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      For These Republicans, 2024 Is Just Around the Corner

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      Mike Pence. Mike Pompeo. Rick Scott. They share big ambitions, but one name hovers above them all …Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesPresident Biden told reporters last month that his “plan is to run for re-election,” despite already being the oldest person to have won a presidential election. So, for now at least, the question of who will lead the Democratic ticket in 2024 has been put to rest.On the Republican side, however, certainty is in short supply. It’s beyond early to be talking about the next presidential election (we’re still hardly even ready to talk about the midterms!) — but that’s only if you aren’t planning to run. Some Republican candidates have already made trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, and others are laying plans to go, in what often represents the first step in building out a campaign operation in those early-voting states.And on Wednesday, in a conspicuously forward-looking move, former Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of a new political organization, Advancing American Freedom, whose advisory board is stacked high with former Trump administration officials and allies. The news came on the same day Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish Pence’s autobiography as part of a two-book deal.The G.O.P. is badly fractured, trying to hold together a dominant base of those loyal to former President Donald Trump and a stubborn minority of pro-decorum, anti-Trump conservatives. Anyone looking to grab the Republican mantle will have to find some way of satisfying both camps — and maybe even expanding upon them.A national poll from Pew Research Center last month found that most Republicans didn’t think the G.O.P. should be accepting of elected officials in the party who openly criticize Trump. But looking at the nation at large, Pew also found that a majority of Americans called Trump either a “poor” or “terrible” president. So it may be tough for Republicans to get very far in a general election if their candidate is seen as too staunch of a Trump loyalist.With all these factors at play, I caught up with our political reporter and Trump guru Maggie Haberman. Here’s what she had to say.Mike Pence on Wednesday announced that he had started the group Advancing American Freedom, with the self-described mission of “promoting traditional conservative values,” advocating “the successful policies of the Trump administration” and opposing Biden’s “expansion of government.” Is this a preliminary move toward a possible 2024 run?It most certainly gives Pence a perch from which to run, and, more significantly, to differentiate himself from Trump to the best of his ability. He has more of a challenge than most of the potential 2024 candidates in presenting himself as a continuation of what Republicans liked about the Trump era, without the parts they didn’t.A stubborn divide remains between the party’s Trump-supporting base and its establishment wing. Pence, for one, has always done his best to skate along that divide. For Republican presidential hopefuls, will there be any room for being even semi-critical of Trump?I think they all have to survive a G.O.P. primary, and the bulk of the Republican base is going to want someone who resembles Trump in some way.There is going to be little room for a Republican to separate from Trump in the primary — barring new circumstances that change Trump’s standing with those voters — and then pivot back in a general election and be viable with swing voters.Pence has also been so, so reluctant to criticize Trump, even after his own life was at risk in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.A number of other prominent Republicans have recently been laying groundwork in Iowa. (Despite the 2020 Democratic caucus shenanigans, the state is certain to hold an early contest in 2024.) Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida just went there, and others are reportedly planning trips. After the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, what clues are you seeing about how the 2024 field will shape up? Does any one figure seem particularly well positioned?It’s so early in the cycle, it’s very hard to say. We don’t know what the world — or the country — will look like closer to 2024, although the midterms will tell us something about the mood of the electorate.Scott is in a bit of a different position than some candidates, having been a governor and now a senator. Scott surprised leaders in his own party by siding with Trump’s objections to the electoral certification, which helps him in a primary but which could be a challenge in other ways.Where does Trump himself stand in all this? He has been relatively quiet since January, his speech at CPAC aside — but he’s still running a political operation out of his residence in Florida. Whether or not he runs again in three years, is it safe to say he will be playing an active role in the race somehow?Remember, Trump keeps telling people he’s running. While most of his own advisers are skeptical that he will do it, it could have a chilling effect on the field for a while. He wants to remain dominant in the party and he is a major factor in down-ballot primaries so far.But that isn’t the only impactful factor in these races. He wants to be relevant; remember that only a narrow majority of Republicans want to see him as the nominee again.Drop us a lineTrump’s Twitter ban: We want to hear from youWe’re nearing the end of three months in which former President Donald Trump has been barred from Twitter and Facebook. This has upset his supporters, of course, but has resulted in a general lowering of the conversational temperature, particularly on Twitter. Our colleague Sarah Lyall is working on an article about the absence of Trump’s voice on social media, and we’d love to hear from readers.We want to know:1. Did you follow (or block) Trump on Twitter?2. How did his tweets make you feel when you saw them on Twitter, or read about them afterward?3. Have you noticed his absence from social media platforms since January? Do you miss his voice, or are you happy not to hear it anymore?Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com and include your name, email address and profession, and you may be included in forthcoming news coverage.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Andrew Giuliani Considers a Run for N.Y. Governor

