More stories

  • in

    Key GOP Megadonor Network Will Hear Pitches From DeSantis and Haley Camps

    The network, the American Opportunity Alliance, will meet in Dallas, as its biggest donors weigh whether investing in any non-Trump candidate remains a worthwhile investment.A network of megadonors whose biggest members have stayed on the sidelines in the Republican presidential primary will meet next month in Dallas as advisers to two of the candidates hoping to defeat Donald J. Trump will make one of their last pitches for support, according to two people briefed on the matter.The multiday event will feature advisers to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, according to the two people. It will be hosted by Harlan Crow, the wealthy real-estate developer who backs Republicans and who has recently drawn attention for his friendship with and financial ties to Justice Clarence Thomas. Mr. Crow is hosting a separate fund-raiser for Ms. Haley next week, according to Bloomberg News.The donor network, known as the American Opportunity Alliance, was founded a decade ago by a group of billionaires, including the hedge fund executive Paul Singer; Kenneth Griffin, another prominent investor; and members of the Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs.Some of its members have been known to be seeking options other than Mr. Trump. Mr. Griffin, in particular, has been vocal about how he is still assessing the field, despite his past support for Mr. DeSantis in his re-election effort as governor. Mr. Griffin, who has said he wants the G.O.P. to move on from Mr. Trump, bluntly told CNBC recently about Mr. DeSantis, “It’s not clear to me what voter base he is intending to appeal to.”The gathering next month comes as a number of top Republican donors are increasingly concerned that a divided Republican primary — even just through the early states — will almost unavoidably lead to Mr. Trump’s renomination.The group does not move in unison, and the meeting is in some ways a final effort for some donors to see if contributing to any candidate — either Mr. DeSantis or Ms. Haley — remains a worthwhile investment, given Mr. Trump’s commanding lead in the polls and his penchant for vengeance against those who cross him.The meeting is also a chance for the donors to assess whether backing one of the candidates could help winnow down the field ahead of the Iowa caucuses, giving either Ms. Haley or Mr. DeSantis a greater chance to defeat Mr. Trump.Aides to other well-known candidates did not receive invitations to the event, according to a person familiar with the planning.There are members of the network who will be present who are already supporting either Ms. Haley or Mr. DeSantis. Underscoring the complicated nature of the current intraparty feud is the expected attendance at the event of Brooke Rollins, a former Trump administration adviser who leads the America First Policy Institute, and Linda McMahon, another former Trump appointee and close friend of the former president, according to one of the people familiar with the event.The circumstances of the meeting reflect the reality of the current race: Mr. Trump leads by enough that he has skipped the first two primary debates and called for the Republican National Committee to cancel the remaining calendar and unite behind him.One Republican strategist who works with the group and who was not authorized to speak publicly said bluntly of the gathering that the priority was beating President Biden next November — not the ongoing Republican primary. The person said the campaign teams will have the opportunity to lay out — and try to sell — their paths to victory. The person added that Mr. Trump’s path to victory, meanwhile, was “straightforward.”Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are among the leading Republicans seeking to stop Mr. Trump, but remain far behind in the polls.Mr. DeSantis has been Mr. Trump’s top rival for the entirety of 2023, but for months he has lost ground to the former president while seeing other candidates make gains. He has been increasingly banking his candidacy on a superlative showing in Iowa, the first state that will vote. Mr. DeSantis has also upset some of the American Opportunity Alliance network donors with his comments minimizing the Russian incursion into Ukraine as a geopolitical concern for the United States.For Ms. Haley’s team, simply being given equal billing with Mr. DeSantis at a crucial donor meeting is a success of sorts, as the former United Nations ambassador has converted two solid debates into momentum and money.The steepness of the task to stopping Mr. Trump was underscored by a memo this week from a group, Win It Back PAC, that has spent millions of dollars trying to soften Mr. Trump’s support in Iowa.“All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” read the memo, which was written by David McIntosh, who also leads the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group.The memo described why the group’s ads — testimonials from past Trump supporters — tackled few policy disagreements and focused more on his perceived electoral weaknesses.“Even when you show video to Republican primary voters — with complete context — of President Trump saying something otherwise objectionable to primary voters, they find a way to rationalize and dismiss it,” Mr. McIntosh wrote.The group has spent essentially no money on television since the start of September, according to data from the media-tracking firm AdImpact.Sarah Longwell, a strategist who oversees a suite of anti-Trump groups, including the Republican Accountability PAC, which spent more than $750,000 on ads over the summer, said she has put her group’s spending entirely on pause in the primary — because Mr. Trump now appears so certain to win.“It’s pretty simple,” Ms. Longwell said. “We don’t see a path right now for somebody else. If it was close, if there was an actual alternative we thought could go somewhere or was running an effective campaign against Trump, we would continue.”Her group, she said, would oppose Mr. Trump in the general election and was saving its resources for that fight. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” she said of the primary. More

