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      As Trump Rallies in Texas, His Followers Shore Up His 2024 Bid

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      Despite a pattern of dangerous, erratic behavior, the former president remains a strong front-runner for his party’s nomination. His durability stems from his most loyal supporters.WACO, Texas — In the last 28 months, former President Donald J. Trump has been voted out of the White House, impeached for his role in the Capitol riot and criticized for marching many of his fellow Republicans off an electoral cliff in the 2022 midterms with his drumbeat of election-fraud lies.He dined at home with a white supremacist in November. He called for the termination of the Constitution in December. He declared himself “more angry” than ever in January. He vowed to make retribution a hallmark of a second term in the White House in March.He has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, described President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a genius and used a gay joke to mock a fellow Republican. He has become the target of four criminal investigations, including one in New York that he warned might result in “potential death & destruction.”Still, Mr. Trump remains a strong front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. At least one reason for this political durability was assembled Saturday morning outside the airport in the central Texas city of Waco in various combinations of red caps, antagonistic T-shirts and MAGA-button flair — the Trump die-hards.Starting before 8 a.m., more than nine hours before the former president was set to take the stage at the first rally of his 2024 campaign, his supporters streamed across dirt roads and formed an ever-growing line that zigzagged across the grass and bluebonnets, with a forest of Trump flags flying nearby. One sign nodded to both the F.B.I.’s search of Mr. Trump’s Florida property and the federal agency’s siege 30 years ago of a religious sect’s compound in this Texas city: “Remember the Alamo, Remember Waco, Remember Mar-a-Lago.”It is Mr. Trump’s base of hard-core followers, who show up to his rallies in force, that has allowed him to maintain his grip on the party despite a pattern of dangerous, discordant behavior that would have sunk most traditional politicians.Whether or not Mr. Trump can expand his support beyond his loyalists, as he must do to win a general election, remains an open question for Republican primary voters. But the loyalty of his superfans remains as strong as ever.They fly “Trump or Death” flags from Jeep Wranglers outside Mar-a-Lago. Many have fallen out with family and friends over their devotion to the former president. They view themselves as mistreated and unappreciated, and view Mr. Trump as not so much a man but a cause. “Jesus, Freedom & Trump” read the T-shirt worn by one woman who went to see the former president in Iowa recently.Amid overlapping investigations and the looming possibility of arrest, the ardor of these supporters has not faded but, many said, has grown only stronger.“I think it’s really disgusting,” said Leslie Splendoria, 71, who arrived early in Waco and said she had supported Mr. Trump since his first presidential run. “They’re trying to do anything they can to get rid of him.” She came to the event from Hutto, Texas, north of Austin, with her ex-husband, her daughter, her 3-year-old granddaughter and a small wagon of supplies for the long wait in line.“No one is safe,” said her daughter, Kimberly Splendoria, 38, wearing a red MAGA sweatshirt and a Trump hat and holding her daughter, Gigi. “They can just throw you in jail, indict you.”“Look at what happened on Jan. 6,” said Bob Splendoria, Leslie’s ex-husband. “You happened to be there and they arrest you.” He and Leslie said they had wanted to attend the protest in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but could not make it. Both said they would not have entered the Capitol.Hours later, Mr. Trump arrived, his plane buzzing the crowd with a flyover before landing.His speech was a familiar festival of grievances and focused heavily on his legal jeopardy, portraying his expected indictment by a New York grand jury as a result of what he claimed was a Democratic conspiracy to persecute him. He also argued that the United States was turning into a “banana republic.”One of the early speakers at the event, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, told attendees that he had pushed for Waco as the rally site after a call from Mr. Trump seeking suggestions. Speaking later to reporters, Mr. Patrick said he preferred Waco because it was centrally located and could attract Trump supporters from around the state. He said he had been unaware that it was the 30th anniversary of the bloody standoff with the Branch Davidians. “Nobody knew until some of you brought it up,” he said.Mr. Trump’s political strength has long proved difficult to fully measure. While polls show that he enjoys a commanding advantage in a Republican primary field, most surveys also show that about half of the party’s voters would prefer another nominee at this early phase in the 2024 contest.His final swing of campaign rallies before the midterm elections in November avoided key battleground states, where independent voters who largely disliked Mr. Trump had been expected to tilt results. His rallies last year instead included stops in Iowa and Ohio, two states that he had twice won easily.A recent call by Mr. Trump for his supporters to protest a potential indictment from the Manhattan district attorney received a tepid response and, in some cases, was met with pushback from other Republican leaders.Still, the support that Mr. Trump has coalesced has given him the luster of an incumbent in the primary contest. That means to overtake the former president, other Republican contenders face the difficult task of first peeling support away from Mr. Trump before they can persuade those same voters to back their own bid for the nomination.In Waco, some rallygoers were skeptical of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief potential rival.