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      The Election No One Seems to Want Is Coming Right at Us

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      Gail Collins: Hey, Bret, it really is 2024 now. Happy new year. And the race is on! Next week, the Iowa caucuses. After Iowa …Bret Stephens: Le déluge.Gail: OK, I want to hear your thoughts. Any chance Donald Trump won’t be the Republican nominee? Do you have a Nikki Haley scenario?Bret: Gail, my feelings about the G.O.P. primary contest are like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. After the 2022 midterms, when Trump’s favored candidates were more or less trounced and he looked like a total loser, I was in complete denial that he could win. Then, as his standing in the party failed to evaporate as I had predicted, I was angry: “Lock him up,” I wrote. Next came bargaining: I said he might be stopped if only Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and every other Republican dropped out of the race to endorse Haley.Gail: Stage four?Bret: Now I’m just depressed. After he takes back the White House in November, I guess acceptance will have to follow. Is there a stage six? Does eternal damnation come next?Gail: I don’t accept acceptance! Come on: I know Joe Biden isn’t the most electric candidate in history. We’re all obsessed with his age. But he isn’t under multitudinous indictments, charged with trying to overthrow the democratic process or in a stupendous personal financial collapse.We may wind up going through this every week for the next 10 months, but I’m sticking with my Biden re-election prediction.Bret: Saying Biden can win is like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the revolver instead of the traditional one. You might be right. Or we end up like Christopher Walken at the end of “The Deer Hunter.”Gail: Ewww.Bret: It isn’t just that Trump is running ahead of Biden now in the overall race, according to RealClearPolitics’ average of polls. It’s that he’s running ahead of him in the states that matter: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin. I don’t quite understand all of these Democrats who say Trump is an existential threat to decency, democracy and maybe life on the planet and then insist they’re sticking with Biden instead of another candidate. It’s like refusing to seek better medical care for a desperately sick child because the family doctor is a nice old man whose feelings might get hurt if you left his practice.At a minimum, can we please replace Kamala Harris on the ticket with someone more, er, confidence-inspiring? Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan? Or Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland? Come on, why not?Gail: Real-world answer is that Harris hasn’t done anything wrong. You don’t dump a hard-working, loyal veep who also happens to be a woman and a minority just because you think there might be somebody better out there somewhere.Bret: Saying Harris hasn’t done anything wrong leaves out two more salient questions: What has she done well? And does she add to or detract from the ticket’s electability?Gail: Let’s go back to Biden. We all know the problems. But he’s done a good job. The economic recovery is going well. And did you hear his speech on Friday? I know he’s not a great orator, but he made it clear that he’s going to campaign against Trump very, very, very hard.Bret: Well, let’s hope it doesn’t kill him. In the meantime, your thoughts about Trump potentially being disqualified from running in Maine and Colorado?Gail: While I love the idea of his role in Jan. 6 making him an insurrectionist who’s constitutionally not permitted to run for president, I have to admit the whole thing makes me very nervous.You don’t take care of the Trump problem by evicting him from the ballot. He has to be defeated or it’ll be a rallying cry for his many crazy supporters that could split the country in two.Am I being too much of a downer here?Bret: Couldn’t agree with you more. The decisions are wrong, pernicious, misjudged, arrogant and guaranteed to backfire.Gail: Great string of adjectives there. Go on.Bret: If Eugene Debs could run for president in 1920 from prison after he was convicted of sedition, why shouldn’t Trump be able to run for president without having been convicted of anything? If Trump can be kicked off the ballot in blue states on account of a highly debatable finding of “insurrection,” then what’s to stop red state judges or other officials kicking Biden off on their own flimsy findings? And on what basis can liberals continue to argue that Trump or Republicans represent a threat to democracy when they are the ones engaged in an attempt to deny tens of millions of voters their choice for president?Gail: Speaking for liberals, I agree. But I also commend Biden for trying to make Trump’s outrageous, dangerous behavior on Jan. 6 a campaign issue.Bret: The Supreme Court should overturn the Colorado court, swiftly and unanimously, and let voters choose the next president. Maybe at Harvard, too, while we’re at it.Gail: Hmm, do I detect an issue that’s really on your mind? Have to admit Claudine Gay’s problems at Harvard haven’t been at the top of my obsession list. But are you ready to rant?Bret: Yes, particularly about a tweet that The Associated Press sent out the other day that seems to capture a particular kind of inanity. It read: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” Maybe this “weapon” wouldn’t have been so injurious to Gay if she hadn’t violated a cardinal academic rule more than three dozen times or been at the top of an institution that is supposed to uphold strict intellectual integrity.I also think the episode is a good