  • in

    How Trump Is Complicating McCarthy’s Attempts to Avoid a Shutdown

    The former president has been publicly pushing a shutdown, but his views are shaped by his own handling of the 2018 shutdown.When a group of House Republicans thwarted Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempt at averting a government shutdown, he fumed that he was being stymied by lawmakers who wanted to “burn the whole place down.”But he spared any public ire for the most powerful member of his party who has been encouraging a shutdown: former President Donald J. Trump.“I’d shut down the government if they can’t make an appropriate deal, absolutely,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”On his social media website, Truth Social, Mr. Trump went further, suggesting on Sunday that Republicans should dig in because President Biden, in Mr. Trump’s view, will take the blame.“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be blamed for the Budget Shutdown,” he wrote. “Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!”Mr. Trump’s view of how shutdowns work was shaped by his own experience as president, when the longest government shutdown in history took place from December 2018 to January 2019. He incurred the public blame for it, as he publicly embraced the idea of a shutdown while holding contentious talks about a budget agreement with two Democratic leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and the House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi of California.“I’ll be the one to shut it down,” Mr. Trump told the leaders in a contentious Oval Office meeting in December 2018 shortly before the shutdown. “I will take the mantle. And I will shut it down for border security.”There is no reason to believe that Mr. Biden would be granted outsize blame, if any at all, for a shutdown that a group of Republican holdouts in Congress are encouraging. Mr. McCarthy has privately noted what Mr. Trump said publicly at the time in 2018, according to a person with knowledge of Mr. McCarthy’s comments.In an earlier post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump suggested he believed the shutdown could “defund” the federal investigations he’s facing, although people have told him that such a belief was not likely to become reality, according to a person briefed on the conversation.Mr. Trump’s eagerness to push for chaos has only gone so far, however: The former president has not been calling lawmakers to try to push a shutdown.Yet Mr. McCarthy, whom Mr. Trump supported at the last minute when he ran for speaker, is facing an existential threat to his leadership, with his Republican critics looking to force him from his role amid the calamity of a likely shutdown.Aides to Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump declined to comment.People close to both men maintain that the looming government shutdown was not a strain on their relationship, nor was it a sign of a bigger rift. Nonetheless, a person close to Mr. Trump acknowledged that his support for a shutdown was providing encouragement to Mr. McCarthy’s adversaries.Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a leading supporter of a shutdown, said in an interview that one of Mr. Trump’s posts on social media endorsing a shutdown may have had an influence on some members of Congress.“I think there might have been a few people on the fence who were persuaded by that statement,” Mr. Gaetz said. “I view that as consequential.”Yet Mr. Trump is not being faulted, at least overtly, for his stance. In Congress, some Republicans dismissed the notion that Mr. Trump could do something to push Mr. Gaetz and his allies in the other direction, away from a shutdown.“I think it certainly helps with some of these folks when they hear from the former president, like during the speaker negotiations or the debt ceiling,” said Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. But he said it was Mr. Gaetz who was “creating a crisis.”A person close to Mr. Trump maintained that the former president did not view the situation in terms of helping Mr. McCarthy, nor did he view the speaker as being especially imperiled. Mr. Trump “doesn’t think Kevin needs rescuing,” the person said. In Mr. Trump’s view, the person said, a government shutdown isn’t a terrible thing so long as it’s not consequential.And there has been another issue at play: Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House.The person close to Mr. Trump insisted the former president had not been frustrated with Mr. McCarthy over his lack of an endorsement in the Republican presidential primary. Yet others who have spoken with Mr. Trump throughout the year said he had raised Mr. McCarthy’s lack of a formal endorsement several times.Mr. McCarthy has all but endorsed Mr. Trump in recent weeks — taking public shots at his chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and talking up Mr. Trump — but he has delayed making it official.Earlier this year, Mr. McCarthy’s reasoning, according to three people with direct knowledge of his thinking, was that he was eventually going to endorse Mr. Trump but needed to hold off for fund-raising purposes. He has said that major donors who are essential to funding House Republican campaigns would cut off funds if he endorsed Mr. Trump and that he needed to raise as much money as possible from donors who do not like the former president before making the decision official, the people with knowledge of his thinking said.Another person in contact with Mr. McCarthy, while not disputing that he expressed those sentiments about fund-raising, said that he was one of the most prolific fund-raisers in the Republican Party, and that he expected to raise money regardless of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump has also had an eye on expunging his impeachments. He asked Mr. McCarthy and his allies what they’re going to do to clear his impeachments — though it remains unclear whether they have any power to do so. Despite the lack of formal support, Mr. McCarthy has made sure to tend to the relationship with Mr. Trump since he said in a television interview earlier this year that he was uncertain the former president was the strongest nominee in the general election. That comment enraged Mr. Trump, who told his aides he wanted it fixed.More recently, Mr. McCarthy has struck a different note, saying: “President Trump is beating Biden right now in the polls. He’s stronger than he has ever been in this process.” More

