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      The Speakership Is Yours, Mike Johnson. Good Luck With That.

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      That House speaker mess was all Donald Trump’s fault. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re not going to argue with me if I blame him for something bad. (“Saturday night’s block party was canceled because of the threat of rain and … Donald Trump.”) Still, follow this thought.The House Republicans are a rancorous crew, and they’ve got only a nine-member majority, one of the tightest in recent history. We’ve been hearing all week that a mere five rebels can halt progress on anything, even a basic task like electing a speaker. Interesting how narrow that majority is. Normally, in nonpresidential-election years, the party that didn’t win the White House gets a lift — often a huge one. Some voters are looking for balance, others are just kinda bored. Given the deeply nonelectric nature of Joe Biden’s victory, you’d figure the Republicans would have made a scary sweep in 2022.But no — and one of the reasons was the completely loopy candidates running on Republican lines in districts that should have been up for grabs. Some had been handpicked by Trump, like Bo Hines, a 28-year-old former college football star who moved into a North Carolina swing district a month before the May primary, won the nomination with the ex-president’s enthusiastic support and then, well, went down the drain.Trump endorsed three candidates in tossup districts last year; all of them lost. Plus there were lots of other dreadful Trump-backed contenders on the ballots — like Mehmet Oz, the longtime New Jersey resident who ran a disastrous race for the Senate in Pennsylvania and almost certainly pulled down the rest of his party’s ticket.POP QUIZ:Donald Trump, who’s facing 91 criminal charges around the country, is now on trial in New York for falsifying records to make himself look like an, um, non-failure in the real estate business. This week, he compared himself to a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner who served time in prison for his battles against apartheid. (“I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela, because I’m doing it for a reason.”) He’s also compared himself to:A) Abraham LincolnB) JesusC) George WashingtonD) The Mona LisaThe answer is everybody but Jesus. And he did recently post a sketch on Truth Social showing Christ next to him in the courtroom.All that flailing around over selecting a House speaker was due, in part, to the Republicans’ failure to corral their Flimsy Five around any of the original contenders. But it was also very, very much about Trump’s lack of enthusiasm for logical candidates like Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, who’d made the dreaded mistake of voting to certify the results of the last presidential election.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump declaimed. “RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement.”RINO, of course, stands for Republican in Name Only, something Trump has truly hated ever since he registered as a Republican in Manhattan back in 1987. Until he registered with the Independence Party in 1999, followed by the Democratic Party in 2001. But hey, he became a Republican again in 2009, then dropped his party affiliation in 2011, and switched back to being a Republican in 2012. There is absolutely no reason to imagine he would ever switch again. Unless, you know, there was something in it for him.Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who finally won the speaker’s job, is exactly the kind of guy you’d expect to come up on top. Right-wing anti-abortion activist who gets along with his colleagues and who, crucially, has items in his résumé that won Trump’s heart. A former radio talk show host who helped lead the Republicans’ battle to overturn the election results! What could be more perfect?“GET IT DONE, FAST! LOVE, DJT!” our ex-president posted on Truth Social.(Earlier, once Emmer had crashed, Trump praised all the possible successors to the ousted Kevin McCarthy as “fine and very talented men.” Quick question: What’s missing in that description? One minor detail — the candidate swarm was notably lacking in female representation. Just saying.)So the beat goes on. Mike Johnson’s friends are celebrating. Much of the rest of the nation is wondering why the heck anybody would ever want to be speaker of the House with its current crush of Republican crazies.Welcome to your new job, Mike. Hope you enjoyed your big day. Just remember that it won’t be long before Congress has to pass another bill to keep the government operating or send the country teetering into disaster.Details, details.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Speaker Mike Johnson Helped Efforts to Overturn The 2020 Election

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      If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, the newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.The election on Wednesday of Mr. Johnson, 51, to the post second in line to the presidency has focused new attention on his behind-the-scenes role in trying to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump.A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results.In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Mr. Johnson persuaded more than 60 percent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them that the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and that the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would defend him.A constitutional lawyer, Mr. Johnson was also a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.In 2020, Mr. Johnson embraced Mr. Trump’s wild and false claims of fraud. In a radio interview, he asserted that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”Mr. Johnson also falsely claimed the election was “rigged.”“You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” Mr. Johnson said.No credible evidence has ever emerged to support the conspiracy theories about Dominion and another voting machine firm having helped to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit by Dominion over reports broadcast by Fox that Dominion machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.After a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and injured about 150 police officers, Mr. Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory.He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans, and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue that he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results.“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.Mr. Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.In an interview this year, he referred to Mr. Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here.”Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.“He started providing advice to me,” Mr. Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”In 2020, the two men and their wives traveled to Israel together and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Mr. Johnson has also made a close ally of Mr. Trump, and he served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team.On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called. Mr. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Mr. Johnson recounting the exchange.“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Mr. Trump told him.“Indeed we do, sir!” Mr. Johnson said he replied.Karoun Demirjian More

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      Trump’s Lawyers Are Going Down. Is He?

