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      Happy Thanksgiving, Hermit Billionaires!

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      Gail Collins: Bret, I guess we should start with things we’re thankful for this year. Don’t suppose the imminent end of the political career of the dreadful Representative George Santos rises to the level of holiday cheer.So you go first. No fair counting family and friends.Bret Stephens: It’s a depressing world, Gail, so we need to find cheer wherever we can, and the House Ethics Committee report on Santos does make for delightful reading. My favorite bit: “During the 2020 campaign, a $1,500 purchase on the campaign debit card was made at Mirza Aesthetics; this expense was not reported to the F.E.C. and was noted as ‘Botox’ in expense spreadsheets.” Santos would have been around 32 years old at the time.Gail: You’re right. Makes me cheery just hearing it.Bret: On a loftier plane, I was delighted to see Joe Biden describe Xi Jinping as, well, “a dictator” of a “Communist country” while Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, visibly winced. That was another wonderful moment.Gail: I can see how Biden felt a little cornered when a reporter asked him if he still believed Xi was a dictator. I mean, what was he supposed to say? “No, I think he’s changed a lot?”But it also does seem as if it’s the kind of question he should have been a tad better prepared to handle.Feel free to perk me up again.Bret: I loved Biden’s answer. It reminded me of Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” to the consternation of diplomats and pundits but to the relief of anyone who liked hearing an American president state the obvious and essential truth. I also think it’s worth celebrating the fact that inflation seems to have been tamed without cratering the rest of the economy in the process. That might not help Biden’s campaign, since a lot of price increases are now baked into the system, but at least things aren’t getting worse.OK, now your turn.Gail: Hey, this is a president who has really kept the economy under control, who has a great program for building new roads, bridges and mass transit and who always keeps climate change in mind when he’s working out an agenda.And who does not seek out cheap headlines by saying things that are both wrong and wrongheaded just to get attention.Bret: Like Elon Musk?Gail: OK, never been grateful for Elon Musk. He has, however, made me more appreciative of stupendously rich people who don’t get involved in public debates. Happy Thanksgiving, hermit billionaires!Bret: He’s also made me more appreciative of normal billionaires who, unlike him, don’t promote crackpot antisemitic conspiracy theories on their social media platforms. I’m also appreciative of companies — like IBM, Paramount, Apple and Disney — that have pulled their advertising dollars from X, formerly known as Twitter, out of disgust for his views. Now I’m rooting for Tesla owners to trade in their Model 3s for a Rivian or any other electric car that doesn’t run on a high-voltage blend of bottomless narcissism, knee-jerk bigotry and probably too much weed.Gail: Well said. Moving on to politics: I’m grateful that some Republican presidential candidates other than He Who Shall Not Be Named are getting some attention. Particularly your fave, Nikki Haley.On that topic, tell me what you think about the primaries. Trump is way ahead nationally, but do you think Haley could do something impressive in the early primaries? If, say, Chris Christie dropped out and endorsed her?Bret: My gut tells me that primary voters prefer a contest to a coronation, but then my brain remembers that the G.O.P. has turned into a cult. As the field narrows, Haley will pick up Christie voters and maybe some DeSantis voters, too. But Trump will pick up other DeSantis voters, plus Ramaswamy’s.I’m about as thankful for Trump’s dominance as I would be for a terminal cancer diagnosis. But hey, aren’t we trying to keep things optimistic?Gail: Maybe it’s my desperation that creates these imagined scenarios in which Haley impresses New Hampshire voters, who are always up for a script in which they get to pick the new star. And then the campaign gets a real jolt when Christie drops out and gives her his endorsement.Bret: I like this fantasy. Say more.Gail: Then Haley starts a serious campaign that draws terrific interest among rich Americans who don’t want a president who has to spend half his time in court trying to prove that he didn’t actually try to fix the last election, that his real estate empire isn’t just a fairyland of debt, that — I could go on. If Haley could get the serious-alternative attention and funding, it’d be quite a ride.And oh, did I mention that I’d be thankful if she rethinks her position on a six-week abortion ban bill?Bret: Gail, I bet this is the first time you wish the 1 percent were more like the majority, at least in terms of attitudes about Republican candidates. If Park Avenue got to decide the G.O.P. primary contest, Haley would be the nominee in a heartbeat.And speaking of heartbeats: Biden turns 81 this week. Happy birthday, Mr. President. May you live to 100, but please, please, please retire. We’ll all pitch in to buy you a new Corvette, at least before we have to take away the keys.Gail: Sigh. Once again, I’m gonna have to follow up my praise of Biden in office with a plea for him to leave it. If you’re in good health like he is, your 80s can be a great time of achievement. Or your 90s — look at Jimmy Carter and all his charitable work and Rosalynn Carter, who just died at 96. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good time to be president of the United States.If our president really wants to make me thankful this season, he knows what he can do.Bret: Let’s face it: There’s just not a lot to be thankful for, politically speaking. So, um, read any good books lately?Gail: Well, right now I’m on “Romney,” the Mitt biography by McKay Coppins, although Romney himself was so wildly cooperative it feels as if he should get some kind of co-author status. So far, it’s a very good read.And I just finished our colleague Adam Nagourney’s book “The Times,” which is about … well, us. Adam’s a friend and a terrific reporter. Bet anyone who’s a devoted Times reader will gobble it up.Finally, I sort of have a thing for presidential biographies, and if anybody’s looking for a really fine one, I’d recommend “Washington,” by Ron Chernow. Always good to start at the beginning.How about you?Bret: Generally, I hate books about the media by the media: Solipsism is one of the curses of our profession. But everyone who has read Adam’s book tells me it’s terrific, and I’ve promised myself to get to it before the year’s out.I’m making my way through two books right now, one to feed the mind and the other the soul. The first is the Johns Hopkins scholar Yascha Mounk’s “The Identity Trap,” an intellectual tour de force about the origins of identity politics and the threat it presents to genuine, honest, old-fashioned liberalism. The second is “My Effin’ Life,” by the greatest living Canadian: the singer and bassist Geddy Lee of the band Rush. It’s a story about how an improbable trio of geeks from Ontario rose to the pinnacle of rock ’n’ roll stardom while somehow holding on to their wits, souls and marriages.I’m sure you can’t wait to read it. I’m guessing you’d rather talk about budget negotiations.Gail: Well, one ongoing story line that’s driving me crazy is the House Republicans’ insistence that pretty much everything be tied to a cut in the I.R.S. budget.Now I know it’s natural for people to hate tax collectors. But the idea that you make the country more stable by making it easier for folks to conceal income and illicitly expand deductions is beyond me.Bret: Hope it won’t surprise you to learn that while I’m all for lowering taxes majorly, I’m also for collecting them fully. The Republican war on the I.R.S. isn’t pro-growth; it’s just anti-government.As for the big picture: We can’t go on like this, from one short-term spending bill to another, one budget crisis to another, one House speaker to another. This is banana republic governance — and by “banana,” I mean “bananas.” Pramila Jayapal, the progressive congresswoman from Seattle with whom I agree roughly once every 500 years, was right when she said, “It’s the same menu, different waiter.”Gail: In a normal — thinking non-Trump — era, the Republicans would have taken over the House by a more substantial margin. Usually happens when one party gets the presidency, as you know. Voters get nervous and want to put up some barricades against extremely partisan behavior.But this time the Republicans won by only a hair, in part because there were a number of awful Trump-promoted Republican candidates.So you’ve got a House run by a deeply inexperienced leader with a tiny majority. And everything bad that happens is going to be the Republicans’ fault.Except, I guess, if Biden’s dog Commander comes back to the White House and bites more people.Hey, before we go, happy Thanksgiving, Bret. Very grateful for the chance to converse with you every week.Bret: And to 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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Donald Trump Endorsed by Greg Abbott at Texas Border Event

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      Gov. Greg Abbott threw his support behind the former president in the Republican presidential primary at an event near the southern border.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas endorsed former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday in an appearance near the southern border, echoing Mr. Trump’s talk about an existential crisis of illegal immigration.“I’m here to tell you that there is no way, no way that America can continue under the leadership of Joe Biden as our president,” Mr. Abbott said in Edinburg, Texas, after he and Mr. Trump greeted Border Patrol agents. “We need a president who’s going to secure the border. We need a president who’s going to restore law and order in the United States of America.”Mr. Abbott, a three-term governor with a strongly conservative record, castigated President Biden for reversing Trump-era policies that had expedited deportations and required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings, and claimed that Mr. Biden was facilitating terrorism.Mr. Abbott has taken extraordinary measures on border crossings during the Biden administration — including putting razor wire along the border and buoys in the Rio Grande — that have injured many migrants. Under his administration, Texas has also bused tens of thousands of newly arrived migrants around the country, frequently to big cities run by Democrats.His aggressive policies align him closely with Mr. Trump, whose plans if elected to a second term include detaining undocumented immigrants in camps, relying on a form of expulsion that doesn’t involve due process hearings, and deputizing local police officers and National Guard troops from Republican-led states to carry out immigration raids.Mr. Trump took to the microphone after the endorsement and gave an unusually short speech: just 10 minutes long, compared with his 75-minute address in Iowa on Saturday and nearly two hours in New Hampshire last weekend. Mr. Trump’s appearance at the border did not bear resemblance to his typical campaign events this year, and it was not widely open to supporters.“We’re going to make the governor’s job very easy,” he said, suggesting that his immigration policies would remove the need for Mr. Abbott to handle the issue and claiming falsely that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had never visited the border.