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      Mike Lee and Ted Cruz Fought So That One Man Wouldn’t Have to Face the Pain of Defeat

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      Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah are two of the most prominent “constitutional conservatives” in the Senate. They built their political careers on their supposed fidelity to the Constitution and the original intent of the founding fathers. Cruz made his constitutional conservatism the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign for president, while Lee has written three books on the founding era and presents himself, to the public, as a constitutional scholar rather than a mere politician.It is interesting, then, that Lee and Cruz were among the Republican senators most involved in Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the Constitution and install himself in office against the will of the voters.As The Washington Post reported last month, Cruz worked “directly with Trump to concoct a plan that came closer than widely realized to keeping him in power.” According to this plan, Cruz would object to and delay the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 in favor of a 10-day election audit that would give Trump-friendly state legislatures time to overturn the result and send new electors to Congress.And as CNN reported last week, Lee was in close contact with Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, in the months, weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack. Lee supported and encouraged the president’s effort to overturn the election, with both ideas and political assistance. “I have an additional idea for the campaign,” he wrote to Meadows on Nov. 23, 2020. “Something is not right in a few states. I think it could be proven or disproven easily with an audit (a physical counting of all ballots cast) in PA, WI, GA, and MI.”Two weeks later, Lee would tell Meadows, “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path.” And on Jan. 4, 2021, Lee told Meadows that he had been “calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow” in hopes of finding “something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning.”Lee eventually voted to certify the results of the presidential election and had previously told journalists, and the public, that he was dismayed by the events of Jan. 6. In their book covering the insurrection, “Peril,” Bob Woodward and Robert Costa report that Lee “was shocked” by the conservative legal scholar John Eastman’s plan to delay final certification of the election and “had heard nothing about alternative slates of electors.”But the truth is that Lee was with the president from the start. His only real objection — the only thing that gave him pause — was that Trump and his allies had not crossed their “T’s” or dotted their “I’s.” Which is to say that they had not done the work necessary to give their attempted self-coup a veneer of legality and constitutional fidelity. Or, as Lee wrote to Meadows, “I know only that this will end badly for the president unless we have the Constitution on our side.”Cruz and Lee were not the only “constitutional conservatives” to support Trump’s attempt to keep himself in office after losing the Electoral College vote (to say nothing of the popular vote). Their participation in the plot, however, tells us something important about what it actually means to be a “constitutional conservative.”The term is supposed to convey a principled commitment to both the Constitution and the institutions of the American republic it helped bring into being. But if Cruz, Lee and other “constitutional conservatives” have any commitment to the Constitution, it is only to the letter of the document, not its spirit.The spirit of the Constitution, of the Philadelphia Convention and everything that followed, is embodied in self-government. The point of the deliberation and experimentation of the founding moment was to find some ground on which the American people, however narrowly defined, could live out the principles of the Revolutionary War they had just fought and pursue their common interests.Whatever the specifics of the governing charter, the essential idea was that this government would be one that, as James Madison wrote, “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.”The people have, for now, agreed to elect the president through a process that gives a good deal of discretion to a broad range of officials, some elected, some appointed, but all working with legitimate authority. In the main, they used that authority to allow as many people to vote as possible, in accordance with our laws and our norms.If, under those conditions, Donald Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, neither Cruz nor Lee nor anyone else in the Republican Party would have disputed the outcome or contested the process. It would have been a shining example of the strength of our republic.But he did not win, and so our “constitutional conservatives” fought to undermine and overturn our institutions so that one man would not have to face the pain of defeat. Which gets to the truth of what that “constitutional conservatism” really seems to be: not a principled attempt — however flawed in conception — to live up to the values of the founding, but a thin mask for the will to power.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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      Can Democrats Turn Their 2022 Around?