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      Mr. Giuliani, 35, has never been elected to public office, and his most prominent government job was as a public liaison assistant and special assistant to the president for the Trump White House.ALBANY, N.Y. — In less than two weeks, at least three potential Republican candidates interested in possibly challenging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo next year will convene in the state capital to lobby many of the party’s county chairs for their support.All three are known to New York voters: Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island is one of the state’s staunchest conservative leaders, and was an ardent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump; Rob Astorino was the party’s 2014 nominee for governor.The third is also known, but is far less of a known quantity: Andrew Giuliani.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Giuliani, 35, confirmed that he was “strongly considering” a run, adding that he planned to make a firm decision “by the end of the month.” State Republican officials confirmed that Mr. Giuliani would be attending the Republican county leaders’ meeting in Albany.Mr. Giuliani would face a steep climb. He has never been elected to public office, and his most prominent government job was as a public liaison assistant and special assistant to the president for the Trump White House.His main selling point would likely be his connection to Mr. Trump and to his father, the former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose reputation in New York and beyond has greatly suffered in recent years.The elder Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, was a central player in a failed legal effort by the former president to overturn the 2020 election. He now faces a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused him of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign” to suggest that Dominion, one of the biggest voting machine manufacturers in the country, plotted to flip votes to President Biden.The Giuliani connection to Trump could prove poisonous in New York, where Mr. Trump’s popularity is in the low 30s, where Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2002, and where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.Still, Mr. Giuliani and other potential Republican candidates have had their hopes buoyed by Mr. Cuomo’s swarm of recent scandals, including multiple accusations of sexual harassment against the governor, as well as a federal investigation into his handling of the state’s nursing homes.The sexual harassment allegations made by current and former employees of Mr. Cuomo, as well as accounts by a series of other women who have described uncomfortable interactions with the governor, have led most of the state’s Democratic leaders to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation.The allegations against Mr. Cuomo, 63, are also the subject of a pair of investigations, including one overseen by the state attorney general, Letitia James, and a second authorized by the State Assembly.The combination of the controversies has resulted in double-digit declines in Mr. Cuomo’s approval ratings in several polls, with support for a fourth term seeming particularly precarious.Mr. Giuliani’s possible interest in the state’s highest office was first reported by The Washington Examiner.The prospect of a Giuliani vs. Cuomo matchup would likely tantalize New York and national political observers, considering the current relationship between Rudolph Giuliani and Mr. Trump, who often sparred with Mr. Cuomo last year during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.Adding to the intrigue is the decades-long connections between the elder Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat whose father, Mario M. Cuomo, was governor for 12 years.When Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, the elder Mr. Cuomo was still governor, and he spoke hopefully of Mr. Giuliani’s ability to help him find compromise with Republicans, who ruled the Senate in Albany.A year later, Mr. Giuliani suffered a humiliating defeat after he endorsed Mario Cuomo’s unsuccessful campaign against fellow Republican George Pataki in the 1994 governor’s race.Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      Democrats Are Torn Over Working With G.O.P. After Capitol Riot