“Our country is going to hell,” he added, before returning to familiar territory of demonizing his political opponents: “We have some people that either they don’t care, they’re not very smart or they hate our country, and nobody really knows the answer.”Both this weekend and last, he had railed at length against President Biden and vowed vengeance upon his opponents, whom he described as “vermin” who posed a greater threat to the country than any outside force — rhetoric reminiscent of fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.Mr. Trump has received endorsements from a number of Republican governors in addition to Mr. Abbott, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Kristi Noem of South Dakota.However, he did not secure the endorsement of Gov. Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s popular governor, who is instead backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. More

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      An Old Hate Cracks Open on the New Right

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      A dam burst last week on the right, and a wave of grotesque antisemitism poured out all over the internet.In August, I wrote about the “lost boys” of the American right, many of them young and relatively unknown, who were outed for having secret or anonymous online profiles and using those profiles to spread raw bigotry, including antisemitism. Some of these people worked for the right wing’s biggest names, including Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.What started in the shadows is now right in the open. It’s being advanced by some of the most powerful and influential people in America, and there is nothing subtle about it. The latest eruption started with a fight between the Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro and his Daily Wire colleague Candace Owens. Both are immensely popular right-wing stars. Owens, for example, has more than four million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and more than five million on Instagram.On Nov. 3, Owens posted on social media, “No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide, ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I can’t believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.” Many of her followers interpreted this as a criticism of Israel, and Shapiro, who staunchly supports Israel in its present conflict with Hamas, was later caught on tape at a private event saying Owens’s behavior during the war has been “disgraceful.”Daily Wire drama should be of little interest to anyone outside The Daily Wire, but what happened next was truly alarming. First, Jason Whitlock, a leading personality at The Blaze, one of the largest right-wing websites, accused Shapiro of dual loyalties: “The guy has multiple loyalties. He loves America, but he loves Israel too. And maybe he loves Israel and he loves America too.” Owens, he said, “is a bit more America first. She only has one loyalty.”Then Owens went on Carlson’s show on X, where he ranted against the “biggest donors at, say, Harvard,” asking where they were when members of the Harvard community “were calling for white genocide.”“White genocide” is a term of art on the racist right and is linked to the so-called great replacement theory, the notion that leftists (including Jewish progressives) are trying to import people of color to replace America’s white majority. This is the theory that motivated the shooter in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh. It is false, evil and very dangerous.The same day, an obscure far-right personality posted the same conspiracy theory on X: “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”“I’m deeply disinterested,” he continued, “in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”The post wouldn’t be notable, except as yet another example of the bigoted filth that dominates discourse on X, but Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and the owner of X — responded with an endorsement. “You have said the actual truth,” he replied.Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, one of the largest right-wing youth organizations in the country, jumped in the next day to defend both the original post and Musk on “The Charlie Kirk Show.” While he hedged by saying that he doesn’t like to generalize, Kirk argued that “the first part” of the original post “is absolutely true.” He then reread the post and repeated the old Jews-and-money trope: “It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans.”While there are more examples of right-wing antisemitism spilling into the public square, I’m going to stop there. I by no means want to minimize the antisemitism we’ve seen from the far left, including on campuses and in the streets, but I am focusing on the people I just mentioned because they are some of the most prominent figures on the right.What is going on? For the past several decades, the Republican Party has been a strong ally of Israel, so much so that the regard evangelical voters have for Israel has been the subject of considerable criticism. In my years as a Republican and a conservative lawyer, I never witnessed a trace of antisemitism. The answer to my question, however, is clear. The “new” American right isn’t that new at all. It has rejected Reaganism, yes, but in doing so, it’s reconnecting with older and darker forces on the right.The ghost of Charles Lindbergh is haunting us. Lindbergh, readers may recall, was the hero aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. He later grew to admire German fascism and gave a famous speech in September 1941 in which he accused Jews of attempting to push America into World War II.