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    McConnell to Manchin: We’d Love to Have You, Joe

    Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, says Democratic outrage over Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition to sweeping policy bills shows he is not welcome in his party any longer.WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell is extending an open invitation to Senator Joe Manchin III — come on over to our side.Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, said on Tuesday that he was astonished by the angry response that Mr. Manchin of West Virginia elicited from the White House and his fellow Democrats with his Sunday bombshell that he would oppose President Biden’s signature domestic policy bill.The Senate, Mr. McConnell noted, is an institution where the most important vote is the next one, leaving the Republican leader perplexed as to what drove Democrats to impugn Mr. Manchin’s integrity by accusing him of reneging on commitments to the president.“Why in the world would they want to call him a liar and try to hotbox him and embarrass him?” Mr. McConnell, who is just one Senate seat away from regaining the majority leader title, asked in an interview. “I think the message is, ‘We don’t want you around.’ Obviously that is up to Joe Manchin, but he is clearly not welcome on that side of the aisle.”It is hardly a secret, Mr. McConnell said, that he has wooed Mr. Manchin for years, only to have Mr. Manchin, a lifelong Democrat, resist. And Mr. Manchin this week said he “hoped” there was still a place for him in the party.Despite his break with Mr. Biden over the sprawling safety net and climate change bill, Mr. Manchin would not be an exact fit for the Republican Party. He is closer to Republicans than Democrats on some flashpoint cultural issues like guns and abortion. But he has a more expansive view than most Republicans of the role of government in social and economic policy. And in both of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trials, Mr. Manchin voted to convict.But Mr. McConnell seemed to see the clash over the spending measure as potentially providing a new opening for a party switch that would both restore him as majority leader and shift the ground in Washington. And he is also not against stirring up trouble for Democrats however and whenever he can.“Obviously we would love to have him on our team,” said Mr. McConnell. “I think he’d be more comfortable.”Mr. McConnell’s appeal to Mr. Manchin came as the Republican leader celebrated the year coming to a close without Democrats advancing two of their most ambitious priorities: legislation to bolster voting rights and the sprawling domestic policy bill that Mr. McConnell characterized as part of a “socialist surge that has captured the other side.”Considering how Republicans began 2021 — in the minority in Congress, a newly elected Democrat poised to move into the White House and a public worn down by a pandemic and alarmed by an assault on the Capitol — Mr. McConnell and his colleagues say they have had a successful year. In some respects, it was all the things they did not do that may have served them best.They did not maneuver themselves into shutting down the government as they have in the past — despite demands from the right that they never work with Mr. Biden. And they did not allow the government to default, with Mr. McConnell providing Democrats a circuitous path to raising the debt ceiling. Either could have created a backlash for Republicans.“We had a good deal of drama,” Mr. McConnell said about the high-wire act over the debt ceiling, “but in the end, we got the job done.”As Democrats spent months trying to hammer out the huge policy bill among themselves, Republicans were relegated to the sidelines. Mr. McConnell said Democrats’ inability to come together on it so far reflected a misreading of the 2020 elections, when voters gave them the White House but bare majorities in both the Senate and the House.“They did not have a mandate to do anything close to what they tried to do,” said Mr. McConnell, suggesting that progressive “ideology overcame their judgment.”The decision by Mr. McConnell and other Republicans to help Democrats write and pass a separate, $1 trillion public works bill was, Mr. McConnell said, a smart one, even though Republican supporters of the measure took heat from others in the party, notably Mr. Trump.Mr. McConnell said that applying pressure to keep the policy bill separate from the infrastructure measure denied Democratic leaders leverage over Mr. Manchin, who helped negotiate the infrastructure measure, while delivering a bipartisan bill that met legitimate needs. He said that Mr. Trump and other Republican critics had been proven wrong.“I think it was a much smarter play to support the infrastructure bill,” he said. “I think it was, A, good for the country, and B, smart for us politically.”Democrats have not given up on either the social policy bill or winning over Mr. Manchin, meaning Mr. McConnell and Senate Republicans will have to maintain their campaign against the legislation into the new year. Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, also intends to press forward with voting rights measures fiercely opposed by Mr. McConnell and is threatening to try to change Senate rules if Republicans try to filibuster it again.Democrats say Mr. McConnell is being complicit in allowing some states to impose new voting restrictions meant to target voters of color, a charge he rejects, saying that the impact of the new laws is being exaggerated. He said he was relying on Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat who recently reaffirmed her opposition to changing filibuster rules, to hold steady.“Kyrsten Sinema has been quite unequivocal that she is not going to break the Senate and eliminate the legislative filibuster,” he said. “Thank goodness for that.”One area where Mr. Biden and Senate Democrats have posted some victories is on judicial confirmations, with 40 judges being seated in the president’s first year, a number well in excess of other recent presidents. It is a subject of special interest to Mr. McConnell, since he spent the Trump era pushing conservative judges through the Senate.“Look, there’s some advantages to having the White House,” he said. “I’m not surprised, but the three Supreme Court justices and the 54 circuit judges we did are still there and I think will be good for the country for a long time to come.”Mr. McConnell said he believed his party’s performance this year and the struggles of the Democrats were setting Republicans up for a strong midterm election next year and his potential return to running the Senate no matter what party Mr. Manchin is in. Despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to encourage candidates he favors in key Senate races, Mr. McConnell said he was intent on avoiding the type of primary contests that in the past have hurt Republicans by saddling them with primary winners who falter in general elections.“I feel good about how we handled ourselves this year and I feel good about how the American public is reacting to what they are trying to do,” he said of the Democrats. “I believe it will be an excellent environment for us.” More

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    John Thune, a Likely Successor to Mitch McConnell, Weighs Retirement