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      An uneasy détente has emerged between congressional Republicans and Democrats after the Jan. 6 attack, but relationships are badly frayed.WASHINGTON — When a Republican lawmaker approached Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat, on the House floor recently with a routine request that she sign on to a resolution he was introducing, she initially refused.Ms. Escobar personally liked the man, a fellow Texan, and she supported his bill. But she held the Republican, who had voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election just hours after rioters stormed the Capitol, partly responsible for the deadly attack and questioned whether she could work with him.Moments after declining, however, Ms. Escobar had second thoughts.“Go ahead and count me in,” Ms. Escobar recalled telling the man, whom she declined to identify in an interview. “But I just want you to know that what you all did — I haven’t gotten past it. And it was wrong, and it was terrible. And it’s not something that I think we should gloss over.”In the immediate aftermath of the assault on the Capitol that left five dead, irate Democrats vowed to punish Republicans for their roles in perpetuating or indulging former President Donald J. Trump’s fiction of a stolen election that motivated the mob that attacked the building. There was talk of cutting off certain Republicans entirely from the legislative process, denying them the basic courtesies and customs that allow the House to function even in polarized times.Democrats introduced a series of measures to censure, investigate and potentially expel members who, in the words of one resolution, “attempted to overturn the results of the election and incited a white supremacist attempted coup.” But the legislation went nowhere and to date no punishment has been levied against any members of Congress for their actions related to Jan. 6.What has unfolded instead has been something of an uneasy détente on Capitol Hill, as Democrats reckon with what they experienced that day and struggle to determine whether they can salvage their relationships with Republicans — some of whom continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory — and whether they even want to try.“I don’t want to permanently close that door,” Ms. Escobar said. “But I can’t walk through it right now.”Republicans have felt the breach as well. Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, who did not vote to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory but joined a lawsuit challenging the election results, said feelings ran raw after the mob violence at the Capitol.“I had some candid conversations with members that I have a good relationship with. There was a lot of heated emotion,” Mr. Waltz said. Still, he said, “I didn’t experience a freeze.”He recently teamed up with Representative Anthony G. Brown, Democrat of Maryland, to round up 70 Republicans and 70 Democrats for a letter to the Biden administration laying out parameters for an Iran nuclear deal.The dilemma of whether to join such bipartisan efforts is particularly charged for centrist Democrats from conservative-leaning districts, who won office on the promise of working with Republicans but say they find it difficult to accept that some of those same colleagues spread lies that fueled the first invasion of the Capitol since the War of 1812.Adding to the tensions, most Republicans insist that they did nothing wrong, arguing that their push to invalidate the election results was merely an effort to raise concerns about the integrity of the vote. Some have reacted angrily to Democrats’ moves to punish them.Days after Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, voted to throw out electoral votes for Mr. Biden, an aide to Representative Cindy Axne, Democrat of Iowa, curtly rebuffed a request from his office to discuss writing insurance legislation together.Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, voted to throw out electoral votes for President Biden.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“Our office is declining to work with your office at this time, given your boss’s position on the election,” the aide wrote in an email to an aide to Mr. Smith.Mr. Smith later sought to turn the tables on Ms. Axne, posting the email on his official Twitter account after she highlighted her work with Republicans.“That’s odd,” Mr. Smith wrote, appending a screenshot of the exchange. “This is the last message my staff got from you. Are you no longer kicking Republicans off your bills?”A spokesman for Mr. Smith did not respond to a request to elaborate on the incident.Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, who was in the House gallery on Jan. 6, said she had taken it upon herself to try to facilitate a reconciliation — or at least an airing out of differences.