Republican Party

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

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

      by

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

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      What Happened When Fake Trump Signs Appeared in Greenwich, Connecticut

      by

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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Blind Ambition of Chris Christie

      by

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

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The People Who Broke the House

      by

      When it comes to Congress, Americans have come to expect a certain baseline of dysfunction. But I think most of us can agree that the current House Republican majority is something special. Overthrowing a speaker for the first time in history. Rejecting multiple nominees to replace him. Members publicly trashing one another. One faction’s supporters threatening opposing members.And so here we languish, with the government’s most basic functions held hostage by a conference divided over everything from ideological differences to petty personal slights: Candidate X broke his promise! Candidate Y ignores me! Candidate Z never votes for my bills! It’s like watching a pack of middle-schoolers hopped up on hormones and Skittles.To help make sense of this dark farce, it is useful to dig into the warring factions that have already destroyed the speaker dreams of multiple colleagues. Boiling down the action so far: A tiny gaggle of eight Republicans, mostly hard-right extremists, took down Kevin McCarthy. Then a larger group of hard-liners quashed the candidacy of Steve Scalise, the majority leader, before it even came up for a floor vote, with an eye toward elevating one of their own, the chronically belligerent Jim Jordan. But a coalition of moderates, institutionalists and members who just can’t stomach Mr. Jordan struck back, voting him down again and again and again — and again, if you count Friday’s closed-conference ballot effectively stripping him of the nomination.The Republicans Who Blocked Jordan and McCarthy From the SpeakershipAcross four votes in the House, both conservative and moderate Republican holdouts ousted Kevin McCarthy and denied Jim Jordan the speaker’s gavel. The colored dots show where those holdouts fall on the ideological spectrum, based on their voting records. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Grapple With Being Speakerless, but Effectively Leaderless, Too