    Mr. Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, is considering giving up his South Dakota seat because of both family concerns and Donald Trump’s enduring hold on the G.O.P.WASHINGTON — Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Senate Republican and a potential future leader, is seriously considering retiring after next year, a prospect that has set off an intensifying private campaign from other Republicans urging him to seek re-election.Mr. Thune is only 60, but a combination of family concerns and former President Donald J. Trump’s enduring grip on the Republican Party have prompted the senator, who is in his third term, to tell associates and reporters in his home state that 2022 could be his last year in Congress.His departure would be a blow to South Dakota, which has enjoyed outsize influence in Washington, and could upend Senate Republicans’ line of succession. Mr. Thune has been open about his ambition to lead his party’s caucus after Senator Mitch McConnell makes way, and quiet but unmistakable jockeying is already underway between him and Senators John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming.“John is the logical successor should Mitch decide to not run again for leader,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine said of Mr. Thune, while noting that Mr. McConnell’s hold on their caucus remained “very secure.”That Mr. Thune would even entertain retirement with the chance to ascend to Senate Republican leader illustrates both the strain of today’s Congress and the shadow Mr. Trump casts over the party. The senator’s departure would represent yet another exit, perhaps the most revealing one yet, by a mainstream Senate Republican who has grown frustrated with the capital’s political environment and the former president’s loyalty demands. The exodus began in 2018 with Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker retiring rather than facing primaries, and has accelerated this year.Part of Mr. Thune’s hesitation owes to Mr. Trump and the potential for the former president — who lashed out at Mr. Thune early this year when the senator rejected his attempts to overturn the election — to intervene in South Dakota’s Senate primary race. But the larger factor may be the longer-range prospect of taking over the Senate Republican caucus with Mr. Trump still in the wings or as the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.Mr. Thune has said he will decide his intentions over the holidays. Yet a number of his friends and colleagues have become convinced that he is serious about leaving public life.Among those alarmed is Mr. McConnell himself, who one adviser said had “leaned in” on pushing Mr. Thune to run again.“I certainly hope that he will run for re-election, and that’s certainly what I and others have been encouraging him to do all year long,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview.He is hardly alone.A range of Senate Republicans — from moderates and Trump targets like Ms. Collins to Trump allies like Kevin Cramer of North Dakota — have lobbied Mr. Thune over dinner, on the Senate floor and, since lawmakers went home for Christmas recess, via text messages.“I let him know how much I appreciate him,” said Mr. Cramer, who has known Mr. Thune since they were young executive directors of their state parties. “He knows both Dakotas really need him.”Mr. Thune first angered Mr. Trump during the former president’s final days in office, when Mr. Thune said any challenge to the election results “would go down like a shot dog.” Mr. Trump derided the senator as “Mitch’s boy” and urged Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota to run against him in the state’s primary.Since then, though, Mr. Trump has trained his fire on Mr. McConnell, whom he has labeled “Old Crow,” and largely ignored Mr. Thune.Two top Senate Republican allies of Mr. Trump said he would probably refrain from targeting Mr. Thune simply because the senator, who is popular at home and has a well-stocked campaign war chest, is unlikely to lose a primary in the state that first elected him to Congress in 1996.“He likes winners, and John Thune is a winner,” said Mr. Cramer, predicting that Mr. Trump would at most be “a nuisance” to Mr. Thune.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was similarly blunt about why Mr. Thune need not sweat a competitive primary. “Trump worries about his win-loss record,” said Mr. Graham, who is the de facto liaison between the former president and Senate Republicans.Mr. Graham, who along with Mr. Thune and Ms. Collins is part of a small group of senators who often dine together in Washington, said that before they left for the holidays, he had reassured Mr. Thune about any Trumpian intervention.“I told John that’ll be fine,” Mr. Graham recalled. “John will be fine.”Asked if he thought the threat of a Trump-inspired primary bothered Mr. Thune, Mr. McConnell said, “No. No, I don’t.”But if Mr. Thune ascended to Republican Senate leadership, Mr. Trump could still prove a headache.The former president does not have the influence in the Senate, where 19 Republicans defied him to support the infrastructure bill, that he does in the House. Yet Mr. Trump’s regular attacks on Mr. McConnell and on anything that has the air of cooperation with President Biden are not lost on Senate Republicans.The Infrastructure Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 5The bill receives final approval. More

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    For First Time, Jan. 6 Panel Seeks Information From a House Member

    The committee is requesting testimony and documents from Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who was deeply involved in efforts to overturn the election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is seeking testimony and documents from Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the first public step the panel has taken to try to get information from any of the Republican members of Congress deeply involved in President Donald J. Trump’s effort to stay in power.The committee sent a letter on Monday to Mr. Perry, the incoming chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, asking for him to meet with its investigators and voluntarily turn over his communications during the buildup to the riot.To date, the panel has been reluctant to issue subpoenas for information from sitting members of Congress, citing the deference and respect lawmakers in the chamber are supposed to show one another. But Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the panel, has pledged to take such a step if needed.“The select committee has tremendous respect for the prerogatives of Congress and the privacy of its members,” Mr. Thompson said in his letter to Mr. Perry. “At the same time, we have a solemn responsibility to investigate fully all of these facts and circumstances.”A spokesman for Mr. Perry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Perry, a member of Congress since 2013, compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations and coordinated a plan to try to replace the acting attorney general, who was resisting Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, with a more compliant official.