opportunity for universities to try to rethink what their core mission ought to be. For starters, they should reread the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report and get out of the business of making political statements of any kind. They should foster more intellectual diversity in their faculties and student bodies. And they need to downsize and restrain their administrative side, particularly the thought police in their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office.Gail: Let me pick out a sliver of agreement here. This country has long had a crippling system of higher education in which kids could get very expensive loans very easily. Sometimes from smarmy private lenders who needed to be shut down and sometimes well-intentioned government-backed ones. But either way, ambitious young people were encouraged to borrow tons of money, and then left with hopeless piles of debt.And all that cash flowing in allowed universities to grow way too much, particularly in areas like administration.Bret: If we keep agreeing this much, the world might end.Gail: University heads have a lot of roles. Representing inclusivity is a worthy one. We’re moving into an era when schools can no longer consider race as its own factor in admissions. But they have to keep finding ways to make sure their student bodies aren’t totally dominated by well-heeled white kids. One strategy is having high-profile administrators and professors who represent a good mix of race, background, special interests, etc.Bret: Sure.Gail: Claudine Gay was an attractive choice on that front. Her performance at that hearing on antisemitism was a disaster, I think in part because she was used to appearing in very different contexts, and didn’t expect her generalizations about inclusivity to be so sharply attacked. Her mistake.Bret: Part of the problem here is that diversity, equity and inclusion went from being a set of worthy aspirations to a bureaucratic and self-serving apparatus with a highly ideological, polarizing and often exclusionary concept of its own mission.Gail: Think you’re leaving me behind here. But go on.Bret: Another part of the problem is that, while diversity is a fine goal, it needs to be in service to the university’s central mission of intellectual challenge and excellence, not at cross-purposes with it. My biggest problem with Gay wasn’t her plagiarism or even her disastrous testimony to Congress. It was her thin academic record: 11 published papers and not a single book in 26 years. I hope her successor is a model of scholarship, irrespective of race or gender.But getting back to politics, Gail, give me your advice on how Biden should run his campaign.Gail: Did you hear his Jan. 6 speech, the one I mentioned earlier? I thought it was pretty good. Best way for him to get past the age issue is to be feisty, take Trump head on. Make the Donald mad — because when he gets mad, he tends to sound more demented than Biden at his worst.Bret: The “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” approach. I like it.Gail: Our president should remind the country of all the good stuff that’s happened under his administration. Including the large economic improvement. And the country’s struggle against that huge jump in the national debt created by Trump’s tax breaks for the rich.Bret: Biden needs an ad campaign in the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s “There Is a Bear in the Woods.” In one ad, people would constantly wake up to a jackhammer, a chain saw or a car alarm, to remind them of what it was like to wake up to whatever Trump had tweeted at 2 in the morning. In another, parents have to deal with a petulant and boastful 12-year-old boy who’s constantly lying to them. A third would just be footage of Trump lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, not to mention Hezbollah.At the end of each ad, a voice that sounds like Tommy Lee Jones’s would ask the question: “Some people want four more years of this — do you?”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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Liz Cheney Implores Republicans to Reject Trump

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      She endorsed efforts to remove him from the ballot and said, “Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation.”In a flurry of appearances and commentary, former Representative Liz Cheney has stepped up her denunciations of former President Donald J. Trump in a last-ditch effort to persuade Republicans not to nominate him again.“Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation,” Ms. Cheney told primary voters in New Hampshire on Friday, in a speech at Dartmouth College’s Democracy Summit. “Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican Party.”A day later, she blasted Mr. Trump’s suggestion on the campaign trail that the Civil War could have been prevented if President Abraham Lincoln had “negotiated.”“Which part of the Civil War ‘could have been negotiated’? The slavery part? The secession part? Whether Lincoln should have preserved the Union?” she wrote on X. “Question for members of the G.O.P. — the party of Lincoln — who have endorsed Donald Trump: How can you possibly defend this?”And in an interview on Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS News, she denounced Mr. Trump’s attempts to end or delay his criminal trials by arguing that he had immunity against charges related to anything he did in office. She endorsed efforts to remove him from ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.