“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war,” he said, “are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.” And while Lindbergh expressed sympathy for Jews facing Nazi persecution, he went straight to the same tropes that were deployed last week, claiming that the Jewish people’s “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”More recently, we see the influence of Pat Buchanan, a former Richard Nixon speechwriter and so-called paleoconservative whom William F. Buckley Jr. denounced for his antisemitism in 1991. A central part of the case against Buchanan once again related to matters of war and peace. In the run-up to the first Iraq war, Buchanan said, “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” And that was a benign comment compared with many of his later pronouncements. In 2010 he wrote that if Elena Kagan were to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, “Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?”Buchanan is no minor figure. As Nicole Hemmer wrote in 2022, his presidential campaigns in the 1990s forecast the present moment in Republican politics. The party “traded Reaganism for Buchananism,” she contended. The evidence that she was correct grows by the day.Everything about the New Right mind-set told us that this devolution was inevitable. It scorns character, decency and civility in the public square, often turning cruelty into a virtue. This was a necessary precondition for the entire enterprise. Decent people can be misguided, certainly, but they are not consumed with hate. Decent people do not indulge bigots.The New Right rejects the norms and values of what it calls the uniparty or the cathedral: the center-left and center-right American elite. And one of those values is a steadfast opposition to racism and prejudice. The rejection first manifests itself in the form of just asking questions, then it veers into direct challenge of conventional norms, followed by a descent into true darkness.Hostility unmoored from character quickly turns conspiratorial, and the world of conspiracy theories is where antisemites live and thrive. And finally, the term “America First,” popular with the New Right and the older, Lindbergh right, has always been misleading. It actually means some Americans first or “real” Americans first, and “real” Americans do not include the ideological or religious enemies of the New Right.It is no coincidence, for example, that after the Owens-Shapiro confrontation, many New Right figures began posting “Christ is king,” an obvious shot at Shapiro’s Jewish beliefs.Evolution is a concept that applies to biology, not human nature. It turns out that humanity does not grow out of the darkness of the past. It has to be contested by every generation. We are neither imprisoned by darkness nor ever fully captured by light.America is no exception. From before the founding, our so-called new world has been plagued by all the sins of the old. Set against that human depravity, however, are the great aspirations of the founding, including the central declaration that “all men are created equal.”American progress was never inevitable. It took immense courage to move haltingly to the more just, more fair country we live in today. We can’t presume that progress is permanent. It never is. No one is more aware of that than America’s most marginalized and vulnerable communities. They feel the effects very keenly when we take steps backward, when our commitment to our principles falters in the face of our own sin.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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      The Axe Is Sharp

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      David Axelrod is not a prick.Truly.I’ve known him since 2007 and if I had to pick a noun to describe him, it would be mensch.So when President Biden privately employs that epithet for Axelrod, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, it’s bad for a few reasons.The ordinarily gracious president is punching down at the strategist who helped elevate him onto the ticket with Barack Obama in 2008 and who thinks he was “a great vice president” and has done a lot of wonderful things as president.When some in the Obama camp chattered in 2011 about switching Biden out for Hillary Clinton, Axelrod said, he protested: “That would be an incredible act of disloyalty to a guy who has done a great job for us.”Surely, Mr. Biden does not want to lower himself to the vulgarity of the growling, brawling, thieving Republicans in the Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of our Congress.(As Seth Meyers noted, George Santos — who spent campaign money on Hermès, Ferragamo, Botox, Sephora and OnlyFans — had “the shopping list of a 98-year-old oil tycoon’s 20-year-old wife.”)Axelrod drew Biden’s ire because he urged the president to consider stopping at one term, throwing open the race to younger Democrats while there’s still time, and leaving as a hero. He said that, despite Biden’s insult, he got a slew of messages agreeing with him.“I don’t care about them thinking I’m a prick — that’s fine,” the strategist told me. “I hope they don’t think the polls are wrong because they’re not.”According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Donald Trump is ahead in five battleground states and, as some other surveys have found, is even making inroads among Black voters and young voters. There’s a generational fracture in the Democratic Party over the Israeli-Hamas horror and Biden’s age. Third-party spoilers are circling.The president turns 81 on Monday; the Oval hollows out its occupants quickly, and Biden is dealing with two world-shattering wars, chaos at the border, a riven party and a roiling country.