Right-Wing Extremism and Alt-Right

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      What Are the Politics of Elon Musk? It’s Complicated.

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      Elon Musk has tweeted about political topics regularly since taking over Twitter, often belittling some liberal causes. But what he stands for remains largely unclear.He has called himself an independent and a centrist, yet “economically right of center, maybe.” He has said he was until recently a supporter of only Democrats and voted for President Biden. He’s encouraged people to vote Republican, which he said he did for the first time this year. Last year, he once even declared himself indifferent about politics, saying he’d rather stay out of it altogether.Elon Musk, ever a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies, has long made his politics tricky to pin down. To many of his critics, though, his relentless flurry of tweets in the six weeks since he took over Twitter has exposed his true conservative bent, and intensified their fears that he would make the social network more susceptible to right-wing misinformation.And at times, he’s made it hard to argue with that. He has said he’d welcome former President Donald J. Trump back on Twitter; suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was lying about the attack at their home that left him hospitalized; and reinstated accounts that have trafficked in offensive ethnic stereotypes and bigotry, including for the artist formerly known as Kanye West. (Mr. Musk later suspended Mr. West’s account again after the rapper-entrepreneur posted an image of a swastika.)His copious tweeting has generated huge amounts of attention. In a 24-hour period late this week, he tweeted more than 40 times, often with little rhyme or reason. He criticized the Biden administration’s deal with Russia that freed Brittney Griner, the Women’s National Basketball Association star. He asked Elton John to clarify his complaint about misinformation flourishing unchecked on Twitter. At times, Mr. Musk was acting like Twitter’s in-house customer service representative, boasting about new features and improved functions.And maybe that is a big part of the point — improving the image of his new $44 billion property, which he has said repeatedly is in dire financial straits.Yet Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, continues to defy easy political categorization. His views have been described as libertarian, though these days his politics seem more contrarian than anything else. He is more clear about what he is against than what he is for.It’s true Mr. Musk certainly sounds a lot like a Republican — and, sometimes, a lot like Mr. Trump — with his missives on Twitter against “woke” politics and Covid restrictions, his attacks on “elite” media and his efforts to draw attention to allegations that Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political clout.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverAn Established Pattern: Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Twitter isn’t the first company that witnessed Elon Musk use those tactics.Rivals Emerge: Sensing an opportunity, new start-ups and other social platforms are racing to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Mr. Musk.The ‘Twitter Files’: Mr. Musk and Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, set off an intense debate with a release of internal Twitter documents regarding a 2020 decision to restrict posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Hunter Biden.Hard Fork: The Times podcast looks at Mr. Musk’s two-day clash with Apple, which he had accused of trying to sabotage Twitter before saying the “misunderstanding” had been resolved.But where Mr. Musk has seemed most in line with the G.O.P. of Mr. Trump is in the tenor of his political commentary, which if anything seems more spiritedly anti-left than ideologically pro-right. While he has not been shy about sharing his disdain for many Democrats, his enthusiasm for Republicans has been more muted. He has stressed repeatedly that his problems are with extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.“To be clear, my historical party affiliation has been Independent, with an actual voting history of entirely Democrat until this year,” he wrote on Twitter the day before the midterm election. “And I’m open to the idea of voting Democrat again in the future.”As with many people who describe themselves as politically independent now, the hostility Mr. Musk harbors toward Democrats appears to have drawn him closer to the Republican Party over the last few years. He considers himself as part of the “center 80% of people, who wish to learn, laugh & engage in reasoned debate.”He has eagerly encouraged his followers to weigh in with their views on the country’s culture wars and traded tweets with some of the right’s favorite punching bags, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. When she criticized his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month to have a verified account with one of the social media service’s signature blue check marks — “Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that ‘free speech’ is actually a $8/mo subscription plan,” she wrote — he dismissed her.“Your feedback is appreciated, now pay $8,” Mr. Musk shot back.Many of his recent tweets have had that kind of “own the libs” tone, the shorthand on the right for when conservatives think they’ve deftly, often sarcastically, swatted down a liberal. A couple of weeks ago, he posted video on Twitter of a closet full of T-shirts with the slogan “#stay woke” that he said he had found at the social media company’s headquarters. Then he followed up with a tweet that linked to a Justice Department report that undercut one of the central narratives of the mass protests against police brutality: that Michael Brown, a Black teenager killed by the police in Ferguson, Mo., had his hands raised when a white officer shot him.On occasion, his remarks have raised concerns that he has planted himself firmly among right-wing conspiracy theorists. When he tweeted about the attack on Ms. Pelosi’s husband, he shared the unfounded claim that there was “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He later deleted the tweet, which linked to an article from a fringe website.He also said he would support Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for president in 2024, though his endorsement was not especially resounding. He merely replied “Yes” when someone on Twitter asked him. Mr. DeSantis, a hard-line conservative, would be an odd choice for someone who professes to want centrist governance in Washington.Mr. Musk has always claimed his concerns with Twitter’s previous management were about the ability of a small group of the company’s employees whom he described as “far left” to censor content. And over the past week, he has cheered on tweets about internal communications before he took over. The communications, which were given to two writers who have posted their findings on Twitter, calling them the Twitter Files, showed how the company went about deciding what information got suppressed.It’s been a mixed bag of revelations. Some showed how Twitter employees made it harder to see tweets from a Stanford University professor who warned about how Covid lockdowns could harm children — a view many public health experts have come around to accept well after the fact. Other documents show how more conventional, conspiracy-theory-embracing conservatives were shut down, like Dan Bongino, the radio host who was one of the biggest amplifiers of lies about the 2020 election.Mr. Musk has not professed to have any profound attachment to Republican policies, though, which is consistent with his posture before taking over Twitter.He has been highly critical of climate change deniers and said he’s proud of how Tesla forced the rest of the automobile industry to embrace electric vehicles. In 2020, he revealed that he’d spoken to Mr. Trump numerous times about the importance of developing sustainable energy, which the former president dismissed in favor of traditional fossil fuel-based sources. And Mr. Musk quit Mr. Trump’s business councils after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate accord.In an interview with The New York Times in 2020, he described his politics as “middle-of-the-road.” “I’m socially very liberal. And then economically right of center, maybe, or center. I don’t know. I’m obviously not a communist.”His political giving supports that claim. According to the Federal Election Commission, which reports spending in federal but not state races, he has donated just shy of $1 million since 2003 to candidates as conservative as former President George W. Bush and as liberal as Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat. More recently, in 2020, he donated to senators of both political parties — including Chris Coons and Gary Peters, both Democrats, and Susan Collins and John Cornyn, both Republicans.Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy. He’s criticized the Biden administration, for instance, as “not the friendliest” and for excluding Tesla, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker, from a White House summit on zero-emission vehicles in August 2021. His speculation on the reason for the exclusion: General Motors and the other car companies invited are union companies; Tesla is not. “Seems to be controlled by unions,” he complained at the time.Many of the views he has espoused on Twitter over the last two years have become popular in today’s Republican Party but are hardly exclusive to card-carrying Republicans. His criticism of progressives he views as overly censorious and sanctimonious is a sentiment many on the left have expressed. And his public condemnation of strict Covid containment measures in 2020 channeled what would become a growing skepticism of widespread public health restrictions. Though he was more exercised about them than most. “Fascist,” he once declared.Often, his tweets can seem to imply he leans in one direction when it’s just as likely that he is trying to court controversy. How to interpret, for instance, a post last week of what he said was an image of his bedside table? It had a revolver on it and a musket in a wooden case decorated with an image of George Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War.“Greetings, I’m Musket, Elon Musket,” he wrote.A few days later, he sounded pleased with himself as he remarked on the way Twitter had changed since his purchase was completed in October. “So many interesting posts on Twitter these days!” More

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      Trump Is Unraveling Before Our Eyes, but Will It Matter?

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      In the weeks immediately surrounding the midterm elections, Donald Trump called for the “termination” of constitutional rule, openly embraced the conspiratorial QAnon movement, pledged support for the Jan. 6 rioters and hosted, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, the white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes and Ye (once known as Kanye West), both of whom are prominent antisemites.Does every step Trump takes off the deep end make him a greater liability for the Republican Party, potentially leading to a second Biden term, the loss of the party’s precarious control of the House and an across-the-board weakening of Republican candidates up and down the ticket — from the U.S. Senate to local school boards?Will Trump’s wrecking ball bid for the presidency fracture his party? Will Trump’s extremism prompt the mainstream right — Mitch McConnell, Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Nikki Haley and all the rest — to rise up in revolt? How are the worsening intraparty fissures likely to play out over the next two years?Most of the strategists and scholars to whom I posed these questions outlined scenarios in which a Trump candidacy is mainly helpful to the Democratic Party and its candidates. They often cited the hurdles confronting those seeking to nominate a more mainstream candidate.“The Republican Party faces a lose-lose proposition as long as Trump is politically active,” Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote by email in response to my inquiry.“If Trump succeeds in getting the nomination again, it would seem that his brand is so damaged among Independents and some Republicans that he will be unelectable,” Wattenberg continued. “And if Trump loses his nomination fight, it seems highly likely that he will charge that he is a victim of voter fraud and damage the legitimacy of the Republican nominee.”If that were not enough to satisfy Trump’s thirst for vengeance, Wattenberg suggested that “it is certainly conceivable that he would mount an independent candidacy and split some of the Republican vote. Continuing his fight as an independent would enable him to continue to raise big sums of money and attract the attention that he so intently craves. All in all, it could well be a disaster for the G.O.P.”While Trump has suffered setbacks on both the political and the legal front, no one I contacted suggested that he should be counted out in the 2024 nomination fight. Instead, just as was the case in 2016, the most favorable situation in 2024 for Trump would be a multicandidate field, as opposed to a single opponent who could consolidate those opposed to him.“It is hard to see President Trump getting more votes in 2024 than he did in the 2020 general election,” Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, said by email:Still, if he has 16 primary election opponents like he did in 2016, his name recognition and loyal base will give him real advantages in securing the nomination. He will get 30-40 percent of every vote, leaving the other 15 candidates to split the remaining 60-70 percent. Unless someone like DeSantis can clear the others out quickly, Trump will maintain an advantage.The split in the Republican Party, Lupia continued,has been brewing for several decades. The Tea Party is a focal point and a precursor to the current populist movement. The evolving split within the G.O.P. represents a divide between people who believe in government but want to run it according to conservative principles and an approach that increasingly questions the legitimacy of government itself.Lupia argued that “Despite that split, there is little or no chance that either faction will split off into a third party”:The rules of the American electoral system are stacked against third parties at nearly every turn. The fact that the U.S.A. elects nearly all members of Congress and state legislatures from single-member districts makes it difficult for third parties to win elections. To have viable third parties, you typically need legislators elected from multi-member districts (imagine that your Congressional district sent the top three vote getters to Congress instead of just one).While exploring various scenarios, Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, warned that there was a substantial chance that unanticipated and unpredictable developments would radically change the course of politics over the next two years and beyond:I think we should consider the likelihood of something very different. Suppose for instance it turns out that DeSantis cannot attract G.O.P. primary election voters and is just another bland Scott Walker. What then? The aftermath would be hard to imagine.Instead, Erikson wrote by email,We should steel ourselves for the possibility that the G.O.P. future turns out like nothing like we imagine today. The same is true regarding the Democrats’ presidential nominee if Biden does retire before 2024. That outcome might be something we could not imagine today. Trump critics have continually predicted that his latest outrage would be his downfall. Not even Jan. 6 caused a revolt within the G.O.P. G.O.P. leaders are too fearful of Trump’s baseBut, Erikson argued,If the fall comes, it could be swift and decisive. The template is the fate of Joe McCarthy. He seemed invincible, with the full support of elements of the American right. Then, following Joseph Welch’s condemnation in his “Have you no sense of decency?” speech, McCarthy was defeated, and swiftly. The circumstances of McCarthy’s downfall may seem hard to believe today. But this is what can happen to a bully when they do lose their power of intimidation.I asked Erikson and others how serious the current divisions within the Republican Party are.“The fissures in the Republican Party are larger than usual, but still comparable to those that regularly occur in American political parties,” he replied, but “compared to the realignment of the parties in the civil-rights era, the current conflict in the Republican Party is mild.”Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, sees some potential for destructive intraparty conflict:Republicans have a real dilemma, because they can’t win without the MAGA faction and are having a hard time winning with it. It comprises at least half the party so they have no choice but to try to keep it in the fold. I think they will succeed; opposition to Biden and the Democrats unites them for the time being at least.Would the defeat of Trump in the primaries by DeSantis, Youngkin or another candidate provoke a damaging schism in the general election?Jacobson replied by email:Depends on how Trump reacts if he is denied the nomination. If it comes about because of his legal difficulties or because he appears to be increasingly off the rails (e.g., demanding we ignore laws and the Constitution to put him back in the White House NOW), then the MAGA faction may look to a DeSantis (if not Youngkin) to take up their banner. If it is an all-out battle through the primaries, then whoever backs the losing side might be disinclined to show up in 2024.But, Jacobson cautioned, “Never underestimate the motivating force of negative partisanship; you really have to hate Democrats and want your party in power to show up and vote for someone with Herschel Walker’s character, but the vast majority of Georgia Republicans” did so.Trump, Jacobson wrote,is still very popular in the party at about 75 percent favorable in the recent Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac polls. I think if the nomination took place now, he would certainly be the winner. But given his legal jeopardy and recent behavior that seems even more self-destructive than usual, on top of his damage to the Republican cause in 2022, I think Republican leaders and conservative pundits will be making every effort to keep him off the ticket to avoid losing again in 2024.A key question, according to Jacobson, is whether Trump’spursuit of self-preservation leads him to back away from the crazy tweets and wacko supporters or to embrace them even further. If the former, non-MAGA Republicans may treat him as they always have. If the latter, he will put them in a real bind. They’ve shown a capacity to put up with a lot over the years, but the combination of losing winnable elections and the constant humiliation of having to answer, or duck answering, for Trump’s latest folly may finally turn them openly against him. If he fights back as hard as he is capable of, the party will split.Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesI posed the same question to all those I queried for today’s column:Is it possible to quantify the size of the extremist vote in the Republican primary electorate? By this, I mean not only active supporters of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, QAnon etc., but also the presumably larger constituency of those who sympathize with the aims of these groups — those with high levels of racial hostility that they want to see expressed in the political system, and those who are particularly fearful that they will be, or already have been, displaced from their position of status?Only Jacobson offered an answer:I took a quick look at some survey data I’ve been gathering over the past two years. One set of questions (27 surveys) ask if people approve of or support or have a favorable opinion of the people who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. The results are quite consistent regardless of how the question is framed, with no trend over the two years: An average of 25 percent of Republicans have positive things to say about insurrectionists.Another question, asked 20 times by the Economist/YouGov poll in between August and December 2021: “How likely or unlikely do you think it is that Donald Trump will be reinstated as President before the end of 2021? An average of 22 percent of Republicans said it was very or somewhat likely that he would be reinstated. Finally, 20 percent of Republicans responding to an April 2022 Economist/YouGov poll said it was definitely true that “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”My estimate is thus 20-25 percent of the Republican electorate can be considered extremists.The continued polarization of the two parties, especially at the extreme left and right, creates complex interactions within each party and between each party.Trump, according to David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, transformed the political environment in ways that have made it difficult, if not impossible, for other prominent Republicans to renounce some of the more extreme groups:The reason Republican politicians are often reluctant to explicitly separate themselves from the Proud Boys, QAnon, or other groups on the right-most fringe isn’t that those groups cast a lot of votes in either Republican primaries or general elections. It’s that denouncing those groups would make a candidate sound like a liberal, or at least like someone who buckles under pressure from liberals.Trump, Hopkins notes, “became a hero to Republican voters not just by adopting conservative policy positions, but also by refusing to make rhetorical concessions to Democrats, journalists, and other perennial conservative nemeses.”Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, contended in an email thatThe Republican Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. Traditional Republicans who push national defense, support for NATO and economic stability are fighting against insurgents who oppose these core tenets of the Republican brand. To these insurgents, isolationism and protectionism are the new mantra.In this struggle for the power to set the agenda in the House of Representatives, Westwood argued, the Republicans’ mediocre performance in the 2022 midterm elections empowered the party’s right wing:The great irony is that the defeat of the red wave gave more power to the extremes of the Republican Party. Had the red wave reshaped Congress, Republicans would have had a strong majority and could have governed with a more traditional policy platform, but because their margin of control is so narrow the new Speaker has no choice but to try to appease the Freedom Caucus and other extremes.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, suggested that Republican Party leaders could make a concerted effort to block a Trump nomination, but it might take more fortitude than they have exhibited in the past. “This is one plausible resolution: first and foremost, if Republicans are thinking rationally and give highest priority to winning, they should see that Biden would defeat Trump in 2024 since he did so in 2020,” Shapiro wrote, “and since then Trump has been damaged by Jan. 6 and other investigations, and election deniers got trounced in 2022. DeSantis has been polling better than Trump against Biden and Youngkin probably would too.”One crucial but politically difficult step party leaders could take would be to unite behind — and endorse — a single candidate while pressuring the others to withdraw and, in Shapiro’s words, leave “only one such candidate opposing Trump in the primaries — otherwise multiple candidates would split the vote and Trump would be the party candidate, as happened in 2016.”Eric Groenendyk — a political scientist at the University of Memphis and a co-author of “Intraparty Polarization in American Politics” with Michael Sances and Kirill Zhirkov, political scientists at Temple University and the University of Virginia — wrote me by email:As party elites polarize, extreme partisans have reason to like it and identify more closely with their party, but not all partisans feel this way. Less extreme partisans have reason to like their party less. The part that is often overlooked is that these less extreme partisans also have reason to like the other party less, since that party is also moving away from them. If these less extreme partisans perceive both parties to be moving away from them at the same rate, they will still be closer to their own party, forcing the less extreme voters to adopt a ‘lesser of two evils’ justification for sticking with their party. And even if the other party is not moving away from the less extreme voters at the same rate, rehearsing negative thoughts about that party will also help them to rationalize sticking with their own party.This, in Groenendyk’s view,seems to be where many Republicans are stuck today. They are frustrated with the Trump wing of the party, but they can’t stomach voting for Democrats. The key point is that this shared hatred for Democrats is what’s holding their coalition together.Most of those I contacted downplayed the possibility that Trump would run as a third-party candidate if he were rejected as the Republican nominee, citing his aversion to losing and the logistical and financial difficulties of setting up a third party bid. Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, disagreed.I asked Hetherington: “If a DeSantis or Youngkin were to defeat Trump for the nomination, would either of them alienate Trump’s supporters, or could either one keep those voters in the tent?”Hetherington replied, “As long as Trump doesn’t run as a third-party candidate or actively tell his supporters to stay home, I suspect they’ll still vote Republican. What motivates them is their hatred of the Democrats.”But, Hetherington wrote, “There is every reason to think that Trump might actually do those things” — tell his loyalists to stay home on Election Day or run as a third-party candidate — “if he’s not the nominee”:If he has proven anything over the years, it is that Trump cares about Trump. In deciding to contest the 2020 vote, he asked “What do I have to lose?” He didn’t think at all about what the country had to lose. If he thinks he benefits from splitting the party — even if doing so just makes him feel better because he gets to settle an old score — then he’ll do it.Westwood noted that “it is not clear what power Trump will have to fight with if he doesn’t get the nomination in 2024, especially if he happens to be in a prison cell, which is increasingly likely.”In fact, however, conviction and imprisonment would not, under the Constitution, preclude a Trump candidacy and might in fact provide additional motivation, both for him and his most zealous supporters. Zijia Song, a reporter at Bloomberg, laid out the possible criminal charges Trump could face on Nov. 15 and then posed the question, “Could any of this disqualify him as a presidential candidate?”Her answer:Broadly speaking, no. Article II of the US Constitution, which lays out qualifications for the presidency, says nothing about criminal accusations or convictions. Trump opponents see two possible avenues to challenging his eligibility, however. One is a federal law barring the removal or destruction of government records: It says anyone convicted of the offense is disqualified from federal office. This could conceivably apply to Trump if — and this is a big if — he’s charged and convicted for taking classified documents from the White House. The other is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which says that nobody can hold a seat in Congress, or “any office, civil or military,” if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”Which gets to the larger question that supersedes all the ins and outs of the maneuvering over the Republican presidential nomination and the future of the party.How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point at which there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills, a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward, and who, without remorse, continuously undermines American democracy?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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      Netanyahu Coalition Roils Israel Before Government Is Formed

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      Efforts by Benjamin Netanyahu to appease his extremist coalition partners have been met with a backlash from Israeli liberals.JERUSALEM — First he agreed to hand control over Israel’s internal security to an ultranationalist. Then he pledged to give a party that opposes gay rights and liberal values wide powers over some programs taught in public schools. Finally, he promised a religious party that seeks to annex the West Bank authority over much of daily life in the occupied territories.The backlash against efforts by Israel’s prime minister-designate, Benjamin Netanyahu, to form a new right-wing government has been swift, with liberal Israeli critics and even many conservatives saying that he is undermining the country’s democratic values.While Mr. Netanyahu is returning to power in a position of strength after the Nov. 1 election — his right-wing and religious alliance won 64 seats, a majority in the 120-seat Parliament — his path back has been far from smooth as he maneuvers the political land mines that come with working with his new allies.He has caused an uproar within the school system after last week promising Avi Maoz, the leader of the far-right Noam party who promotes policies that critics describe as homophobic, racist and misogynist, authority over extracurricular content and enrichment programs in the state school system. Within days, hundreds of teachers and hundreds of school principals, as well as dozens of city mayors and local councils publicly pledged to ignore any dictates from Mr. Maoz and to preserve the spirit of pluralism in their classrooms.Israeli soldiers in October on guard at a bus stop south of the West Bank city of Nablus with far-right election posters. Experts say Mr. Netanyahu will have to consider how much to rein in far-right coalition partners.Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesInitial agreements with other potential coalition partners have also been contentious, underlining what the emerging government’s opponents describe as a struggle ahead to preserve the country’s liberal democracy, its independent judiciary and the status quo in matters of state and religion.Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is returning to office after more than a year in the opposition even as he is standing trial on corruption charges. Accusing the departing government of seeking to foster a rebellion against the incoming one, he has tried to reassure his domestic and international audiences that he alone will be responsible for his government’s policies.But despite his strong position in the new Parliament, experts say Mr. Netanyahu has been weakened by his legal troubles, leaving open the question of how much he will want to rein in his ultranationalist or ultra-Orthodox coalition partners.“On one side is what is good for the country,” said Reuven Hazan, a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “and there is what is good for him on the other.”“Netanyahu might now be willing to consider things that are not in the country’s interest if they help him survive politically,” Professor Hazan said. “His partners know that and realize they can squeeze more from him.”What to Know About Israel’s Latest ElectionThe country held its fifth election in less than four years on Nov. 1.Netanyahu’s Return: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition leader, is set to return to power with a new, far-right coalition that will once again make him prime minister.The Far Right’s Rise: To win the election, Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right allies harnessed perceived threats to Israel’s Jewish identity.What’s Next for the Left?: After a near wipeout, the leaders of Israel’s left-leaning parties say they need to change — but disagree on how.Worries Among Palestinians: To some Palestinians, the rise of Israel’s far right can scarcely make things worse. But many fear a surge of violence.The first deal that Mr. Netanyahu reached, with Itamar Ben-Gvir of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, would make Mr. Ben-Gvir minister of national security with oversight over the police and with the newly expanded authority to control additional forces, including the Border Police unit that operates in the occupied West Bank.Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, would have oversight over the police under the deal to make him minister of national security.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThat led the departing defense minister, Benny Gantz, a centrist and a former army chief, to declare that the expanded powers “stemmed, in the best case, from a lack of understanding” of national security and “in the worst case, from a desire to establish a private militia for Ben-Gvir.”Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, which ultimately seeks to annex the West Bank, has been promised control over the Defense Ministry agencies dealing with the construction of Jewish settlements and Palestinian and Israeli civilian life in the occupied territories. That would mean a division of powers with the future defense minister, which a former military spokesman, Ronen Manelis, said would lead to “chaos.”Professor Hazan said that the coalition promises should be treated for now as “conjecture,” and that it would not be unusual for there to be a gap between the written agreements and what happens in reality as the negotiations over the coalition makeup continue.Mr. Netanyahu has dismissed his critics as fear-mongers who do not accept the outcome of the election.Defending his actions, he wrote on Facebook on Friday: “I was elected to lead the state of Israel and I intend to do so on your behalf and in the spirit of the national and democratic principles on which I was raised in my father’s home and that have guided me my whole life.”Bezalel Smotrich, center, the leader of the Religious Zionism party, has been promised control over the Defense Ministry agencies dealing with the construction of Jewish settlements and Palestinian and Israeli civilian life in the occupied territories.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesIn another post on Monday, he wrote, “Over 20 years, I have responsibly led the state of Israel forward in all spheres, and I will also do so this time.”But Professor Hazan said that Mr. Netanyahu would be constrained by the fact that it will be difficult to rein in his far-right and religious allies by threatening to seek alternative coalition partners because other Israeli parties have refused to be part of a government with a prime minister under indictment.Mr. Netanyahu still has until Sunday to form a government, and he can request a 14-day extension. Laws must be changed to accommodate the shifting of responsibilities between ministries he has proposed. More thorny issues on the agenda include measures to curb the power of the Supreme Court and a new military draft law that will satisfy the ultra-Orthodox parties’ demands for broad exemption from service for Torah students.But Mr. Netanyahu’s future coalition partners have already been stirring up problems for him. Mr. Ben-Gvir publicly sided with soldiers who had been disciplined for physically and verbally abusing left-wing activists who were visiting the volatile West Bank city of Hebron, leading to a high-decibel dispute between senior officers, the departing government and the incoming one over the politicization of the army.Marching in the Pride parade in Jerusalem in June. Avi Maoz, the leader of the Noam party, has said he would cancel the event.Ariel Schalit/Associated PressMr. Maoz, who is expected to head an authority for national Jewish identity as a deputy minister in the prime minister’s office, and who opposes women serving in the army, told a small, religious publication last week that he intended to work to cancel the annual gay pride parade in Jerusalem, which he described as “an obscene abomination,” forcing Mr. Netanyahu to reiterate his commitment to protect gay rights.The largest outcry, however, has been over the plan to give Mr. Maoz the authority to approve or expunge external content programs from the list currently offered to Israeli schools, even though his party, Noam, which ran on a joint slate with Religious Zionism and Mr. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power, later broke with them, and only has one seat in Parliament.Yair Lapid, the departing centrist prime minister, wrote a letter to the heads of local authorities telling them not to cooperate with Mr. Maoz’s unit and to exercise their right to decide what content enters their schools.Dozens of City Council heads, including some from Mr. Netanyahu’s own party, Likud, said they would pay for any school programs promoting pluralism that Mr. Maoz canceled.“No party has exclusivity over Judaism, just as no party has exclusivity over pluralism,” Tzvika Brot, the mayor of Bat Yam, a Likud stronghold, wrote on Twitter, adding that the city would continue to educate its children in the spirit of “pluralism and acceptance of the other.”Children returning from school in Tiberias, Israel, last year. There has been widespread outcry over plans to give Mr. Maoz the authority to approve or expunge external content programs from the list offered to Israeli schools.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesMr. Maoz responded with a televised statement on Monday, saying: “This is a campaign by the minority that lost the election against the majority of the people who spoke clearly at the ballot boxes. This campaign is nothing short of sedition.”Some of his opponents said the deal was a wake-up call for liberal Israelis.“It made people understand that you can’t be indifferent,” said Orly Erez Likhovski, the executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center, a rights group of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism, which runs school programs promoting pluralism.“It even woke up mayors on the right who believe in liberal values,” she said. “It drew a line between the liberals and the zealots.” More

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      Trump Embraces Extremism as He Seeks to Reclaim Presidency

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      As he gets his presidential campaign underway, Donald J. Trump has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.He stands with the mob.Mr. Trump sent a video statement of support to a fund-raiser hosted by a group calling itself the Patriot Freedom Project on behalf of families of those charged with attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said. The country, he warned, “is going communist.”The video underscored just how much the former president has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics as he seeks to reclaim the White House through a rematch with President Biden in 2024. With the Justice Department targeting him as well as some of his violent allies, Mr. Trump’s antigovernment jeremiads lately sound like those once relegated to the outer edges of the political spectrum.He has embraced extremist elements in American society even more unabashedly than in the past. The video comes as Mr. Trump has been using music sounding like a QAnon theme song at recent rallies and hosting for dinner Kanye West, a rap star under fire for antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist.And it comes just two days after the conviction of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, placed Mr. Trump at the spiritual heart of a seditious conspiracy to illegitimately keep power in a way that is unparalleled in American history.Mr. Trump’s acceptance, if not outright courtship, of the militant right comes as the Republican establishment blames him for the party’s failure to do better during the November midterm elections. Republican officeholders, led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party leader in the upper chamber, argue that Mr. Trump’s promotion of candidates based on fidelity to his false claims about the 2020 election cost them seats.“Trump is doubling down on his extremist and cult leader profile,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present” and a history professor at New York University. “For someone of Trump’s temperament, being humiliated by people turning away from him will only make him more desperate and more inclined to support and associate with the most extremist elements of society. There is no other option for him.”His former dinner guests fanned the flames on Thursday with fresh incendiary comments on the Infowars show of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist. “I like Hitler,” said Mr. West, who now goes by the name Ye, adding that “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” He added that “we got to stop dissing Nazis all the time,” and he denied that the Holocaust happened.At another point, Mr. Fuentes voiced his support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, calling himself “very pro-Putin” and “very pro-Russia.” Ye agreed: “I am also.”The verdict in the Oath Keepers case underscored Mr. Trump’s alignment with a right-wing militia deemed a danger by the government. The trial effectively established that there was an illegal plot to keep Mr. Trump in power despite his defeat in the 2020 election, whether the former president was directly involved or simply inspired it through the lies he spread.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 4Donald J. Trump is running for president again, being investigated by a special counsel again and he’s back on Twitter. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Documents case. More

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      They Used Robocalls to Suppress Black Votes. Now They Have to Register Voters.