“I certainly believe that Donald Trump’s behavior rose to that level,” she said, referring to Section 3’s disqualification of people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it. (She made a similar comment at Dartmouth, saying, “There’s no question in my mind that his actions clearly constituted an offense that is within the language of the 14th Amendment.”)“I think that there’s no basis for an assertion that the president of the United States is completely immune from criminal prosecution for acts in office,” she added of Mr. Trump’s appeals on that front. “He’s trying to delay his trial because he doesn’t want people to see the witnesses who will testify against him,” she continued.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said on Sunday: “Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying in order to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”Ms. Cheney turned against Mr. Trump in response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. As a member of the House, she was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him and one of two who served on the committee that investigated the attack. She lost her Republican primary overwhelmingly in 2022.Of all the states holding early primaries and caucuses, New Hampshire — where Ms. Cheney spoke on Friday — is the most fertile ground for Trump opponents, thanks to its voters’ moderate tendencies and the fact that independents can vote in the Republican race. Mr. Trump leads his nearest challenger there, Nikki Haley, by about 13 percentage points — a large margin, but substantially smaller than the roughly 30 points by which he leads Ron DeSantis in Iowa and Ms. Haley in South Carolina.Voting will begin in just one week, when Iowa Republicans hold their caucuses on Jan. 15. The New Hampshire primary comes next, on Jan. 23, followed by Nevada and South Carolina in February.Ms. Cheney told the audience at Dartmouth that her own plans depended on whether Republican voters heeded her call.As she has done on several occasions, she left open the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if they nominate Mr. Trump. But at the same time, she indicated a preference for President Biden over Mr. Trump, saying that while she disagreed with Mr. Biden on policy matters, “Our nation can survive and recover from policy mistakes. We cannot recover from a president willing to torch the Constitution.”“I’m going to do whatever the most effective thing is to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected,” she added. “I’ll make a decision about what that is in the coming months as we see what happens in the Republican primaries.”A spokesman for Ms. Cheney did not respond to a message asking whether she planned to make an endorsement in the primaries. More

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      Trump Takes Aim at Haley as Primary Enters Final Phase in Iowa

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      Nearly a week before the state’s caucuses, a frenzy of campaigning belies a seemingly static G.O.P. race, with former President Donald J. Trump the prohibitive front-runner.Donald J. Trump’s escalating attacks on Nikki Haley both on the airwaves and at his rallies — criticisms she likened Saturday to “a temper tantrum” — captured the turbulent dynamics in the final week before the first votes of the 2024 Republican presidential primary are cast.Mr. Trump, Ms. Haley and Ron DeSantis fanned out across Iowa this weekend to make their case before the state’s caucuses on Jan. 15 in a frenetic burst of activity as voters endured an unending barrage of mailers, TV ads and door knockers.But the late gust of campaigning belies a Republican race that has remained stubbornly static for months despite unfolding under the most extraordinary of circumstances. Mr. Trump remains the party’s prohibitive front-runner, even as he stares down legal jeopardy in the form of 91 felony counts spread across four criminal cases.For months, the date of the Iowa caucuses has been circled on Republican calendars as the first and one of the best opportunities for those hoping to slow Mr. Trump’s march toward a rematch with President Biden. Iowa Republicans, after all, were some of the few voters in the party to reject Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary.But the former president’s two top rivals — Ms. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, and Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor — continue to thrash each other as much as Mr. Trump, though both are badly trailing him in most polls.Nikki Haley, left, the former governor of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, have attacked each other as much as they have Mr. Trump, even though most polling shows him leading them both by wide margins.Brian Snyder/ReutersThe leading pro-Haley super PAC has spent more than $13 million attacking Mr. DeSantis in Iowa since December, including one recent mailer that features Mr. Trump’s distinctive blond hair photoshopped onto Mr. DeSantis, calling the governor “unoriginal” and “too lame to lead.” A pro-DeSantis super PAC, meanwhile, has funded more than $8 million worth of attacks in Iowa on Ms. Haley since November, with ads calling her “Tricky Nikki Haley” and condemning her positions on China and transgender rights.