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      On Tuesday morning, Jenna Ellis became the third Donald Trump-allied lawyer to plead guilty in Fulton County, Ga., to state criminal charges related to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. She joins Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro in similar pleas, with each of them receiving probation and paying a small fine, and each of them cooperating with the prosecution in its remaining cases against Trump and his numerous co-defendants.The Ellis, Powell and Chesebro guilty pleas represent an advance for both the state election prosecution in Georgia and the federal election prosecution in Washington. While their guilty pleas came in the Georgia case (they’re not charged in the federal prosecution, though Powell and Chesebro have been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case), the information they disclose could be highly relevant to Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump.Perhaps as important, or even more important, the three attorneys’ admissions may prove culturally and politically helpful to those of us who are attempting to break the fever of conspiracy theories that surround the 2020 election and continue to empower Trump today. At the same time, however, it’s far too soon to tell whether the prosecution has made real progress on Trump himself. The ultimate importance of the plea deals depends on the nature of the testimony from the lawyers, and we don’t yet know what they have said — or will say.To understand the potential significance of these plea agreements, it’s necessary to understand the importance of Trump’s legal team to Trump’s criminal defense. As I’ve explained in various pieces, and as the former federal prosecutor Ken White explained to me when I guest-hosted Ezra Klein’s podcast, proof of criminal intent is indispensable to the criminal cases against Trump, both in Georgia and in the federal election case. While the specific intent varies depending on the charge, each key claim requires proof of conscious wrongdoing — such as an intent to lie or the “intent to have false votes cast.”One potential element of Trump’s intent defense in the federal case is that he was merely following the advice of lawyers. In other words, how could he possess criminal intent when he simply did what his lawyers told him to do? He’s not the one who is expected to know election laws. They are.According to court precedent that governs the federal case, a defendant can use advice of counsel as a defense against claims of criminal intent if he can show that he “made full disclosure of all material facts to his attorney” before he received the advice, and that “he relied in good faith on the counsel’s advice that his course of conduct was legal.”There is a price, though, for presenting an advice-of-counsel defense. The defendant waives attorney-client privilege, opening up both his oral and written communications with his lawyers to scrutiny by a judge and a jury. There is no question that a swarm of MAGA lawyers surrounded Trump at each step of the process, much like a cloud of dirt surrounds the character Pigpen in the “Peanuts” cartoons, but if the lawyers themselves have admitted to engaging in criminal conduct, then that weakens his legal defense. This was no normal legal team, and their conduct was far outside the bounds of normal legal representation.Apart from the implications of the advice-of-counsel defense, their criminal pleas, combined with their agreements to cooperate, may grant us greater visibility into Trump’s state of mind during the effort to overturn the election. The crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege prevents a criminal defendant from shielding his communications with his lawyers when those communications were in furtherance of a criminal scheme. If Ellis, Powell or Chesebro can testify that the lawyers were operating at Trump’s direction — as opposed to Trump following their advice — then that testimony could help rebut Trump’s intent defense.At the same time, I use words like “potential,” “if,” “may” and “could” intentionally. We do not yet know the full story that any of these attorneys will tell. We only have hints. Ellis said in court on Tuesday, for example, that she “relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information.” Indeed, Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has indicted two other attorneys with “many more years of experience” — Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. If Ellis’s court statement is any indication, it’s an ominous indicator for both men.If you think it’s crystal clear that the guilty pleas are terrible news for Trump — or represent that elusive “we have him now” moment that many Trump opponents have looked for since his moral corruption became clear — then it’s important to know that there’s a contrary view. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, a respected former federal prosecutor, argued that Powell’s guilty plea, for example, was evidence that Willis’s case was “faltering” and that her RICO indictment “is a dud.”“When prosecutors cut plea deals with cooperators early in the proceedings,” McCarthy writes, “they generally want the pleading defendants to admit guilt to the major charges in the indictment.” Powell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. Ellis and Chesebro both pleaded to a single felony charge, but they received punishment similar to Powell’s. McCarthy argues that Willis allowed Powell to plead guilty to a minor infraction “because minor infractions are all she’s got.” And in a piece published Tuesday afternoon, McCarthy argued that the Ellis guilty plea is more of a sign of the “absurdity” of Willis’s RICO charge than a sign that Willis is closing in on Trump, a notion he called “wishful thinking.”There’s also another theory regarding the light sentences for the three lawyers. When Powell and Chesebro sought speedy trials, they put the prosecution under pressure. As Andrew Fleischman, a Georgia defense attorney, wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, it was “extremely smart” to seek a quick trial. “They got the best deal,” Fleischman said, “because their lawyers picked the best strategy.”As a general rule, when evaluating complex litigation, it is best not to think in terms of legal breakthroughs (though breakthroughs can certainly occur) but rather in terms of legal trench warfare. Think of seizing ground from your opponent yard by yard rather than mile by mile, and the question at each stage isn’t so much who won and who lost but rather who advanced and who retreated. Willis has advanced, but it’s too soon to tell how far.The guilty pleas have a potential legal effect, certainly, but they can have a cultural and political effect as well. When MAGA lawyers admit to their misdeeds, it should send a message to the Republican rank and file that the entire effort to steal the election was built on a mountain of lies. In August, a CNN poll found that a majority of Republicans still question Joe Biden’s election victory, and their doubts about 2020 are a cornerstone of Trump’s continued political viability.Again, we can’t expect any single thing to break through to Republican voters, but just as prosecutors advance one yard at a time, opposing candidates and concerned citizens advance their cultural and political cases the same way. It’s a slow, painful process of trying to wean Republicans from conspiracy theories, and these guilty pleas are an important element in service of that indispensable cause. They represent a series of confessions from the inner circle and not a heated external critique.Amid this cloud of uncertainty, there is one thing we do know: With each guilty plea, we receive further legal confirmation of a reality that should have been plainly obvious to each of us, even in the days and weeks immediately following the election. Trump’s effort to overturn the election wasn’t empowered by conventional counsel providing sound legal advice. It was a corrupt scheme empowered by an admitted criminal cabal.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘Chaos Doesn’t Scare Me. American Decline Does.’