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      With the midterms just over six months away, the electoral prospects for Democrats are looking bleak. President Biden’s approval rating is at 42 percent, around where Donald Trump’s was at this point in his presidency. Recent polls asking whether Americans want Republicans or Democrats in Congress found that Republicans are leading by about 2 percentage points. And with inflation spiking to its highest point in decades, Covid cases rising and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continuing to send economic and humanitarian shock waves across the globe, things don’t look as if they are going to get better anytime soon.What will it take for Democrats to turn things around? What fights should they be picking with Republicans, and how should they be making the case that they deserve another chance at leading the country?[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]Sean McElwee is a co-founder and the executive director of Data for Progress, a research organization that gathers polling data to strategize on behalf of progressive causes and policies. Anat Shenker-Osorio is a principal at ASO Communications, a political communications firm that conducts analytic and empirical research to help progressive political campaigns. McElwee and Shenker-Osorio have deeply influenced my thinking on how words work in American politics: how campaigns can meaningfully address what voters want and how they can persuade swing voters and motivate the party’s base.In this conversation, McElwee and Shenker-Osorio help me understand where Democrats stand with the electorate and what, if anything, they can do to improve their chances in 2022. We discuss why Biden’s approval rating is so low, given the popularity of his policies, why governing parties so often lose midterm elections, whether Democrats should focus more on persuading swing voters or on mobilizing their base, why it’s important for Democrats to get their base to sing from the same songbook, what Democrats can learn from Trump about winning voters’ attention, how Republicans are running politics on easy mode, whether it was wise politically for Biden to double down on the message to fund the police, what political fights Democrats should pick in the lead-up to the midterms, how the party should address spiking inflation and more.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.Warning: This episode contains explicit language.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Photo courtesy of Ahmad Ali“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Effort to Remove Marjorie Taylor Greene From Ballot Can Proceed, Judge Says

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      The case that Ms. Greene unsuccessfully sought to have dismissed mirrors efforts against other Republicans centered on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.A federal judge cleared the way on Monday for a group of Georgia voters to move forward with legal efforts seeking to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from running for re-election to Congress, citing her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The disqualification effort is based on a constitutional provision adopted after the Civil War that barred members of the Confederacy from holding office. It mirrors several other cases involving Republican members of Congress, whose roles leading up to and during the deadly riot have drawn intense criticism.The judge, Amy Totenberg, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia by President Barack Obama, denied Ms. Greene’s request for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order in the high-profile legal feud.Ms. Greene, 47, who is known for her unflinching loyalty to former President Donald J. Trump and for her clashes with Democrats, has steadfastly denied that she aided and engaged in the attack on the Capitol.In the 73-page ruling, Judge Totenberg wrote that Ms. Greene had failed to meet the “burden of persuasion” in her request for injunctive relief, which she called an extraordinary and drastic remedy.“This case involves a whirlpool of colliding constitutional interests of public import,” Judge Totenberg wrote. “The novelty of the factual and historical posture of this case — especially when assessed in the context of a preliminary injunction motion reviewed on a fast track — has made resolution of the complex legal issues at stake here particularly demanding.”James Bopp Jr., a lawyer for Ms. Greene, said on Monday night that the ruling was flawed and minimized the adverse effect that the disqualification effort was having on Ms. Greene’s right to run for office.“This is fundamentally antidemocratic,” Mr. Bopp said, maintaining that Ms. Greene had “publicly and vigorously condemned the attack on the Capitol.”He called the effort to remove her from the ballot part of a well-funded nationwide effort to strip voters of their right to vote for candidates of their choice, with elections determined by “bureaucrats, judges, lawyers and clever legal arguments.”In her request for an injunction, Ms. Greene argued that it would be impossible to fully resolve the case before Georgia holds its primary elections on May 24. Absentee ballots will start to be mailed on April 25, Ms. Greene’s motion said.In the ruling, Judge Totenberg determined that Ms. Greene had failed to prove that there was a strong likelihood that she would prevail on the merits of her legal claims. A state administrative judge is scheduled to hear the case on Friday.The decision by Judge Totenberg stood in stark contrast with a recent ruling in a similar case involving Representative Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina. In blocking that disqualification effort, U.S. District Judge Richard E. Myers II, an appointee of Mr. Trump, ruled that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution narrowly applied to members of the Confederacy after the Civil War.Ms. Greene’s critics have said that she frequently referred to efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election results as “our 1776 moment” in public comments that led up to the riot at the Capitol. They contend that the phrase was a code used to incite violence, and point to the third section of the 14th Amendment in their argument to drop her from the ballot.That section says that “no person shall” be a member of Congress or hold civil office if they had engaged in insurrection or rebellion after “having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Trump Allies Are Still Feeding the False 2020 Election Narrative