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?A former Army helicopter pilot and a retired brigadier general in the National Guard whose colleagues call him General Perry, Mr. Perry introduced Mr. Trump to Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division who became one of the Stop the Steal movement’s most ardent supporters. Around this time, the committee said, investigators believe Mr. Perry was communicating with Mark Meadows, who was then the White House chief of staff, via an encrypted app, Signal.Mr. Clark has said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he next appears before the panel.“We have received evidence from multiple witnesses that you had an important role in the efforts to install Mr. Clark as acting attorney general,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mr. Perry. “When Mr. Clark decided to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, he understood that we planned to pose questions addressing his interactions with you, among a host of other topics.”Shortly after Mr. Trump lost the election, Mr. Perry joined Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, as they huddled with senior White House officials at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington County, Va., and came up with a strategy that would become a blueprint for Mr. Trump’s supporters in Congress: hammer home the idea that the election was tainted, announce legal actions being taken by the campaign and bolster the case with allegations of fraud.Mr. Perry pressed the case for weeks, and in January circulated a letter written by Pennsylvania state legislators to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republicans in each chamber, asking Congress to delay certification. “I’m obliged to concur,” Mr. Perry wrote.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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    Joe Manchin Is Wondering What Happened to His White House Christmas Card

    Gail Collins: Bret, this is our last conversation of the year. I’ve had a lot of fun disagreeing over the past 12 months. Mentioning that partly because it’s hard to imagine a whole lot of people saying, “Remember all the great times we had in 2021.”Bret Stephens: I had such high hopes for the year, Gail. Melania and Donald would slink quietly out of the White House, she in couture, he in ignominy. The vaccines would conquer the pandemic. Joe Biden would preside competently and serenely over a country looking for respite after four years of craziness. Relations with the rest of the world would improve. Republicans would wake up from their fever dreams and become a serious party again, or at least hang their heads in shame after the sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6.Alas not. 2021 turned out to be even worse than 2020, and I’m struggling to see why 2022 will be any better. Care to cheer me up?Gail: OK, here’s a theory. Most of the things that were terrible about 2021 were reflections of a world that’s changing hyperfast because of new technology.Bret: The assault on the Capitol was more Genghis than Google. Sorry, go on ….Gail: Crazy people find it very, very easy to get in touch and swap paranoid fantasies. Mean people can gossip on sites that the targets of their ire can visit easily. (Always thinking about those teenage girls reading reviews of their clothes/figures/hair). Special events are dwindling — no point in going out to the movies if you can stream the latest attractions at home.Bret: Very true. Social media freezes us all in a kind of permanent middle school presided over by a mean girl named Veronica.Gail: None of this will go away, but I’m hoping that as we get more skilled in living with the good side of the web, things will balance out. Sane people will confer on how to make the world better. Families will automatically set places at holiday dinners for loved ones who can Zoom in from the other side of the country. And those who are consigned to their beds by illness or old age can have fantastic adventures via virtual reality headsets.Bret: That’s a bit too “Brave New World” for me, Gail. My hope for 2022 is that millions more Americans will realize that the worst thing they can do with their lives is to spend them working or socializing online. People should be dedigitizing — if that’s a word — disconnecting virtually and reconnecting physically. They should leave bigger cities in favor of places where nature is more accessible, homes are more affordable, neighbors are more approachable, careers are less cutthroat, the point of life isn’t the next promotion, weekends are actual weekends, people shop at real stores and read real books and have dinner with real people. Sitting around and doing nothing should be seen as a perfectly respectable use of time.Gail: Well, I’m not going to argue with you about the glories of doing nothing. But I can’t relate to your vision of finding meaningful life by ditching the big cities. Reminds me of growing up in an era of suburban explosion where the new neighborhoods had about as much diversity as a raft of albino waterfowl.Bret: Very insensitive to albino waterfowl, Gail.Gail: But maybe we’re both right — if the pandemic ever fades, the future could hold lots of urban-rural options and folks will get to pick.Bret: Well, that’s the meta-hope. The more specific hope is that we’ll finally lick the pandemic, Democrats will stop screwing up and the country won’t get handed back to Donald — “They’re Jewish people that run The New York Times” — Trump.Gail: I’m obviously not going to argue that the Democrats are doing a terrific job at present. But their situation — that 50-50 Senate, the pandemic-riddled economy — is pretty impossible. Don’t think any president could have delivered much in this mess. Not Reagan or Lyndon Johnson or maybe even F.D.R.Bret: Hmmm. Reagan had a Democratic-controlled House for his whole presidency. Biden could be doing better.Gail: Different kind of political parties back then. Trump’s turned the whole scene into something from “Attack of the Killer Bees.”Bret: Point taken.Gail: And oh my God, Joe Manchin. I’ll refrain from doing an hourlong rant, but this is a man whose state uses up way more government money than its people pay in taxes. Who wants to kill climate change legislation while he’s living off the millions he made in the coal business.Bret: And I’ll refrain from reminding you that I’ve been saying for months there was no way Manchin was going to vote for Biden’s legislation. I’ll also refrain from gloating.Gail: What I’d love to see is an election next year that gives Biden an actual, real, not-Manchin-dependent Democratic Congress so he could be tested on how he could deliver in a semi-sane world. Any chance, do you think?Bret: Very unlikely. Midterm elections historically go against the party holding the presidency. Republicans have the built-in advantage of being able to gerrymander more districts than Democrats. Biden’s poll numbers are terrible, and I don’t think he has the kind of political charisma to turn things around. And people are scared and angry, particularly about rising prices.Gail: Biden actually has a lot he can point to with pride, particularly in the war on the coronavirus. Still, I can’t say I disagree with you. Sigh.Bret: The only silver lining, as far as Democrats are concerned, is that Republicans always reach for the self-destruct button whenever they have control of Congress, particularly when it comes to the House. Donald’s Footstool, a.k.a. Kevin McCarthy, is not a compelling G.O.P. figurehead if he becomes speaker.Gail: If the Republicans have to rely on Kevin McCarthy’s charisma, that