“It’s been a really challenging time,” she said. “Literally, people were murdered in our workplace. For some people, that is deeply troublesome, and for some people, they want to move on faster than others are ready.”In the days after the attack, the wounds it laid bare seemed almost too deep to heal. As the mob tore closer to lawmakers on Jan. 6, Representative Dean Phillips, a mild-mannered Minnesota Democrat known for fostering bipartisan relationships, shouted at Republicans, “This is because of you!”Afterward, lawmakers nearly came to blows on the House floor and got into heated arguments in the hallways. Some Democrats were so nervous that their Republican colleagues might draw weapons on the floor that House leaders set up metal detectors outside the chamber, drawing loud protests from gun-toting lawmakers in the Republican Party.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, released a review of Republicans’ incendiary remarks on social media before the attack.Some Democrats, particularly the most progressive lawmakers from safe districts who rarely found occasion to work with Republicans even before the riot, have pressed to penalize the G.O.P. systematically in its aftermath, arguing that there can be no return to normalcy. A spreadsheet of Republicans who voted to overturn the election, outlining how many states’ electoral votes they moved to cast out, has circulated widely among Democratic offices.Lawmakers and their staff members were evacuated from the House chamber on Jan. 6.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressBut there has been little action to truly cut Republicans out of the work of Congress. When Representative Sean Casten of Illinois moved to punish a Republican who had voted to overturn the election results by forcing a recorded vote on his bill to rename a post office — the kind of measure that normally sails through unchallenged — only 15 other Democrats joined Mr. Casten in opposing it. As some rank-and-file Democrats sought to expel the Republican conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the move was “not a leadership position.” (Leaders did, however, take the unusual step of stripping Ms. Greene of her committee seats.)The reluctance stems, at least in part, from politics. Democrats owe their majority to a group of lawmakers from competitive districts who say their constituents elected them to work with Republicans to get legislation done.“Retreating or closing myself off to any kind of conversations or working with folks on the other side of the aisle — it doesn’t feel like an option for me,” said Representative Sharice Davids, the only Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation. “Even when it feels hard.”Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was in the House gallery on Jan. 6 and had what she believed was a panic attack as she crouched on the floor and heard the noise from the mob grow closer. But she said in an interview that she had “moved past the election issue,” adding that she was “not one to hold grudges.”“I haven’t talked to a single Republican about that day. Nothing. At all,” said Ms. Wild, who has resumed working with Pennsylvania Republicans on legislation, even though most of them voted to overturn the election. “I don’t want it to get in the way of other things that I want to work on with them. I know that it would, because I would be angry.”Many House Republicans have refrained from discussing the attack, while some have tried to rewrite history and argue that they never claimed the election was “stolen,” despite their objections. One tried to remove mentions of the assault from a resolution honoring the police officers who defended the Capitol that day. Some have continued to deny that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected, while still others have sought to deflect attention from the riot or downplay the factors that drove it.When the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing recently to examine domestic extremism in the military, Representative Pat Fallon, Republican of Texas, complained that the session was “political theater” and a waste of the panel’s time.The chairman, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, tartly replied that the topic deserved discussion, since “20 percent of the people that have been arrested from the Capitol Hill riots had a history of serving in the military.”Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the Administration Committee, objected to Ms. Lofgren’s report cataloging his colleagues’ incendiary social media posts. One Democrat, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, recently removed a Republican from a bill the two had worked on together for years, in line with his new policy of collaborating only with lawmakers who publicly state that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.But he said he had drawn some optimism from a blunt conversation with Representative Jody B. Hice, Republican of Georgia, whom he has worked with on environmental issues, about a speech Mr. Hice gave questioning his state’s electoral votes for Mr. Biden.Mr. Hice said in a statement that he was proud that he and Mr. Schneider could “put aside our differences” on “many of the hot-button political debates of the day” to work together.Still, Mr. Schneider said that many other Republicans were still questioning Mr. Biden’s legitimacy — and that some were even continuing to put lawmakers at risk with incendiary remarks.“The fact that there is — how many at this point? — that it’s not an insignificant number who are still trying to have it both ways, makes it harder to get something done in Congress,” he said. More