“It’s literally a circular firing squad for second place,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist who managed Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign. “Trump is the de facto incumbent nominee of the party, and if you want to beat an incumbent, you have to give a fireable offense. Their effort has been abysmal at delivering a fireable offense.”On the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol on Saturday, Mr. Trump indulged in the same lies about the results of the last election that were at the center of the violent uprising, and described those imprisoned for their roles in the attack as “J6 hostages.” But his leading G.O.P. rivals, ever wary of crossing a Trump-aligned party base even as the election nears, left the anniversary mostly unremarked upon. And it was Mr. Biden who on Friday used the occasion to pitch Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency.Chris McAnich, who was at Mr. Trump’s event in Newton, Iowa, on Saturday wearing his white “Trump Caucus Captain” hat, said he had specifically attended because of the Jan. 6 date.“He did not incite a riot, and that’s kind of why I’m here, on Jan. 6, to say I’m with Trump and stick a thumb in their eye,” Mr. McAnich said.A Trump rally in Clinton, Iowa, on Saturday, the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Trump has described those imprisoned for their roles in the attack as “J6 hostages.”Tannen Maury/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA confident Mr. Trump continued to throw punches at a range of Republicans, including the late Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war whom Mr. Trump infamously mocked in 2015 when he said, “I like people who weren’t captured.” In Newton on Saturday, Mr. Trump brought up Mr. McCain’s vote against repealing the health care law known as Obamacare.“John McCain for some reason couldn’t get his arm up that day,” Mr. Trump said, mimicking Mr. McCain’s thumbs-down gesture. Mr. McCain had sustained injuries during his imprisonment that limited his arm mobility.Entering 2024, Ms. Haley appeared to be gaining momentum, consolidating support among more moderate Republicans. She announced this week that she had hauled in $24 million in the fourth quarter, a major infusion of cash at a critical juncture. The political network founded by the industrialist Koch brothers said it was plunging another $27 million into aiding Ms. Haley, including the first spending in Super Tuesday states.But she has made some verbal stumbles in recent days as a brighter spotlight shines on her. She suggested that New Hampshire would “correct” Iowa’s vote and that “you change personalities” as the calendar turns to the second voting state, miscues that Mr. DeSantis’s operation hopes he can capitalize on as the battle for second place has raged in Iowa. The DeSantis campaign was texting the quotes to Iowans over the weekend.Mr. Trump slashed at Ms. Haley, much as he has Mr. DeSantis, for daring to run against him after she said she would not. “Nikki would sell you out just like she sold me out,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. The day before, he accused her of being “in the pocket” of “establishment donors,” and of being a “globalist.”“She likes the globe,” Mr. Trump said. “I like America first.”Mr. Trump’s pivot to Ms. Haley after months of unrelenting attacks on Mr. DeSantis signaled a new phase in the race. Ms. Haley is threatening not only to eclipse Mr. DeSantis for second place in Iowa but also to compete with Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, where independent voters are giving her a lift in a state with an open primary.Since mid-December, Mr. Trump’s super PAC has spent more than $5 million hitting Ms. Haley in New Hampshire — after spending nothing, federal records show. Mr. Trump’s campaign is now on the airwaves there, too.“Isn’t that sweet of him spending so much time and money against me?” Ms. Haley said on Fox News on Friday after she was shown a Trump ad attacking her on immigration.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who has endorsed Ms. Haley and campaigned with her in Iowa this week, said in an interview that Mr. Trump was “scared.”“He’s seeing exactly what we’re seeing,” Mr. Sununu said. “She’s moving. He’s not. She has momentum. He doesn’t. She’s getting people excited. He’s yesterday’s news.”Ms. Haley campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday. She is threatening not only to eclipse Mr. DeSantis for second place in the state but also to compete with Mr. Trump in New Hampshire.Rachel Mummey/ReutersMr. Trump’s team is hoping that a string of early and decisive victories, starting in Iowa and then in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, will help make him the presumptive nominee by March, when most of the delegates he needs to secure the nomination are up for grabs. The former president has reliably led in national polling by landslide margins for many months. The indictments at the center of Mr. Trump’s legal vulnerability have so far served only to strengthened him politically, with Republicans consistently rallying to his defense.Mr. Trump’s advisers have said that, in some ways, they are battling complacency as much as they are his rivals, with surveys showing him so far ahead. “Don’t go by the polls,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday, urging Iowa Republicans to turn out despite his lead to send a “thundering message” that will resonate through November.