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      Fifteen months after they tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election, the same group of lawyers and associates is continuing efforts to “decertify” the vote, feeding a false narrative.A group of President Donald J. Trump’s allies and associates spent months trying to overturn the 2020 election based on his lie that he was the true winner.Now, some of the same confidants who tried and failed to invalidate the results based on a set of bogus legal theories are pushing an even wilder sequel: that by “decertifying” the 2020 vote in key states, the outcome can still be reversed.In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.But just as Mr. Eastman’s original plan to use Congress’s final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the election was seen as far-fetched in the run-up to the deadly Capitol riot, the continued efforts are fueling a false narrative that has resonated with Mr. Trump’s supporters and stoked their grievances. They are keeping alive the same combustible stew of conspiracy theory and misinformation that threatens to undermine faith in democracy by nurturing the lie that the election was corrupt.The efforts have fed a cottage industry of podcasts and television appearances centered around not only false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, but the notion that the results can still be altered after the fact — and Mr. Trump returned to power, an idea that he continues to push privately as he looks toward a probable re-election run in 2024.Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the impact of the decertification efforts. They warn of unintended consequences, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters — convinced that he could still be declared the winner of the 2020 election — stormed the Capitol. Legal experts worry that the focus on decertifying the last election could pave the way for more aggressive — and earlier — legislative intervention the next time around.“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”Most of Mr. Trump’s aides would like him to stop talking about 2020 — or, if he must, to focus on changes to voting laws across the country rather than his own fate. But like he did in 2020, when many officials declined to help him upend the election results, Mr. Trump has found a group of outside allies willing to take up an outlandish argument they know he wants to see made.The efforts have been led or loudly championed by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser; Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist; and Boris Epshteyn, an aide and associate of Mr. Trump’s.Another key player has been Mr. Eastman, the right-wing lawyer who persuaded Mr. Trump shortly after the election that Vice President Mike Pence could reject certified electoral votes for Mr. Biden when he presided over the congressional count and declare Mr. Trump the victor instead.Mr. Eastman wrote a memo and Mr. Epshteyn sent an email late last year to the main legislator pushing a decertification bill in Wisconsin, laying out a legal theory to justify the action. Mr. Eastman met last month with Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, and activists working across the country, a meeting that was reported earlier by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Jefferson Davis, an activist from Wisconsin, said he had asked Mr. Eastman to join the meeting after hearing about his work on behalf of Mr. Trump following the election.“If it was good enough for the president of the United States,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, “then his expertise was good enough to meet with Speaker Vos in Wisconsin on election fraud and what do we do to fix it.”Mr. Vos has maintained that the Legislature has no pathway to decertification, in line with the guidance of its own lawyers.John Eastman, left, has made clear that he has no intention of dropping his fight to show that the election was stolen.Jim Bourg/Reuters“There is no mechanism in state or federal law for the Legislature to reverse certified votes cast by the Electoral College and counted by Congress,” the lawyers wrote, adding that impeachment was the only way to remove a sitting president other than in the case of incapacity.But Mr. Eastman has made clear that he has no intention of dropping his fight to prove that the election was stolen. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has said his legal efforts to invalidate the results most likely violated the law by trying to defraud the American people. A federal judge recently agreed, calling Mr. Eastman’s actions “a coup in search of a legal theory.”Legal experts say his continued efforts could increase his criminal exposure; but if Mr. Eastman were ever to be charged with fraud, he could also point to his recent work as evidence that he truly believed the election was stolen.“There are a lot of things still percolating,” Mr. Eastman said in an interview with The New York Times last fall. He claimed that states had illegally given people the ability to cast votes in ways that should have been forbidden, corrupting the results. And he pointed to a widely debunked video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta, which he claimed showed that tabulation ballots were run through counting machines multiple times during the election.Charles Burnham, Mr. Eastman’s lawyer, said in a statement that he “was recently invited to lend his expertise to legislators and citizens in Wisconsin confronting significant evidence of election fraud and illegality. He did so in his role as a constitutional scholar and not on behalf of any client.”The fringe legal theory that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Epshteyn are promoting — which has been widely dismissed — holds that state lawmakers have the power to choose how electors are selected, and they can change them long after the Electoral College has certified votes if they find fraud and illegality sufficiently altered the outcome. The theory has surfaced in multiple states, including several that are political battlegrounds.As in Wisconsin, state legislators in Arizona drafted resolutions calling for the decertification of the 2020 election. In Georgia, a lawsuit sought to decertify the victories of the Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. And Robert Regan, a Republican favored to win a seat in the Michigan House, has said he wants to decertify the 2020 election either through a ballot petition or the courts.Mr. Bannon, Mr. Lindell and Mr. Epshteyn have repeatedly promoted decertification at the state level on Mr. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” since last summer, pushing it as a steady drumbeat and at times claiming that it could lead to Mr. Trump being put back into office. They have described the so-called audit movement that began in Arizona and spread to other states as part of a larger effort to decertify electoral votes.“We are on a full, full freight train to decertify,” Mr. Epshteyn said on the program in January. “That’s what we’re going to get. Everyone knows. Everyone knows this election was stolen.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Republicans Say, ‘Let Them Eat Hate’

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      So Donald Trump has endorsed J.D. Vance in the race for Ohio’s Republican Senate nomination. Will Trump’s nod tip the balance? I have no idea, and frankly I don’t care.Ohio’s G.O.P. primary has, after all, been a race to the bottom, with candidates seemingly competing to see who can be crasser, who can do the most to dumb down the debate. Vance insists that “what’s happening in Ukraine has nothing to do with our national security” and that we should focus instead on the threat from immigrants crossing our southern border. Josh Mandel, who has been leading in the polls, says that Ohio should be a “pro-God, pro-family, pro-Bitcoin state.” And so on. Any of these candidates would be a terrible senator, and it’s anyone’s guess who’d be worst.But the thing about Vance is that while these days he gives cynical opportunism a bad name, he didn’t always seem that way. In fact, not that long ago he seemed to offer some intellectual and maybe even moral heft. His 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” drew widespread and respectful attention, because it offered a personal take on a real and important problem: The unraveling of society in Appalachia and more broadly for a significant segment of the white working class.Yet neither Vance nor, as far as I can tell, any other notable figure in the Republican Party is advocating any real policies to address this problem. They’re happy to exploit white working-class resentment; but when it comes to doing anything to improve their supporters’ lives, their implicit slogan is, “Let them eat hate.”Let’s talk for a minute about the reality Vance was writing about back when many took him seriously.I still encounter people who imagine that social dysfunction is mainly a problem involving nonwhite residents of big cities. But that picture is decades out of date. The social problems that have festered in 21st-century America — notably large numbers of prime-age males not working and widespread “deaths of despair” from drugs, suicide and alcohol — have if anything fallen most heavily on rural and small-town whites, especially in parts of the heartland that have been left behind as a knowledge-centered economy increasingly favors high-education metropolitan areas.What can be done? Progressives want to see more social spending, especially on families with children; this would do a lot to improve people’s lives, although it’s less clear whether it would help revive declining communities.Back in 2016 Trump offered a different answer: protectionist trade policies that, he claimed, would revive industrial employment. The arithmetic on this claim never worked, and in practice Trump’s trade wars appear to have reduced the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs. But back then Trump was at least pretending to address a real issue.At this point, however, neither Trump nor any other important Republican is willing to go even that far. I’d say that G.O.P. campaigning in 2022 is all culture war, all the time, except that this would be giving Republicans too much credit. They aren’t fighting a real culture war, a conflict between rival views of what our society should look like; they’re riling up the base against phantasms, threats that don’t even exist.This isn’t hyperbole. I’m not just talking about things like the panic over critical race theory, although this has come to mean just about any mention of the role that slavery and discrimination have played in U.S. history. Florida is even rejecting many math textbooks, claiming that they include prohibited topics.That’s bad. But we’re seeing a growing focus on even more bizarre conspiracy theories, with frantic attacks on woke Disney, etc. And roughly half of self-identified Republicans believe that “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”What people may not realize is that Vance’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is almost as detached from reality as QAnon-type theories about Democratic pedophiles. I mean, yes, undocumented immigrants do exist. But the idea that they pose a major threat to public order is a fantasy; indeed, the evidence suggests that they’re considerably more law-abiding than native-born Americans.And making the alleged insecurity of the southern border your signature campaign issue is especially bizarre if you’re running for office in Ohio, where immigrants make up only 4.8 percent of the population — around a third of the national average. (Almost 38 percent of the population of New York City, and 45 percent of its work force, is immigrant. It’s not exactly a dystopian hellhole.)But look, none of this is a mystery. Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate.And history tells us that this tactic often works.As I said, I have no idea whether Trump’s endorsement of Vance will matter. What I do know is that the G.O.P. as a whole has turned to hate-based politics. And if you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention.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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      A Biden Blood Bath?