“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said. “He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”The president’s flash of anger indicates that he may be in denial, surrounded by enablers who are sugarcoating a grim political forecast.Like other pols, Biden has a healthy ego and like all presidents, he’s truculent about not getting the credit he thinks he deserves for his accomplishments. And it must be infuriating that most of the age qualms are about him, when Trump is only a few years younger.No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever, referring to Democrats with the fascist-favored term “vermin” and plotting a second-term revengefest. Trump’s campaign slogan should be, “There will be blood.”For Biden, this is about his identity. It’s what he has fought all his life for, even battling his way through “friendly fire,” as Hunter Biden told me, in the Obama White House, when some Obama aides undermined him. It must have been awful when Obama took his vice president to lunch and nudged him aside for Hillary to run in 2016. Biden craves the affirmation of being re-elected. He doesn’t want to look like a guy who’s been driven from office.But he should not indulge the Irish chip on his shoulder. He needs to gather the sharpest minds in his party and hear what they have to say, not engage in petty feuds.If Trump manages to escape conviction in Jack Smith’s Washington case, which may be the only criminal trial that ends before the election, that’s going to turbocharge his campaign. Of course, if he’s convicted, that could turbocharge his campaign even more.It’s a perfect playing field for the maleficent Trump: He learned in the 2016 race that physical and rhetorical violence could rev up his base. He told me at the time it helped get him to No. 1 and he said he found violence at his rallies exciting.He has no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries at the hands of one of his acolytes is subhuman, any more than he understood how repellent it was in 2015 when he mocked a disabled Times reporter. He gets barbaric laughs somehow, and that’s all he cares about. In an interview with Jonathan Karl, Trump gloated about how his audience on Jan. 6 was “the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of by far.”Never mind that it was one of the most dangerous, shameful days in our history. To Trump, it was glorious.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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      Can Nikki Haley Beat Trump?

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      It’s time to admit that I underestimated Nikki Haley.When she began her presidential campaign, she seemed caught betwixt and between: too much of a throwback to pre-Trump conservatism to challenge Ron DeSantis for the leadership of a Trumpified party, but also too entangled with Trump after her service in his administration to offer the fresh start that anti-Trump Republicans would be seeking.If you wanted someone to attack Trump head-on with relish, Chris Christie was probably your guy. If you wanted someone with pre-Trump Republican politics but without much Trump-era baggage, Tim Scott seemed like the fresher face.But now Scott is gone, Christie has a modest New Hampshire constituency and not much else, and Haley is having her moment. She’s in second place in New Hampshire, tied with DeSantis in the most recent Des Moines Register-led poll in Iowa, and leading Joe Biden by more than either DeSantis or Trump in national polls. Big donors are fluttering her way, and there’s an emerging media narrative about how she’s proving the DeSantis campaign theory wrong and showing that you can thrive as a Republican without surrendering to Trumpism.To be clear, I do not think Haley has proved the DeSantis theory wrong. She is not polling anywhere close to the highs DeSantis hit during his stint as the Trump-slayer, and if you use the Register-led poll to game out a future winnowing, you see that her own voters would mostly go to DeSantis if she were to drop out — but if DeSantis drops out, a lot of his voters would go to Trump.As long as that’s the case, Haley might be able to consolidate 30 or 35 percent of the party, but the path to actually winning would be closed. Which could make her ascent at DeSantis’s expense another study in the political futility of anti-Trump conservatism, its inability to wrestle successfully with the populism that might make Trump the nominee and the president again.But credit where it’s due: Haley has knocked out Scott, passed Christie and challenged DeSantis by succeeding at a core aspect of presidential politics — presenting yourself as an appealing and charismatic leader who can pick public fights and come out the winner (at least when Vivek Ramaswamy is your foil).So in the spirit of not underestimating her, let’s try to imagine a scenario where Haley actually wins the nomination.First, assume that ideological analysis of party politics is overrated, and that a candidate’s contingent success can yield irresistible momentum, stampeding voters in a way that polls alone cannot anticipate.For Haley, the stampede scenario requires winning outright in New Hampshire. The difficulty is that even on the upswing, she still trails Trump 46-19 in the current RealClearPolitics Average. But assume that Christie drops out and his support swings her way, assume that the current polling underestimates how many independents vote in the G.O.P. primary, assume a slight sag for Trump and a little last-moment Nikkimentum, and you can imagine your way to a screaming upset — Haley 42, Trump 40.Then assume that defeat forces Trump to actually debate in the long February lull (broken only by the Nevada caucus) between New Hampshire and the primary in Haley’s own South Carolina. Assume that the front-runner comes across as some combination of rusty and insane, Haley handles him coolly and then wins her home state primary. Assume that polls still show her beating Biden, Fox News has rallied to her fully, endorsements flood in — and finally, finally, enough voters who like Trump because he’s a winner swing her way to clear a path to the nomination.You’ll notice, though, that this story skips over Iowa. That’s