“It is effectively over,” said David Bossie, a Republican National Committee member who oversaw the debates process for the party and was a Trump campaign adviser. “It’s been effectively over since the beginning. This has never been a real race.”Still, millions of dollars are being plunged into the race by all sides. Mr. Trump’s super PAC recently produced a mailer in New Hampshire that counterintuitively links Ms. Haley to Mr. Trump. The mailer calls her “a BIG supporter of Trump’s MAGA Agenda.” It then tries to attack former Gov. Chris Christie as “an anti-Trump Republican.”The twist, according to a person working for the super PAC, is that the mailer went exclusively to independent voters in New Hampshire who have voted in Democratic primaries. The idea is that tying Ms. Haley to Mr. Trump will lure those independents to Mr. Christie, which could help the former president stay ahead of Ms. Haley.It’s just one example of the flurry of tactical maneuvers and advertisements that is now so omnipresent in the early states that one pro-DeSantis ad played on television screens in an Iowa venue on Saturday while Ms. Haley was speaking.Mr. Trump’s decision to bypass all the debates so far has left his rivals to fight among themselves. On Wednesday, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are set for their first one-on-one debate, on CNN. Mr. Trump has scheduled an overlapping town hall on Fox News.Ms. Haley, who has made the case that a Trump nomination will bring too much “chaos,” tried to goad the former president onto the debate stage at a town hall in Indianola, Iowa, urging him to “stop acting like Biden” and stop hiding.Mr. DeSantis, who has struggled for months to find an effective message that draws a contrast with Mr. Trump, may have landed on one in the waning days: “Donald Trump is running for his issues. Nikki Haley is running for her donors’ issues. I’m running for your issues.”The Iowa caucuses are quirky. There are no traditional polling places that are open all day. Instead, on a Monday evening of a holiday weekend, more than 1,500 precincts will open in the evening for in-person gatherings that can include speeches and lobbying among neighbors. Temperatures are projected to be in the single digits.The exercise can advantage the most organized campaigns, and Mr. DeSantis is banking that his super PAC’s much-discussed door-knocking operation will pay late dividends.“It’s never in our business inevitable,” said Beth Hansen, who managed former Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 Republican run for president. “But we don’t know what it is that is going to change this paradigm. And I don’t think it exists inside the current set of arrows the candidates are using in the quiver.”Kellen Browning More

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      Trump Doesn’t Actually Speak for the Silent Majority

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      I can’t fit everything that I think into a single piece, especially when I’m writing on deadline. My column this week, for example, was on the effort to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Although the piece is not exactly brief, it’s by no means exhaustive of my thoughts on the matter.There was one point in particular that I couldn’t quite fit into the flow. It concerns an assumption that, in my view, undergirds much of the discourse around Trump and his voters.It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024

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      In dueling sets of speeches, Donald Trump and President Biden are framing the election as a battle for the future of democracy — with Mr. Trump brazenly casting Mr. Biden as the true menace.Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Fact-Checking Trump and Others’ Sparring Over Social Security and Medicare

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      The top presidential candidates are vowing to protect the entitlement programs for current seniors, though some have floated changes for younger generations. But they’ve muddied each other’s current positions.Top contenders for the 2024 presidential election in recent weeks have accused each other of jeopardizing Social Security and Medicare, key entitlement programs for seniors.The future of the programs has been fodder for endless political debate — and distortions — because of the long-term financial challenges they face.Social Security’s main trust fund is currently projected to be depleted in 2033, meaning the program would then be able to pay only about three-quarters of total scheduled benefits. Medicare, for its part, is at risk of not having enough money to fully pay hospitals by 2031.President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are among the candidates zeroing in on those vulnerabilities, often by referring to one another’s previous positions.Here’s a fact-check.WHAT WAS SAID“Trump in 2020: We will be cutting Social Security and Medicare”— Biden campaign in a December social media post that includes a clip of Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. The Biden campaign has repeatedly claimed that cutting the programs is one of Mr. Trump’s policies. But while Mr. Trump has in the past suggested he might entertain trims to entitlements, he has repeatedly vowed during his campaign to protect the programs.In this case, the Biden campaign shared a short clip of Mr. Trump during a Fox News town hall in March 2020 and ignored his clarification at the time.The clip shows a Fox News host, Martha MacCallum, telling Mr. Trump, “If you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”“Oh, we’ll be cutting, but we’re also going to have growth like you’ve never had before,” Mr. Trump responded.The Trump administration immediately walked back his comments and said he was referring to cutting deficits. “I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past 3 years,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post a day later.During his time in office, Mr. Trump did propose some cuts to Medicare — though experts said the cost reductions would not have significantly affected benefits — and to Social Security’s programs for people with disabilities. They were not enacted by Congress.Like other candidates, including Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has shifted his positions over time. In a 2000 book, Mr. Trump suggested, for people under 40, raising the age for receiving full Social Security retirement benefits to 70. Before that, he said he was open to the idea of privatizing the program, even if he did not like the concept. He no longer advances those positions.Former President Donald J. Trump suggested that the government could avert Social Security changes by expanding drilling, but experts say that would not be enough revenue.