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      Jim Jordan’s bid last week to become speaker of the House — together with the withdrawal on Tuesday of Thomas Emmer from his campaign for the same job — revealed not only how far House Republicans have moved to the right, but also how weak the intraparty forces for moderation have become.The full House, including all 212 Democrats, rejected Jordan in the first floor vote, but 90 percent of Republicans backed the election-denying Trump avatar.Minutes before Emmer withdrew from the race yesterday, Politico reported that Donald Trump told an associate, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.” It was, according to Politico, a reflection of Trump’s veto power among House Republicans — “that while Trump may not be able to elevate someone to the post — his earlier choice for the job, Jordan, flopped — he can ensure that a person doesn’t get it.”Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, published a piece on Oct. 20 on his Substack, “The U.S. House Has Sailed Into Dangerously Uncharted Territory. There’s No Going Back.”“Republicans have moved far to the right and polarization is at record highs,” Druckman wrote, citing a measure of ideological polarization between House Democrats and Republicans known as DWNominate which shows House Republicans moving steadily to the right, starting in 1968, reaching a level in 2022 substantially higher than at any point in time since 1880.House Democrats, in contrast, moved very slightly to the left over the same 1968-2022 period.I asked Drutman whether he thought House Republicans could move further right. He replied by email:Hard to say. We keep thinking the G.O.P. can’t move any further to the right and still win nationally, and yet, when more than 90 percent of districts are safe, and the Democratic Party is equally unpopular, and there are only two parties. the G.O.P. can win in too many places just by not being the Democrats.In 2022, Drutman continued, “the G.O.P. definitely paid a small but significant MAGA penalty. So I want to say there are limits, and that I really do hope we are close to reaching them. But I wouldn’t bank on that hope.”For those banking on hope, a closer examination of the Oct. 17 ballot I mentioned earlier, when Jordan won the votes of 200 of the 221 Republican members of the House, may dampen optimism.Not only did the Republican Caucus overwhelmingly back Jordan, but the intraparty forces that would normally press for centrist policies failed to do so.There are 18 Republicans who represent districts President Biden carried in 2020. These members, more than others, were forced to choose between voting for Jordan and facing sharp criticism in their districts, or voting against him and facing a potential primary challenger.This group voted two to one (12-6) for Jordan, deciding, in effect, that the threat of a primary challenge was more dangerous to their political futures than the fallout in their Democratic-leaning districts from voting for Jordan.Or take the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which describes its members as “tired of the obstructionism in Washington where partisan politics is too often prioritized over governing and what is best for the country.” Jordan’s approach to legislation and policymaking embodies what the problem solvers are tired of.Despite that, the Republican members of the caucus voted decisively for Jordan, 21-8, including the co-chairman of the caucus — Brian Fitzpatrick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Kean, the son and namesake of the distinctly moderate former governor of New JerseyIn a statement posted on the Problem Solvers’ website, Kean declared that he joined the group “to help find solutions for families and businesses in New Jersey. Every day of gridlock in Washington is another day that issues impacting my constituents at home go unaddressed.”A third overlapping group, The Republican Governance Group, would, in normal times, be a bastion of opposition to Jordan. The governance group calls for “common-sense legislation on issues including health care, energy, infrastructure and work force development” and its members “represent the most marginal, swing districts, and are ranked among the most bipartisan and most effective lawmakers on Capitol Hill.”The conference declares that it “needs to lead in a time when partisan gridlock often derails progress.”How did its members vote on Jordan? More than three quarters, 32, voted to make Jordan speaker; 10 voted against him.In the middle of the weeklong Jordan-for-speaker saga, Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote in “The Threat to Democracy Is Coming From Inside the U.S. House” that win or lose,Jordan’s rise, like Trump’s own commanding lead in the 2024 GOP presidential race, provides more evidence that for the first time since the Civil War, the dominant faction in one of America’s two major parties is no longer committed to the principles of democracy as the U.S. has known them.Each time the Republican Party has had an opportunity to distance itself from Trump, Brownstein continued,It has roared past the exit ramp and reaffirmed its commitment. At each moment of crisis for him, the handful of Republicans who condemned his behavior were swamped by his fervid supporters until resistance in the party crumbled.Earlier this week, Nate Cohn, a Times colleague, wrote in “Fight for Speaker Reveals Four Types of House Republicans”:Mr. Jordan fell short of winning the gavel three times. But his failed bid nonetheless revealed that the ultraconservative faction of congressional Republicans is larger in number and potentially more broadly acceptable to mainstream congressional Republicans than might have been known otherwise.An examination of the votes, Cohn continued, suggeststhat nearly half of congressional Republicans are sympathetic to Mr. Jordan and the conservative right wing, putting anti-establishment outsiders within striking distance of becoming the predominant faction in the House Republican conference. It suggests that the party’s right wing could, under circumstances not necessarily too different from those today, make a serious bid for House leadership — and win.The analyses above focus on the 90 percent of Republicans who voted for Jordan as evidence of the party’s rightward shift.There is an alternative approach: to focus on the 20-plus dissenters. This approach leads to different conclusions.An Oct. 19 Times article by my news-side colleague Catie Edmondson, for example, was headlined, “Mainstream Republicans, ‘Squishes’ No More, Dig in Against Jordan.”Focusing on the small group of Republicans who rejected Jordan, Edmondson wrote:In a remarkable reversal of roles, a group of roughly 20 veteran Republicans, including institutionalists and lawmakers in politically competitive districts, are flexing their muscles against Mr. Jordan’s candidacy. Their choice to do so has prolonged an extraordinary period of paralysis in the House, which began more than two weeks ago when the hard right deposed Kevin McCarthy as speaker. It has continued as Republicans wage an extraordinary feud over who should replace him.The next day, a Washington Post article by Jacqueline Alemany, “Concerns About Jordan’s Election Denialism Flare During Failed Bid for Speaker,” made the case that Jordan’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election proved to be a significant factor in his defeat.Alemany wrote:As Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) waged his battle to become House speaker, some House Republicans were uncomfortable with the possibility of having an election denier occupying the most powerful legislative seat in the U.S. government heading into a presidential election year.I asked Matthew Green, a political scientist at Catholic University, whether it was more significant that House Republicans could not come up with enough votes to push either Steve Scalise or Jordan over the top or that both Scalise and Jordan actually received plus or minus 200 votes each? He emailed back:I think it’s more