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      A recent poll truly shocked me.Quinnipiac University found that President Biden’s approval rating had sunk to just 33 percent. You might argue that this was just one poll, but Biden’s approval is down in multiple surveys.As CNN’s Harry Enten pointed out Friday, there were four major national polls released last week, and in three of them — including Quinnipiac — Biden had his lowest showing of his presidency. In the fourth, he was “one point off the lowest.”These are just devastating results on the heels of a historic Supreme Court confirmation and only seven months out from the midterms.When Politico’s Ryan Lizza last week asked Biden pollster John Anzalone how dire the situation had become for Democrats, Anzalone responded in blunt terms, saying that no Democratic consultant would say “that this is anything but a really sour environment for Democrats.”Anzalone, like many Democrats, seems to believe that a major part of the problem is messaging, saying in the interview, “We’re scared of our own shadow on taxes and it … makes no sense.”But what if the issue is not the messaging but the messenger?Poor messaging may contribute to the problem, but I think the problem is more on ground level, a gut level: How do people feel? They feel stuck and angry, they’re tired and overwhelmed, and that energy is being directed at Biden.Biden is a decent man. As a matter of course and tactic, he strikes me as not entirely built for hyperbole and hype, for beating his chest while he boasts. It’s not part of his character. He is sober and straightforward. Many Americans wanted him as an antidote to Donald Trump for precisely this reason.But America has changed its mind and its mood. It wants a show and a showman to distract from its misery. Biden is not that. And he is being punished for not being a huckster.There is an old saying that is some variation of, “People will forget what you said, but they won’t forget how you made them feel.” Biden isn’t constantly tweeting and hamming it up for the cameras — in fact, too often, he has shied away from interviews — and his reticence has left a void of emotional connection to him.I hate that emotional connection plays such an outsize role in our politics, but I also can’t deny that it does. If Americans can’t cheer you, they’ll chide you.Biden’s presidency is far from a failure, but it has been stymied on some big promises that Biden made during the campaign on issues like voting rights and police reform. Lately it feels like, on domestic policy, Biden has moved from the macro to the micro, taking steps that will indeed benefit many Americans, but are too narrowly focused to transform our society or fix the core problems that plague it — trying to recruit more American truckers, focusing on Black maternal health, announcing an emergency waiver to allow higher ethanol blend gasoline to be sold this summer.All the while, two major perennial issues are resurgent: crime and the economy. The fear of crime and the pinch of inflation aren’t abstractions, or complicated foreign policy, or perks for special interests. They creep into every door and lurk under every kitchen table.And on the other side, Republicans are playing heavily into culture war issues like challenging the teaching of Black history and the history of white supremacy in schools, as well as restricting discussions of L.G.B.T. issues and campaigning against trans women and girls competing in sports with other women and girls. And they are using parental rights as the Trojan horse to enact their agenda.Democrats, for their part, have almost ceded the parental rights argument, instead of fighting back and framing these efforts as oppressive and backward. They do not recognize that oppression by conservatives in this country is like an amoeba: simple, primitive, pervasive and highly adaptable. It simply shifts its shape to fit the environment and argument.Republicans are using white parental fear, particularly the fears of white moms, worried about harm coming to their children, to attract suburban white women and get them to the polls. The oppression is a bonus.There was another worrisome sign in the Quinnipiac poll: Biden’s approval rating among people identified as Hispanics was even lower than it was among those identified as white. Pundits have been discussing Biden’s declining numbers among Hispanics for months. In October, FiveThirtyEight pointed out that “there has been a drop in support for Biden among all three racial and ethnic groups we measured, but the drop among Hispanics — from the high 60s to slightly below 50 percent — marks Biden’s most precipitous decline.”The reasons for this drop appear to range from a response to the pandemic to the fact that Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues.But all this taken together — in addition to voter suppression and racial, political gerrymandering — may prove hugely problematic for Democrats and for the administration, unless they can turn things around before Election Day. If not, we could well be looking forward to a Biden blood bath.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. 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      Trump as a Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding Cash and Doling Out Favors

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      Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, the former president is dominating the G.O.P., preparing for another race and helping loyalists oust officials who thwarted his attempted subversion of the 2020 election.PALM BEACH, Fla. — On any given night, Donald J. Trump will stroll onto the patio at Mar-a-Lago and say a few words from a translucent lectern, welcoming whatever favored candidate is paying him for the privilege of fund-raising there.“This is a special place,” Mr. Trump said on one such evening in February at his private club. “I used to say ‘ground zero’ but after the World Trade Center we don’t use that term anymore. This is the place where everybody wants to be.”For 15 months, a parade of supplicants — senators, governors, congressional leaders and Republican strivers of all stripes — have made the trek to pledge their loyalty and pitch their candidacies. Some have hired Mr. Trump’s advisers, hoping to gain an edge in seeking his endorsement. Some have bought ads that ran only on Fox News in South Florida. Some bear gifts; others dish dirt. Almost everyone parrots his lie that the 2020 election was stolen.Working from a large wooden desk reminiscent of the one he used in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has transformed Mar-a-Lago’s old bridal suite into a shadow G.O.P. headquarters, amassing more than $120 million — a war chest more than double that of the Republican National Committee itself. Federal records show that his PAC raised more online than the party on every day but two in the last six months of 2021, one of which was Christmas Eve.And while other past presidents have ceded the political stage, Mr. Trump has done the opposite, aggressively pursuing an agenda of vengeance against Republicans who have wronged him, endorsing more than 140 candidates nationwide and turning the 2022 primaries into a stress test of his continued sway.Inspiring fear, hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving not merely as a power broker but as something closer to the head of a 19th-century political machine.