“I like DeSantis, I do, but the ground that needs to be covered is going to take Trump to get it done,” said Jeff Fiebert, 69, a farmer who described himself as a die-hard Trump supporter and who moved to Waco from California during the pandemic, a move he said was motivated almost entirely by politics.Asked what Mr. Trump could do that Mr. DeSantis could not, he said the former president was the kind of person “who goes into the bar and knocks all the bottles off the shelf just to see where they land.” Mr. DeSantis, he added, does not do that sort of thing.While the field of official Republican challengers remains small — Mr. DeSantis, for example, is still months away from an expected formal announcement — Mr. Trump has continued to tend to his die-hard supporters. He invited a handful of his most devoted rallygoers to his Mar-a-Lago resort in November for his official campaign announcement, and delivered private remarks to many of them in a small ballroom before his public speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference three weeks ago.Mr. Trump has spent years on the campaign trail persuading supporters to interpret pressure on him — from his opponents, law enforcement and members of Congress — as attacks on them. That is why some of his allies believe that becoming the first former president to face criminal charges — as expected in the Manhattan district attorney’s case — could carry political upside for Mr. Trump, at least in a Republican primary.“And no matter what happens,” Mr. Trump wrote this week in an email seeking supporters’ campaign contributions, “I’ll be standing right where I belong and where I’ve always been since the day I first announced I was running for President…Between them and YOU.”Trump rallygoers often explain their continued backing of Mr. Trump in terms of gratitude. They say he has stood up for them and, as a result, has been targeted with investigations into his company’s finances, his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“I think it just helps him,” said Courtney Sodolak, 37, a nurse from outside Houston who arrived early in Waco.Ms. Sodolak, who was wearing a shirt that read, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Clintons Do,” connected the treatment of Mr. Trump to her own experience being kicked off social media platforms. She said she had been removed for posting conservative content, including images of Kyle Rittenhouse and of people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.“I’ve been through 60 Facebooks,” she said. “I can’t even have one in my own name.”The legal scrutiny of Mr. Trump, Ms. Sodolak maintained, is similarly unfair.“It makes him more relatable to what real people go through,” she said. “The social injustice.” More

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      Trump Plans Rally in Waco During Anniversary of Branch Davidian Standoff

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      In the chapel at Mount Carmel, the longtime home of the Branch Davidian sect outside Waco, Tex., the pastor preaches about the coming apocalypse, as the sect’s doomed charismatic leader David Koresh did three decades ago.But the prophecies offered by the pastor, Charles Pace, are different from Mr. Koresh’s. For one thing, they involve Donald J. Trump.“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” Mr. Pace said in an interview. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”Mr. Trump, embattled by multiple investigations and publicly predicting an imminent indictment in one, announced last week that he would hold the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign on Saturday at the regional airport in Waco.The date falls in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the weekslong standoff involving federal agents and followers of Mr. Koresh that left 82 Branch Davidians and four agents dead at Mount Carmel, the group’s compound east of the city.More than 80 Branch Davidians died during the standoff at their compound outside Waco.Tim Roberts/AFP via Getty ImagesMr. Trump has not linked his Waco visit to the anniversary. Asked whether the rally — the former president’s first in the city of 140,000 — was an intentional nod to the most infamous episode in Waco’s history, Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman, replied via email that the Waco site was chosen “because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas’ biggest metropolitan areas — Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — while providing the necessary infrastructure to hold a rally of this magnitude.”But the rally comes amid a spate of increasingly aggressive statements by Mr. Trump claiming his persecution at the hands of prosecutors, and the historical resonance has not been lost on some of his most ardent followers.“Waco was an overreach of the government, and today the New York district attorney is practicing an overreach of the government again,” said Sharon Anderson, a retiree from Etowah, Tenn., who is traveling to Waco for Saturday’s event, her 33rd Trump rally.Mr. Pace said he believed it was “a statement — that he was sieged by the F.B.I. at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren’t really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the F.B.I. when they sieged him.”“I’m going to the rally, for sure,” he added.The attention to Mr. Trump’s choice of locale highlights the long political afterlife of the Waco standoff. A polarizing episode in its own time, the deadly raid was invoked in the 1990s by right-wing extremists including Timothy McVeigh, often to the dismay of the surviving Branch Davidians. It has remained a cause for contemporary far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” said Charles Pace, a pastor who preaches about the coming apocalypse. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAlex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. The longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser Roger Stone dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel.“Waco is a touchstone for the far right,” said Stuart Wright, a professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Tex., and an authority on the standoff.He said Mr. Trump’s decision to begin his campaign there, if intentional in its nod to the siege, would echo Ronald Reagan’s August 1980 speech affirming his support of “states’ rights” at a county fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town known for the murder of three civil rights activists 16 years earlier.