significant that neither Scalise nor Jordan could get the votes they needed to be elected Speaker. It’s a norm for lawmakers to vote for their party’s nominee for Speaker, no matter how odious they may find that person. That the G.O.P. could not keep McCarthy in power or immediately elect a replacement, even at the risk of extended paralysis of the House and major damage to the party’s reputation, signifies just how weak and divided the Republican Conference is right now.There is little doubt that the three-week-long struggle, still unresolved, to pick a new speaker is quite likely to inflict some costs on Republicans.First and foremost, if, as appears possible, the government is forced to shut down because of a failure to reach agreement on federal spending, Republicans have set themselves up to take the fall when the public decides which party is at fault.Previous government shutdowns, especially those in 1995 and 1996, backfired on Republicans, reviving Bill Clinton’s re-election prospects to the point that he won easily in November.I asked Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about the current situation, and he emailed back: “A failure to choose a speaker before appropriations expire and the government shutdowns — that would look bad to many voters.”The Jordan campaign for speaker may turn into a liability for Republican members in districts won by Biden in 2020.After Fitzpatrick voted for Jordan, his probable Democratic challenger, Ashley Ehasz, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, declared:Brian Fitzpatrick has campaigned on his supposed commitment to reaching across the aisle and solving problems — but time and again his votes have shown who he really is. He voted to install an anti-abortion, election-denying extremist as speaker and has made his values perfectly clear.Sue Altman, executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance and the probable Democratic challenger to Kean, said, after Kean voted for Jordan:Tom Kean Jr. just voted for a man who in his personal life helped cover up sexual abuse and in his political life tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election and pass a national abortion ban. This is not the Republican Party of Tom Kean Jr.’s father, and Tom Kean Jr. has done nothing but enable the most extreme elements of his own party instead of being a voice for moderation. Jim Jordan is a radical election denier who does not represent the values of this district and Tom Kean Jr. should be ashamed of his vote.I asked Michael Olson, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, about the possible costs of a Jordan vote for these 12 Republicans in Democratic-leaning seats. He replied by email:Concerns about appearing extreme should be particularly acute for these legislators. Most won by quite narrow margins. Voters do care about extremism on the margins — more extreme candidates seem to be more likely to subsequently lose — so a vote for Jordan could be a real liability in a campaign, or a vote against him a real feather in these folks’ caps as they try to establish their independent bona fides.The political calculus of these 12 Republicans is, however, complicated. Olson cited a 2023 paper, “A Good Partisan? Ideology, Loyalty and Public Evaluations of Members of Congress,” by Geoffrey Sheagley, Logan Dancey and John Henderson that reveals the difficulty of the choices facing members of Congress.Using poll data on the vote to impeach Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sheagley, Dancey and Henderson write that Democrats are:More approving of a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump. Republican respondents, however, are more approving of a conservative Republican representative and less approving of a representative who voted to impeach Trump.For a Republican deciding whether to vote for or against a Trump impeachment, the loss of support among Republican voters far outweighs the gains from Democrats: “Approval for a Republican representative who voted to impeach Trump decreases by nearly a full point on the 4-point approval scale, while support among Democrats increases by only half a point.”The political implications of this choice are, however, very different for a Republican evaluating prospects in a closed primary in which no Democrats can vote, than in the general election, when Democrats do cast ballots.I asked Dancey, a political scientist at Wesleyan, about the calculations a Republican in a Democratic district has to make and he emailed back to say that a vote against Jordan would not prove excessively costly in November:In a general election matchup where the main choice is between a Republican and a Democrat, I suspect that the vast majority of Republican voters would stick with a Republican candidate who voted against Jordan. Even if they don’t like the position the Republican took on that one vote, they won’t see the Democratic candidate as a better option.In contrast, Dancey continued,Voting for Jordan carries some risk of losing support from independents and moderate Democrats in the general election, especially since Jordan received Trump’s endorsement. Republicans running in Biden districts have incentives to create an image as a more independent-minded Republican who isn’t fully aligned with Trump.That said, Darcey wrote, “Jordan is a less high-profile figure than Trump and at this point isn’t on track to actually become speaker. As a result, I doubt this one vote will be as consequential as something like voting to impeach Trump.”Perhaps most damaging to Republicans is the perception that they are dominated by a group more determined to wreak havoc than to govern.In 2019, I looked at a small percentage of voters committed “to unleash chaos to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.”The notion was salient once more on Oct. 3, when a cadre of eight Republican members of the House — led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida — brought down Speaker Kevin McCarthy.Gaetz evoked havoc again on Oct. 19 when he posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter:Ever seen a SWAMP actually drained? This Florida Man has. It’s not orderly. Turns out, the alligators & snakes get unruly when the comfort of their habitat is disrupted. Chaos doesn’t scare me. American decline does.I asked Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Sciences Po Paris and lead author of the 2021 paper “Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn: the Prevalence, Psychology and Politics of the ‘Need for Chaos,’ ” about the role of Gaetz and his seven allies. Arceneaux emailed back that he has no way of knowing, without conducting tests and interviews, how the eight “would answer the need for chaos survey items.”But, Arceneaux added, “their behavior is certainly consistent with the ‘burn-it-all-down’ mentality that we found associated with the need for chaos.”In addition, he continued,We also found that a drive to obtain status along with a sense that one’s group has lost social status increases one’s need for chaos. It would be interesting to study whether Freedom Caucus members are more preoccupied with concerns about status loss relative to other Republicans. If so, that would offer some circumstantial evidence that a need for chaos could at least partly explain their willingness to damage their own party.I asked Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, for his perspective on recent events in the House. He replied by email:I’ve long thought that a party’s drift to the ideological extreme would inevitably be stopped and reversed to a certain degree by big defeats that force party voters to come to terms with pragmatic reality. These days, I’m starting to believe that Republicans moving headlong to the right may just give in to the inertia of motion and continue their lunge toward extremism until they can no longer win an overall majority. I’m not convinced of this yet, but the G.O.P. has put the idea on the table.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How the Right’s Purity Tests Are Haunting the House G.O.P.

