after Mr. Johnson pushed through a long-stalled $95 billion package to aid Israel, Ukraine and other U.S. allies over the objections of Ms. Greene and other right-wing Republicans who staunchly opposed sending additional aid to Kyiv.And it came one day after House Democratic leaders said they would vote to block the effort to remove Mr. Johnson, which would give Republicans more than enough backing to kill Ms. Greene’s motion before it could be considered.Still, House rules allow any one lawmaker to raise the challenge and force a vote on it within two legislative days, the same mechanism that right-wing Republicans used last fall to make Kevin McCarthy of California the first speaker in history to be removed from the post.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Matt Gaetz Faces Last-Minute Challenger in Republican Primary

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      Aaron Dimmock, a retired Navy officer and aviator, has entered the Republican primary to challenge Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida — jumping into the race hours before a filing deadline last Friday.Mr. Dimmock’s campaign committee shares a treasurer with American Patriots PAC, a group that was used by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to support candidates who were aligned with him in the 2022 midterms. Mr. Gaetz led the revolt among House Republicans that ultimately ousted Mr. McCarthy from the speakership.Mr. Dimmock and representatives of American Patriots PAC did not respond to requests for comment. The primary for the First Congressional District, which covers Pensacola and the western Florida Panhandle, will take place on Aug. 20.Mr. Dimmock, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, served as a pilot for the P-3 surveillance plane for the Navy. In an interview with the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association in 2020, Mr. Dimmock said that he had deployed to Bosnia and Kosovo and had completed several tours in the Middle East. He also described flying surveillance missions over New York City in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. He became an instructor pilot, later worked as a recruiting officer and closed out his career as a Navy liaison in the Pentagon. The Navy operates a major air base in Pensacola.Mr. Gaetz quickly attacked Mr. Dimmock on social media, pointing to LinkedIn posts that Mr. Dimmock made as a business consultant in 2020 in support of racial diversity and the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.“Meet Aaron W. Dimmock,” Mr. Gaetz wrote. “The B.L.M. supporting D.E.I. instructor running against me in the Republican Primary. I knew former Representative McCarthy would be getting a puppet of his to run. I didn’t know it would be a Woke Toby Flenderson!” More