      by

      With a speaker fight in the House, concerns about an aging Senate leader and a 2024 front-runner who has the party in a vise grip, some G.O.P. members worry the turmoil could have long-term effects.Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him.His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.”That might be an understatement.In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.As national Democrats largely stand behind President Biden and his agenda — more united than in years — Republicans are divided, directionless and effectively leaderless.For years, Mr. Trump has domineered Republican politics, with a reach that could end careers, create new political stars and upend the party’s long-held ideology on issues like trade, China and federal spending. He remains the party’s nominal leader, capturing a majority of G.O.P. voters in national polling and holding a double-digit lead in early voting states.And yet his commanding position has turned Republicans into a party of one, demanding absolute loyalty to Mr. Trump and his personal feuds and pet causes, such as his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The result is an endless loop of chaos that even some Republicans say once again threatens to define the party’s brand heading into an election in which Republicans — after struggling to meet the basic responsibilities of governing the House of Representatives — will ask voters to also put them in charge of the Senate and the White House.“This looks like a group of 11th graders trying to pick the junior class president, and it will hurt our party long term,” said former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is challenging Mr. Trump for the party nomination. “It’s going to be very hard to make the case that the American people should turn over control of the government to Republicans when you can’t even elect a speaker.”In recent months, the former president has focused more on his own legal peril than on his party. Flouting pressure from the Republican National Committee, Mr. Trump has largely opted out of some of the party’s biggest moments. He skipped the first two Republican primary debates for his own events and plans to skip the third, forgoing a chance to present his party’s message to an audience of millions.And he has largely taken a hands-off approach to the fight over the House speakership. Nine months ago, he helped install Mr. McCarthy as speaker. But he did not come to Mr. McCarthy’s rescue this fall when Representative Matt Gaetz led the charge to oust him. He then endorsed Representative Jim Jordan, who has failed to win enough support.Political parties out of power typically lack a strong leader. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s election plunged Democrats into years of ideological battles between a restive liberal wing and a more moderate establishment. But what’s less typical — and perhaps more politically damaging, some Republicans said — is the drawn-out, televised turmoil putting the internal dysfunction on public display.“It’s kind of a captainless pirate ship right now — a Black Pearl with no Jack Sparrow,” said Ralph Reed, a prominent social conservative leader, who argued that the issues would eventually be resolved. “But on the bright side, we will have a speaker at some point.”“These Republicans are complete idiots,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said on a radio program last week.Mr. McConnell all but threw up his hands in interviews on the Sunday talk shows. “It’s a problem,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We’re going to do our job and hope the House can get functional here sometime soon.”And The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a bastion of establishment Republican thought, wrote more than a week into the drama: “As the current mess in choosing another House Speaker shows, never underestimate the ability of Republicans to commit electoral suicide.”Most frustrating to some Republicans is the fact that the messy battle is largely symbolic. Democrats control the Senate and the White House, meaning that whoever becomes speaker has little chance of making their agenda into law.Still, there could be real-world political implications. As Republicans battled one another, Mr. Biden focused on an actual war. He spent much of last week building support for Israel, with a wartime visit and an Oval Office prime-time appeal for $105 billion in aid to help Israel and Ukraine — funds that face an uncertain future in a House frozen by infighting.It’s a split screen Democrats are more than happy to highlight.“The president of the United States, a Democrat, gave the strongest pro-Israel speech, at least since Harry Truman, maybe in American history,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts. “The division is on the Republican side of the aisle, where they are so fractured they can’t even elect a leader of their conference.”Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who is advising Mr. Christie, said the inability to pick a speaker was a “new low” for Republican governance. “If you don’t have the presidency there is no clear leader of the party,” he said. “That’s natural. What’s unnatural here is that we can’t run our own caucus.”But others say that Mr. Trump, along with social media and conservative media, has turned the very incentive structure of the party upside down. With a broad swath of the conservative base firmly behind the former president, there may be little political cost in causing chaos. The eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, for example, are likely to face no backlash for plunging the party into disarray. As their message is amplified across conservative media, they’re more likely to see their political stars rise, with a boost in fund-raising and attention.“What’s happening is you have people who don’t want to be led, but also want to engineer a situation where they can be betrayed and use that to rail against leadership,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.Some Republicans doubt the incident will have a lasting impact. In the summer, the party will pick a nominee at its national convention, and that person will become Republicans’ new standard-bearer.Nicole McCleskey, a Republican pollster, said the messy dust-up in the House would be forgotten by next November’s elections, washed away as just another moment of broken government amid near-record lows for voters’ trust in Congress.“People are used to Washington dysfunction, and this is just another episode,” she said. “It’s Republicans and Democrats, and they’re all dysfunctional. For voters, it’s just further evidence that Washington can’t address their problems.” More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      How DeSantis’s Hyper-Online 2024 Campaign Strategy Fell Flat