because I’m not sure what Haley needs there. Victory seems implausible, but does she want to surge so impressively that it knocks DeSantis out of the race? Or, as the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio has suggested, does the fact that DeSantis’s voters mostly have Trump as a second choice mean that Haley actually needs DeSantis to stay in the race through the early states, so that Trump can’t consolidate his own potential support? In which case maybe Haley needs an Iowa result where both she and DeSantis overperform their current polling, setting her up for New Hampshire but also giving the Florida governor a reason to hang around.This dilemma connects to my earlier argument that beating Trump requires a joining of the Haley and DeSantis factions, an alliance of the kind contemplated by Trump’s opponents in 2016 but never operationalized. But I doubt Haley is interested in such an alliance at the moment; after all, people are talking about her path to victory — and here I am, doing it myself!Fundamentally, though, I still believe that Haley’s destiny is anticipated by the biting, “congrats, Nikki,” quote from a DeSantis ally in New York Magazine: “You won the Never Trump primary. Your prize is nothing.”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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      When It Comes to Disdain for Democracy, Trump Has Company

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      It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups.But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.In Wisconsin, that same year, voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, into the governor’s mansion, breaking eight years of Republican control. The Republican-led Legislature did not have the power to overturn the election results, but the impenetrable, ultra-gerrymandered majority could use its authority to strip as much power from the governor as possible, blocking, among other things, his ability to withdraw from a state lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — one of the things he campaigned on. Wisconsin voters would have their new governor, but he’d be as weak as Republicans could possibly make him.It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor. And although we’ve only had a few elections this year, it doesn’t take much effort to find more of the same.I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose a majority of votes statewide.In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future. But the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities. As in Wisconsin, the Ohio Legislature is so gerrymandered in favor of the Republican Party that it would take a once-in-a-century supermajority of Democratic votes to dislodge it from power. Most lawmakers in the state have nothing to fear from voters who might disagree with their actions.It was in part because of this gerrymander that abortion rights proponents in the state focused their efforts on a ballot initiative. The Ohio Legislature may have been dead set on ending abortion access in the state — in 2019, the Republican majority passed a so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion after six weeks — but Ohio voters were not.Aware that most of the voters in their state supported abortion rights, and unwilling to try to persuade them that an abortion ban was the best policy for the state, Ohio Republicans first tried to rig the game. In August, the Legislature asked voters to weigh in on a new supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives to amend the State Constitution. If approved, this requirement would have stopped the abortion rights amendment in its tracks.It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators. This group may not like the fact that Ohioans have declared the Republican abortion ban null and void, but that is democracy. If these lawmakers want to advance their efforts to restrict abortion, they first need to persuade the people.To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, you always win.That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question. That’s why Republicans in places like North Carolina have adopted novel and dubious legal arguments about state power, the upshot of which is that they concentrate power in the hands of these gerrymandered state legislatures, giving them total authority over elections and electoral outcomes. And that’s why, months before voting begins in the Republican presidential contest, much of the party has already embraced a presidential candidate who promises to prosecute and persecute his political opponents.One of the basic ideas of democracy is that nothing is final. Defeats can become victories and victories can become defeats. Governments change, laws change, and, most important, the people change. No majority is the majority, and there’s always the chance that new configurations of groups and interests will produce new outcomes.For this to work, however, we — as citizens — have to believe it can work. Cultivating this faith is no easy task. We have to have confidence in our ability to talk to one another, to work with one another, to persuade one another. We have to see one another, in some sense, as equals, each of us entitled to our place in this society.It seems to me that too many Republicans have lost that faith.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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      Haley Tussles With DeSantis, Aiming to Prove Herself in Iowa