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      An Ohio judge ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who concocted a 2020 robocall scheme to discourage mail-in voting, to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.Two conservative operatives responsible for placing tens of thousands of calls in Midwestern states that made false claims about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots were sentenced by an Ohio judge to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.The operatives, Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Va., and Jacob Wohl, 24, of Irvine, Calif., orchestrated a robocall scheme that targeted Black neighborhoods in Ohio in 2020, prosecutors said.More than 8,000 of the roughly 67,000 phone calls the pair made across the Midwest, using a voice broadcasting service, were sent to phone numbers in Cleveland and East Cleveland, where many Black voters reside, prosecutors said. The calls were placed during the pandemic, ahead of the 2020 election, a time of heightened interest in absentee voting because of rising concerns about health and safety.The calls falsely stated that voting by mail meant the personal information of people who cast those ballots would be added to a public database and that they would be tracked by the authorities.“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man,” the recorded message said, according to a court filing in Michigan, which said Mr. Burkman and Mr. Wohl specifically targeted “Black neighborhoods” in the Midwest, including Cleveland. “Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.”The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.The prerecorded messages claimed that mail-in voting would result in a cascade of negative consequences, including pursuit by the authorities for outstanding debts and warrants, and mandatory vaccines.On Tuesday, Mr. Burkman and Mr. Wohl were sentenced in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland. At the hearing, which the defendants attended by videoconference, Judge John Sutula likened the robocall scheme to voter suppression efforts targeting Southern Black voters in the 1960s, Cleveland.com reported.“I think it’s a despicable thing that you guys have done,” Judge Sutula remarked, according to Cleveland.com.Mr. Wohl previously promoted false sexual assault allegations against Pete Buttigieg, then a Democratic presidential candidate, and Robert S. Mueller, the former special counsel.In the robocall case, Mr. Wohl and Mr. Burkman were each sentenced to completing two years of probation, working 500 hours at a voting registration center in Washington, D.C., and paying a $2,500 fine, a spokeswoman for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office said. They will also be electronically monitored for 12 hours, starting at 8 p.m. each day, through the first six months of their probation period.Michael C. O’Malley, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, called the sentence “appropriate.”“These two individuals attempted to disrupt the foundation of our democracy,” Mr. O’Malley said in a statement.The sentence arrived two years after they were indicted in Ohio for their voter intimidation scheme. They had initially faced up to 18 years in prison for multiple charges of bribery and telecommunications fraud but under a plea deal, the charges were merged into a single count each of telecommunications fraud, which they pleaded guilty to in October 2022.Mark Wieczorek, a lawyer representing Mr. Wohl, said that the sentence was “fair” and “in the spirit of justice.”“We think it’s a great sentence given the amount of charges he was originally indicted with,” Mr. Wieczorek said. “I think he is genuinely remorseful for his actions and took full responsibility for it.”Mr. Burkman’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.The pair also face similar charges in Michigan, where a case against them is still pending in the state’s Supreme Court, said John Nevin, a spokesman for the court. In 2020, they were charged with intimidating voters, conspiracy to intimidate voters, using a computer to intimidate voters and conspiracy to use a computer to intimidate voters, according to a criminal complaint. A judge in New York previously ordered them to call 85,000 people back to inform them that their initial calls about voting by mail had included false information. More

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      Facebook Failed to Stop Ads Threatening Election Workers

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      The ads, submitted by researchers, were rejected by YouTube and TikTok.Facebook says it does not allow content that threatens serious violence. But when researchers submitted ads threatening to “lynch,” “murder” and “execute” election workers around Election Day this year, the company’s largely automated moderation systems approved many of them.Out of the 20 ads submitted by researchers containing violent content, 15 were approved by Facebook, according to a new test published by Global Witness, a watchdog group, and New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy. Researchers deleted the approved ads before they were published.Ten of the test ads were submitted in Spanish. Facebook approved six of those ads, compared with nine of the 10 ads in English.TikTok and YouTube rejected all the ads and suspended the accounts that attempted to submit them, the researchers said.The tests underscored the challenges that social networks face in moderating increasingly partisan and violent content around elections, especially as poll workers are facing additional threats from election deniers and far-right extremists. The Justice Department and other federal agencies warned ahead of this year’s midterm elections that threats against election workers had surged.In a statement, a spokesman for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it later disabled several accounts that had submitted the ads. The company also said that ads continue to be reviewed after they go live.“This is a small sample of ads that are not representative of what people see on our platforms,” the spokesman said in a statement. “Content that incites violence against election workers or anyone else has no place on our apps, and recent reporting has made clear that Meta’s ability to deal with these issues effectively exceeds that of other platforms.”The research adds to previous tests conducted by the same groups, including one this year in which 20 ads were submitted containing political misinformation. In that test, Facebook approved only two of the misleading ads in English from an account in the United States, while TikTok approved about 90 percent of them. YouTube suspended the account that tried to submit the ads.But this round used more overt language that tested Facebook’s largely automated moderating system. Those included direct threats of violence, which were sourced from real statements by election deniers and other far-right extremists in the United States. One ad, which was approved by Facebook, read: “We are going to kill you all.” Another ad, which threatened to abuse children, was also approved.“It was really quite shocking to see the results,” said Damon McCoy, an associate professor at N.Y.U. “I thought a really simple keyword search would have flagged this for manual review.”In a statement, researchers also said they wanted to see social networks like Facebook increase content moderation efforts and offer more transparency around the moderation actions they take.“The fact that YouTube and TikTok managed to detect the death threats and suspend our account, whereas Facebook permitted the majority of the ads to be published shows that what we are asking is technically possible,” they wrote. More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Found Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Case