  • in

    Meet the Republican Voters at the Heart of the G.O.P. Identity Crisis

    Republican voters are looking to the presidential debate stage as they decide who should win the party primaries. And even though Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his return to the top of the ticket feels all but inevitable. But at least one-third of Republican voters are left wondering why their party can’t quit this guy.The Opinion deputy editor Patrick Healy guides us through a recent focus group discussion with 13 longtime Republican voters who are desperate for their party to get over the Trump appeal, lest the G.O.P. risk losing their support in the 2024 election.Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Burazin/Getty ImagesThe 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.This Opinion Short was produced by Phoebe Lett. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Efim Shapiro, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Special thanks to Alison Bruzek and Jillian Weinberger. More

  • in

    What if the Framers Got Something Critical Wrong?

    Here are three instances in American history, out of many, when the rules of our system preserved a failed or suboptimal status quo against the views — and the votes — of a majority of Americans and their representatives.In 2021, 232 members of the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in summoning and provoking the mob that attacked and ransacked the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6. Not long after, 57 members of the Senate voted to convict Trump. But because the Constitution demands a two-thirds supermajority for conviction in an impeachment trial, the considered decision of a substantial majority of Congress — backed by a substantial majority of the public — was thwarted by the veto of a self-interested, partisan minority.A couple of generations earlier, between 1971 and 1972, the vast majority of lawmakers in Congress — 354 members of the House and 84 members of the Senate — voted to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and send it to the states. Most Americans, according to surveys at the time, wanted to make the E.R.A. the 27th amendment to the Constitution. And within five years of passage in Washington, legislatures in 35 states — which constituted a majority of the nation’s legislators — had voted for ratification. But 35 states was three short of the three-fourths needed for the amendment to succeed. By the time the deadline for ratifying the E.R.A. came in 1982, the amendment was essentially dead in the water.Decades before that, in 1922, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill passed the House, 230 to 119. It was supported by President Warren G. Harding, a Republican, as well as the large Republican majority in the Senate. But that majority was not large enough to overcome a Democratic filibuster — spearheaded by Jim Crow lawmakers from the South — and the bill died before it could come to a vote. It would take a full century after the death of the Dyer bill for Congress to pass, and the president to sign, an anti-lynching bill into law.The American political system — with its federalism, bicameralism and separation of powers — consists of overlapping majoritarian and counter-majoritarian institutions designed to promote stability and continuity at the expense of popular government. Not content to build structural impediments to change, the framers of the Constitution also insisted on supermajority thresholds for a number of key actions: executive and judicial impeachment, ratification of foreign treaties and the passage and ratification of constitutional amendments. The Constitution also allows for the legislature to make its own rules regarding its conduct and both chambers of Congress have, at different points in their histories, adopted de facto supermajority rules for passing legislation.Americans are so accustomed and acculturated to these supermajority rules that they often treat their value as self-evident — a natural and necessary part of American constitutionalism. No, we don’t want to subject our every political decision to simple majority rule. Yes, we want to raise the highest possible barrier to removing a president or changing the rules of the game.Defenses of supermajority rules tend to rest on claims related to what appears to be common sense. The argument goes like this: Supermajority rules stabilize our political institutions, encourage deliberation, secure consensus for change and protect minorities from the tyranny of overbearing majorities. But as the political theorist Melissa Schwartzberg argues in her 2014 book, “Counting the Many: The Origins and Limits of Supermajority Rule,” the story isn’t so simple, and the actual value of supermajority rules isn’t clear at all.It is certainly true that supermajority rules promote stability of institutions and the norms that are supposed to govern them. There is a reason, after all, that the United States Constitution has only been amended 27 times in 235 years. But, Schwartzberg asks, “How can we determine which norms are worth stabilizing” since “for any given political community, different institutional arrangements could ensure security of expectations and make ordinary political life possible — even the set of rights and their scope could vary.”Do we defer to the wisdom of the framers? What if, in our estimation, they got something critical wrong? And even if they didn’t, should the dead hand of the past so strongly outweigh the considerations of the present? Do we defer to wisdom and tradition under the assumption that stability is de facto evidence of consent?But here’s where we come to the Catch-22, because the stability of our system rests on supermajority rules so strong that they stymie all but the broadest attempts to change that system. And who is to say that stability is such a paramount goal? In a dynamic society, which is to say in a human society, promoting stability with little institutional recourse for reform might ultimately be more disruptive because it creates friction, and thus energy, that will be released one way or another.What of the claim that supermajority rules — like the filibuster or the ones that structure the constitutional amendment process — promote consensus? Here again, Schwartzberg says, we have to think carefully about what we mean. If by consensus we mean the aggregate opinions of the community, then there might be a basis for supporting supermajority rules, although that raises another question: What is the threshold for success? The two-thirds demand for impeachment in the Senate, for example, is essentially arbitrary. So is the three-fourths of states threshold for ratifying a constitutional amendment. There is no rational standard to use here, only a feeling that “most” people want something.In which case, if what you want is some general sense that a specific outcome is what the community or legislative body generally wants, then it’s not clear that supermajority rules are the optimal solution. Consider what Schwartzberg calls an “acclamatory” conception of consensus. In this version, what the community believes is true or prudent is what it is “willing to let a belief stand as the group’s view,” even if there is a significant minority that disagrees.Not every American may believe, to use Schwartzberg’s example, that “freedom of the press ought to be unlimited,” but they are “willing to accept that the view of the United States is that Congress should not restrict the ability of newspapers to publish as they see fit.” As citizens, Schwartzberg writes, “they recognize they are implicated in this view, even if as private individuals they may disagree with it.”If what we want out of a decision to remove a president or pass an amendment is an acclamatory consensus of this sort, then rather than set a supermajority rule — which would permit a minority to preserve a status quo that no longer commands the acclamatory support of the group — what we might use instead, Schwartzberg suggests, is a system that privileges serious and long-term deliberation, so that the minority on a particular question feels satisfied enough to consent to the view of a simple majority, even if it still disagrees.As for the question of minority protection from majority tyranny, one of the quirks of nearly all supermajority rules is that they make no distinction between different kinds of minorities. This means that they are as likely to protect and strengthen privileged and powerful minorities as they are to empower and defend weak ones. Looking at the American experience, we see much more of the former than we do of the latter, from the arc of the “slave power” in antebellum America to the specific case of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to recent efforts to protect the civil rights of more vulnerable Americans.This gets to the most powerful point Schwartzberg makes about the impact of supermajority rules on democratic life. Democracy, she writes, “entails a commitment to the presumption of epistemic equality among its citizens.” Put another way, democracy assumes an equal capacity to judge one’s interests — or at least what an individual believes is her interest. This epistemic equality is “manifested institutionally in formally equal voting power.” In a democracy, our political institutions should affirm the fact that we are equal.In the United States, ours do not. The rules of the game here tend to elevate the views and judgments of some citizens over others, to the point where under certain circumstances small, factional minorities can rule with no regard for the views of the majority in their communities. Whether it is the supermajority rules of the Senate or the counter-majoritarianism of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, our system makes it clear that some voices are more equal than others.One might say, even so, that the wisdom of the framers and of past generations holds true. But as Americans struggle against their own counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajoritarian rules to stop the ascendance of a wannabe authoritarian, I am not so sure that wisdom holds true.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

