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      What Will D.J.T. Do?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn Politics With Lisa LererWhat Will D.J.T. Do?That’s the question that could define the Republican Party for years to come, even as the president’s time in Washington winds down.Dec. 12, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETHi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.Credit…Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesA lot will change for Republicans when Joe Biden becomes president next month. But their party may still be defined by the same old question: What will Donald Trump do next?Since launching his bid for the White House in 2015, Mr. Trump has remade the Republican Party in his populist image, embracing far-right rhetoric, elevating once-fringe elements of the base and shifting conservative ideology on issues like foreign policy, immigration and trade.Republicans hailed his ability to achieve key pieces of their political agenda — like installing conservative judges and passing tax cuts — and stayed silent on the rest, fearing the backlash that could come from crossing the president. Those who criticized Mr. Trump quickly found themselves retiring, defeated or declaring themselves political independents.Now, Mr. Trump will depart Washington. And Republicans are wondering how much political influence Mr. Trump will take with him.“The reality is, none of us know,” said Chip Lake, a Georgia-based political consultant. “I’m not even so sure the president knows what a post-presidential Donald Trump looks like politically.”Already, there are signs that even in defeat, Mr. Trump continues to hold sway over his party. More than one hundred Republican members of Congress and 17 attorneys general backed a Texas lawsuit aimed at overturning the election results in four swing states and invalidating the votes of millions of Americans — despite no significant evidence of malfeasance. (The Supreme Court tossed out the suit on Friday night.)Across the country, Mr. Trump’s conspiracy-mongering about the election results has led to a civil war within the G.O.P. Trump loyalists in state parties, installed by the campaign in leadership posts last year, are battling with Republican elected officials, whom they see as insufficiently pursuing Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo his loss.Those tensions worry many Republican strategists, candidates and officials. Mr. Trump drove a record-breaking number of Republican voters to the polls this year, expanding the party’s support in rural areas and among voters of color. But it’s not clear whether the new voters who turned out for Mr. Trump will become loyal Republicans if he is not on the ticket — or if he is actively campaigning against the party’s candidates.Credit…Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesIn recent weeks, Mr. Trump has encouraged primary challenges against Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, prompting some loyal allies to muse about running against them. He has attacked Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, who is prevented from running for re-election by state term limits but has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2024.And then there’s the issue of Mr. Trump’s own ambitions. He’s been making plans to run again in 2024, with a kickoff as early as this month or perhaps on Inauguration Day. He’s raised more than $200 million since Election Day, funneling some of those funds into a new political action committee he formed after the election.As they often have during the Trump era, Republicans find themselves navigating uncharted political waters. Traditionally, ex-presidents shy away from partisan combat, wading back into the fray only for the final weeks of a general election.“Is Trump going to go out and basically announce an exploratory committee and start doing rallies? If that’s the case then I think he is able to maintain a pretty high boil,” said David Kochel, a former top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “If he doesn’t do that, it could be that the party is able to start to take steps away from the Trump presidency and entertain other leaders.”Some Republicans believe that as the fervor around the election fades, so could Mr. Trump’s influence. Others doubt whether he’ll remain focused on politics, given the financial and legal difficulties faced by his businesses and the diminished media coverage of his every move.“I personally believe that once he is out of office and gets back to running his business, that he may very well realize he likes doing that a lot more than he likes being president,” said Juliana Bergeron, a Republican National Committee member from New Hampshire.Credit…Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesShould Mr. Trump mount even a quasi-serious bid for a second term, he would freeze the large field of Republicans quietly plotting the beginnings of a presidential run. Some would-be candidates may be daunted by Mr. Trump’s grip on the party base, with his expansive email list, loyal supporters and growing war chest. Others may struggle to cast themselves as the bearers of the president’s legacy should Mr. Trump himself remain in the field.Another Trump campaign — or just the prospect of one — could also create difficult political crosscurrents for down-ballot Republican candidates, particularly those in battleground states.In 2022, the party will again have to defend Senate seats in a number of swing states — though having a Democrat in the White House should help their chances, given that the president’s party typically loses seats in the midterm elections. Some Republicans are eager to move past the divisiveness of the Trump era and embrace a message that can win back suburbanites in states like North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump has delighted in backing Republican primary challengers, picking loyalists who generally win the primaries but often lose competitive general election races. If he continues to meddle in primaries as an ex-president, the fear is that the party could end up with nominees who have little appeal beyond their own base.Of course, American politics aren’t as consistent as Mr. Trump’s hard-right political strategy. The country’s whims can shift quickly, and a political style that was revolutionary in 2016 could be retro by 2024.As Mr. Kochel put it, pointing to the swing Republicans made over four years from Mr. Romney to Mr. Trump: “We are always one nominee away from changing the party’s image and brand.”Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.Biden’s cabinet picks take heat from all sidesFighting over cabinet picks seems almost quaint after four years of the epic clashes of the Trump administration. Still, grass-roots activists, policy advocates and party leaders are finding plenty of fodder in Mr. Biden’s nominees.Environmental activists and anti-hunger advocates aren’t happy with Tom Vilsack’s potential return as head of the Agriculture Department. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are raising concerns about naming retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, a recently uniformed military commander, as defense secretary — the top civilian leadership post at the Pentagon. And Republicans are already threatening to hold up the confirmation of Xavier Becerra as secretary of health and human services, questioning his lack of public health expertise.At least a few — if not nearly all — of Mr. Biden’s nominees are likely to face opposition from Senate Republicans.Here’s our running list of Mr. Biden’s picks so you can follow along with the incoming administration.By the numbers: 17… That’s the number of Republican attorneys general who backed Mr. Trump in a brief filed with the Supreme Court that sought to delay the certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states the president lost. It was the latest attempt in Mr. Trump’s increasingly desperate effort to change the outcome of the election.Legal experts largely dismissed the lawsuit as a publicity stunt. And experts said that a statistical claim in the suit — that Mr. Biden’s chances of winning the four battleground states were “less than one in a quadrillion” — was “comical.”The Supreme Court rejected the suit on Friday night, saying Texas lacked standing to pursue the case.… SeriouslyLondon man, 91, receives Covid-19 vaccination. Complains about “rather nasty lunch” and not being able to “damn well find anywhere to park.” The best interview of the week.Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny Anymore

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ‘Trump Won’ Farce Isn’t Funny AnymoreRepublicans are now seriously arguing that elections are legitimate only when their side wins.Opinion ColumnistDec. 11, 2020Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo tell a joke to a crowd is to learn a little something about the people who laugh.For our purposes, the “joke” is President Trump’s ongoing fight to overturn the election results and hold on to power against the wishes of most Americans, including those in enough states to equal far more than the 270 electoral votes required to win the White House.“#OVERTURN,” he said on Twitter this week, adding in a separate post that “If somebody cheated in the Election, which the Democrats did, why wouldn’t the Election be immediately overturned? How can a Country be run like this?”Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for the country, he has not been able to bend reality to his desires. Key election officials and federal judges have refused his call to throw out votes, create chaos and clear a path for the autogolpe he hopes to accomplish. The military has also made clear where it stands. “We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech not long after the election.But there are others who — out of partisanship, opportunism or a simple taste for mayhem — have chosen to support the president’s attack on American democracy. They refuse to acknowledge the president’s defeat, back lawsuits to throw out the results, and spread lies about voter fraud and election malfeasance to Republican voters. They are laughing at Trump’s joke, not realizing (or not caring) that their laughter is infectious.What was a legal effort by the Trump campaign, for instance, is now one by the state of Texas, which has petitioned the Supreme Court to scrap election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, depriving Biden of his victory. Filed by Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general, the suit says it would be a violation of due process to accept the outcome in those states, on account of “election irregularities” and “interstate differences in the treatment of voters” that disadvantage Republican voters in areas with stricter voting rules.This lawsuit rests on the novel argument that the Constitution gives exclusive and unquestioned authority to state legislatures to appoint presidential electors as they see fit and renders any action to expand voting without direct legislative consent unconstitutional. The Supreme Court already rejected that argument once this week when it turned away a similar lawsuit by the Trump campaign to overturn the results in Pennsylvania.Regardless, on Wednesday, 17 Republican attorneys general filed a brief in support of Texas, urging the court, in essence, to cancel the election and hand power back to Trump. “Encroachments on the authority of state Legislatures by other state actors violate the separation of powers and threaten individual liberty,” reads the brief, which also claims that “States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States.” The next day, more than 100 Republican members of Congress filed a brief in support of this lawsuit, in effect declaring allegiance to Trump over the Constitution and urging the court to end self-government in the name of “the Framers.”Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesThere’s a paradox here. This sloppy, harebrained lawsuit has no serious chance of success. Granting Texas (and, by extension Trump, who joined the lawsuit) its relief would plunge the country into abject chaos, with violence sure to follow. That this quest is quixotic is, in all likelihood, one reason it has so much support. It is only with the knowledge of certain defeat that Republican officeholders feel comfortable plowing forward with an effort that would tear the United States apart if it succeeded. They can play politics with constitutional government (Paxton, for instance, hopes to succeed Greg Abbott as governor of Texas) knowing that the Supreme Court isn’t going to risk it all for Donald Trump.Then again, it was only two weeks before Election Day that four of the court’s conservatives announced their potential willingness to throw out votes on the basis of this theory of state legislative supremacy over electoral votes. It is very easy to imagine a world in which the election was a little closer, where the outcome came down to one state instead of three or four, and the court’s conservatives could use the conflict over a narrow margin to hand the president a second term.With no evidence that Republicans have really thought about the implications of a victory in the courts, I think we can say that these briefs and lawsuits are part of a performance, where the game is not to break kayfabe (the conceit, in professional wrestling, that what is fake is real). Still, we’ve learned something from this game, in the same way we learn something about an audience when it laughs.We have learned that the Republican Party, or much of it, has abandoned whatever commitment to electoral democracy it had to begin with. That it views defeat on its face as illegitimate, a product of fraud concocted by opponents who don’t deserve to hold power. That it is fully the party of minority rule, committed to the idea that a vote doesn’t count if it isn’t for its candidates, and that if democracy won’t serve its partisan and ideological interests, then so much for democracy.None of this is new — there is a whole tradition of reactionary, counter-majoritarian thought in American politics to which the conservative movement is heir — but it is the first time since the 1850s that these ideas have nearly captured an entire political party. And while the future is unwritten, the events of the past month make me worry that we’re following a script the climax of which requires a disaster.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit

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