is certainly good news for the Democrats.Bret: Turning to another subject, Gail, Covid cases are skyrocketing again. What’s your prescription for doing things differently?Gail: The rules won’t change — get the shots, three of them, wear the damned masks and don’t patronize places that cater to crowds of people unless there’s a vaccination check at the door.Bret: Agreed. But keep schools open no matter what. It’s bad enough having a public-health crisis without having to add mental-health and learning crises on top of it.Gail: I’m fine with barring the unvaccinated from public places, including work, unless they’re prepared to start every day with a coronavirus test. And of course we’ve got to do battle against the right-wing ranters who try to get attention as anti-mask crusaders.That’s your party they’re coming from — any ideas on how to make them behave?Bret: Former party, Gail, former party. Roy Moore’s Senate candidacy was the last straw for me.Gail: Bret, weren’t you going to try to reform Republicanism from within? Not that we wouldn’t welcome you into the Democratic fold. I’ll bet Nancy Pelosi would be happy to hold a celebration, once parties are permitted again.Bret: I’m sure Madam Speaker would gladly send me a half-eaten box of crackers and a banana peel so I could slip on it.Truth is, I’m happy as an independent: It’s like getting to order à la carte, whereas everyone else is stuck with a bento box of things that don’t actually go together. Why do Republicans have to be in favor of more economic freedom but less social freedom? Why do so many Democrats favor something closer to the opposite? And why can’t ideologues of both the left and right wrap their heads around the Emerson line about a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds?Gail: I believe we’ve marched into a major disagreement. It’s true both parties are flawed, although I’d certainly argue that one has turned into Flaw City. But going independent is the worst possible response.Bret: Say more ….Gail: The only way you make a party better is by working from within. In New York, the primaries decide who the elected officials are going to be. Voting for an independent third-party candidate is worse than a waste. Registering as an independent is like telling a charitable fund-raiser that you want to help by sending good thoughts.Bret: Totally disagree! The more independents there are, the more Democrats and Republicans need to fight for their votes rather than take entire constituencies for granted, to bend toward the political center rather than toward the fringe, to pay attention to the personal quality of their candidates rather than insisting that they pass ideological purity tests, to accept nuance and compromise. We’ve become way too partisan as a country, and reducing the hold each party has on its own side is a good thing. I’d even say “independents of the world, unite,” but that would kinda defeat the purpose.Gail: I dunno, Bret. Nothing more irritating than that plague-on-both-your-houses posing. I say pick a side and work to improve it in 2022.Bret: To which I’d reply that each side should work harder to earn a vote, not assume they already own it.A final note before we say goodbye to this lousy year. Don’t miss my favorite piece in The Times this month, which is Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s fabulous portrait of Si Spiegel, a World War II hero and Christmas tree entrepreneur who’s going strong at 97. A good reminder that mettle and moxie go a long way in a person’s life — and in a country’s, too.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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    Will Trump Undercut a Red Wave?

    Former Senator David Perdue knows how to crash a party. When he announced that he would seek the 2022 Republican nomination for governor in Georgia, challenging the incumbent, Brian Kemp, he did more than enter a primary race. He illustrated the dangers facing the G.O.P. in the coming year.Georgia Republicans are divided over former President Donald Trump and torn between mainstream credibility and the conspiratorial fringe. Mr. Perdue — an ally of Mr. Trump — has made these divisions worse. The beneficiary? The Democrat Stacey Abrams.Republicans worry about internal strife and outlandish messages that turn off swing voters because everything else is going their way. The party did well in last month’s elections. President Biden’s low approval ratings endanger Democrats in Congress, where Republicans must net only five seats in the House and one in the Senate to seize control.Republican strength at the state level gives the party an advantage in drawing new maps of congressional districts, which will amplify their slim lead in the FiveThirtyEight estimate of the congressional generic ballot.Yet history shows how expectations can be thwarted. Republicans have experienced hopeful times before — only to have the moment pass. They believed that disapproval of President Bill Clinton’s conduct would expand their majorities in 1998. They ended up losing five House seats. They believed that Mr. Trump would rally the base to support two incumbent senators during runoffs in Georgia last January. They lost both seats and control of the Senate.Time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasn’t been the Democratic Party. It’s been the Republican Party.Republican victories in the midterms next year are far from preordained. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia may be much harder to replicate elsewhere than it looked on election night. Republican leaders continue to fear Mr. Trump and his supporters, and they are divided over candidate selection, message and agenda. The result is a unique combination of external strength and internal rot: an enthusiastic and combative Republican Party that despite its best efforts may soon acquire power it has done nothing to deserve.It will be hard for the party to appeal to the suburban independents who decide elections, though Mr. Youngkin’s success suggests a path. He is the first Republican elected governor of Virginia in over a decade because of his emphasis on kitchen-table issues like rising prices and school closures. He ignored immigration, encouraged vaccination while opposing government mandates and stayed clear of Mr. Trump during the general election. He focused on parental involvement in education and planted himself firmly in the center-right of the political mainstream. When asked about a Trump rally where the Pledge of Allegiance was recited to a flag supposedly connected to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Youngkin called it “weird and wrong.” One Republican senator joked in private that Mr. Youngkin had figured out how to hold Mr. Trump’s hand — under the table and in the dark.Other candidates won’t be as skilled or as lucky as Mr. Youngkin. Republicans lost winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012 because of flawed nominees like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Past may be prologue if Republicans nominate Trump allies whose record or rhetoric are questionable and extreme. Last month, one Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate, Sean Parnell of Pennsylvania, suspended his campaign after he lost a custody battle against his estranged wife. The Trump endorsees Kelly Tshibaka of Alaska and Herschel Walker of Georgia are untested on the campaign trail. In