“There’s some deep symbolism,” Mr. Wright said.Mr. Trump has a long history of statements that feed the far right, even as he claims that was not his intent. That list includes his equivocating response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one woman dead; his message to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in a presidential debate; and his exhortations to supporters in Washington just before many stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn his defeat.As state and federal investigations have drawn closer to him in recent months, he has often portrayed himself in embattled or even apocalyptic terms. When F.B.I. agents searched his Mar-a-Lago resort in August looking for classified documents, he issued a statement declaring himself “currently under siege.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference this month, he described the 2024 presidential election as “the final battle” and vowed “retribution.” As word circulated this month of a possible indictment from a New York grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s role in payments made to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign, he posted a message to supporters in all-caps to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”Early Friday, still awaiting the grand jury’s action, Mr. Trump posted that the “potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.”Newt Gingrich, a prominent critic of the federal government’s handling of the standoff during his time as House speaker, noted a major theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign: “the degree to which the federal government is corrupt and incompetent.”Whether or not the historical resonance of his Waco rally was intentional, Mr. Gingrich said, “It would certainly fit as a symbol of federal overreach and a symbol of a Justice Department run amok.”Parnell McNamara, the sheriff of McLennan County, home to Waco, said he did not believe there were security concerns beyond the ordinary preparations for a presidential campaign rally.“Him coming here, to me, is just a totally different situation, and really has nothing to do with that,” he said in reference to the 1993 raid, for which he was present as a U.S. marshal. “I have not heard anybody even bring that up.”Visitors to Mount Carmel. The standoff at the Branch Davidian compound has inspired pilgrimages and conspiracy theorists.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesOn Feb. 28, 1993, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms mounted a raid to serve a search and arrest warrant at the compound belonging to the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of Seventh-day Adventists then under the leadership of Mr. Koresh. Federal investigators suspected Mr. Koresh of possessing illegal weapons. A gunfight erupted, four A.T.F. agents and six Branch Davidians were killed, and a 51-day standoff began.It ended on April 19, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke off negotiations with Mr. Koresh and advanced with tanks. Mr. Koresh and 75 of his followers, many of them children, were killed as a fire consumed the compound.The Branch Davidians mostly eschewed politics. But the siege was overseen by the administration of a Democratic president and set off by an investigation of a Christian sect over a weapons charge, at a time when the National Rifle Association had begun stoking fears about the federal government seizing Americans’ guns, factors that help make it a cause on the right.An independent inquiry completed in 2000, led by the former Republican senator John Danforth, faulted federal agencies for their lack of transparency regarding the standoff, while also seeking to dispel many of the most lurid conspiracy theories.But by then, the Branch Davidians had already been embraced as martyrs by the far-right extremists of the era, including many members of a rapidly expanding “patriot” or militia movement and Mr. McVeigh, who visited Waco during the siege of Mount Carmel and bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the burning of the compound.David Thibodeau, a survivor of the siege who came from a “very Democratic liberal family,” found the embrace odd.“David and the people at Mount Carmel weren’t political at all,” he said. But he said he appreciated the attention of the right-wing groups when the survivors were struggling to make sense of their experience and were treated as pariahs in other political circles.“Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say except for people on the right,” Mr. Thibodeau said.Funds for the construction of the chapel at Mount Carmel were raised by Mr. Jones, whose obsession with Waco conspiracy theories led to his firing in 1999 from the Austin radio station KJFK and the start of his own media empire, Infowars.Invocations of Waco persisted into the next generation of militias and other extremists that emerged in response to Barack Obama’s presidency and supported Mr. Trump’s. In 2009, the founder of the Three Percenters movement warned of “No More Free Wacos” in an open letter to then-attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. The Oath Keepers issued a statement warning that the Bundy family could be “Waco’d” in their standoff with the federal government in 2014.Waco will host Donald Trump’s first campaign rally of the 2024 race on Saturday. A Trump flag flew at the site of the former Branch Davidian compound on Thursday.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAccording to Newsweek, in 2021, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys and a onetime F.B.I. informant, denounced the agency as the “enemy of the people” in a Parler post, writing: “Remember Waco? Are your eyes opened yet?”A Texas Proud Boys chapter made a pilgrimage to the Mount Carmel chapel on the anniversary of the raid last year, according to Mr. Pace, whose politicized, QAnon-inflected theology is rejected by some other Branch Davidians. “They come out and pay their respects, and find out what really happened here,” Mr. Pace said.Mr. Danforth, a Republican, lamented the changes in his party in the Trump years that had brought the conspiracy theories that his report had aimed to dispel into the political mainstream. “It’s the prevailing view of Republicans today that no matter what the facts show, the system is broken, our election system doesn’t work, we shouldn’t have confidence in elections, there’s no finality, it’s all a steal,” he said.Asked whether his Waco report would be widely accepted today, he said, “No. It’s just a very different time.” More