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      When Casey Stengel had the misfortune to be the manager of the historically inept 1962 New York Mets, his famous plaint was, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”The question for House Republicans, mired in a weekslong demonstration of their internal dysfunction, is: Does anybody here want to play this game?It is tempting to interpret the chaos in the House as the function of a dispute between the pro- and anti-Trump elements of the party, but this isn’t quite right: The deposed speaker, Kevin McCarthy, is in no way anti-Trump. Instead, there were pre-existing trends, either represented or augmented by the rise of Donald Trump, that have undermined G.O.P. coherence and made the Republican House practically ungovernable in the current circumstances.The conservative movement has warred against the party establishment since its inception. Conservative heroes like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich rose by arraying themselves against Republican powers-that-be that they considered too timid and moderate.The Tea Party of the 2010s seemingly reflected the same tendency toward greater conservative purity. Yet, it was more populist and more disaffected with the G.O.P., which is why so many of its leaders and organizations lined up so readily behind Donald Trump.On top of this, the two losses to Barack Obama, especially the second one in 2012, convinced many Republican voters that their party was feckless and naïve. Mitt Romney was serious, civic-minded and conscientious, and got absolutely bulldozed by the Obama campaign, which portrayed him as some kind of monster.The thinking of a lot of Republicans after that was, basically, If you portray all our candidates as crude, unethical partisan haters, well, maybe we should give you one.At the same time, the power of the party establishment had atrophied thanks to all sort of factors, from campaign-finance reform to social media, while it still remained a hate object for much of the right. This made the establishment a ready target for Donald Trump in 2016, but ill-suited to fighting back against him.Mr. Trump is a little like Bernie Sanders — a forceful critic of his party’s mainstream who isn’t at his core a member of the party. (Senator Sanders isn’t a registered Democrat, while Mr. Trump became a Republican again after flitting among various affiliations and would surely quit once more if things didn’t go his way.) The difference is that Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination in a hostile takeover, whereas the Democratic Party had the antibodies to resist Mr. Sanders.Even as Mr. Trump was something new in Republican politics, he was also something familiar. Even before his rise, Republicans were much more susceptible than Democrats to nonserious presidential candidates running to increase their profile for media gigs, book sales and the like. Mr. Trump was this type of candidate on a much larger scale, and, again, happened to actually win.One way to look at it is that the very successful model that the commentator Ann Coulter forged in the world of conservative media — generate controversy and never, ever apologize — came to be replicated by candidates and officeholders.Both Vivek Ramaswamy and Matt Gaetz are creatures of politics for the sake of notoriety. It creates entirely different incentives from the traditional approach: Stoking outrage is good, blowing things up is useful, and it never pays to get caught doing the responsible thing.At the congressional level, there was a related, although distinct phenomenon. With the rise of the Tea Party, the tendency of the right flank of the House Republican caucus to make the life of the party leadership miserable became more pronounced. This was especially true in spending fights. The pattern was that the right, associated with the House Freedom Caucus after its founding in 2015, would hold out a standard of impossible purity, and then when leaders inevitability failed to meet it, denounce them as weak and traitorous.There are, of course, legitimate disagreements about tactics and priorities, and the leadership doesn’t always make the right calls. But some of these members consider the legislative process in and of itself corrupt, and refuse to participate even if they can increase the negotiating leverage of their own side or move spending deals marginally in their direction.This was a notable dynamic in the spending fight that led to the toppling of Speaker McCarthy. His fiercest critics did nothing to help keep him from having to resort to the option they found most hateful — namely, going to Democrats for a kick-the-can deal in advance of a government shutdown.Representative Gaetz, the Gavrilo Princip of the Republican meltdown, exemplifies almost all these trends. He is a House Freedom Caucus-type in his attitudes toward the leadership and his rhetoric about federal spending, but his ultimate political loyalty is to Donald Trump. He’s overwhelmingly concerned with garnering media attention. And no one has the power to bring him to heel.There’s no dealing with the likes of Mr. Gaetz because he’s operating on a different dimension from someone like Mr. McCarthy, a pragmatist and coalition-builder who is trying to move the ball incrementally. It’s the difference between politics as theater and politics as the art of the possible; politics as individual brand-building and politics as team sport.In the last Congress, Nancy Pelosi had a slim majority like Mr. McCarthy and a restive handful of members on her left flank, the so-called Squad. Yet she held it together. The difference is that Ms. Pelosi still had considerable legitimacy as a leader, which gave her the moral power to keep everyone together. It is instructive to contrast her not just with Mr. McCarthy, but with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. Whereas Ms. Pelosi, an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is a legend among Democrats, Mr. McConnell, also an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is hated by much of his party’s own base and constantly attacked by the party’s de facto leader, Donald Trump.The situation in the Republican House caucus has now developed into a sort of tribal war, where memories of real or alleged wrongs committed by the other side lead to more conflict and more bad feelings. So, establishmentarians and relative moderates were willing to take down the speaker candidacy of the House Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan, rejecting his new argument that everyone had to come together for the good of the whole.It may be that exhaustion sets in and Republicans eventually settle on a speaker, or it may be that the problem is unresolvable and they will have to find a way to govern under the speaker pro tempore, Patrick McHenry. Regardless, it’s become obvious over the last three weeks that no, not nearly enough Republicans want to play this game.Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Tim Scott Tackles Race and Racism in Chicago, Trying to Gain Traction