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      Nikki Haley is vying for a matchup with Donald Trump in her home state. The calculus is similar for Ron DeSantis, who has stepped up his attacks on his rival for second place.For most of the 2024 presidential cycle, Nikki Haley has ceded ground in Iowa to Donald J. Trump, who dominates its polls, and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has made the state central to his hopes of besting the Republican front-runner.But Ms. Haley, who has focused more energy on the primaries in New Hampshire and her home state of South Carolina where she served as governor, is sending strong signals that she still intends to make it a fight.With just two months to go before the critical first-in-the-nation caucuses, Ms. Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, is starting a series of campaign events Thursday as her battle with Mr. DeSantis to become Mr. Trump’s nearest rival reaches a fever pitch. She will arrive armed with more than 70 new endorsements in the state and plans for a $10 million advertising blitz across Iowa and New Hampshire, seeking to capitalize on the narrowing field and the polls that show her steady rise.“She is peaking at the right time,” said Chris Cournoyer, a state senator and Ms. Haley’s Iowa state chairwoman. “Right now.”Yet Mr. DeSantis has had a strong head start in Iowa. He has pursued an all-in strategy in the state for months, building what appears to be a formidable ground game and moving much of his staff to the state in a last-ditch attempt to win the Jan. 15 caucuses. Before the third presidential debate last week in Miami, he landed a major victory when he drew the endorsement of Gov. Kim Reynolds, who said there was “too much at stake” to remain neutral in the primary nomination, as Iowa governors typically do.And then there is Mr. Trump himself. Ms. Haley’s turn toward the state appears to be confirmation of what Mr. DeSantis and others have been signaling from the onset: For another candidate to have a shot, Mr. Trump must be stopped in Iowa first.As their competition for second place heats up, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis have been clashing on the debate stage and in mailers, online posts and media appearances. The two have lobbed misleading claims at each other in recent weeks on dealings with Chinese companies and energy. Mr. DeSantis in particular has ramped up the attacks, seeking to use Ms. Haley’s own appeal to a broader coalition of voters against her by casting her as too liberal. The tone of the attacks has also escalated.He has falsely characterized Ms. Haley’s position on Gazan refugees, and criticized her for saying that social media users should be forbidden from posting anonymously. (On Wednesday, after some online backlash from right-wing media commentators, Ms. Haley clarified on CNBC that she had been referring solely to foreign-based actors.)In a radio interview on Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis dug up a three-year-old post in which Ms. Haley said that the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police should be “personal and painful for everyone.” Mr. DeSantis, who at the time said he was “appalled” by Mr. Floyd’s death, questioned her sentiments, saying “Why does that need to be personal and painful for you or me? We had nothing to do with it.”Ms. Haley has not humored such strikes with a response, and when asked about criticism from her rivals, she has sought to project strength. “When I’m attacked, I kick back,” she has warned.They are not the only ones competing for better positioning. Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and political newcomer who has mostly self-funded his campaign, has made 150 Iowa stops, 34 more than Mr. DeSantis and more than double those by Ms. Haley. He has attempted to make inroads with Indian American voters in the state. And his campaign officials on Wednesday said they would be spending more on advertising and expanding their staff there soon. He released a list of more than 20 Iowa events through next week.Iowa is a difficult state to survey partly because turnout is difficult to predict and the number of swing voters who show up to caucus can be higher than expected. But a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll released at the end of last month captured Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis tied for second place at 16 percent, far behind Mr. Trump, who pulled in 43 percent support among likely Republican caucusgoers. It has been consistent with her steady rise in other surveys of the early voting states.Gloria Mazza, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Polk County, which is the largest in the state and includes Des Moines, said Ms. Haley still had plenty of opportunity to catch up to other candidates who have spent more time in the state.“There are a lot of people undecided,” said Ms. Mazza, who is staying neutral. “There are still people who they won’t even disclose to polls who they are going for.”Through the early days of the election cycle, Republican voters and elected officials in Iowa said they saw little of Ms. Haley. She was polling in the single digits and lagging behind her rivals on fund-raising, making it difficult to campaign in a rural state that requires more time and money to cover ground. But her campaign has been gradually adding staff and building out her Iowa footprint since the summer. Last month, her Iowa team added two new members: Hooff Cooksey, Governor Reynolds’s campaign manager during her 2018 run, and Troy Bishop, the 2022 field director for Senator Chuck Grassley.Before the most recent Republican debate in Miami, a group of Iowa farmers and agricultural leaders announced their support for Ms. Haley’s bid, citing her tough talk on China, stances on renewable energy and pledges to repeal government regulations. On Tuesday, she released a slate of more than 70 endorsements from elected officials and community and business leaders.In interviews, Ms. Cournoyer and some Haley endorsers argued that though much of Mr. Trump’s support in Iowa is unmovable, Ms. Haley had the chance to make up ground with independents and moderates. Bob Brunkhorst, a former state senator and former mayor of Waverly on that list, said her team had been astute about not spending too much early in the cycle and waiting to expand in the state.