      by

      The G.O.P. contender’s campaign tried to take on Donald Trump’s online army. Now it just wants to end the meme wars.In early May, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prepared to run for president, about a dozen right-wing social media influencers gathered at his pollster’s home for cocktails and a poolside buffet.The guests all had large followings or successful podcasts and were already fans of the governor. But Mr. DeSantis’s team wanted to turn them into a battalion of on-message surrogates who could tangle with Donald J. Trump and his supporters online.For some, however, the gathering had the opposite effect, according to three attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to damage their relationships with the governor or other Republican leaders.Mr. DeSantis’s advisers were defensive when asked about campaign strategy, they said, and struggled to come up with talking points beyond the vague notion of “freedom.” Some of the guests at the meeting, which has not previously been reported, left doubtful that the DeSantis camp knew what it was in for.Four months later, those worries seem more than justified. Mr. DeSantis’s hyper-online strategy, once viewed as a potential strength, quickly became a glaring weakness on the presidential trail, with a series of gaffes, unforced errors and blown opportunities, according to former staff members, influencers with ties to the campaign and right-wing commentators.Even after a recent concerted effort to reboot, the campaign has had trouble shaking off a reputation for being thin-skinned and meanspirited online, repeatedly insulting Trump supporters and alienating potential allies. Some of its most visible efforts — including videos employing a Nazi symbol and homoerotic images — have turned off donors and drawn much-needed attention away from the candidate. And, despite positioning itself as a social media-first campaign, it has been unable to halt the cascade of internet memes that belittle and ridicule Mr. DeSantis.These missteps are hardly the only source of trouble for Mr. DeSantis, who is polling in a distant second place. Like the rest of its rivals, the DeSantis campaign has often failed to land meaningful blows on Mr. Trump, who somehow only gains more support when under fire.But as surely as past presidential campaigns — such as Bernie Sanders’s and Mr. Trump’s — have become textbook cases on the power of online buzz, Mr. DeSantis’s bid now highlights a different lesson for future presidential contenders: Losing the virtual race can drag down an in-real-life campaign.“The strategy was to be a newer, better version of the culture warrior,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist. “But they did it to the exclusion of a lot of the traditional campaign messaging.”The DeSantis campaign disputed that it was hurt by its online strategy, but said it would not “re-litigate old stories.”“Our campaign is firing on all cylinders and solely focused on what lies ahead — taking it to Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” said Andrew Romeo, a campaign spokesman.Pudding FingersThe trouble began immediately. When Mr. DeSantis rolled out his campaign in a live chat on Twitter, the servers crashed, booting hundreds of thousands of people off the feed and drawing widespread ridicule.When his campaign manager at the time, Generra Peck, discussed the fiasco at a meeting the next morning, she claimed the launch was so popular it broke the internet, according to three attendees, former aides who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal for discussing internal operations.Each recalled being flabbergasted at the apparent disconnect: Senior staff members seemed convinced that an embarrassing disaster had somehow been a victory.Ms. Peck exercised little oversight of the campaign’s online operations, which were anchored by a team known internally as the “war room,” according to the three former aides. The team consisted of high-energy, young staffers — many just out of college — who spent their days scanning the internet for noteworthy story lines, composing posts and dreaming up memes and videos they hoped would go viral.At the helm was Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s rapid response director. Ms. Pushaw has become well known for her extremely online approach to communications, including a scorched-earth strategy when it comes to critics and the press. As the governor’s press secretary, she frequently posted screenshots of queries from mainstream news outlets on the web rather than responding to them and once told followers to “drag” — parlance for a prolonged public shaming — an Associated Press reporter, which got her temporarily banned from Twitter.Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s rapid response director, has become known for a scorched-earth strategy when it comes to critics and the press.Marta Lavandier/Associated PressLong before the presidential run was official, Ms. Pushaw and some others on the internet team — often posting under the handle @DeSantisWarRoom — aggressively went after critics, attacking the “legacy media” while promoting the governor’s agenda in Florida.At first, they conspicuously avoided so much as mentioning Mr. Trump, and appeared completely caught off guard when, in March, pro-Trump influencers peppered the internet with posts that amplified a rumor that Mr. DeSantis had once eaten chocolate pudding with his fingers.The governor’s campaign dismissed it as “liberal” gossip, even as supporters of Mr. Trump began chanting “pudding fingers” at campaign stops and a pro-Trump super PAC ran a television ad that used images of a hand scooping up chocolate pudding. Seven months later, #puddingfingers still circulates on social media.The episode looks like little more than childish bullying, but such moments can affect how a candidate is perceived, said Joan Donovan, a researcher at Boston University who studies disinformation and wrote a book on the role of memes in politics.The best — and perhaps only — way to counter that kind of thing is to lean into it with humor, Ms. Donovan said. “This is called meme magic: The irony is the more you try to stomp it out, the more it becomes a problem,” she said.The DeSantis campaign’s muted response signaled open season: Since then, the campaign has failed to snuff out memes mocking the governor for supposedly wiping snot on constituents, having an off-putting laugh and wearing lifts in his cowboy boots.Pink Lightning BoltsAttempts to go on the offensive proved even further off the mark. In June, the war room began creating highly stylized videos stuffed with internet jokes and offensive images that seemed crafted for a very young, very far-right audience.One video included fake images of Mr. Trump hugging and kissing Anthony S. Fauci — a dig at the former president’s pandemic response. Many conservatives were offended, calling the post dishonest and underhanded.