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      Why Kentucky Just Became the Only Red State to Expand Voting Rights

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      At a time when states with Republican-led legislatures are rushing to restrict ballot access, Kentucky proved the exception to the rule. The reasons are both political and logistical.Jennifer Decker has solid conservative credentials. A first-term Republican state lawmaker in Kentucky who used to work for Senator Rand Paul, she represents a county that voted for Donald J. Trump last year by nearly 30 percentage points.Yet at a time when many of her Republican counterparts around the country are racing to pass stringent new restrictions on voting — fueled in part by Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election — Ms. Decker’s first major bill swerved.It aimed to make it easier for people to vote in the state.Kentucky on Wednesday became the only state in the country with a Republican-controlled legislature to expand voting rights after a bitter presidential election that tested the country’s democratic institutions and elevated ballot access as an animating issue for both parties.In a signing ceremony on Wednesday, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, hailed the bill as a bipartisan effort that cut against the push in other Republican legislatures to put up barriers to voting.“When much of the country has put in more restrictive laws, Kentucky legislators, Kentucky leaders were able to come together to stand up for democracy and to expand the opportunity for people to vote,” Mr. Beshear said.The law in Kentucky establishes three days of early voting in the state; introduces voting centers that would allow for more in-person balloting options; creates an online portal to register and request ballots; and allows voters to fix problems with absentee ballots, a process known as curing.The reasons that Kentucky Republicans have diverged on voting rights range from the political to the logistical. For one, they had an easier sell: With sweeping new rules allowing the election to be held safely during the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans in Kentucky had one of their best cycles in years, with both Senator Mitch McConnell and Mr. Trump easily winning in the state.And expanding voting access in Kentucky was a low bar to clear; the state had some of the tightest voting laws in the country before 2020, with not a single day of early voting, and strict limits on absentee balloting.The push in Kentucky and other states — including the Democratic-controlled Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii and Massachusetts — reflects an odd outcome of the pandemic: The most challenging election in nearly a century brought about expansive changes across the country to ease access to the ballot box.“We did things a little bit differently because of Covid, and I just thought that some of that might help us going forward,” Ms. Decker said in an interview. “And election reform should not be partisan. Partisan majorities can change at any time.”Republicans and Democrats alike in Kentucky have overwhelmingly supported and celebrated the bill, heralding it as a welcome bipartisan achievement. But voting rights advocates have been more muted, pointing to the legislation’s relatively limited scope and its mixture of measures, like the introduction of a short early voting period, as well as new restrictions heralded under the banner of election security. They caution that the proposal represents a modest improvement in a state long hostile to voting rights — a fact even conservatives have acknowledged.“Kentucky actually had probably, until this point, the most restrictive laws in the country on voting,” said Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state, who was the leading force behind the bill. “And that’s what we’re trying to change.”Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, led the push to pass the voting bill. Jon Cherry for The New York TimesIndeed, even with its newly expanded voting access, Kentucky’s voting rules remain comparatively stricter than those of Georgia, which recently overhauled its electoral system with new restrictions on voting. Even under Georgia’s new law, for example, the state still has no-excuse absentee voting and a much longer earlier voting period than Kentucky.Voting rights experts note that three days of early voting is still a short window compared with other states that offer the process, and that the law does not have a provision for no-excuse absentee voting. It also includes restrictions like the banning of ballot collection, a practice in which one person gathers and drops off multiple voters’ ballots.Nearly all of the country’s current efforts to expand voting access are unfolding in states with Democratic-led legislatures, and they go much further in expanding access to the ballot than Kentucky’s law does.Connecticut is trying to make no-excuse absentee voting permanent after the method worked successfully in last year’s election, and Delaware is working on a constitutional amendment to add no-excuse absentee voting. Hawaii is progressing toward the introduction of automatic voter registration. And Massachusetts is seeking a host of changes, including adding same-day voter registration and extending early voting.“The election in 2020 helps give them confidence that they could act quickly in expanding access and not have to go slowly,” Sylvia Albert, the director of the voting rights group Common Cause, said of these states.She said that Kentucky did not fall into the category of true expansion, because its new law will provide fewer options than the emergency orders of 2020. “This might be a political calculation made by Democrats in the state, so that Republicans don’t go even further in suppressing the vote like other states have,” she said. “But as an election, voter access bill, it is not successful.”While Kentucky’s compromise — expanding voting access while enacting some more restrictive policies in the name of election security — could serve as a model for other Republican-controlled states, it is more likely to be a blip in a year of G.O.P.-led pushes for voting restrictions.Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky at the State Capitol in Frankfort.Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader, via Associated PressIndeed, it was a unique set of circumstances and an unlikely coalition in Kentucky that led to the state’s first steps in a generation to expand voting access.Fresh off a successful free, fair and safe election conducted with a host of temporary policies during the pandemic, Mr. Adams began the dutiful task of surveying county election administrators about the new rules. He had expected complaints, but instead found strong support for some of the measures, particularly the multiple days of early voting.So Mr. Adams went to the Republican leadership in the Legislature to gauge its interest in adopting some of the policies. After a 2020 election in which Republicans picked up seats in the State Legislature and Mr. McConnell cruised to an easy victory, G.O.P. leaders in Kentucky had a far different political calculus than Republicans in Georgia, who saw their state turn blue for the first time in a generation. They were open, they said, though not necessarily eager to shake things up.“The hard part at first was finding a sponsor,” Mr. Adams said, “because this was seen as so unlikely that no one wanted to be the sponsor.”Enter Mr. Paul. The junior senator from Kentucky, who is up for re-election next year and has repeatedly made false statements about the 2020 election, had reached out to Mr. Adams with some concerns of his own regarding Kentucky election law. But he soon came around to the idea of a compromise effort, expanding some points of access while restricting others.And he had an idea for a sponsor: Ms. Decker, who had been interested in an election overhaul after the high turnout in last year’s vote.“I’ve been a lifelong Republican, I was chairman of the Republican Party in my county for a long time, and I’ve never felt like voter turnout was anything but good,” Ms. Decker said.The bill quickly began gaining momentum in the Legislature. And Democrats, who eyed the effort warily, would soon come on board.“We saw a bill come forward this year, and you’ve got to recognize some political realities of Kentucky,” said Morgan McGarvey, the Democratic minority leader in the State Senate. “This bill does not do everything that I would like to see in an election reform law, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.”For years, Democrats in the State Legislature had worked to expand voting in Kentucky, both by putting forward large, transformative bills that never had a chance of passing, and pared down efforts like simply seeking to keep polls open until 8 p.m. (Kentucky currently closes polls at 6 p.m. on Election Day, the earliest shuttering time in the country along with Indiana’s.) The party was consistently rebuffed by the State Senate, which has been controlled by Republicans since 1999.“No one can argue: This expands voting options in Kentucky,” Mr. McGarvey said. “Every Kentuckian has more choices of when and how to vote than they did before this law. So that’s something we have been fighting for for years, and I’m not going to slow it up.”Republicans have been quick to praise the bill. Mr. Paul said in a statement that he was “proud” of the effort, and that it would ensure “our elections are accurate and accessible.” The Honest Elections Project, a conservative group that has joined legal efforts seeking to roll back voting access, said the bill had found “a balance” on “the need for both access and security.”Joshua Douglas, a professor of election law at the University of Kentucky who was part of a small team of county election officials and other experts who consulted with Mr. Adams on the initial effort, said that “it’s not the bill I would have written by any means.”He added: “But it has a lot of stuff I like and not a ton I hate.” More