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      Fact Check: The Ties Between Alvin Bragg and George Soros

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      Donald Trump’s allies have accused the district attorney bringing a case against him as having been “bought” by Mr. Soros, the philanthropist. That is misleading, though the men do have a financial connection.WASHINGTON — As a potential indictment looms over former President Donald J. Trump, he and his allies have sought to tie the Manhattan district attorney bringing the case to a familiar Republican specter: George Soros, the financier and Democratic megadonor.Mr. Soros, who has backed Democratic candidates and causes as well as democracy and human rights around the world, has for years been a boogeyman on the right, confronting attacks that portray him as a “globalist” mastermind and that often veer into antisemitic tropes.The connections between him and Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, are real but overstated. In reality, Mr. Soros donated to a liberal group that endorses progressive prosecutors and supports efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system — in line with causes that he has publicly supported for years. That group used a significant portion of the money to support Mr. Bragg in his 2021 campaign.A spokesman for Mr. Soros said that the two men had never met, nor had Mr. Soros given money directly to Mr. Bragg’s campaign.Here’s a fact check.What Was Said“Alvin Bragg received in EXCESS OF ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the Radical Left Enemy of ‘TRUMP,’ George Soros.”— Mr. Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday“Alvin Bragg is bought by George Soros. He allows violent criminals to walk the streets of New York City, but will prosecute the likely Republican nominee (and former president) on a baseless misdemeanor charge. These people are trying to turn America into a third-world country.”— Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, in a Twitter post on Saturday“Alvin Bragg is bought and paid for by George Soros and has repeatedly showed his hatred for President Trump based on purely political motives.”— Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, in a Twitter post on SaturdayThese claims are exaggerated.While the link between Mr. Bragg and Mr. Soros exists, arguments that the district attorney was “bought” by the philanthropist are misleading.Mr. Bragg announced his candidacy for the position in June 2019. Nearly two years later, on May 8, 2021, the political arm of Color of Change, a progressive criminal justice group, endorsed him. It pledged to spend $1 million on direct mailers, on-the-ground campaigning and voter turnout efforts on his behalf. (It did not donate to Mr. Bragg’s campaign directly.) A few days later, on May 14, Mr. Soros contributed $1 million to the group, which intended to help Mr. Bragg with the money.Color of Change did not meet its pledge. It eventually spent nearly $500,000 in support of Mr. Bragg. That amounted to about 11 percent of the group’s $4.6 million in total spending during the 2021-22 election cycle, according to the campaign finance website Open Secrets..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.A spokeswoman for the political arm of Color of Change said that the group reviewed and interviewed reform-minded district attorney candidates each election cycle, and that the process was independent of funders. Mr. Soros was just one of many large donors to the group. Past donors included members of the wealthy Pritzker family, the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys.Mr. Bragg was not the only candidate Color of Change endorsed and aided through organizing efforts in 2021. The group also helped re-elect Larry Krasner, the district attorney of Philadelphia, by contacting more than 300,000 voters and sending nearly 200,000 pieces of direct mail on his behalf. In addition, it operated phone banks, ran advertisements and mobilized voters to support a local candidate in Virginia and a ballot initiative in Minneapolis.Nor was Mr. Soros’s $1 million contribution particularly unusual. Mr. Soros gave to the group multiple times before it endorsed Mr. Bragg; he personally donated $450,000 between 2016 and 2018, and his political action committee, Democracy PAC, gave $2.5 million in 2020.Neither Mr. Soros nor Democracy PAC contributed directly to Mr. Bragg’s campaign, according to Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros.“George Soros and Alvin Bragg have never met in person or spoken by telephone, email, Zoom, etc.,” Mr. Vachon said. “There has been no contact between the two.”Mr. Vachon also noted that Mr. Soros had been open about his yearslong support of progressive prosecutors. In a 2022 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Soros explained his thoughts on overhauling the criminal justice system and wrote that “the idea we need to choose between justice and safety is false.”“I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform,” he wrote. “I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,’ by Kerry Howley

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      In “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” Kerry Howley explores how the erosion of privacy has fueled conspiracy theories and the national security state.BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS: A Journey Through the Deep State, by Kerry HowleyThe people in Kerry Howley’s new book include fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call, texting a friend, looking up something online. Certain conveniences have become so frictionless that we reflexively entrust devices with mundane yet intimate secrets: group-chat gossip, numbers of steps taken, dumb selfies.“It is our fate to live in the age of the indelible,” Howley writes in “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” her account of the national security state and the people entangled in it. “It’s best to just take another photograph. Keep building up the database. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is.”Howley is a writer for New York magazine and the author of “Thrown” (2014), a book about mixed martial arts fighters (real) that was narrated by a philosophy student named Kit (not real). As far as I can tell, “Bottoms Up” seems to be narrated by Howley — though who she “really is” and, by extension, who any of us “really are” is something that this book encourages us not to take for granted.The book is riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word, unclassifiable. Howley writes about privacy and its absence; about hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal. But she also writes about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified into data that can be turned into portraits of static, permanent beings — creatures who would be unrecognizable to ourselves.“With endless information comes the ability to take information from its context, to tell stories perfectly matched to the intentions of the teller, freed from the complex texture of reality,” Howley writes. Countering that slide toward bland propaganda, “Bottoms Up” returns information to its context, capturing as much as possible the texture of reality, showing us how bewildering it often is.She reintroduces us to figures like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and John Walker Lindh. We revisit the case of John Kiriakou, the ex-C.I.A. officer who disclosed on television that the American government had waterboarded (that is, tortured) a detainee. Kiriakou would become the first C.I.A. officer convicted of a leak. He later took a job at the Russian propaganda outfit Sputnik Radio.Kerry Howley, the author of “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs.” Jordan GeigerBut at the center of this book is Reality Winner (“her real name, let’s move past it now”), who was 9 years old on 9/11. What happened to Winner is the point on which a number of the book’s themes converge. She joined the Air Force at 18, becoming a linguist who spoke Dari and Pashto. She later worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. In 2017 she was arrested for mailing five printed pages of classified information to The Intercept that detailed Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections.Howley got to know Winner and her family, depicting a young woman who “took ideas in their fullness, ignorant of their social context, and therefore radically open to argument.” Winner worked as a translator for the drone program while teaching yoga and worrying about global warming. “She was not on a team,” Howley writes. The book suggests it was this — the fact that nothing Winner did was easily amenable to the narrative of a particular side — that eventually did her in.Winner sent the classified information to The Intercept because she visited the site for news; she knew that some of its journalists were skeptical about the allegation of Russian meddling, and she wanted to show them evidence of the meddling. Howley explains, step-by-step, how The Intercept bungled the handling of those five pages, neglecting to consult its own first-rate digital security experts, eventually showing the document — creases and watermarks intact, betraying the source — to the N.S.A. for verification. “It would prove extremely unfortunate for Reality that the audience who might be most interested in and moved by her case was largely captured by a publication embarrassed by it,” Howley notes.It would also prove extremely unfortunate for Reality that the American government used her work for the American government against her. “It had taught her obscure languages,” Howley writes, “knowledge of which it now implied was dangerous.” A note Winner had made about wanting to “burn the White House down” was taken as proof of malevolent intent, omitting the “ha, ha” that followed it. (Winner later wondered if she would have fared better with an “lol jk.”) She was sentenced to 63 months — “the longest sentence ever handed down for an Espionage Act conviction.” The government assembled the fragments from Winner’s life and projected a story into the absences, essentially creating what Howley elsewhere calls a “fantasy built on solid ground.”This warped kind of world-building bears more than a passing resemblance to what conspiracy theorists do. So it’s fitting that the title “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs” comes from a 2014 viral video of a Christian woman at a conference who presents a (remarkably polished and assured) case that Monster Energy drinks are a vehicle for Satan. From there it’s just a short crawl to QAnon’s elaborate nightmares about Satan-worshiping pedophiles.The arc of Howley’s extraordinary book feels both startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep state would send her down the rabbit hole. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a congresswoman from Georgia, said in 2017. How’s that for the banality of evil? As Howley puts it, “True believers speak of Satanism with the bored fluency of someone selling condos.”But it’s not as if QAnon has had to make up its nonsense out of whole cloth. Its propagation also relies on the not uncommon impulse to worry for one’s children. It was only toward the end of the book that I noticed how children were a recurrent presence — Howley’s, her friend’s, those of a camera assistant in Baghdad killed by an American strike.Howley learned she was pregnant while reporting the book. “I despaired many times, in the writing, about my ability to protect the thing I was growing,” she says. She was immersed in a world “that had forgotten what it was like to construct a self in the dark.” We become ourselves by shedding our past selves — but now those discarded selves are recorded somewhere, potentially living longer than we do. In her acknowledgments, Howley ends with a note to her children that could serve as a blessing for us all: “May you be only as remembered as you wish.”BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS: A Journey Through the Deep State | By Kerry Howley | 233 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28 More

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      The Iran Hostages, and a Plot to Thwart Carter