“I was 55/45 for Trump/DeSantis,” Tim Pool, whose podcast has three million subscribers across multiple YouTube channels, wrote in response to the video. “Now I’m 0% for DeSantis.”Another video cast Mr. Trump as too supportive of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and mashed up images of transgender people, pictures of Mr. DeSantis with pink lightning bolts shooting out of his eyes and clips from the film “American Psycho.”That was followed by a video that included a symbol associated with Nazis called a Sonnenrad, with Mr. DeSantis’s face superimposed over it.A screenshot from a video posted online by the “DeSantis War Room” account over the summer. The campaign has since toned down its online videos.DeSantis War RoomAlthough many of the videos were first posted on third-party Twitter accounts, they were made in the war room, according to two former aides as well as text messages reviewed by The New York Times. Drafts of the videos were shared in a large group chat on the encrypted messaging service Signal, where other staff members could provide feedback and ideas about where and when to post them online.As public outrage grew over the Sonnenrad video, the anonymous account that posted it — called “Ron DeSantis Fancams” — was deleted. The campaign, which was in the process of laying off more than three dozen employees for financial reasons, took steps to rein in the war room, according to two former aides. And although the video was made collaboratively, a campaign aide who had retweeted it was fired.The online controversy roiled the rest of the campaign. In early August, the aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, who had been by far the largest contributor to Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, said he would halt donations, saying “extremism isn’t going to get you elected.” Money from many other key supporters of Mr. DeSantis has also dried up, including from the billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin.Terry Sullivan, a Republican political consultant who was Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign manager in 2016, said the bizarre videos amounted to a warning sign for donors that Mr. DeSantis’s campaign was chaotic, undisciplined and chasing fringe voters.“Most high-dollar donors are businesspeople,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Nobody wants to buy a burning house.”‘Counterproductive or Annoying or Both’Videos haven’t been the only problem. The campaign has struggled to build a network of influencers and surrogates that could inject Mr. DeSantis’s message into online conversations and podcasts dominated by supporters of Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis had won over many of those voices in his re-election campaign last year. But repeated attempts at courting additional influencers for his presidential campaign — including the poolside dinner in Tallahassee — fell flat.Benny Johnson, a former journalist with nearly two million followers on X, Twitter’s new name, resisted overtures from the DeSantis team, remaining a vocal Trump supporter. Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok account has 2.6 million followers, was at the Tallahassee dinner, according to two attendees, but has remained neutral.Neither Mr. Johnson nor Ms. Raichik responded to requests for comment. Other influencers said they were repelled by the combative, juvenile tenor of the campaign and unwilling to abandon Mr. Trump, who seemed to be only gaining momentum with each passing week.“It feels like the campaign has been reduced to little more than bickering with the Trump camp,” said Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer with a large social media following. He said the campaign had reached out to him about being a surrogate, but he declined and has since been turned off by its aggressive tactics online.“Its tactics are either counterproductive or annoying or both,” he said.Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer with a large social media following, says he was turned off by the DeSantis campaign’s tactics.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Getty ImagesThe existing network of DeSantis influencers has presented challenges for the campaign. Online surrogates for Mr. DeSantis have repeatedly parroted, word for word, the talking points emailed to them each day by the campaign, undermining the effort to project an image of widespread — and organic — support.Last month, for example, three different accounts almost simultaneously posted about Mr. Trump getting booed at a college football game in Iowa. Bill Mitchell, a DeSantis supporter with a large following on X, said the identical posts were coincidental.“I talk with all of the team members when necessary but other than the daily emails get no specific direction,” he said. Ending the Meme WarsThe campaign has lately tried to switch course. Under the direction of James Uthmeier, who replaced Ms. Peck as campaign manager in August, the campaign has shifted to a more traditional online strategy.“I should have been born in another generation,” said Mr. Uthmeier, 35, in an interview. “I don’t even really know what meme wars are.”Recently, the campaign has more closely aligned its online messaging with the real-world rhetoric Mr. DeSantis delivers on the stump. It has installed new oversight over its social media team and more closely reviews posts from the DeSantis War Room account, according to a person familiar with the campaign. It also has dialed down the often combative tone set by many of its influencers and staff members and scaled back its production of edgy videos, dumping lightning-bolt eyes for more traditional fare.A video released this week, for example, used clips of television interviews to suggest that Nikki Haley, who has been challenging Mr. DeSantis for second place in Republican polls, had reversed course on whether to allow Palestinian refugees into the United States.“For a while, they struck me as being more interested in winning the daily Twitter fight than in winning the overall political campaign,” said Erick Erickson, an influential conservative radio host. But now, he said, Mr. DeSantis finally seemed to be running for “president of the United States and not the president of Twitter.”Rebecca Davis O’Brien More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Says He Would Cancel Student Visas of Hamas Sympathizers

