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      Donald Trump Tests Pro-Life America

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      On Sunday, Donald Trump sent shock waves through the Republican primary when an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” aired in which he said that Ron DeSantis did a “terrible thing” and made a “terrible mistake” when he signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban. It’s the kind of statement that could end virtually any other Republican presidential campaign. Opposition to abortion rights, after all, is every bit as fundamental to Republican identity as support for abortion rights is to Democratic identity. Breaking with the party on that issue is the kind of heresy that no national politician can survive.Or is it? When it comes to Republican identity, is support for Trump, the person, now more central than any other issue, including abortion?My colleague Michelle Goldberg speaks often of the distinction between movements that seek converts and movements that hunt heretics. It’s an extremely helpful one. Cultural and political projects centered around winning converts tend to be healthier. They’re outward-facing and bridge-building. Heretic hunters, by contrast, tend to be angrier. They turn movements inward. They believe in addition by subtraction.The G.O.P. under Trump hunts heretics. Oddly enough, it has grown more intolerant even as it has become less ideological. The reason is simple: Trump is ideologically erratic but personally relentless. He demands absolute loyalty and support. He relishes driving dissenters out of the party or, ideally, into political retirement.Trump presents the pro-life movement with multiple heresy-hunting problems. First, and most obviously, if support for Trump is the central plank of the new G.O.P. orthodoxy, then the pro-life movement will find its cause subordinated to Trump’s ambitions as long as he reigns. If he believes the pro-life movement helps him, the movement will enjoy the substantial benefits of his largess — for example, the nomination of pro-life judges, including the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. But if he perceives the movement to be hurting his political ambitions — as his comments to Welker suggest he feels now — then its members will be cast as the heretics and will stand outside, in the cold, complaining about their lost influence to a Republican public that will not care.Second, as long as the Trumpian right shapes the pro-life movement more than the other way around, the movement will adopt many of the same tactics. It won’t merely serve Trump, it will also imitate Trump. Every movement adopts the character of its leaders, and if Trump is the leader of the G.O.P. and by extension the pro-life movement, then his manners and methods will dominate the discourse.Finally, and more important, if the backlash to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision teaches us anything, it’s that the pro-life movement cannot be hunting heretics. As a strategy, heretic hunting is far less costly to the side with the more popular position, which can afford its purity, at least for a time. The same impulse can be utterly destructive to those in the minority, as the pro-life movement clearly is now.As I discussed in a Times Opinion Audio short last week, the Guttmacher Institute published new research suggesting that the number of legal abortions has actually increased after Dobbs. Even though abortion is illegal or sharply restricted in 14 states, there were roughly 10 percent more abortions in the remaining 36 states and Washington, D.C., in the first six months of 2023 than there were when abortion was legal across the country in 2020.At the same time that abortion numbers rise, the electoral results for the pro-life movement have been exceedingly grim. When abortion referendums have been placed on statewide ballots, the pro-choice movement has won. Every time. Even in states as red as Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The general polling numbers, moreover, are disastrous. There has been a marked increase in support for abortion rights positions, and there’s evidence that the pro-life movement began its sharp decline during the Trump