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      Boehner Blasts Trump, Saying He ‘Incited That Bloody Insurrection’

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      In his new book, John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, sharply rebukes the former president for his role in the “mob violence” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, issues a stinging denunciation in his new book of Donald J. Trump, saying that the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”The criticism from Mr. Boehner in his book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” represents an extraordinary public rebuke by a former speaker of the House toward a former president from his own party and shows how much the Republican Party has shifted since Mr. Boehner left Congress in 2015. And his remarks came as Mr. Trump has sought to retain his grip on Republican lawmakers’ loyalty from his new political base in South Florida.The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, sharply criticized Mr. Trump at the end of the Senate trial for the former president’s second impeachment, pointing to his role in the Capitol riot. Others, like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 in the House Republican leadership, have also excoriated him.But Mr. Boehner’s remarks went a step further, serving as a rejection of what the party he once helped lead has morphed into over the last several years. While he has criticized Mr. Trump in the past, it’s his comments about the events of Jan. 6 that have the most resonance.In the book, an excerpt from which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Boehner writes that Mr. Trump’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence,” adding, “It was painful to watch.”At another point, he writes, “I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for what came after the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.”Former President Donald J. Trump speaking at a rally in front of the White House on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe adds: “Watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity.” Nodding to the divisions between the parties in Congress now, he writes, “Whatever they end up doing, or not doing, none of it will compare to one of the lowest points of American democracy that we lived through in January 2021.”Mr. Trump, he goes on, “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” Mr. Boehner writes, “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”In an emailed statement, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, called Mr. Boehner a “Swamp Creature” and accused him of favoring “Communist China” (The former speaker’s lobbying firm represents the Chinese Embassy in the United States). In a separate email to The Times, Mr. Trump asked of Mr. Boehner, whose love of merlot wine is legendary in Washington: “Was he drinking when he made this statement? Just another RINO who couldn’t do the job!”The former president has continued to make wild and false claims about widespread voter fraud in the election, despite multiple court rulings against him and the certification of President Biden’s victory.Of members of the House and the Senate who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, Mr. Boehner writes: “Some of the people involved did not surprise me in the least. The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism.”Mr. Boehner, whose tenure in the House Republican leadership coincided with the congressional obstruction of the Obama years and who was subsumed by the rise of the Tea Party and House members who were rewarded by conservative media appearances, writes that the G.O.P. must “take back control from the faction that had grown to include everyone from garden-variety whack jobs to insurrectionists.”For now, Mr. Trump has retained support among Republican voters. A slim majority would like to see him as the party’s nominee again if he runs in 2024, something he has told advisers he’s serious about considering. And some House G.O.P. officials are deeply concerned about keeping him on their side in their efforts to retake control in the midterm elections next year. More

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      The Fear That Is Shaping American Politics