races where Mr. Trump hasn’t yet endorsed, Blake Masters of Arizona, Eric Greitens of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio may secure the MAGA base by forfeiting viability in the general election.Mr. Trump remains the central figure in the G.O.P. Party elites try to ignore him as he spends many days fighting Republicans rather than Democrats and plotting his revenge against the 10 Republican House members who voted for his second impeachment, the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him and the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Mr. Trump targets his enemies with primary challenges, calls for “audits” and “decertification” of the 2020 presidential results and howls at Mitch McConnell for not being “tough.” His imitators within the party are a font of endless infighting and controversy, and they undermine the authority of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. Trump would have it no other way.The former president was content to keep a distance in this year’s races for governor. He won’t be so quiet next year — especially if he concludes that a successful midterm is a key step to his restoration to power in 2024. A more visible and vocal Trump has the potential to help Republicans in solid red states but doom them in purple or blue ones. Yet control of the Senate hinges on the results in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — states Mr. Trump lost in 2020.Mr. Youngkin showed that a positive message attuned to middle-class priorities repels Democratic attacks. If Republicans campaign on a unified message that applies conservative principles to inflation, the border, crime, education and health care, they might be able to avoid being tagged as the party of extremism, conspiracy and loyalty to Mr. Trump. Their problem is that they have no such message.Mr. McConnell has reportedly told Senate Republicans that they won’t release an agenda before the midterms. He’s worried that specific proposals are nothing but fodder for Democratic attacks. What should worry him more are rudderless Republican candidates who allow their Democratic opponents to define them negatively — and then, if they still win, take office in January 2023 with no idea what to do.In an ideal world, more Republicans would think seriously about how best to provide individuals and families with the resources necessary to flourish in today’s America. They would spend less time attacking one another and more time offering constructive approaches to inflation and dangerous streets. They would experiment with a ranked-choice primary system that played a role in Mr. Youngkin’s nomination in Virginia and in the law-and-order Democrat Eric Adams’s win in New York City’s mayor’s race. Interested Republicans would declare today that Mr. Trump won’t deter them from seeking the presidency — reminding him that renomination is not guaranteed.But that’s not the world we live in. Republicans appear either unwilling or unable to treat the former president as a figure from the past whose behavior has done the party more harm than good. They take false comfort in the idea that midterm elections are “thermostatic,” the inevitable repudiation, climatic in nature, of the governing party. They assume they will win next year without doing anything of significance. And they may be right.Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the forthcoming “The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.”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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    Map by Map, G.O.P. Chips Away at Black Democrats’ Power

    Black elected officials in several states, from Congress down to the counties, have been drawn out of their districts this year or face headwinds to hold onto their seats.More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.Until this year.Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”Mr. Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials across the country — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The G.O.P. is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas, and because partisan gerrymandering has long been difficult to disentangle from racial gerrymandering, proving the motive can be troublesome.But the effect remains the same: less political power for communities of color.The pattern has grown more pronounced during this year’s redistricting cycle, the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting. He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35 percent Black, from his district.“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said.In addition to Mr. Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil rights groups sued the state.Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina said he was retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is 35 percent Black, from his district.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAcross the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”In North Carolina and elsewhere, Republicans say that their new maps are race-blind, meaning officials used no racial data in designing the maps and therefore could not have drawn racially discriminatory districts because they had no idea where communities of color were.“During the 2011 redistricting process, legislators considered race when drawing districts,” Ralph Hise, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, said in a statement. Through a spokesperson, he declined to answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.His statement continued: “We were then sued for considering race and ordered to draw new districts. So during this process, legislators did not use any racial data when drawing districts, and we’re now being sued for not considering race.”In other states, mapmakers have declined to add new districts with majorities of people of color even though the populations of minority residents have boomed. In Texas, where the population has increased by four million since the 2010 redistricting cycle, people of color account for more than 95 percent of the growth, but the State Legislature drew two new congressional seats with majority-white populations.And in states like Alabama and South Carolina, Republican map drawers are continuing a decades-long tradition of packing nearly all of the Black voting-age population into a single congressional district, despite arguments from voters to create two separate districts. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on Thursday that the Republican-controlled State Legislature should draw a second majority-Black House district.Allison Riggs, a co-executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights group, said that the gerrymandering was “really an attack on Black voters, and the Black representatives are the visible outcome of that.”Efforts to curb racial gerrymandering have been hampered by a 2019 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged in federal court.Though the court did leave intact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it offered no concrete guidance on how to distinguish between a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander when the result was both, such as in heavily Democratic Black communities.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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    Surprise! There’s No Voter Fraud. Again.