administration. After years of stability in abortion polling, support for the pro-life cause is at an extraordinarily low ebb.In this context, heretic hunting is disastrous. The pro-life movement has to seek converts. Its first three priorities should be to persuade, persuade and, yes, persuade. Donald Trump is not the man for that job, not only because he’s a bully and a heretic hunter but also because it is quite clear that he is not convictionally pro-life. He is conveniently pro-life, and the moment it stops being convenient, he stops having a meaningful opinion either way.How would someone who is convictionally pro-life and also eager to persuade have responded to Kristen Welker’s questions? Such a person wouldn’t condemn pro-life laws unless those laws were poorly written or had glaring flaws. Instead, he or she would use a challenging question from Welker as an opportunity to persuade, in terms that even skeptics could understand.For example, when speaking of so-called heartbeat bills that ban abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy, one could connect the concept to one of the happiest moments in parents’ lives — the first moment they heard their child’s heartbeat. Parents feel that joy because it is tangible evidence of life and health. Even for a parent who is anxious, or financially stressed, or caught in a terrible relationship, that heartbeat still signals a life that is precious.If a politician is challenged to describe the kind of pro-life legislation he’d seek in a nation or state that increasingly favors abortion rights, he could emphasize how a holistic pro-life movement can work with pro-choice allies on legislation that would improve the lives of mothers and children. It turns out that our nation can reduce abortions without banning abortions, and it did so for decades before the abortion rate rose under Trump.To take one example, in 2021, Mitt Romney advanced a child allowance proposal that would provide families with $4,200 per year per child for each child up to age 6, and $3,000 per year per child between the ages of 6 and 17. Crucially, benefits would begin before birth, helping financially distressed families to prepare to care for their new children.Not only would the plan cut childhood poverty (while paying for itself through cuts elsewhere), it would almost certainly also reduce the number of abortions. Writing in Public Discourse, the Institute for Family Studies fellow Lyman Stone analyzed the impact of financial support for mothers on abortion rates and found that not only does financial support decrease abortion, that decrease is also most pronounced in jurisdictions with the fewest restrictions on abortion.That’s what persuasion can look like — defending the source of your convictions by explaining and demonstrating love for kids and moms while also looking for areas of agreement and common purpose. But does any of that sound like Donald Trump to you?Despite generating interest from conservatives and progressives, Romney’s proposal went nowhere. An astute analysis by Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic noted that the Biden administration had a competing child tax credit plan and Romney himself was an “isolated figure” in his party. While some Republicans reject direct cash transfers, it’s also true that working with Romney meant crossing Trump, and that, of course, would be heresy.In the days after the Dobbs decision, I wrote a piece arguing that when Roe was reversed, the right wasn’t ready. A Trump movement animated by rage and fear wasn’t prepared to embrace life and love. And now the pro-life movement is forced to ponder: Is Donald Trump more important to the G.O.P. than even the cause of life itself? Is he under any circumstances the best ambassador for a cause that’s already losing ground?For a generation, the pro-life movement was powerful enough to hunt heretics right out of the Republican Party. Now, if it clashes with Trump, it might find itself the heretic. And if the movement is that weak — if it is that beholden to such a corrupt and cruel man — then we might look back at the Dobbs decision not as a great victory for the pro-life cause, but rather as the beginning of a long defeat, one of a movement that forgot how to persuade. More