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLast January, the former president said in a video that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” But he has not outlined a clear plan for keeping the programs solvent. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump suggested last month that the government could avert any Social Security changes by expanding drilling in the United States, but experts say that is not feasible.“Dedicating current oil and gas leasing revenues to Social Security would cover less than 4 percent of its shortfall, and it would be impossible to fix Social Security even if all federal land were opened to drilling operations,” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.WHAT WAS SAID“And unlike Ron DeSanctimonious, we will always protect Social Security and Medicare for our great seniors. He wanted to knock the hell out of Social Security and Medicare.”— Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in mid-DecemberThis is misleading. While in Congress, Mr. DeSantis supported budget frameworks that proposed raising the full Social Security retirement age to 70, but leaving the early retirement age the same. As a presidential candidate, he has said he would not cut Social Security for seniors but has at times expressed openness to changes for younger people without specifying what those are.Currently, workers are eligible for their full benefits at their full retirement age, which varies from 66 to 67 depending on year of birth. But recipients can qualify for reduced benefits as early as age 62.As a Florida congressman, Mr. DeSantis did vote for Republican budget proposals — which would not have changed the law on their own — that supported gradually raising the full retirement age for Social Security to 70. The proposals did not call for changing the early retirement age.Gov. Ron DeSantis has not made clear his plans for Medicare as he runs for president.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe proposals also called for changes to Medicare, including by eventually increasing its retirement age to 67 or 70, from 65, and transitioning the program to “premium support,” in which the government would provide payments for seniors to shop for various health care plans.Mr. DeSantis has not made clear his plans for Medicare as he runs for president, but he has often rejected the idea of changing Social Security. “We’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans, I think that that’s pretty clear,” he said in March.That said, he has signaled openness to adjusting the program for younger people. In a July interview on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis said, “Talking about making changes for people in their 30s or 40s, so that the program’s viable, you know, that’s a much different thing, and that’s something that I think there’s going to need to be discussions on.”The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.WHAT WAS SAID“Nikki Haley, she has claimed that the retirement age is way, way, way too low. That’s what she said. So you’ve got a lot of people that have worked hard their whole life. Life expectancy is declining in this country. It’s tragic, but it’s true. So to look at those demographic trends and say that you would jack it up so that people are not going to be able to have benefits. I mean, I don’t know why she’s saying that.”— Mr. DeSantis on CNN last monthThis needs context. Life expectancy in the United States dropped during the coronavirus pandemic, but it is inching back up. And Ms. Haley has only called for changes to Social Security for younger people — not unlike what Mr. DeSantis himself has entertained.“The way we deal with it is, we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in, but we go to people, like my kids in their 20s, when they’re coming into the system, and we say, ‘The rules have changed,’” Ms. Haley said in an August interview with Bloomberg. “We change retirement age to reflect life expectancy.”Ms. Haley did not specify what the new retirement age should be. “What we do know is 65 is way too low, and we need to increase that,” she said when pressed. “We need to do it according to life expectancy.”Nikki Haley has suggested changing the Social Security retirement age for younger generations.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMs. Haley also called for determining benefit adjustments based on inflation, rather than the current cost-of-living calculation, and limiting benefits for the wealthy.On Medicare, Ms. Haley has proposed expanding Medicare Advantage, under which private companies provide plans and are paid by the government to cover the beneficiary.Yet for 2023, the government was projected to spend $27 billion more for Medicare Advantage plans than if those enrollees were in traditional Medicare. Experts note that expanding Medicare Advantage while achieving overall savings would require structural changes that would be politically challenging to implement.“It would require a change in payment policy that would likely run into fierce opposition,” said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president at the health nonprofit KFF and executive director for its program on Medicare policy.Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com. More

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      Trump Targets Nikki Haley in Sharpest Attacks Yet