  • in

    Latino Republicans Call Debate a Missed Opportunity to Reach Voters

    Republicans have sought to make inroads with the fast-growing slice of the electorate. But voters saw a swing and a miss on debate night.The Republican Party has been on a quest to make inroads with Hispanic voters, and the second presidential debate was tailored to delivering that message: The setting was California, where Latinos now make up the largest racial or ethnic demographic. The Spanish-language network Univision broadcast the event in Spanish, and Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a weekday prime-time newscast on a major network in the United States, was a moderator.But questions directly on Latino and immigrant communities tended to be overtaken by bickering and candidates taking swipes at one another on unrelated subjects. Only three candidates — former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — referred directly to Latinos or Hispanics at all. And only Mr. Pence pitched his economic message specifically toward Hispanic voters.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose state has the third-largest Latino population, appeared to suggest there was no need for specific overtures to Hispanics or independents when he had won by such large margins in his home state, including in Miami-Dade County, a former Democratic stronghold.“I’m the only one up here who’s gotten in the big fights and has delivered big victories for the people of Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”In interviews, Latino voters and strategists called the debate a missed opportunity for Republicans: Few of the candidates spoke directly to or about Latinos or claimed any cultural affiliation or familiarity with them. The Republican field offered little in the way of economic plans to help workers or solutions to improve legal channels to immigration. The candidates doubled down on depictions of the nation’s southern border as chaotic and lawless.Mike Madrid, a longtime Latino Republican consultant in California, said the tough talk could draw in the support of blue-collar Latino Republicans who did not hold a college degree and in recent years have tended to vote more in line with white voters. But the debate was only further evidence that the party had abandoned attempts to broaden its reach beyond Latino Republicans already in its fold. Republicans are “getting more Latino voters not because of their best efforts, but in spite of them,” he said.Latinos are now projected to number about 34.5 million eligible voters, or an estimated 14.3 percent of the American electorate, according to a 2022 analysis by the Pew Research Center.Although Latino voters still overall lean Democratic, former President Donald J. Trump improved his performance with the demographic in 2020 nationwide, and in some areas like South Florida and South Texas even made sizable gains. Debate over what exactly drove his appeal continues.Some post-mortem analyses have found his opposition to city-led Covid pandemic restrictions that shut down workplaces and his administration’s promotion of low Latino unemployment rates and support for Latino businesses helped persuade Latino voters to his side, even when they disagreed with his violent and divisive approach to immigration.Historically, about a third of Latino voters have tended to vote for Republican presidential candidates. But Latino Republicans differ from non-Hispanic Republicans on guns and immigration: Fewer Hispanic Republicans believe protecting the right to own guns is more important than regulating who can own guns, and Hispanic Republicans are less likely to clamor for more border security measures, according to the Pew Research Center.At the debate on Wednesday, Ms. Calderón, who is Colombian and has gained prominence in Latin America for her incisive reporting on race and immigration, and the other moderators often turned to issues central to Latinos in the United States, including income inequality, gun violence and Black and Latino students’ low scores in math and reading.But on the stage, the candidates’ attention quickly turned elsewhere. Mr. DeSantis — the only candidate to provide a Spanish translation of his website — accused Washington of “shutting down the American dream,” an idea popular with Latino workers, but mostly pitched himself as a culture warrior.Ilia Calderón, the first Afro-Latina to anchor a major national news desk in the United States, was a moderator.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockIn response to a question on whether he would support a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people in the United States, Mr. Christie talked of the need for immigrant workers to fill vacant jobs. But in his central point, he pledged to increase the presence of troops and agents at the border with Mexico, calling for the issue to be treated as “the law enforcement problem it is.”Mr. Pence dodged Ms. Calderón when she pressed him on whether he would work with Congress to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The initiative, which remains in limbo in the courts, is temporarily protecting from deportation roughly 580,000 undocumented immigrants who have been able to show they were brought into the country as children, have no serious criminal history and work or go to school, among other criteria. About 91 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents and 54 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners favor a law that would provide DACA recipients permanent legal status. Although Mr. Pence described himself as the only candidate onstage who had tackled congressional reform before, he did not directly answer the question on DACA. Mostly, he used his responses to attack Vivek Ramaswamy and Mr. DeSantis before launching into a lengthy accounting of his track record on hard-line Trump policies.“The truth is, we need to fix a broken immigration system, and I will do that as well,” Mr. Pence said. “But first and foremost, a nation without borders is not a nation.”When asked how he would reach out to Latino voters, Mr. Scott highlighted his chief of staff, who he said was the only Hispanic female chief of staff in the Senate and someone he had hired “because she was the best, highest-qualified person we have.” But he, too, quickly turned to attacking his home-state rival, former Gov. Nikki Haley.The exchanges were a marked difference from the 2016 presidential debate when Senator Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, defended speaking Spanish and personalized their experiences with immigration and the Latino community.Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who helped run Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign last election cycle, said they also were different — and less effective — from those of Mr. Trump. Missing were the pledges “to bring jobs back to America, buy American and drain the swamp,” he added, messages that he said tended to resonate with Latinos and Latino men in particular.“Their campaigns have become such grievance politics that there is not a positive message that is radiating from anyone,” Mr. Rocha said. The shift could also hurt Republicans with a Latino community that skews young and tends to be aspirational, he argued.In South Texas, Sergio Sanchez, the former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party, said he listened to the debate with dismay. He wanted to hear the candidates talk about pocketbook issues and energy policies. And he wanted them to stay on message and connect the dots for voters on why their economic policies were better than those under the Biden administration. Instead, he said, they spent more time swinging at one another.That was not good for Latinos or anyone else, he said. “They swung and missed,” he added. More