    For those who spend their days operating within the constraints of empirical reality, the long-running voter-fraud scam peddled by right-wing con artists poses a dilemma: Respond to their claims and give them the veneer of legitimacy they crave. Ignore them, and risk letting transparent lies spread unchecked.I used to err on the side of responding as often as possible, in the belief that persistent fact-checking and debunking was the best way to inoculate the American public against a virulent campaign of deception. But it became clear to me, probably later than it should have, that this was always a fool’s game. The professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business. While they pretend to care about real election crimes, their purpose is not to identify whether voters are actually committing such crimes; it is to concoct a world in which the votes of certain people (and it always seems to be the same people) are presumptively invalid. That’s why they are not chastened by data demonstrating — again and again and again and again — that there is essentially no voter fraud anywhere in this country.Thanks to their efforts, about three quarters of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, and they won’t be convinced by evidence to the contrary.That evidence continues to grow. Earlier this week The Associated Press released an impressively thorough report examining every potential case of voter fraud in six decisive battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where Donald Trump and his allies challenged the result in 2020. Voters in these six states cast a combined 25.5 million votes for president last year, and chose Joe Biden over Mr. Trump by 311,257 votes. The total number of possible cases of fraud the A.P. found? Fewer than 475, or 0.15 percent of Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in those states.Many of those cases the A.P. identified turned out not to be fraud at all. Some involved a poll worker’s error or a voter’s innocent confusion, such as the Trump supporter in Wisconsin who mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole. (“The guy upstairs knows what I did,” the man said after a court appearance. “I didn’t have any intention to commit election fraud.”)In the few instances of clear fraud — for example, a Pennsylvania man who cast two ballots, one for himself and, later in disguise, one for his son — local authorities were quick to act. In Arizona, officials investigated 198 cases of potential fraud, most involving double-voting. They invalidated virtually all of the second votes and have so far charged nine people with voting fraud crimes.That’s the thing about voter fraud: Not only is it rare, it’s generally easy to catch, especially if it happens on a larger scale. In 2019, North Carolina officials ordered a do-over of a congressional election after the winning candidate’s campaign was found to have financed an illegal voter-turnout effort. That candidate was a Republican, as were two of three residents of the Villages, a Florida retirement community, who were arrested and charged with double voting in the 2020 election earlier this month. (The third had no party affiliation.)Given how much Republicans bang on about the dangers of voter fraud, a little schadenfreude is in order here. But it misses the bigger point: To the extent there is any fraud, it is almost entirely an individual phenomenon. The A.P. report confirmed this, finding no evidence anywhere of a coordinated effort to commit voter fraud. That’s no surprise. Committing a single case of fraud is hard enough; doing so as part of a conspiracy is essentially impossible, once you consider how many people would need to be in on the scheme. “It’s a staggeringly inefficient way to affect an outcome,” said David Daley, the author of “Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy.” “It simply doesn’t work.”To sum up once more for the folks in the cheap seats: Voter fraud is vanishingly rare. It is virtually never coordinated. And when it does happen, it is often easily discovered and prosecuted by authorities.I hold no illusions that any of these truths will matter to those who have invested themselves in tales of widespread fraud. After all, they weren’t moved when both Republican and Democratic officials in states around the country reaffirmed, in some cases multiple times, the accuracy and integrity of their vote counts. Even Bill Barr, the former attorney general and one of Mr. Trump’s most reliable bootlickers, could not bring himself to repeat the lie that there was any meaningful fraud in 2020.Alas, Republican voters don’t listen to Bill Barr. They listen to Donald Trump, who dismissed the A.P.’s report by doing his standard Mafia don impression. “I just don’t think you should make a fool out of yourself by saying 400 votes,” the former president told the news organization, insisting that the true number of fraudulent votes in 2020 was in the “hundreds of thousands.” His evidence? An unreleased report by a source he refused to name.This is how it goes with the vote-fraud fraudsters. The damning evidence is always right around the next corner, or the one after that. Recall that Mr. Trump established a voter-fraud commission soon after he entered office, with the goal of rooting out the supposedly massive fraud that led him to lose the popular vote by nearly three million votes. (Like everyone else, he knew that true democratic legitimacy comes not from the Electoral College, but from a majority of the American people.) The commission was led by Kris Kobach, the indefatigable vote-fraud warrior whom Mr. Daley once called “an Inspector Clouseau who gazes into his mirror and sees Sherlock Holmes.” In Mr. Kobach’s previous job as Kansas’s secretary of state, he spent years hunting for widespread vote fraud and won only nine convictions, most of them of older Republican men who had double voted. Under Mr. Kobach’s leadership, the Trump voter-fraud commission disbanded after less than a year of chaos and controversy, without having made any findings.That’s because, as the A.P. report affirms once again, there was nothing to find. American voters aren’t cheating, and certainly not in any coordinated way.And here lies the deepest irony of this strange, fragile moment we are living in. A very real threat is, in fact, looming over America’s electoral integrity. But it’s not coming from voters; it’s coming from the people braying the loudest about the importance of election integrity.Donald Trump turned fact-free charges of voter fraud into an art form, but the exploitation of the predictable public fear generated by that sort of rhetoric has been a central feature of the Republican playbook for years. Back in 2013, the then-North Carolina lawmaker Thom Tillis explained why Republicans in the Legislature were passing their strict voter-ID law. “There is some evidence of voter fraud, but that’s not the primary reason for doing this,” said Mr. Tillis, now a U.S. senator. “There are a lot of people who are just concerned with the potential risk of fraud.” Why are they so concerned? Because their leaders have been feeding them a steady diet of lies.That diet became an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Trump years, culminating in the “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election and then, horrifically, in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Now the same people who subscribed to the lies about election fraud are running for, and often winning, jobs overseeing the running of elections across the country. They are representative of a new generation of Republicans, raised in the fever swamps of Fox News and other purveyors of disinformation, who believe elections are valid only when their candidate wins.The goal of the voter-fraud brigade, it turns out, was never to identify fraud that might have happened in the past; it was to indoctrinate voters with the terror of stolen elections, and to pave the way for a hostile takeover of American democracy in the future.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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    From Fox News to Trump’s Big Lie, the Line Is Short and Direct