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina gave his speech as his struggling presidential campaign said it would move most of its staff to Iowa.Senator Tim Scott, struggling to gain traction less than three months before the first Republican primary ballots are cast, came to the South Side of Chicago on Monday to rebuke the welfare state and the liberal politicians he dismissed as “drug dealers of despair.”The speech was at New Beginnings Church in the poor neighborhood of Woodlawn. It may have been delivered to Black Chicagoans, but the South Carolina senator’s broadsides — criticizing “the radical left,” the first Black female vice president, Kamala Harris, and “liberal elites” who want a “valueless, faithless, fatherless America where the government becomes God” — were aimed at an audience far away. That audience was Republican voters in the early primary and caucus states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the donors who have peeled away from his campaign.His political persona as the “happy warrior” gave way to a chin-out antagonism toward the Black leaders who run the nation’s third-largest city, and the Democratic Party that “would rather lower the bar for people of color than raise the bar on their own leadership.”Speaking to a largely receptive audience in a church run by a charismatic Republican pastor, Mr. Scott added: “They say they want low-income Americans and people of color to rise, but their actions take us in the opposite direction. The actions say they want us to sit down, shut up and don’t forget to vote as long as we’re voting blue.”The speech came just minutes before a Scott campaign staff call announcing that the senator’s once-flush campaign would move most of its resources and staff to Iowa, in a last-ditch effort to win the first caucus of the season and rescue the campaign.“Tim Scott is all in on Iowa,” his campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, said in a statement.Mr. Scott, the first Black Republican senator from the South in more than a century, launched his presidential bid in May, with a roster of prominent Republicans behind him, a $22 million war chest and a message of optimism that separated him from the crowded primary field. To many white Republicans, his message on race, delivered as a son of South Carolina, where slavery was deeply embedded and where the Civil War began, resonated, while many Black Democrats found it naïve and insulting.“If you stop at our original sin, you have not started the story of America, because the story of America is not defined by our original sin,” he said early this year as he considered a presidential run. “The story of America is defined by our redemption.”But from the beginning, even supporters wondered aloud whether optimism and uplift were what Republican voters wanted, after so many years of Donald J. Trump and the rising culture of vengeance in the G.O.P.This past weekend, Don Schmidt, 78, a retired banker from Hudson, Iowa, put it bluntly to Mr. Scott as the senator campaigned in Cedar Falls before the University of Northern Iowa beat the University of North Dakota in football. Mr. Schmidt told Mr. Scott he was thinking of supporting him or Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor.“But,” he cautioned, “I don’t know whether you can beat Trump.”Race has lately been a particularly problematic subject for Mr. Scott. He has at once maintained there is no such thing as systemic racism in the United States, but has also spoken of having a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South, and of his own brushes with law enforcement simply because he was driving a new car.His audience on Monday on the South Side were the grandchildren of the Black workers who left the segregated South during the Great Migration to lean their shoulders into the industrialization of the Upper Midwest. And he seemed to invite the pushback he got after the speech as part of the political theater.Rodrick Wimberly, a 54-year-old congregant at the New Beginnings Church, was incredulous that Mr. Scott really did not believe that the failings of some Black people were brought on by systemic impediments. He brought up redlining that kept Black Chicagoans out of safer neighborhoods with better schools and lending discrimination that suppressed Black entrepreneurship and homeownership.“What we see in education, in housing, the wealth gap widening, there is statistical data to show or suggest at the very least there are some issues that are systemic,” Mr. Wimberly told the senator. “It’s not just individual.”But Mr. Scott held his ground, just as he has since June, when the senator tried to stir up interest in his campaign with a clash on the television show “The View” over an assertion that he didn’t “get” American racism.When Mr. Wimberly suggested that the failing educational system was an example of the systemic racism holding Black Chicagoans back, Mr. Scott responded: “But who’s running that system? Black people are running that system.”Such sparring has largely failed to lift his campaign, however. On Saturday, his hometown newspaper, The Post and Courier of Charleston, advised Mr. Scott and other Republican candidates to drop out and endorse Ms. Haley as the candidate best positioned to challenge Mr. Trump in the primaries, which begin in fewer than three months.Last week, Mr. Scott’s super PAC, Trust in the Mission PAC, or TIM PAC, told donors it would cancel “all of our fall media inventory.”“We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, a Republican strategist who is a co-chairman of the super PAC, wrote in the blunt memo. As Bill Brune, 73, a Republican and Army veteran from La Motte, Iowa, put it this weekend: “There’s a lot of good people, but they get no attention. The good guys finish last.”Republican politicians, including Mr. Trump, who has a glittering high-rise hotel on the Chicago River, have for years used the city as a stand-in for urban decay and violence, though that portrait is at best incomplete. Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican presidential candidate, came to a different South Side neighborhood three miles from New Beginnings in May to discuss tensions among Black residents over the city’s efforts to accommodate an influx of migrants, many of whom were bused there from the border by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas — but also to show his willingness to speak with audiences usually ignored by Republican candidates.Monday’s appearance was, in effect, Mr. Scott’s take on adopting — and amplifying — Mr. Ramaswamy’s flair for the dramatic. Shabazz Muhammad, 51, was released from prison in 2020, after serving 31 years. Since then, he said, he has struggled to find work and housing because of his record and what he called “the social booby traps” in his way. Beyond the candidate’s critique of the welfare state, Mr. Muhammad wanted to know specifically what Mr. Scott wanted to do to help people like him.Mr. Scott, though sympathetic, was unwavering in his description of social welfare policies as “colossal, crippling, continual failures.”“Are we tough enough to get better and not bitter?” he asked his audience.Neil Vigdor More

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      What Happened When Fake Trump Signs Appeared in Greenwich, Connecticut