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday opened one of his most targeted lines of attack yet against Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who has emerged as one of his top competitors for the Republican nomination, accusing her of being “in the pocket” of “establishment donors.”At a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Mr. Trump denounced Ms. Haley as the choice of corporate elites and the political establishment. Ms. Haley has received significant financial support from wealthy donors on Wall Street and in the tech world, including the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, who is a major Democratic donor.“Nikki Haley’s campaign is being funded by Biden donors,” Mr. Trump said to hundreds of attendees at an event space about 20 miles from the South Dakota border, referring to Ms. Haley as a “globalist.”“She likes the globe. I like America first,” Mr. Trump said, adding that the “establishment losers and sellouts lagging far behind us in the Republican primary can’t be trusted on taxes or trade or anything else. They’re globalists, and they always will be.”Mr. Trump also cited Ms. Haley’s recent missteps on the campaign trail, in particular her response last week to a question in New Hampshire about the causes of the Civil War. Ms. Haley did not mention slavery in her answer.“She does not have what it takes,” Mr. Trump said.A spokeswoman for the Haley campaign, Nachama Soloveichik, said, “If Trump feels so strongly about his false attacks, he should stop hiding and defend them on the debate stage in Des Moines.” She added that Mr. Trump “probably doesn’t remember that Nikki Haley passed one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration laws in the country in 2011, because he was still a New York City liberal.”Mr. Trump’s increased scrutiny of Ms. Haley reflects her improved standing in the race over the past few months. For most of last year, his fiercest criticism was reserved for Mr. DeSantis, but Ms. Haley has risen in polling throughout the fall and winter. Mr. Trump continues to lead both candidates by wide margins in state and national polls.Mr. Trump argued that his “Make America Great Again” movement had rescued the Republican Party from an elite political class intent on regaining influence by keeping him out of office.“There’s no chance we’re going to let them claw their way back to power,” Mr. Trump said. More

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      Majorie Taylor Greene Book-Signing on Jan. 6 Stirs Backlash in Florida

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      A Florida venue canceled an event on Saturday featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman and acolyte of Donald J. Trump, after materials promoting the event advertised it, in part, as an occasion marking the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The gathering was being organized by the Osceola County Republican Party in central Florida as a book-signing event for Ms. Greene. It was supposed to take place on Saturday at the Westgate Resorts in Kissimmee, Fla. But backlash ensued after State Representative Anna V. Eskamani, a Democrat, posted on social media a screenshot of a text that advertised the event as being on the “3rd Anniversary of Jan 6.”Ms. Greene has repeatedly downplayed, and at times defended, the deadly insurrection at the Capitol three years ago. She has elevated popular right-wing claims, which have been refuted, that the attack was orchestrated by F.B.I. agents. In November, she called on House Speaker Mike Johnson to create a new Jan. 6 select committee to investigate the original committee’s members.Ms. Greene addressed the change in venue on Friday night, writing on the social media platform X that she won’t be backing down to Democrats who she claimed “tried to shut down my book-signing, but the show must go on!!”Mark Cross, the chairman of the Osceola County Republican Party, said he had first received notice that the venue had pulled out on Thursday evening. He attributed the cancellation to a “combination of disinformation that was put out and a lot of miscommunication between parties.”The theme of the event was meant to honor Republican women, Mr. Cross said, and the event “just happened to be on Jan. 6.” He added, “We’re not going out of the way to celebrate Jan. 6 — it’s something that happened. It was a negative thing for everyone involved.” He noted that the group “didn’t pick the day.”A representative for the resort confirmed that the event was no longer taking place there but declined to elaborate. “Please be advised that Westgate was not made aware of the purpose of this event when we were approached to host a book-signing,” Westgate Resorts said in a statement to NBC News, which first reported on the event. The party’s book-signing for Ms. Greene will now take place on Saturday at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in St. Cloud, Fla., Mr. Cross said.The event was originally advertised as an opportunity for attendees to hear from Ms. Greene and receive signed copies of her book, “M.T.G.” Prices to attend started at $45 for general admission and went up to $1,000 for “super V.I.P.s,” who would be allowed to attend a “special private briefing on J6 and DC.”Ms. Eskamani said in an interview that she was sent screenshots of the text by two friends. She praised Floridians who had “created the backlash” that preceded the cancellation of the event at the resort.“When I saw that text message, my first reaction was, ‘Is this a joke?’” she said. “No one should be commemorating, in a celebratory fashion or even with a book-signing, Jan. 6.” More