    This article is part of Times Opinion’s Holiday Giving Guide 2021. For other ideas on where to donate this year, please see the rest of our guide here.What did Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham say about the Jan. 6 rioting at the United States Capitol — and when did they say it?Were they suitably censorious of the violence? At the time, did their public remarks match their private horror?Those questions have been heatedly and extensively hashed out over the days since a House committee released text messages from Jan. 6 in which Hannity and Ingraham, the popular hosts of prime-time shows on Fox News, separately implored President Donald Trump’s chief of staff to get Trump to say and do something to disperse the protesters and quell the violence. Hannity and Ingraham knew that he had stirred those protesters and could sway them, more so than they ever acknowledged on-air, according to their critics. According to Hannity and Ingraham, they’re just the victims — yet again! — of left-wing media smears.You can delve into the weeds of this or you can pull back and survey the whole ugly yard. And what you see when you do that — what matters most in the end — is that Fox News has helped to sell the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and there’s a direct line from that lie to the rioting. There’s a direct line from that lie to various Republicans’ attempts to develop mechanisms to overturn vote counts should they dislike the results.That lie is the root of the terrible danger that we’re in, with Trump supporters being encouraged to distrust and undermine the democratic process. And that lie has often found a welcome mat at Fox News.The Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple is among the many attuned observers who have documented this, and a column of his from mid-January 2021 presented a compendium of inciting commentary on Fox News in the lead-up to Jan. 6. Interviewing Trump on Nov. 29, 2020, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo declared: “We cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted. We cannot.” On Hannity’s show two days later, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro vented an apocalyptic outrage about Joe Biden’s victory, saying: “This fraud will continue and America will be doomed for the next 20 years.” The Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, Hannity himself — all of them got in on the action to some degree, stating or signaling that something about the 2020 election was terribly amiss.And their evidence? It was fugitive then, and no one has tracked it down since. That’s because it doesn’t exist. It’s a conspiracy-minded, ratings-driven hallucination. Just this week, The Associated Press published a review of “every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states” where Trump has disputed Biden’s victory. It found fewer than 475 cases.“Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president,” the A.P. reported. “The disputed ballots represent just 0.15 percent of his victory margin in those states. The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.”This mathematical analysis hardly supports the hysteria on the right — a hysteria that Fox News readily whips up. (I direct you to the so-called documentary “Patriot Purge” on Fox Nation, in which Tucker Carlson recasts Jan. 6 as evidence that a corrupt government is setting up and locking up Trump supporters, who are really political prisoners.) And this is no garden-variety partisan hysteria. It circles around and sometimes lands squarely on the contention that Biden is an illegitimate president and Trump is our rightful ruler, exiled to the Siberia of southern Florida.I know the pushback from the right: It was Democrats who refused to accept Trump’s legitimacy by insisting that he, in cahoots with Russia, cheated his way into the Oval Office. They rushed to judgment as more than a few sympathetic journalists indulged or floated rococo scenarios well beyond anything provable.But, but, but. Democrats weren’t passing or trying to pass laws in battleground states that would enable them to counter the popular will. Democrats weren’t trying to enshrine rule by the minority. Many Republicans are doing precisely that now.And they’re being motivated and cheered, both directly and obliquely, by what they see and hear on Fox News. I care less about Hannity’s and Ingraham’s precise words on Jan. 6 than about what they and their colleagues on Fox News said before and after, and what they’re saying now. It’s reckless. It’s subversive. And it’s scary.One Vision of GivingThe dance class at Visions.Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo go blind is to go back to school — the school of life.The simplest things, like cooking and dressing, are no longer simple, not at the start, because you once did them primarily with the sense of sight and must now rely on touch and sound and little prompts and tricks that weren’t necessary before. Often, someone has to teach you those tricks.Someone has to show you how to navigate the exit from your home and the re-entry; how to walk safely down the street; how to cross the street, a passage grown exponentially more perilous. Familiar tasks are suddenly unfamiliar, and independence must be forged anew.That’s where a group like Visions comes in.It’s a nonprofit rehabilitation and social services agency in New York that specifically helps people who are blind and visually impaired, and an overwhelming majority of those people have limited means — they can’t afford to pay for this help themselves. Visions is funded largely, but not entirely, by continuing government and foundation grants. But it depends, too, on individual contributions. It thrives when generous people give.I found my way to one of three centers that Visions runs after I was diagnosed with a rare disorder that threatens my own eyesight. I went there not as a client but as a journalist, curious to know more about the challenges that visually impaired people face. At this particular Visions center, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, I saw such people being coached through the use of special computer programs. I saw them in a dance class, which gave them an outlet for physical expression — and a safe space — that they can’t find elsewhere.But much of what Visions does is in people’s homes, to which it sends therapists and other helpers. One of those therapists told me about an elderly woman who despaired of being able to light the candles that she typically used for the Jewish sabbath. She learned anew, though she could no longer see the flame.Blind people live full lives, but they face challenges that the rest of us don’t. In my own holiday season giving over recent years, I’ve kept that in mind and been sure to include groups that directly serve visually impaired people or promote research into potential cures and treatments for blindness. Large and small organizations on my radar include the Foundation Fighting Blindness, the VisionServe Alliance, the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School and The Seeing Eye.I’ll long remember that dance class at Visions, not for the moves that its participants busted but for the contentment that they radiated. In a world that could often shut them