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      It affects everyone from Joe Manchin to Joe Biden.Why is the Republican Party so determined to constrain the franchise?One answer is provided by the changing demographics of the children in the nation’s public schools, a leading indicator of shifts in the racial and ethnic makeup of the country.According to the National Center for Education Statistics,The percentage of public school students who were white was 64.8 percent in 1995, and this percentage dropped below 50 percent in 2014 (to 49.5 percent). N.C.E.S. projects that in 2029, White students will make up 43.8 percent of public school enrollment.The changing racial and ethnic makeup of the schools, something visible to parents and to anyone who walks by at recess, is a leading indicator of the day (in roughly 2045) when non-Hispanic whites of all ages will drop under 50 percent of the U.S. population, soon to be followed by the day when whites become a minority of the electorate (although that will depend on how voters self-identify — among other things, data suggests that many mixed race Americans identify as white).Hispanics and Asian-Americans are driving the ascendance of America’s minority population, while the Black share of the population will increase by a small amount. Pew Research estimates that over the 50 year period from 2015 to 2065, the non-Hispanic white share of the population — as defined by the U.S. census — will drop from 62 to 46 percent, while the Hispanic share will grow from 18 to 24 percent and the Asian-American share from 6 to 14 percent. The Black share will go from 12 to 13 percent.Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York, and other experts have argued that predictions of a white minority in a little over 20 years have created a false narrative because it fails to account for the numerous second- and third-generation children of interethnic and interracial marriages, many of whom see themselves (and are seen by others) as white.False or not, the white minority prediction has become a dominant political narrative — particularly insofar as Republicans exploit this characterization — and in the process this framing has become a central element in the worldview of many conservative whites.How does the expectation of a majority-minority America affect the thinking of white Americans?Maureen Craig at N.Y.U. and Jennifer Richeson, at Yale, reported in their 2018 paper “Majority No More? The Influence of Neighborhood Racial Diversity and Salient National Population Changes on Whites’ Perceptions of Racial Discrimination” thatWhite Americans considering a future in which the white population has declined to less than 50 percent of the national population are more likely to perceive that the societal status of their racial group — in terms of resources or as the “prototypical” American — is under threat, which in turn leads to stronger identification as white, the expression of more negative racial attitudes and emotions, greater opposition to diversity, and greater endorsement of conservative political ideology, political parties, and candidates.Biden, more than either of his three Democratic predecessors — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — is putting this white reaction to the test.Not only is Biden actively supporting voting rights reform designed to protect and strengthen Black and Hispanic political participation, but he has taken assertive stands on racial issues, both in terms of appointments and in supporting racially targeted provisions in his stimulus and infrastructure legislation.The question for Biden is whether a Democrat can firm up the party’s multiracial coalition with a double-edged strategy. First, winning over enough working class whites by disbursing substantial benefits in his stimulus and infrastructure legislation; and, second, by targeting generous programs to racial and ethnic minorities to reduce disparities in income and education.The underlying question is whether more white voters will turn against Biden in the 2022 midterm elections as they turned against Clinton in 1994 and Obama in 2010.A large number of white people already believe that they suffer higher levels of discrimination than Black people and other minorities do.Craig and Richeson write:Organizational messages that are favorable to racial diversity have also been found to enhance the sense among whites of personal and group discrimination against them compared with race-neutral messages.In addition, many Republican and conservative-leaning whites are convinced that as minorities become more powerful, the left coalition will become increasingly antagonistic to them. Craig and Richeson write:This research suggests, in other words, that whites are likely to perceive more antiwhite discrimination under circumstances in which they perceive that their group’s position in society is under threat.Nour Sami Kteily, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, emailed to say that he and Richeson have been conducting a study that asks whites how much they agree (7) or disagree (1) with statements like:If Black Americans got to the top of the social hierarchy, they would want to stay on top and keep other groups down.andIf Black Americans got to the top of the social hierarchy, they would put all of their effort toward creating a more egalitarian social system for all groups.On average, whites fell at the midpoint but, Kteily wrote, there waslarge variation associated with being Republican vs. Democrat, with Republicans being more likely to believe that Black Americans would use power to dominate. The difference is highly statistically significant.In a December 2019 article, “Demographic change, political backlash, and challenges in the study of geography,” Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, wrote:The relationship between diversity and reactionary politics should be considered one of the most important sociopolitical issues facing the world today — it is a near certainty that almost every developed country and many developing countries will be more diverse a generation from now than they are today.Thus, Enos continued,if increasing diversity affects political outcomes, the relationship can point in two consequentially different directions: toward increased diversity liberalizing politics or toward increased diversity causing a reactionary backlash.The 2020 election of Biden combined with Democratic control of the House and Senate have contained, at least momentarily, the reactionary backlash, but a liberalized politics has not yet been secured. What are the prospects for Democrats seeking to maintain, if not strengthen, their fragile hold on power? More

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      in World Politics

      Obstructing Governance as a Substitute for Public Policy

      by

      It is hard to figure out why it seems so difficult to be a white guy in today’s America, even though I am a white guy and should be able to figure it out. The problem seems to be that there are just too many people in America who are not white guys, or even white guys and gals combined. Whenever this feeling seems to overwhelm some white guys, their solution to the perceived problem is to try to preclude something that non-white guys want: entry into the country, voting rights, equal opportunity, racial justice, access to meaningful health care and, way too often, the simple desire to live in peace or continue to live at all.

      So, now that the mass shootings have started again in earnest in America after seemingly taking a small break during the height of pandemic restrictions, it is again mostly white guys out front depriving lots of others of their lives and sense of security. Of course, who can forget the hordes of white guys storming the US Capitol a few months ago trying to prevent their fearless leader from the perceived insult of a permanent return to his beloved mansion in Florida.