      by

      At a G.O.P. candidate showcase in Iowa, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his rivals repeatedly sought to one-up one another on support for Israel.In a competition of hawkish messages on Israel, Ron DeSantis pledged on Friday night to revoke the student visas of Hamas sympathizers if elected president, while Tim Scott said he would withhold Pell grants from universities that failed to stamp out antisemitism.At an Iowa showcase featuring most of the top Republican presidential contenders, the Florida governor and the South Carolina senator engaged in one-upmanship about who would best support Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally.With their focus on students and academic institutions, they repackaged a traditional line of attack for Republicans: that liberal college campuses foster “woke” extremism, which they said was now taking the form of anti-Israel expressions.“You see students demonstrating in our country in favor of Hamas,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Remember, some of them are foreigners.”Mr. DeSantis then warned that if he became president, “I’m canceling your visa and I’m sending you home.”His remarks, during a tailgate at a construction plant in Iowa City, echoed recent talking points of former President Donald J. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken this week urging him to rescind the visas of “Hamas sympathizers.”Mr. Trump, who did not attend the event, had issued a similar pledge to expel student sympathizers of Hamas.Tim Scott, a South Carolina senator, said he had sponsored a bill to deny Pell grants to colleges that failed to stamp out antisemitism.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Scott, who has been polling in the low single digits, said that he had already sponsored a bill — which he would sign if elected president — that would deny Pell grants to colleges and universities that shirk responsibility for condemning support for terrorist groups.By their inaction, he said, they were sending a message that “it’s OK to be anti-Israel.” He continued, “I say no.”At a town hall earlier on Friday in Cedar Rapids, Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, delivered a similar warning and accused some colleges and universities of promoting violence.“We have got to start connecting their government funding with how they manage hate,” she said. “Because when you do that, you are threatening someone’s life when you do that. That’s not freedom of speech.”Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, said Israel should wipe out Hamas.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMs. Haley, who has been sparring with Mr. DeSantis over the Israel-Hamas conflict as she threatens to eclipse him in some polls, also spoke at the showcase on Friday night. The event was hosted by Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican from a competitive district in Iowa. The state holds its first-in-the-nation presidential caucus in mid-January.At the event, Ms. Haley called for Israel to wipe out Hamas, a militant group backed by Iran.“Stop acting like it’s Sept. 10,” she said.But Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, struck a contrast with his G.O.P. rivals, calling for restraint toward an imminent ground invasion by Israel in Gaza. He said that Israel should heed the lessons of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.“To what end?” he said.Mr. Scott took the opposite view.”I am sick and tired of people saying to Israel, ‘Settle down,’” he said.Jazmine Ulloa More