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      More from our inbox:Why the U.S. Invaded Iraq: Theories AboundWhite Supremacy PropagandaCare at the End of Life“History needs to know that this happened,” Ben Barnes now says of his trip to the Middle East in 1980.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “43-Year Secret of Sabotage: Mission to Subvert Carter Is Revealed” (front page, March 19), about an effort to delay release of the American hostages in Iran to weaken Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign:By way of apology to Mr. Carter, Ben Barnes details the mission to ensure that the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran were not released on Mr. Carter’s watch. Mr. Barnes’s candor, though overdue, is welcome, but his apology is somewhat misdirected.While Jimmy Carter might rightly claim that he suffered defeat in 1980 because Ronald Reagan’s campaign engaged in a contemptible plot, he was nevertheless a “second tier” victim.More than 50 Americans were held in terror for 444 days, not knowing whether they would live or die. If, as Mr. Barnes implies, his mission resulted in extending the hostages’ captivity, they stand at the front of the line of those to whom he should apologize.Mark SteinbergLos AngelesTo the Editor:How would President Jimmy Carter have responded to this news that, according to Ben Barnes, the G.O.P. was involved in an effort to thwart Mr. Carter’s efforts to win the American hostages’ release?I was on Air Force One accompanying Mr. Carter in the days leading up to the 1980 election. All efforts were focused on getting those Americans home.Our last hope came when news reached Mr. Carter at 2 a.m., Chicago time, on the Sunday before the election. Learning that the Iranian mullahs had modified their demands, the president put off campaigning and raced back to Washington. Unfortunately, Mr. Carter realized that obstacles remained.Imagine if he’d just learned that a Republican ally of President Reagan had been spreading the word in Arab capitals that Iran should keep the 52 hostages until after he had taken office? Imagine if Mr. Carter had gotten this story just before his final debate with Ronald Reagan? It would have put the G.O.P. challenger on the defensive.Imagine if …Chris MatthewsChevy Chase, Md.The writer, the former longtime host of the MSNBC show “Hardball,” was a speechwriter for President Carter.To the Editor:Ben Barnes’s revelations that political operatives met with overseas governments before the 1980 presidential election didn’t surprise me. The release of American hostages from Iranian captivity a few minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981 was too much of a coincidence.This unwarranted interference in American foreign affairs by private citizens reminded me of Richard Nixon’s intrigues to entice the South Vietnamese government to stall the Paris peace talks in an effort to derail a Democratic victory in the 1968 presidential election.Shame on all those involved for risking American lives to benefit their political ambitions.Paul L. NewmanMerion Station, Pa.To the Editor:Thanks for an important and credible addition to the narrative of the Iran hostage crisis.An addendum: John Connally and Ben Barnes would almost certainly have received a chilly response to their scheme from President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, who was close to President Carter and loyal to him.Moreover, at the time of the trip, Sadat had welcomed his friend, the recently deposed shah of Iran, to Egypt, and the shah died there in July. Thus there is little chance Sadat conveyed the Connally-Barnes message to Tehran, though other Middle Eastern heads of state might have done so.Jonathan AlterMontclair, N.J.The writer is the author of “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life.”Why the U.S. Invaded Iraq: Theories AboundOnly a statue of Saddam Hussein remained standing at an Iraqi communications center that was the target of a bombing attack by American forces in 2003.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the U.S. Invade?,” by Max Fisher (The Interpreter, March 19), suggests that the triggering motive for the 2003 invasion of Iraq will remain unknown.The article says “a critical mass of senior officials all came to the table wanting to topple” Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, “for their own reasons, and then talked one another into believing the most readily available justification”: weapons of mass destruction.The clear goal was to topple Mr. Hussein. Recall that President George W. Bush desired revenge on Mr. Hussein for an attempt on his father’s life and that he was reportedly advised that only wartime presidents become great.The missing piece of the puzzle is that neoconservative advisers, with an array of reasons for toppling Mr. Hussein, were able to play on President Bush’s personal aspirations to get the go-ahead for the invasion.Richard ReillyOlean, N.Y.To the Editor:“Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the U.S. Invade?” gives plausible answers. Another possible explanation was foretold by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address.He warned of “the unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” telling us, in effect, that those who make money from war and those whose careers benefit from these actions have both influence and a shared interest in military interventions.His words are still worth heeding.Barbara H. ChasinIthaca, N.Y.The writer is emerita professor of sociology at Montclair State University and the author of “Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism.”White Supremacy Propaganda Michael Dwyer/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “White Supremacist Propaganda Soared Last Year, Report Finds” (news article, March 10):The alarming rise of white nationalist vandalism and propaganda, the majority of which is being spread by Patriot Front, is more than offensive — it is often a criminal offense. Legislators, prosecutors and law enforcement should recognize the dangers these attempts to intimidate, recruit and inspire violence pose to American communities.White nationalist activities are occurring nationwide, are coordinated and are often evading accountability in local jurisdictions. The arrest of 31 Patriot Front members preparing to disrupt an L.G.B.T.Q.+ Pride celebration in Idaho last summer should have been the notice federal authorities needed. After the mass arrest, 17 organizations called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Patriot Front.We hope that The Times’s coverage of this disturbing trend adds urgency to the appeal for federal action against these dangerous campaigns of hate. Our local communities — and our democracy — can’t afford to be left to manage this threat alone any longer.Lindsay SchubinerBerkeley, Calif.The writer is the program director for the Western States Center, a nationwide group that works to strengthen inclusive democracy.Care at the End of Life Nadia HafidTo the Editor:Re “Aggressive Care Still Common at Life’s End” (The New Old Age, March 14):As a nurse practitioner in a large hospital, I see this kind of aggressive care all too often.In addition to the physical and emotional stress it places on patients and families, there’s a financial cost, since such care isn’t free.I will never forget an older man who spent his last months in one of our I.C.U.s. His wife not only lost him when he died but also their house, as the cost of medical care made her unable to pay the mortgage.These kinds of nonmedical consequences need to be considered, acknowledged and regularly assessed for. Something else our health care system doesn’t do.Marian GrantReisterstown, Md. More