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      A jury in federal court in Washington convicted Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia, and one of his subordinates for a plot to keep Donald Trump in power.Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was convicted on Tuesday along with one of his subordinates of seditious conspiracy as a jury found them guilty of seeking to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power through an extensive plot that started after the 2020 election and culminated in the mob attack on the Capitol.The jury in Federal District Court in Washington found three other defendants in the case not guilty of sedition and acquitted Mr. Rhodes of two separate conspiracy charges.The split verdicts, coming after three days of deliberations, were a landmark — if not total — victory for the Justice Department, which poured enormous effort into prosecuting Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants.The sedition convictions marked the first time in nearly 20 trials related to the Capitol attack that a jury had decided that the violence that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, was the product of an organized conspiracy.Seditious conspiracy is the most serious charge brought so far in any of the 900 criminal cases stemming from the vast investigation of the Capitol attack, an inquiry that could still result in scores, if not hundreds, of additional arrests. Mr. Rhodes, 57, was also found guilty of obstructing the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 and of destroying evidence in the case. On those three counts, he faces a maximum of 60 years in prison.Nearly two years after the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 and what led up to them remain at the center of American politics and the subject of multiple investigations, including an inquiry by the Justice Department into any criminal culpability that Mr. Trump and some of his allies might face and an exhaustive account being assembled by a House select committee.The conviction of Mr. Rhodes underscored the seriousness and intensity of the effort by pro-Trump forces to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, and was the highest-profile legal reckoning yet from a case related to Jan. 6.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.But it is not clear how much effect it might have on broader public perceptions that have hardened, largely along partisan lines, over the past two years. Mr. Trump, written off as a political force in the days after the attack, is again a candidate for president, embraced by a substantial portion of his party as he continues to promote the lie that the election was stolen from him.Mr. Rhodes was convicted of sedition along with Kelly Meggs, who ran the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers at the time the Capitol was stormed. Three other defendants who played lesser roles in the planning for Jan. 6 — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — were found not guilty of sedition.Mr. Rhodes was also acquitted of two different conspiracy charges: one that accused him of plotting to disrupt the election certification in advance of Jan. 6 and the other of planning to stop members of Congress from discharging their duties that day.Mr. Meggs, who led a group of Oath Keepers into the Capitol, and Ms. Watkins, who went in separately and was recorded on a digital walkie-talkie app, were both convicted of conspiracy to stop the election certification. Along with Mr. Harrelson, they were also found guilty of the count of conspiracy to interfere with members of Congress during the attack. All five were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding and destroying evidence in the case.Taken as a whole, the verdicts suggested that the jury rejected the centerpiece of Mr. Rhodes’s defense: that he had no concrete plan on Jan. 6 to disrupt the transfer of presidential power and to keep Joseph R. Biden Jr. from entering the White House.But the jury also made the confusing decision to acquit Mr. Rhodes of planning in advance to disrupt the certification of the election yet convict him of actually disrupting the certification process. That suggested that the jurors may have believed that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 erupted more or less spontaneously, as Mr. Rhodes has claimed.“The government did a good job — they took us to task,” said James Lee Bright, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers. Mr. Bright added that he intended to appeal the convictions. No sentencing date was set.In a statement on Tuesday night, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noted the convictions against all five defendants.“The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” he said.A charge that traces back to efforts to protect the federal government against Southern rebels during the Civil War, seditious conspiracy has been used over the years against a wide array of defendants — among them, far-right militias, radical trade unions and Puerto Rican nationalists. The last successful sedition prosecution was in 1995 when a group of Islamic militants was found guilty of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks.The Oath Keepers sedition trial began in Federal District Court in Washington in early October. In his opening statement, Jeffrey S. Nestler, one of the lead prosecutors, told the jury that in the weeks after Mr. Biden won the election, Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy”: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.Mr. Nestler also closed the government’s case last week, declaring that the Oath Keepers had plotted against Mr. Biden, ignoring both the law and the will of the voters, because they hated the results of the election.“They claimed to be saving the Republic,” he said, “but they fractured it instead.”In between those remarks, prosecutors showed the jury hundreds of encrypted text messages swapped by Oath Keepers members, demonstrating that Mr. Rhodes and some of his followers were in thrall to outlandish fears that Chinese agents had infiltrated the United States government and that Mr. Biden — a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party — might cede control of the country to the United Nations.The messages also showed that Mr. Rhodes was obsessed with the leftist movement known as antifa, which he believed was in league with Mr. Biden’s incoming administration. At one point during the trial, Mr. Rhodes, who took the stand in his own defense, told the jury he was convinced that antifa activists would storm the White House, overpower the Secret Service and forcibly drag Mr. Trump from the building if he failed to admit his defeat to Mr. Biden.Prosecutors sought to demonstrate how Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a law degree from Yale, became increasingly panicked as the election moved toward its final certification at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. Under his direction, the Oath Keepers — whose members are largely former law enforcement officers and military veterans — took part in two “Stop the Steal” rallies in Washington, providing event security and serving as bodyguards for pro-Trump dignitaries.Throughout the postelection period, the jury was told, Mr. Rhodes was desperate to get in touch with Mr. Trump and persuade him to take extraordinary measures to maintain power. In December 2020, he posted two open letters to Mr. Trump on his website, begging the president to seize data from voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged.In the letters, Mr. Rhodes also urged Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two centuries-old law that he believed would give the president the power to call up militias like his own to suppress the “coup” — purportedly led by Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris, the incoming vice president — that was seeking to unseat him.