  • in

    We Need to Talk About Joe Biden

    Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIn 2020, Joe Biden handily beat Donald Trump in a race that was never particularly close. But now that the twice-impeached and four-times-indicted former president may once again be the Republican nominee, polls suggest they might be even, at best. Why isn’t Biden doing better? Has his presidency really gone so poorly?This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss the uphill battle Biden is facing heading into 2024 and debate what kind of leader Americans really want.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Evan Vucci/Associated PressMentioned in this episode:“Reagan Should Not Seek Second Term, Majority Believes,” by Barry Sussman in The Washington PostThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Stephanie Joyce. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

  • in

    With Shutdown Looming, Biden Points to Republican Infighting

    The president and his team insist they do not want the government to shut down. But they are also confident that Republicans will receive the blame if it does.President Biden’s shutdown strategy is simple: Avoid one, if possible. But if not, make sure Americans know whom to blame.His aides at the White House and in his re-election campaign have spent the past several days describing the consequences of what they call an “extreme Republican shutdown” of the government: delayed disaster relief; no food stamps for poor women and children; no pay for troops, air traffic controllers, Border Patrol or Transportation Security Administration agents.“They pull the country toward an extreme government shutdown in the name of draconian cuts to education, law enforcement, Meals on Wheels and Head Start,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in describing House Republicans.The president and his team are quick to insist that they do not want a shutdown, especially a lengthy one, because of the harms that would ripple across America. But they are also confident that Republicans will receive the blame, as they have during standoffs that temporarily shuttered government agencies in years past.White House aides also believe that the intraparty fighting in Congress is putting Republican dysfunction on display, to the benefit of Mr. Biden and Democrats. Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a handful of his most conservative colleagues are refusing to keep the government open unless their demands for border security and spending cuts are met. “Extreme House Republicans are playing partisan games with people’s lives and marching our country toward a government shutdown that would have damaging impacts across the country,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday, highlighting nearly 2,000 disaster recovery projects that would be delayed by a shutdown.Mr. McCarthy has tried to draw Mr. Biden into the drama by suggesting that he would be responsible for a work stoppage because of his refusal to support Republican proposals for more restrictions on migrants at the border with Mexico.Speaker Kevin McCarthy has suggested Mr. Biden is responsible for a government shutdown because of his refusal to support Republican proposals on immigration.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“The president, it’s in his hands,” Mr. McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Capitol Hill this week. “He can keep the government open by taking an action on the border.”Mr. Biden has also been under pressure from members of his own party to confront the surge of migrants at the border, thousands of whom are putting enormous stress on social services in big cities like New York and Boston.The president and his aides have pointed to their efforts to provide more migrants with a chance to receive work permits. And they have repeatedly noted that Republicans blocked a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration system that might have helped the authorities manage migration more easily.Advisers to Mr. Biden, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House and campaign strategy, are confident that — with a little nudging — Americans will place the blame squarely on House Republicans if the government shuts down this weekend. That could benefit the president for the remainder of his term, they say, by bolstering his leverage with lawmakers and eroding support for the Republican majority in the House.Campaign aides also say the sense of disgust among Americans with the shenanigans on Capitol Hill will help Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign by sharpening the contrast with his rivals. Former President Donald J. Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, has urged House conservatives to shut down the government, a move that Mr. Biden’s advisers and supporters are quick to point out.“Except for President Trump, who called for Republicans to shut down the government, no one actually wants this, because it means real people will get hurt,” said Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic strategist who has helped presidents develop messages inside the White House and during campaigns.Those running Mr. Biden’s campaign would be wise to repeatedly draw the public’s attention to the similarities between Mr. Trump and his conservative allies in Washington, Ms. Cutter said.