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      The placards were up in a wealthy town for less than a day. The fight over them lasted years.The sudden sprouting of red-and-white campaign signs upended one autumn morning in the affluent Connecticut town of Greenwich. It was as if the valuable ground had been sprinkled overnight with political pixie dust.The signs seemed at first to blend into the election-time foliage, conveying customary solidarity between a local Republican candidate and his party’s standard-bearer. “Vote Republican — Vote Team,” they said. “Trump/Camillo.”But instead of instilling pride of party unity, the signs caused local Republicans to lose their Connecticut Yankee cool. How dare someone link a Greenwich Republican candidate with the Republican president of the United States!Outraged texts, emails and phone calls heated up that chilly October morning in 2019. “It was a general frenzy and maybe panic,” a party leader later recalled. “Like: ‘What are these?’ ‘Where did they come from?’ ‘What do we do about them?’”The Greenwich tempest that came to be known as “Signgate” was, in some ways, larger than Greenwich itself, touching on national politics, election integrity and free speech. But it was also exquisitely parochial, reflecting the acutely petty vibe of local politics, the clash of big personalities in a small space — and sweet, delicious revenge.Politics in this town of about 63,000, once a bastion for Republican moderates, have gotten complicated in recent years, with Trumpian Republicanism emerging like a wet Saint Bernard galumphing through a staid garden party.Mr. Trump had lost Greenwich by a sizable margin in the 2016 presidential elections; in many ways he was the antithesis to the town’s favored Republican son, George H.W. Bush. Still, your dog is your dog, leashed or unleashed.By 2019, local Republican discomfort in the Age of Trump seemed overripe for Democratic mockery, so a certain Greenwich police captain — an outspoken Democrat when off-duty — took it upon himself to exercise the time-tested political ploy of satire. He chose as his subject the Republican candidate for the mayor-like position of first selectman, Fred Camillo, who was consistently deflecting calls to either embrace or denounce Mr. Trump.Some residents had even threatened to pull their support if the generally well-liked Mr. Camillo did not reject the generally not-liked Mr. Trump and his policies. His response, he later recalled, was: “That’s not my concern. Your concern should be how I vote. Do I respond to you? What my beliefs are.”Seeing opportunity in Mr. Camillo’s sidestepping, the police captain, Mark Kordick, spent about $250 on 50 campaign signs from a website called Signs On the Cheap. The signs, featuring the obligatory Republican elephant mascot, said in full:Local Elections MatterVote Republican — Vote TeamTRUMP/CAMILLOMake Greenwich Great AgainAt the bottom appeared “www.FredCamillo.com,” a domain name purchased months earlier by Mr. Kordick. The address redirected viewers to a militantly pro-Trump website.In the weeks to come, people would debate whether the police captain’s furtive planning was dastardly and underhanded, or merely akin to high schoolers preparing a prank before the big homecoming game. Either way, now he was set.At first, the signs seemed to blend in with other campaign placards.Leslie YagerSigngate began around midnight in late October, as an old, red Ford Escort stopped and started along the darkened streets. With Mr. Kordick behind the wheel, his college-student son, Matthew, hopped out to plant 37 Trump/Camillo signs on public property already adorned with campaign placards, adding red hues and cheeky mischief to autumn in Greenwich.The sun hadn’t yet risen when Mr. Camillo’s campaign chairman, Jack Kriskey, received his first complaint. “Then they just kept coming,” he later told investigators. Describing the reaction among Republicans as a “frenzy,” he said: “I was just getting barraged with: ‘Where did these come from?’”In frantic texts and calls to town and police officials, Republicans sought permission to remove signs they called unauthorized and deceptive. But they faced an obstacle: Campaign signs are protected speech under the First Amendment.As First Selectman Peter Tesei, a fellow Republican, explained to them in a text, “Town cannot touch political signs unless for mowing or sight line issues.”Mr. Camillo showed up at the police station to file a complaint, after which a police captain, Robert Berry, issued an internal memo that said, “We will not be getting involved in managing sign content or the removal of alleged fake signs.”But Republicans continued all day to pressure the Republican-controlled town hall. Finally, around 6 p.m., Captain Berry issued a second memo saying that the town’s law department and the Democratic and Republican town committees had agreed that the signs were “not legitimate and should be removed” — though the local Democratic leader later clarified that his committee had only determined that it had no standing since it had nothing to do with the signs.The Republican Town Committee quickly issued a statement urging supporters to take action: “Please make every effort to remove all of these signs as soon as possible.”The prank now stifled, the Camillo camp set out to expose the anonymous antagonist. A paid campaign worker identified SignsOnTheCheap.com through a Google search, then hired someone in Texas to go to the company’s shop in Austin and get a copy of the invoice by pretending to represent the customer.The impostor was paid $450, plus a $50 bonus, for securing an invoice bearing a familiar Greenwich name.A week after the offending signs were placed, Fred Camillo won the election.Jane Beiles for The New York TimesMr. Camillo already disliked Mr. Kordick, who often criticized him and other Republicans on social media; in a recent text to a town lawyer, he had called the police captain a fat so-and-so who would “get his too.” Now that Mr. Kordick had been outed, the candidate wrote to a supporter: “He is the biggest scum bag of all. He better pray that I do not win because I would be police commissioner and he will be gone.”Mr. Kordick was called into the deputy chief’s office, a few doors down from his own. When asked whether he knew anything about those Trump/Camillo signs, he recalled answering: “I know quite a bit about them.”Mr. Kordick joined the department in 1988, worked his way up the ranks, and received the latest of his glowing performance evaluations just four months earlier. Now he was being placed on administrative leave by a longtime colleague — and would soon be under internal investigation.A week later, Mr. Camillo was elected first selectman and, effectively, police commissioner. Not good for a certain police captain.Five months after that, in April 2020, Mr. Kordick retired with a full pension just as he was about to be fired for violating provisions of the police department’s Unified Policy Manual, including “Using Common Sense and Promoting Positive Values.” The next month, he filed notice of his intent to sue.In his lawsuit against Greenwich, Mr. Camillo and three other Republicans, Mr. Kordick alleged that he had been retaliated against for exercising his free-speech rights, and that the Camillo campaign had jeopardized his employment by using deceit to unmask him.