“Party leaders have never played the role that Trump is playing,” said Roger Stone, an on-and-off adviser to Mr. Trump since the 1980s who has been spotted at Mar-a-Lago of late. “Because he can — and he’s not bound by the conventional rules of politics.”This portrait of Mr. Trump as a modern-day party boss is drawn from more than 50 interviews with Trump advisers past and present, political rivals, Republicans who have sought his support and G.O.P. officials and strategists who are grappling with his influence.Mr. Trump plainly relishes the power. But as he hints repeatedly about a third White House bid, the looming question is whether he can remain a kingmaker if he doesn’t actually seek the crown.For now, he has delved into the minutiae of cleansing the Republican Party of his critics, even if, in typical fashion, the planning and execution can be haphazard. He has focused his efforts almost obsessively on installing unflinching loyalists in key battleground state posts — governors, senators, House members, secretaries of state and state attorneys general — often in place of the very officials who thwarted his attempts to subvert the 2020 results.He has pressured candidates to switch the races they enter, counseled Republicans on whom to hire, involved himself in party registration rules in Wyoming and the statehouse speaker’s race in Michigan. He conditioned his endorsement of Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska on Mr. Dunleavy not endorsing the state’s incumbent senator, Lisa Murkowski; Mr. Dunleavy quickly complied. Last week, he issued an anti-endorsement, urging Pennsylvanians not to vote for Bill McSwain in the primary for governor, on the grounds that Mr. McSwain had insufficiently embraced his allegations of 2020 election fraud.Mr. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article.Those close to Mr. Trump say he draws gratification from the raw exercise of his power. He will listen to the lobbying of senior Republicans, like Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House G.O.P. leader, and then turn on them with little warning. A day after Mr. McCarthy reprimanded Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina for saying that colleagues in Washington had held orgies and used cocaine, Mr. Trump awarded Mr. Cawthorn a coveted speaking slot at his next rally.For 15 months, a parade of supplicants — senators, governors, congressional leaders and Republican strivers of all stripes — have made the trek to Mar-a-Lago.Saul Martinez for The New York Times‘A developing Tammany situation’An entire political economy now surrounds Mr. Trump, with Trump properties reaping huge fees: Federal candidates and committees alone have paid nearly $1.3 million to hold events at Mar-a-Lago, records show. A phalanx of Trump whisperers has emerged with candidates paying them in hopes of lining up meetings, ensuring that he sees damaging research on their rivals or strategically slipping him a survey showing a surge in the polls, even as Trump alumni warn that it is always buyer-beware in the Trump influence game.“If someone is out there selling their ability to make endorsements happen, they’re selling a bridge they don’t own,” said Michael Caputo, a former adviser who still speaks to Mr. Trump. “What appears to be a developing Tammany situation is really the coalescence of many consultants who pretend they have an inside track toward the endorsement. No inside track exists.”Yet while Tammany Hall, a New York City political machine that endured for nearly two centuries, owed its longevity to its spreading around of patronage, Mr. Trump can be downright stingy. Though he holds rallies for some candidates, for many his support goes no further than an email and a $5,000 check. Mr. Trump has almost never deployed his huge list of supporters to help other politicians raise money (Representative Elise Stefanik of New York being a rare exception earlier this year). Facing the possibility of high-profile defeats, the Trump team is now planning to spend directly to assist some vulnerable Trump-backed candidates; a cash transfer to a Georgia super PAC was only the first step.Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said focusing only on direct spending does not fully account for the value of the Trump imprimatur for voters and the “free media coverage” it generates. “It was once said an endorsement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, but there’s now a caveat to that — the Trump endorsement,” Mr. Budowich said.Not unlike past political bosses, Mr. Trump has focused heavily on the mechanics of elections — who counts the votes, who certifies them — while ceaselessly sowing distrust in the system through false claims of vote rigging.As Tammany’s corrupt Boss Tweed was portrayed saying, as he leaned on a ballot box in a famous 1870s cartoon: “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”Or, as Mr. Trump told Breitbart News this month, “There’s an expression that the vote counters are more important than the candidate, and you could use that expression here.”Wielding power over the party and selling the fiction of a stolen election also serve to distract from Mr. Trump’s unhappy exit from the White House as a loser.Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, drew a parallel between this period and an earlier crisis in Mr. Trump’s career: his bankruptcy in the early 1990s. “These would have been ruinous events for someone else,” he said. “But for Trump it just marked a turn in his method and his pursuit of power. And he never accepted these were really losses.”Democrats are bracing for losses in 2022. But strategists in both parties say Mr. Trump’s big public profile presents a risk for Republicans, as private surveys and focus groups show he remains a potent turnoff for swing voters.It is a very different story in Republican primaries, where few serious candidates are openly breaking with Mr. Trump. “The takeover of the Republican Party by President Trump has been so complete,” said Boris Epshteyn, another former Trump adviser sometimes seen at Mar-a-Lago, “that even the RINOs are attempting to talk MAGA.”Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina was reprimanded for saying colleagues in Washington had held orgies and used cocaine, but Mr. Trump nevertheless awarded him a coveted speaking slot at his next rally.Veasey Conway for The New York Times“I need to see polling, I need to see funding, I need to see you make a name for yourself,” Mr. Trump instructed Joe Kent, who won Mr. Trump’s backing for his effort to unseat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State.Nathan Howard/Associated Press‘Like crabs in a bucket’Nothing reveals Mr. Trump’s hold on the party quite like the genuflections and contortions of those seeking his political approval.Some candidates pay to attend Mar-a-Lago fund-raisers for others — clamoring for a fleeting moment of Mr. Trump’s attention, or better yet, a photo. “Epic moment,” was how one House contender memorialized her few seconds with Mr. Trump on Instagram.When Mr. Trump invited candidates from Michigan to stand beside him at one event, a man’s voice rang out: “I’m running for governor, too, can I come up there?” It was Ryan Kelley. “You’re running for governor of what?” a confused Mr. Trump asked. “Michigan!” Mr. Kelley replied. Up he came, shaking hands with an opponent, Perry Johnson.Mr. Johnson, for his part, had been a repeated presence at Mar-a-Lago, proudly posting a grainy video of Mr. Trump hailing his “good poll numbers” at another fund-raiser. He had even bought a television ad welcoming Mr. Trump to Michigan before an April 2 rally.Yet Mr. Trump snubbed him at the rally and instead praised a rival candidate, Tudor Dixon, who had held her own Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser in February.In many ways, the endorsement chase is a real-life reprisal of Mr. Trump’s old reality-television role.“What was ‘The Apprentice’ but a sad scramble of people behaving like crabs in a bucket to be lifted out by him?” said Mr. D’Antonio, the biographer. “How are these people anything other than contestants vying for his approval?”In one oft-recounted scene, Mr. Trump pulled several Ohio Senate candidates into a room last year at Mar-a-Lago, where they began verbally attacking one another as he watched. “Things went off the rails,” said one candidate, Bernie Moreno, who blamed his rivals, not Mr. Trump, for the mayhem. Mr. Moreno has since dropped out, not wanting to divide the pro-Trump vote.Nearly all the Ohio contenders have run ads playing up their ties to Mr. Trump and lobbied him personally. Jane Timken calls herself “the real Trump conservative.” Josh Mandel calls himself “pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.” Mike Gibbons calls himself and Mr. Trump two “businessmen with a backbone.”Mr. Trump did not endorse any of them, instead backing the author J.D. Vance. At a debate before the endorsement, Matt Dolan, the only leading Republican contender not aggressively vying for a Trump endorsement, suggested his rivals were putting Ohio voters second. “There are people up on this stage who are literally fighting for one vote,” he said, “and that person doesn’t vote in Ohio.”Mr. Dolan is an exception. As a rule, an audience with Mr. Trump can make or break a candidacy. So candidates strategize heavily.Mr. Trump enjoys flattery and is not above rewarding sycophants. But insiders say bringing compelling visual material matters, too. Big fonts are crucial. With photos and graphics. In color.“He’s not a real big digital guy, so we had printouts,” said Joe Kent, who has since won Mr. Trump’s backing for his effort to unseat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, one of the 10 Republican impeachment votes.“I need to see polling, I need to see funding, I need to see you make a name for yourself,” Mr. Trump instructed him, as Mr. Kent recalled.When he likes what he sees, Mr. Trump will mail words of encouragement, scrawled on news clippings with a Sharpie. “You are doing great!” he wrote in January to Mr. Kent. “You are doing great!” he wrote last October to Harriet Hageman, who is challenging Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.When Representative Billy Long, a candidate for Senate in Missouri, first met with Mr. Trump last year, he brought along a favorable poll printout. But he sensed he’d been beaten to the punch when, he recalled, Mr. Trump “reached over and picked up another poll” that Mr. Long presumed came from a rival, though it could have been part of the packet Mr. Trump’s team prepares for candidate meetings.“Donald J. Trump is going to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it,” Mr. Long said. “There is no secret sauce here.”In March, a group urging Mr. Trump to rescind his endorsement of Matthew DePerno, a candidate for Michigan attorney general, bought an ad that ran in West Palm Beach.Nic Antaya for The New York TimesMr. Trump made clear his desire to take control of Michigan’s vote-counting posts, rallying support for Kristina Karamo, his choice for secretary of state.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesPrecision televisionTelevision is a popular way to lobby Mr. Trump, and some candidates try by running ads far away from their voters. When Mr. Trump was staying at his Bedminster, N.J., golf course last summer, Jim Lamon, a Senate candidate in Arizona, paid for an ad on Fox News in New Jersey.Michele Fiore, a Las Vegas city councilwoman, announced her bid for Nevada governor with a theatrically pro-Trump commercial that ran in West Palm Beach. She later switched to the state treasurer’s race, saying in another ad that the Trump team had counseled her to lower her sights.And in March, a group urging Mr. Trump to rescind his endorsement of Matthew DePerno, a Republican running for attorney general in Michigan, bought an ad attacking Mr. DePerno that ran in West Palm Beach.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      in Elections

      Will Democrats Soon Be Locked Out of Power?