“Republican infighting and dysfunction is the best example of the difference between Bidenomics and MAGAnomics,” she said. “These situations, when you’re thinking about your closing arguments, help you really crystallize the choice voters will have a year from now.”The president’s team has begun to do just that.His campaign issued a statement on Monday blasting Mr. Trump’s call for a shutdown, accusing House Republicans of “gleefully letting Donald Trump function as their chief political strategist at the expense of American families.” Mr. Biden’s most recent campaign ad, titled “The Way,” emphasizes bipartisan legislative achievements even as the current Congress is in stalemate.Inside the West Wing, the president’s closest advisers have been sending out daily talking points for their allies to deliver as a shutdown looms. Stephen Benjamin, the director of public engagement at the White House, and Anita Dunn, one of the president’s top strategists, emphasized those issues on a conference call on Thursday with Democratic surrogates.Aides are encouraging allies to stress several points.First, they are told to repeatedly remind voters that Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy shook hands on a spending agreement months ago that was supposed to avert a shutdown. The speaker, under pressure from his conservative members, later reneged on the deal.Second, Biden allies are urged to note how isolated Mr. McCarthy is. Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have urged their House colleagues to accept a short-term agreement to keep the government open.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is among the Republicans who have urged their colleagues in the House to accept a short-term agreement to keep the government open.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFinally, Biden officials are asking their supporters to be specific about the pain that a shutdown is likely to inflict.The White House warned in a statement this week of the impact of a shutdown on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, which helps poor families buy food.“During an extreme Republican shutdown, women and children who count on WIC would soon start being turned away at grocery store counters, with a federal contingency fund drying up after just a few days and many states left with limited WIC funds to operate the program,” the statement said.The White House went into further detail with a state-by-state breakdown of exactly how many women, children and infants were enrolled in the program — 421,294 in Florida, 207,728 in Michigan, 139,765 in Arizona and so on — and at risk of losing assistance. More

  • in

    Donald Trump’s Campaign of Violence and Lawlessness

    Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isn’t enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, “found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.”Donald Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milley’s actions would have once been punishable by death.Most Americans probably didn’t notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former president’s recent comments, “Trump is and has been unhinged, and that’s priced in” to the views that many voters have of him.It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies — real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.In poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said they’d vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including the vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday night’s farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trump’s large lead in the primary.That advantage over the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds — from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents don’t apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case. A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors in another after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. He is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will — even when he is out of office.All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, “so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others,” The Times reported this week. “The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised ‘retribution’ to produce violence.”Mr. Trump’s targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer, sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons — they’re big sellers! — it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.Mr. Trump’s whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as “Trump being Trump.” Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it “the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.”While a government shutdown won’t end the prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters “I am your retribution,” all Americans should take him at his word.Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is “most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”True enough. Which is why Americans can’t wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.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