“If you fail to act while you are still in office,” Mr. Rhodes told Mr. Trump, “we the people will have to fight a bloody war against these two illegitimate Chinese puppets.”As part of the plot, prosecutors maintained, Mr. Rhodes placed a “quick reaction force” of heavily armed Oath Keepers at a Comfort Inn in Arlington County, Va., ready to rush their weapons into Washington if their compatriots at the Capitol needed them. Mr. Caldwell, a former Navy officer, tried at one point to secure a boat to ferry the guns across the Potomac River, concerned that streets in the city might be blocked.Mr. Rhodes tried to persuade the jury during his testimony that he had not been involved in setting up the “quick reaction force.” But he also argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, it would have given the Oath Keepers the legal standing as a militia to use force of arms to support the president.On Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Rhodes remained outside the Capitol, standing in the crowd like “a general surveying his troops on the battlefield,” Mr. Nestler said during the trial. While prosecutors acknowledged that he never entered the building, they claimed he was in touch with some of the Oath Keepers who did go in just minutes before they breached the Capitol’s east side.Even with the convictions, the government is continuing to prosecute several other Oath Keepers, including four members of the group who are scheduled to go on trial on seditious conspiracy charges on Monday. A second group of Oath Keepers is facing lesser conspiracy charges at a trial now set for next year, and Kellye SoRelle, Mr. Rhodes’s onetime lawyer and girlfriend, has been charged in a separate criminal case. More

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      Republicans Hate Everything About Trump’s Dinner With Ye and Fuentes Except Trump

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      There was a pattern with Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. He would say or do something outrageous and often quite offensive. Most people condemned him and the remarks themselves. Republicans took a different approach. They condemned the remarks, but avoided an attack on Trump the person.You saw this in full effect during the Republican primary season, when Trump refused to disavow support from David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader and Republican candidate for senator and governor in Louisiana. Both leaders of the Republican Party in Congress, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, condemned Duke.“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games,” Ryan said. “They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.”“There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the K.K.K., so let me make it perfectly clear,” McConnell said. “That is not the view of Republicans who have been elected to the United States Senate, and I condemn his views in the most forceful way.”As for Trump, who led the field for the nomination? “My plan is to support the nominee,” Ryan said. McConnell was not ready to commit at that point, but in short order, he bent the knee too.Trump is once again running for the Republican presidential nomination. Once again, though this time as the former president of the United States, he has the automatic support of a large part of the Republican Party base, as well as a large faction of Republican politicians, from state lawmakers to top members of the House of Representatives. And once again he has forced members of his party to make a choice about his rhetoric and behavior: Will they condemn his actions and cast him out or will they criticize his choices but allow him the privilege of leadership within the party?The offense this time? As you may have heard, Trump held a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with Kanye West, who has turned himself into arguably the nation’s most prominent antisemite, and Nick Fuentes, a far-right provocateur whose supporters, called groypers, were among the crowd that stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Trump, for his part, claims he knew nothing about Fuentes, who is an antisemite, a Holocaust denier and a white supremacist. “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said in a statement on Friday. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about.”This is hard to believe. Trump has had links to the far right going back to his first presidential campaign. Whether out of belief or, more likely, out of his extreme narcissism, he has refused to disavow his supporters on the fringes of American politics. And as we all know, he encouraged them outright in his attempt to hold on to power after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Trump may not have known about Fuentes in particular — although I think that is doubtful, given Fuentes’s proximity to Republican politics — but he certainly knows the type.It took Republican leaders a few days to muster the energy to respond to the meeting. But on Monday afternoon, a cascade of high-level Republican officeholders criticized Trump for meeting with Fuentes.Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, made a stern statement: “President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier a seat at the table. I think he should apologize for it, and he should denounce those individuals and their hateful rhetoric without qualification.”Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said, “President Trump hosting racist antisemites for dinner encourages other racist antisemites.”John Thune, the Senate minority whip, said that the dinner was “just a bad idea on every level. I don’t know who was advising him on his staff but I hope that whoever that person was got fired.” And Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters: “The meeting was bad, he shouldn’t have done it. But again, you know, there’s a double standard about this kind of stuff.”You’ll notice, in all of this, that while Republicans are willing to condemn Fuentes and Ye and Trump’s decision to eat dinner with them, they are not willing to go so far as to draw any conclusions about Trump himself. Even Pence — who had, in this group, the strongest words for Trump — took care not to impute any malice to his former boss. “I don’t believe Donald Trump is an antisemite. I don’t believe he’s a racist or a bigot,” he said. “I think the president demonstrated profoundly poor judgment in giving those individuals a seat at the table.”One of the few Republicans to condemn Trump as a person and a political figure was Mitt Romney, who, notably, no longer has any national ambitions beyond the Senate. “There’s no bottom to the degree to which he’s willing to degrade himself, and the country for that matter,” said Romney, who also called the dinner “disgusting.”Among those Republicans who have been silent on the matter so far, the most conspicuous is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, where the dinner took place. DeSantis is often eager to jump into national political controversies. But he’s also Trump’s rival for control of the Republican Party and eager to court (and win) the former president’s supporters.Recently, there has been quite a bit of talk about the extent to which Republicans are leaving Trump behind and how they’ve tried to ignore his complaints and keep their distance. But this episode demonstrates the extent to which that distance — the distance between Trump and the Republican establishment — is overstated.Trump can still force the rest of the party to respond to him; he can still force it to contend with his rhetoric and his actions. And most important, his influence still constrains the behavior of other Republicans — rivals, allies and everyone in between. Trump is still at the center of the Republican political universe, exerting his force on everybody around him.I have no doubt that Republican elites want to rid themselves of Trump, especially after their poor performance — historically poor — in the midterm elections. But what we’re seeing right now is how that is easier said than done; how even in the face of the worst transgressions, Trump still has enough power and influence to make the party hesitate before it attempts to take action — and pull punches when it does. It’s the same hesitation and fear that helped Trump win the nomination in 2016. And if Republicans cannot overcome it, it will help him win it again in 2024.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