      by

      Throughout the Trump era it was a frequent theme of liberal commentary that their political party represented a clear American majority, thwarted by our antidemocratic institutions and condemned to live under the rule of the conservative minority.In the political context of 2016-20, this belief was overstated. Yes, Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with a minority of the popular vote. But more Americans voted for Republican congressional candidates than Democratic congressional candidates, and more Americans voted for right-of-center candidates for president — including the Libertarian vote — than voted for Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein. In strictly majoritarian terms, liberalism deserved to lose in 2016, even if Trump did not necessarily deserve to win.And Republican structural advantages, while real, did not then prevent Democrats from reclaiming the House of Representatives in 2018 and the presidency in 2020 and Senate in 2021. These victories extended the pattern of 21st century American politics, which has featured significant swings every few cycles, not the entrenchment of either party’s power.The political landscape after 2024, however, might look more like liberalism’s depictions of its Trump-era plight. According to calculations by liberalism’s Cassandra, David Shor, the convergence of an unfavorable Senate map for Democrats with their pre-existing Electoral College and Senate disadvantages could easily produce a scenario where the party wins 50 percent of the congressional popular vote, 51 percent of the presidential vote — and ends up losing the White House and staring down a nearly filibuster-proof Republican advantage in the Senate.That’s a scenario for liberal horror, but it’s not one that conservatives should welcome either. In recent years, as their advantages in both institutions have increased, conservatives have defended institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College with variations of the argument that the United States is a democratic republic, not a pure democracy.These arguments carry less weight, however, the more consistently undemocratic the system’s overall results become. (They would fall apart completely in the scenario sought by Donald Trump and some of his allies after 2020, where state legislatures simply substitute their preferences for the voters in their states.)The Electoral College’s legitimacy can stand up if an occasional 49-47 percent popular vote result goes the other way; likewise the Senate’s legitimacy if it tilts a bit toward one party but changes hands consistently.But a scenario where one party has sustained governing power while lacking majoritarian support is a recipe for delegitimization and reasonable disillusionment, which no clever conservative column about the constitutional significance of state sovereignty would adequately address.From the Republican Party’s perspective, the best way to avoid this future — where the nature of conservative victories undercuts the perceived legitimacy of conservative governance — is to stop being content with the advantages granted by the system and try harder to win majorities outright.You can’t expect a political party to simply cede its advantages: There will never be a bipartisan constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate, on any timeline you care to imagine. But you can expect a political party to show a little more electoral ambition than the G.O.P. has done of late — to seek to win more elections the way that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won them, rather than being content to keep it close and put their hopes in lucky breaks.Especially in the current climate, which looks dire for the Democrats, the Republicans have an opportunity to make the Electoral College complaint moot, for a time at least, by simply taking plausible positions, nominating plausible candidates and winning majorities outright.That means rejecting the politics of voter-fraud paranoia — as, hopefully, Republican primary voters will do by choosing Brian Kemp over David Perdue in the Georgia gubernatorial primary.It means rejecting the attempts to return to the libertarian “makers versus takers” politics of Tea Party era, currently manifested in Florida Senator Rick Scott’s recent manifesto suggesting tax increases for the working class — basically the right-wing equivalent of “defund the police” in terms of its political toxicity.And it means — and I fear this is beyond the G.O.P.’s capacities — nominating someone other than Donald Trump in 2024.A Republican Party that managed to win popular majorities might still see its Senate or Electoral College majorities magnified by its structural advantages. But such magnification is a normal feature of many democratic systems, not just our own. It’s very different from losing the popular vote consistently and yet being handed power anyway.As for what the Democrats should do about their disadvantages — well, that’s a longer discussion, but two quick points for now.First, to the extent the party wants to focus on structural answers to its structural challenges, it needs clarity about what kind of electoral reforms would actually accomplish something. That’s been lacking in the Biden era, where liberal reformers wasted considerable time and energy on voting bills that didn’t pass and also weren’t likely to help the party much had they been actually pushed through.A different reform idea, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, wouldn’t have happened in this period either, but it’s much more responsive to the actual challenges confronting Democrats in the Senate. So if you’re a liberal activist or a legislator planning for the next brief window when your party holds power, pushing for an expanded Senate seems like a more reasonable long ball to try to train your team to throw.Second, to the extent that there’s a Democratic path back to greater parity in the Senate and Electoral College without structural reform, it probably requires the development of an explicit faction within the party dedicated to winning back two kinds of voters — culturally conservative Latinos and working-class whites — who were part of Barack Obama’s coalition but have drifted rightward since.That faction would have two missions: To hew to a poll-tested agenda on economic policy (not just the business-friendly agenda supported by many centrist Democrats) and to constantly find ways to distinguish itself from organized progressivism — the foundations, the activists, the academics — on cultural and social issues. And crucially, not in the tactical style favored by analysts like Shor, but in the language of principle: Rightward-drifting voters would need to know that this faction actually believes in its own moderation, its own attacks on progressive shibboleths, and that its members will remain a thorn in progressivism’s side even once they reach Washington.Right now the Democrats have scattered politicians, from West Virginia to New York City, who somewhat fit this mold. But they don’t have an agenda for them to coalesce around, a group of donors ready to fund them, a set of intellectuals ready to embrace them as their own.Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and necessity may impose itself upon the Democratic Party soon enough.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More