“His speech was totally off-duty and clearly protected speech,” his lawyer, Lewis Chimes, said. “If it interferes with the performance of one’s duties, there’s a balancing test. But there wasn’t any real argument that it interfered with his duties, because he’d gotten outstanding reviews.”But the town attorney, Barbara Schellenberg, rejected the framing of the case as being about Mr. Kordick’s free-speech rights. She said the question came down to: “Can he effectively do this job after putting out what the town maintained was false speech? And hiding that? And not coming forward until he was put on the spot?“It was determined that he could not effectively continue,” Ms. Schellenberg added. “The chief lost trust in him.”Years of legal squabbling followed. All the while, local politics became more and more un-Greenwichlike, smashing the stereotype of fiscal restraint and social moderation being discussed over cucumber sandwiches and wine. Mr. Trump lost the town in the 2020 presidential election by an even wider margin than in 2016, but Trumpism had taken root. In 2022, a hard-right faction took over the Republican Town Committee — and are now planning to seize control of the Representative Town Meeting, the 230-member (!) legislative body whose powers include final say on any municipal expenditure over $5,000.As the Kordick lawsuit unfolded, things got a bit messy. Town officials gave vague, sometimes conflicting depositions. Leslie Yager, a journalist who runs a one-person news site called Greenwich Free Press, was subpoenaed by the town, which “effectively silenced me as a reporter,” she said in an email.And mortifying emails and text messages became public. Mr. Camillo, first selectman and author of the “scum bag” and fat so-and-so epithets, had to acknowledge in a deposition that his colorful words were “not language that I would condone.”A Superior Court judge dropped two defendants from the lawsuit, and Mr. Kordick reached settlements with Mr. Camillo and his campaign manager for undisclosed amounts. But the case continued against the Town of Greenwich, as its legal bills climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.Just two months ago, the town sought to block Mr. Kordick’s actions from being referred to as “parody or satire,” arguing in a motion that the signs were not in the vein of “A Modest Proposal,” in which Jonathan Swift proposed to “solve” the problem of Irish poverty by killing and eating Irish children. Rather, the signs were a “dirty trick,” defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as dishonest activity “carried out to harm the reputation or success of a rival.”In other words, in Greenwich, linking a local Republican candidate to the Republican president would do that candidate harm.Mr. Kordick’s lawyer described the motion as “chutzpah,” and noted that the judge had already written that a reasonable jury might conclude the signs were “acceptable political parody.”Suddenly, last month, more than three years after the sprouting of the offending signs and just a week before the case against Greenwich was to be heard, a settlement was reached with Mr. Kordick for $650,000. The overall cost to Greenwich taxpayers: $1.5 million.Ms. Schellenberg, the town attorney, said that while she was confident Greenwich would have prevailed if the case had gone to trial, it “had no viable option but to comply with the demand of its insurance carrier to end the case.”She said the town continued to maintain that “there is no constitutional protection for speech that is intentionally false or deceptive, or recklessly indifferent to the truth,” or “for speech by an employee that disrupts or threatens to disrupt the operations of the department in which that employee works.”Mr. Kordick countered that Greenwich had infringed on his First Amendment rights and knew it would lose in court. “The reason I wanted to remain anonymous is that I feared retribution,” he said. “Which is what I got.”It’s late October again in Greenwich, with leaves turning and campaigns competing. That hard-right contingent is girding to take over the Representative Town Meeting in next month’s elections. Donald Trump is in the midst of another presidential run, notwithstanding his four criminal indictments. Fred Camillo, who declined to comment other than to say the case was resolved, is running for a third term.And Mark Kordick, forcibly retired police captain, said he is once again thinking of exercising his free-speech rights with a few campaign signs. Signs that might say, in part: “Paid for with proceeds from the settlement of Mark Kordick v. Town of Greenwich et al.” More

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      The Blind Ambition of Chris Christie

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      Chris Christie’s presidential announcement at a June town hall at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire may not have had the drama of, say, a “West Wing” episode, but it did help clarify our current political moment and its most intriguing character. For over two hours — you could turn it into a mini-series — Mr. Christie, a former New Jersey governor and federal prosecutor, built a case against Donald Trump. To nominate him for the presidency again, Mr. Christie said, would be a moral and political disaster. “Trump made us smaller,” Mr. Christie told his audience as he prowled the stage, explaining that he wanted to go after Mr. Trump for two reasons: “One, he deserves it. And two, it’s the way to win.”It’s a bold premise, but more sound than it might seem. Almost any pollster will tell you that Mr. Trump’s support is soft once you look beyond the MAGA base. A CNN poll conducted in late August found that 44 percent of Republican or Republican-leaning independents said they were seriously worried that Mr. Trump’s legal issues could impair his ability to win the general election. Mr. Christie is the only candidate speaking directly, specifically to this fear. A separate poll found that almost a third of Republican voters who intend to support Mr. Trump said they might still change their minds based on what happens in the months leading up to the first votes being cast.But in national surveys, Mr. Christie is still polling in the low single digits. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, looks increasingly inevitable as the Republican nominee. Even in New Hampshire, a state where moderate voters hold outsize influence, Mr. Christie is languishing in fourth place, at just 9 percent in the polls. Why isn’t his message resonating?There are the obvious explanations: Mr. Trump has advantages as a former president, and his legal troubles have given him an excuse to present himself as an outsider, persecuted by the powers that be; Mr. Christie, meanwhile, is competing in a crowded field, packed with other candidates desperate for the same voters. But there is something deeper at work here, and it holds clues about what it would take to attack Mr. Trump successfully. Because while Mr. Christie may sound like the perfect Trump nemesis — pugnacious, outspoken, loud — he is a uniquely flawed foil for the former president, compromised in ways that blunt his most effective attacks. And though Mr. Christie’s journey through Republican politics is especially colorful — he is from New Jersey, after all — most of the other candidates are running up against similar problems as they struggle to maneuver through a political landscape forever changed by Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More