“They know how the game is run,” he said, “and when to peak.”On Monday, Ms. Haley’s campaign announced it would be spending $10 million in television, radio and digital advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire starting in the first week of December — its first investment in advertising of the cycle and an amount so far outpacing the DeSantis campaign in the coming months.In a press call the next day, Mark Harris, the lead strategist for Stand for America, the super PAC backing Ms. Haley, said the PAC had been helping level the playing field for her in Iowa. (Mr. DeSantis’s allied super PAC, Never Back Down, has invested roughly $17.7 million in the state covering this year and into January, and Stand for America has committed $13.6 million, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.) He projected further growth and contended the DeSantis campaign had backed itself into a corner.“We have our eggs in multiple baskets,” Mr. Harris said.But Andrew Romeo, the DeSantis campaign’s communications director, countered that Ms. Haley’s ad buy amounted to “lighting money on fire,” and paled in comparison to having a network of staff members and volunteers who can mobilize voters on caucus day. “History shows the Iowa caucus cannot be bought on TV ads alone and that a strong ground game is what ultimately matters,” Mr. Romeo said in a statement.Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and an allied super PAC have been pouring resources into building just that. The campaign has shifted roughly 20 employees to the state from its headquarters in Tallahassee, Fla., including three top aides. The candidate himself has made pit stops at gas stations, diners and county fairs across Iowa, so far visiting all but seven of its 99 counties, with plans to hit the rest soon. More than 40 state legislators have endorsed Mr. DeSantis, who has secured at least one local chair in each Iowa county. This week, Ms. Reynolds cut an ad promoting her endorsement of her fellow governor.And Never Back Down says it has secured commitments from nearly 30,000 Iowans to caucus for Mr. DeSantis, signed up almost 20,000 volunteers and knocked on more than 633,000 doors. In a Nov. 6 memo sent to donors, Mr. DeSantis’s team said it soon expects to have nearly 50 paid staffers across “more than six offices” statewide between the campaign and super PAC. More

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      Nancy Dahlstrom, Alaska’s Lieutenant Governor, Is Running for Its Sole House Seat

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      Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom is challenging Mary Peltola, who scored upset wins last year against Sarah Palin to flip Alaska’s sole seat in the House to the Democrats for the first time in 50 years.A second Republican has joined the race in Alaska to challenge Representative Mary S. Peltola, a popular Democrat who holds the state’s sole House seat.Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who was elected last year, is taking on Ms. Peltola, who became the first Alaska Native woman ever elected to Congress after she defeated former Gov. Sarah Palin in two 2022 elections. Ms. Peltola’s first victory against Ms. Palin, in a special election after the death of Alaska’s longtime congressman, Don Young, flipped the seat to the Democrats for the first time in 50 years.Her second victory, in the November midterms, dealt a political blow for Ms. Palin, once considered a standard-bearer in the national Republican Party.Ms. Dahlstrom, a former state representative and the former commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections, is the second Republican to enter the House race, following Nick Begich III. A scion of a prominent liberal political family in Alaska, Mr. Begich finished in third place in previous races against Ms. Peltola.“Alaska needs a proven tough fighter,” Ms. Dahlstrom said in a statement announcing her candidacy and criticizing President Biden. She vowed that if elected to the House she would “stop Biden and the extreme liberals ruining our future.”The House Republican campaign arm has made this seat a priority target in 2024. Will Reinert, a spokesman for the group, said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Ms. Dahlstrom “is a top-tier recruit who will win this Trump won state.”Ms. Peltola’s election to a full term with 55 percent of the vote last November — after playing up her bipartisan credentials and local issues on the campaign trail — demonstrated her ability to hold on to the seat despite political headwinds. Alaska has long been a red state, and former President Donald J. Trump handily won Alaska in the 2020 election. Mr. Young, a Republican who was one of the longest-serving members in the House, won re-election that year with 54 percent of the vote.But Ms. Peltola’s popularity will still pose a significant obstacle for Republicans, despite their advantages. The race was competitive but leaning toward Ms. Peltola, according to an analysis by the Cook Political Report earlier this year.Activists and former Republican candidates in the state, including Ms. Palin, are also trying to repeal the state’s recently adopted ranked-choice voting system. They argue that the system can allow a Democrat to win even when a majority of voters pick a Republican on the first ballot. Ms. Peltola was the most popular choice on the first ballot in both of her previous races, but she did not secure outright majorities until the second round.Proponents of the system say that when voters have more choices, they’re less likely to follow strict party lines, and that it reduces polarization and gives more moderate candidates a better shot. More