      Escaping Thucydides’ Trap: Keeping the Peace Between Rising and Reigning Powers

      READ MORE

      It is worth asking who these white guys are who continue to board their trains to nowhere, callously leaving misery, destruction and even death in their wake. Some are among the really challenged people in America. Among other things, they seem to be intellectually incapable of seeing the connection between incredibly easy access to firearms and mass human slaughter in the American landscape. Find an assault weapon, and you are likely to find a challenged white guy.

      However, those white guys fueling the nation’s resistance to humane immigration policies, to easy access to the polls to affect democratic change, to a racial reckoning and equal opportunity, to universal access to meaningful health care, and even to a comprehensive public health response to the pandemic are all on the same trains to nowhere, along with their gun nut buddies. Tragically, they enable America to fail and they empower each other to add critical mass to their efforts.

      Many of these white people live in neighborhoods with a lot of other white people, only some of whom share their views. Some live in more diverse neighborhoods or pockets of poverty where they often hide their views until, for some reason, they have had enough of “others” and snap. But a whole bunch of these white people were among the 74 million people who voted for Trump in the last election.

      Thwarting Efforts to Govern

      Worse yet, they and their Republican cohorts are now determined to thwart any Biden administration effort to govern. Governing is not the same thing as being a government. Governing is, in its most basic sense, the exercise of authority thru the making of policy and the administration of that policy. President Joe Biden often has the authority to act, but to exercise that authority within America’s constitutional framework requires collaboration with, and the cooperation of, other institutional elements of that framework.

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      Take immigration policy as an example, since there is often talk of “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Biden administration can determine policy and administer elements of that policy through executive action. It can humanely allow Latino children to enter the United States and then make sure that they have a bed, a blanket and enough food to sustain them. After that, figuring out how these immigrant minors should be processed and treated becomes much more complicated, unless it is viewed as a component of a much larger US immigration problem that requires “comprehensive reform.”

      Enter Congress, enter the Republicans in Congress, enter the white guys on the trains to nowhere and that comprehensive reform is almost certainly doomed. So, what happens to the children? With some luck, they disappear into the fabric of the world of undocumented immigrants striving to find a place in a nation where a lot of white guys don’t want them to be.

      Although the immigration example is bad enough, there is more bad news from the white guys on the trains to nowhere. They don’t seem to want anybody but themselves to have a go at voting. It would be nice to say that this effort will fail in that exceptional “model democracy” known as America. But hold on, the white guys have a plan: You change the voting rules to get better results. This is easier than changing the policies, programs and personalities that many of the voters rejected under the old rules.

      Just to make sure that nobody mistook the latest white guy effort at voter suppression for a serious effort to make voting easier, those wacky Republicans in the Georgia legislature, aided and abetted by the Republican governor, just criminalized providing food and water to their fellow citizens waiting in voting lines. That is, of course, only part of what they did, but enough to fully demonstrate the lengths to which the white guys on the trains to nowhere will go to preserve their shrinking political influence.

      You see, prior voting practices in Georgia often left voters of color waiting in longer lines than their white counterparts, so instead of legislating to reduce wait times for everybody, someone came up with the bright idea of making it harder to wait in line. (This plan will work even better if the white guys also make it a crime to sell those little cooler bags to anyone who isn’t a white guy.)

      The Key That Unlocks the Door

      I wish I were making this up, but I am not. The Biden administration’s capacity to govern is being challenged not by people who have a sincere agenda of constructive reform for the nation, but by those same kind of white guys on their trains to nowhere who have just criminalized giving grandma a drink of water while she waits in line to vote.

      Even some things as potentially lifesaving for white guys as wearing masks and seeking COVID-19 vaccines seem challenging to way too many of them. While they should overwhelmingly embrace these measures if for no other reason than if only people of color get vaccinated and white guys die off, their situation gets even more desperate. Yet the world has watched while many white guys on their trains to nowhere have overtly contributed to tens of thousands of COVID deaths in the US and continue to try to thwart coordinated government efforts to address the nation’s pandemic and public health crisis.

      For some reason, even their significant contribution to the deaths of so many has failed to pause the white guys on their trains to nowhere long enough to stand back so that those of good will in government have the space they need to function and the support they need to govern.

      For as long as the mindless obstruction continues, the nation’s governmental institutions will be significantly impeded from pursuing the long-delayed promise of a more just and equitable America. And it will be that much harder to demonstrate that good government is the key that unlocks the door.

      *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in Elections

      How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

      by

      Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in February. Katie Currid for The New York TimesMarketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious ramifications.“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the “deceptive design” genre.“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.How Refunds to Trump Donors Soared in 2020Refunds are shown as the percentage of money received by each operation to date via WinRed and ActBlue. More