out, they’d been invited in. In a society that often told them what they couldn’t do, they were doing something that they themselves hadn’t expected. They gave me something: hope.For the Love of SentencesBettmann via Getty ImagesComing up with new ways to express frustration about the crazily high number of Americans who refuse coronavirus vaccines is increasingly difficult, so I tip my hat to John Ficarra, in Air Mail, for this: “Yes, West Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But with your measly 49 percent double-vaccinated rate, he will be skipping most of your state.”In a recent re-examination of Greta Garbo’s career in The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot wrote: “Few other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did — she started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the first soon fell away, like a spent rocket booster.” (Thanks to Ian Grimm, of Chapel Hill, N.C., and Stephanie Hawkins of Denton, Texas, for nominating this.)Per usual, there have been great sentences aplenty in The Times recently, including Eric Kim’s on one of the components of a divine holiday ham: “Sticky like tar and richly savory in taste, this glaze gets its body and spice from Dijon mustard, its molasses-rich sweetness from brown sugar and its high note, the kind of flavor that floats on top like a finely tuned piccolo in an orchestra, from a touch of rice vinegar.” (Dan Lorenzini, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.)Here’s John McWhorter on how reliably language, including pronunciation, mutates: “Even with a word as quotidian as lox (with no disrespect intended to salmon, smoked or otherwise), you can bet that sooner rather than later, the passage of time will mash it with pestles and refract it through prisms to the point that it is all but beyond recognition.” (Barbara Sloan, Conway, S.C.)Here’s Pete Wells on the New York City restaurant that he liked best among the standouts that opened this year: “Half of Dhamaka’s success must have been its timing. New York was still coming out of a pandemic-shutdown fog when it opened in February, a period of glitchy video calls, undefined working hours, creeping anxiety, reheated leftovers and repressed pleasures. Life had gone prematurely gray. There’s nothing gray about the food at Dhamaka, though. Every dish comes at you as if it wants to either marry you or kill you.” (Kathleen Bridgman, Walnut Creek, Calif., and Donald Ham, Vallejo, Calif., among others)And here’s James Poniewozik on a recurring character in America’s culture wars: “There’s a rule in politics, or at least there should be: Never get into a fight with Big Bird. You end up spitting out feathers, and the eight-foot fowl just strolls away singing about the alphabet.” (Valerie Hoffmann, Montauk, N.Y.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here, and please include your name and place of residence.What I’m Watching (and Reading)Aunjanue Ellis (far left) and Will Smith with the actresses who play their daughters in “King Richard.”Warner BrosFor me, the holiday season is often about catching up on television series and movies that I didn’t have time to watch when they were first released. So I recently binged “Mare of Easttown,” which I enjoyed and admired every bit as much as its most ardent fans had told me I would, and “Hacks,” whose virtues redeemed its unevenness from episode to episode. “Mare” and “Hacks” have a common denominator: the actress Jean Smart, who has a supporting role in “Mare,” as the mother of the police detective (Kate Winslet) trying to solve a local murder, and the starring role in “Hacks,” as a stand-up diva terrified that she’s being put out to comedy pasture. Over the past two decades, Smart has become the Meryl Streep of the small screen. I’d pay to listen to her read the instructions for assembling an Ikea dresser. I’d pay to watch her assemble it. Heck, I’d assemble it for her, and I’m entirely thumbs.Speaking of great performances, the movie “King Richard,” about Richard Williams, father of Venus and Serena, is chockablock with them. Will Smith’s work in the title role has received the most attention, but Aunjanue Ellis, as the tennis prodigies’ mother, Oracene, impressed me just as much if not more. “King Richard” itself is entertaining and skillfully made, especially in the way it captures the speed and breathtaking athleticism of the sport at its center.Seldom does a celebrity profile generate as much discussion as Michael Schulman’s of the actor Jeremy Strong (“Succession”) did. The article, published in The New Yorker, is very much worth reading on its own merits: It’s a model of exhaustive, detail-rich reporting. But you can have some extra fun by also checking out the reactions to it and figuring out your own answer to the question of whether Schulman stacked the deck against his subject.On a Personal NoteNina Simone in 1965, the year her version of “Feeling Good” was released.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)There are some songs that you hear so often across so many years that you no longer listen to them, not in any active sense. They wash over you. You hum without knowing it, tap your foot without engaging your brain. That’s the way it is with me and the unsurpassable Nina Simone version of “Feeling Good.” I swim in it without realizing I’m wet.But the other day, when it cycled onto some Pandora station of mine, I happened to pay close attention. I registered — really registered — the words: “Birds flying high/You know how I feel/Sun in the sky/You know how I feel.” “River running free,” “blossom on a tree,” “stars when you shine,” “scent of the pine” — all of them know how she feels. What a lovely take, and what a true one. When you’re indeed feeling as good and as free as the singer of this song, you’re not just in nature. You’re communicating with it, and it’s the expression of your own elation.The song, a declaration of emancipation, was written not by Simone but by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, for the 1964 musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd.” No surprise that it comes from a stage production: As the tributes to Stephen Sondheim after his death a few weeks ago reminded us, musical theater is a treasure chest of grand and clever lyrics. And lyrics are my focus here — lyrics and what a joy it is to come across superior ones.Most popular songs nowadays are lyrical letdowns. They don’t try all that hard. They lean on catchy riffs and on clunky or banal rhymes. Sometimes the lyrics are inscrutable. Just as often they’re trite.But when they’re not? It’s a much bigger surprise than encountering stellar prose, and thus, for me, it’s an even bigger pleasure. It’s poetry that you can sing along to, eloquence with a beat. I have a terrible memory for many things, but play me a well-written song with well-turned words three or four times and those words are with me and in me forever.Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” for example. There are banal rhymes and then there are audacious ones. I put “yacht,” “apricot” and “gavotte” in the latter category — and they appear in the song’s first stanza. I can sing “You’re So Vain” from start to finish, not muffing a syllable, even if I haven’t heard it in a decade.And you? Where in popular music, especially current and recent popular music, have you struck lyrics gold? Tell me by emailing me here. Maybe I’ll spotlight and celebrate some of these examples in newsletters to come.This column is part of Times Opinion’s Holiday Giving Guide 2021. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the giving guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor The Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations. More