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      Trump Could Stand in the Middle of Fifth Avenue and Not Lose Mike Pence

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      Mike Pence wants to have it both ways.He wants to be the conservative hero of Jan. 6: the steadfast Republican patriot who resisted the MAGA mob and defended the institutions of American democracy. “Make no mistake about it,” Pence said at the Gridiron Club Dinner in Washington, D.C., this month. “What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way. President Donald Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day.”But Mike Pence also wants to be president. And he can’t fully repudiate the previous Republican president if he hopes to win the Republican presidential nomination, especially when that president is still on the stage, with a commanding role in Republican politics.The result is that Mike Pence has to talk out of both sides of his mouth. With one breath, he takes a righteous stand against the worst dysfunction of the Trump years. “We have to resist the politics of personality, the lure of populism unmoored by timeless conservative values,” Pence said last week while speaking to an audience of Republican donors in Keene, N.H.With his next breath, however, Pence rejects any effort to hold Trump accountable, especially when it asks him to do something more than give the occasional sound bite. Asked to testify about the events surrounding Jan. 6, Pence says no. Faced with a grand jury subpoena forcing him to testify, Pence says he’ll challenge it, under the highly dubious theory that as president of the Senate he was a legislative officer who, like other lawmakers, was covered by the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution and thus free of any obligation to testify.When asked this past weekend about potential criminal charges against the former president — possibly for falsifying records of a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — Pence deflected, telling ABC News, “At the time when there’s a crime wave in New York City, the fact that the Manhattan D.A. thinks that indicting President Trump is his top priority I think just tells you everything you need to know about the radical left.”Who will hold Trump accountable, according to Pence? No one living. “History will hold Donald Trump accountable,” he said, as if “history” has agency separate from the people who make or write it.In fairness to Pence, he’s not the only Republican hedging his bets. None of Trump’s rivals — or anyone else who hopes to have a future in Republican politics — views either the investigation into his behavior or the potential charges against him as legitimate.“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical D.A. who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.“I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions,” he added, without irony.“The Manhattan district attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor. And so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” said the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, the pot calling the kettle black.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and current presidential aspirant, has been silent on the matter, and the long-shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a venture capitalist, condemned the potential Trump indictment as a “disastrously politicized prosecution.”Whether or not you think it is a good idea to indict Trump in this particular case, it is striking to see how Republicans commit to the former president when asked to speak to his alleged crimes.But it speaks to a larger point, beyond the double-talk of Pence or the deflection and avoidance of other Republican politicians. Trump may not be as strong as he was as president. He may have been wounded by the long investigations into Jan. 6 and diminished by the failure of many of his handpicked MAGA candidates in the midterm elections. And yet, Trump is still the dominant figure in Republican politics. He still occupies the commanding heights of the Republican Party. And there’s no one — not DeSantis or Haley or any other potential contender — ready to challenge Trump for control of the party.There was hope, after the 2020 presidential election, that after his defeat Trump would somehow fade away. He didn’t. There was hope, after his failed putsch, that his time in the spotlight was over. It wasn’t. And there was hope, after the 2022 elections, that MAGA had run its course and Trump along with it. Wrong again.The only way to remove Trump from the board — to neutralize his influence in the Republican Party and to keep him out of power — is for Republicans to move against him with as much force as they can muster. It was true in 2015, when Republican elites could have coordinated themselves against him when he was still a curiosity and not the leading candidate for the nomination; it was true in 2019 and 2021 when he was impeached by the House, and it’s true now.Republicans can’t avoid conflict if they want to be free of Trump. They have no choice but to condemn him, reject his influence and refuse to defend his criminality.We can see, of course, in this instance and so many others that they won’t. Among Republicans with an ambition to lead, there’s no one who will take that step. Which tells us all we need to know about the state of the Republican Party. It was Trump’s when he was president, it is Trump’s while he’s still a private citizen, and it will be Trump’s next year, when the presidential race starts in earnest.Put differently, if there’s no voter Trump could lose if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot somebody, as Trump famously said, there are probably no leading Republican politicians who would leave his camp, either. Hell, they might even say the victim deserved it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump, Vowing ‘Retribution,’ Foretells a Second Term of Spite

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      In a speech before his supporters, the former president charged forward in an uncharted direction, talking openly about leveraging the power of the presidency for political reprisals.Donald J. Trump has for decades trafficked in the language of vengeance, from his days as a New York developer vowing “an eye for an eye” in the real estate business to ticking through an enemies ledger in 2022 as he sought to oust every last Republican who voted for his impeachment. “Four down and six to go,” he cheered in a statement as one went down to defeat.But even though payback has long been part of his public persona, Mr. Trump’s speech on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference was striking for how explicitly he signaled that any return trip to the White House would amount to a term of spite.“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd in National Harbor, Md. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”He repeated the phrase for emphasis: “I am your retribution.”Framing the 2024 election as a dire moment in an us-versus-them struggle — “the final battle,” as he put it — Mr. Trump charged forward in an uncharted direction for American politics, talking openly about leveraging the power of the presidency for political reprisals.His menacing declaration landed differently in the wake of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a last-ditch effort to keep him in power. The notion that Mr. Trump’s supporters could be spurred to violence is no longer hypothetical, as it was in 2016 when he urged a rally audience to “knock the crap out of” hecklers. The attack on the Capitol underscored that his most fanatical followers took his falsehoods and claims of victimhood seriously — and were willing to act on them.Mr. Trump’s speech was laced with allusions to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, so far the chief threat to his winning another nomination. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhile Mr. Trump has long walked up to a transgressive line, he has often managed to avoid unambiguously crossing it, leaving his intentions just uncertain enough to allow his supporters to say he is being mistreated or misinterpreted.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said the speech was “a call to political action to defeat the Democrats who have put their collective boot on the throats of Americans,” adding, “Anyone who thinks otherwise is either being disingenuous or is outright lying because they know President Trump continues to be a threat to the political establishment.”But John Bolton, a national security adviser under Mr. Trump who later broke publicly with him, had little doubt what the former president meant on Saturday. “I think he’s talking about retribution he would exact on people who would cross him,” said Mr. Bolton, who also served as ambassador to the United Nations. The reference was not about Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Bolton said, but about Mr. Trump himself.“It would be, first and foremost, getting back at the people he thinks deserve some kind of punishment for not doing what he tells them to do,” Mr. Bolton said. “And it’s a big group of people.”Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News

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      Even in today’s highly partisan media world, experts said, the lack of coverage about the private comments of Fox’s top executives and hosts stands out.Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, have avoided the story. Newsmax and One America News, Fox’s rivals on the right, have steered clear, too. So have a constellation of right-wing websites and podcasts.Over the past two weeks, legal filings containing private messages and testimony from Fox hosts and executives revealed that many of them had serious doubts that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, even as those claims were made repeatedly on Fox’s shows. The revelations, made public in a defamation lawsuit against Fox brought by Dominion Voting Systems, have generated headlines around the world.But in the conservative media world? Mostly crickets.On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — The National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.“These results are shocking,” one article asserted.The Gateway Pundit did not respond to requests for comment.Even in a media world often divided along partisan lines, the paucity of coverage stands out, media experts said. And it means that many of the people who heard the conspiracy theories about election fraud on Fox’s networks may not be learning that Fox’s leaders and on-air stars privately dismissed those claims.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCutting Back: Job cuts in the social media industry reflect a trend that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that platforms have put in place to ban or tamp down on disinformation.A Key Case: The outcome of a federal court battle could help decide whether the First Amendment is a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle disinformation.A Top Misinformation Spreader: A large study found that Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast had more falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims than other political talk shows.Artificial Intelligence: For the first time, A.I.-generated personas were detected in a state-aligned disinformation campaign, opening a new chapter in online manipulation.“Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a veteran press critic and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Mr. Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”Who Is Covering Dominion’s Lawsuit?A review of 26 conservative news and opinion sources showed little coverage of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News. More