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      What to Keep in Mind About Mitt Romney

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      Reading the recent excerpt from McKay Coppins’s forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney of Utah, I was struck by the depth of the senator’s contempt and disdain for much of the Republican Party, including many of his colleagues in the Senate.He condemned their vanity, their venality, their cowardice. “Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed,” Coppins writes, describing Romney’s account, “some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity.” Romney made note of the “rank cynicism” of his Republican colleagues and their almost total refusal to stand up for anything that might harm their future electoral prospects. He saved his harshest words, however, for those Republican senators who would do or say anything for political power and influence.What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”As for the latest crop of Republicans, Romney had this to say: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance.”Reading all this, which is surprisingly harsh and unsparing for someone who is still an active participant in American political life, I wonder how much of it is Romney’s sublimated criticism of himself.On the occasion of Romney’s retirement, which he announced this week, there have been a number of odes, retrospectives and more or less hagiographic assessments of his political career, each colored by his genuinely admirable opposition to Donald Trump. Romney was, after all, the first senator in American history to ever vote to remove a president of his own party from office.But Romney also played a significant role in giving Trump mainstream political credibility when he enthusiastically accepted the reality television star’s endorsement in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. And beyond Trump, Romney — in both of his campaigns for president — eagerly and enthusiastically pandered to the right-wing rage and resentment that eventually found its champion in Trump. This was the Romney who promised to “double Guantánamo” in 2007 and urged “self-deportation” in 2012. It was the Romney who cracked, to a cheering crowd, that “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” and the Romney who did a great deal to appeal to the most viciously right-wing figures in his party.Romney was, not unlike the colleagues he criticizes, willing to say whatever it took to win power, even if it meant smearing nearly half the country as essentially unproductive and opening the door to some of the most corrosive forces in American political life.It is interesting that Romney has such tough words for his colleagues. But speaking as an observer of his career, it seems to me that there are tough words that Romney ought to have for himself. And if he isn’t willing to go that far in public, he should at least do more than leave the scene with a parting jab at the former president.If nothing else changes, then next November, one of two men, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, will be on the way to a second term in the White House. For his role in creating this mess, I think the least Romney could do is to say, to the country, exactly who he thinks should prevail.What I WroteMy Friday column was on Mitt Romney’s comments about his party’s hostility to the Constitution and what that might mean.Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.Now ReadingRepresentatives Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib on “Cop City” in Atlanta and the silencing of dissent for The Nation.Lynn Hunt on the revolutions of 1848 in Europe for The New York Review of Books.Julian Borger on the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup for The Guardian.Kathryn Joyce on the right-wing’s parallel economy for The New Republic.A two-hour analysis of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing.Photo of the WeekI was in Montreal for a little bit over the summer and I’m just beginning to go through my photos from the trip. Here is a quick snapshot of a street performer and the crowd around him.Now Eating: Pearl Couscous With Creamy Feta and ChickpeasI made this for dinner this week and it was a hit with the whole family. It also helped me use up the abundance of cherry tomatoes we have from our garden, which is a big plus. As always, I went heavy on the herbs. I also served this with a tzatziki sauce and some tinned fish (smoked tuna) that I had in the pantry. The whole meal was filling and nutritious, and felt reasonably virtuous. Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.Ingredients1 pint grape tomatoes, halved¼ cup sliced scallions2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, plus more for serving2 fat garlic cloves, finely grated or minced1½ teaspoons kosher salt, plus more as needed½ teaspoon black pepper, plus more for serving3 oregano, rosemary or sage sprigs2 cups vegetable stock or water⅓ cup chopped cilantro, dill or parsley, plus more for serving½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (from ½ lemon)¾ teaspoon ground cumin8 ounces pearl couscous (1½ cups)1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed1 cup feta, crumbled (about 4 ounces)⅓ cup freshly grated Parmesan (1½ ounces)DirectionsHeat oven to 450 degrees. In a 9-inch baking dish, cake pan or gratin dish, toss together tomatoes, scallions, 2 tablespoons oil, 1 tablespoon vinegar, garlic, ½ teaspoon salt, pepper and oregano sprigs. Roast until tomatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.While tomatoes roast, heat the stock until it boils, then stir in remaining 1 teaspoon salt, adding more to taste. (You want a well-seasoned broth here to flavor the couscous.) Stir in cilantro, lemon zest and cumin.Remove tomatoes from oven and fold in couscous, chickpeas and hot stock mixture. Cover pan tightly with foil, and return to oven for 20 minutes.Remove foil and fold in about ¾ of the feta (save the rest for garnish) and Parmesan. Bake uncovered until feta starts to melt, another 5 minutes.To serve, pull out and discard herb sprigs if you like, and spoon couscous into bowls. Top with remaining feta, lots more herbs, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. More

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      Republicans Don’t Mind the Constitution. It’s Democracy They Don’t Like.

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      “A very large portion of my party,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah tells McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”Romney doesn’t elaborate further in the article, and Coppins, who spoke to him in depth and at length, beginning in 2021, for a forthcoming biography, does not speculate on what exactly Romney meant with this assessment of his co-partisans.If Romney was using “the Constitution” as a rhetorical stand-in for “American democracy,” then he’s obviously right. Faced with a conflict between partisan loyalty and ideological ambition on one hand and basic principles of self-government and political equality on the other, much of the Republican Party has jettisoned any commitment to America’s democratic values in favor of narrow self-interest.The most glaring instance of this, of course, is Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was backed by prominent figures in the Republican Party, humored by much of the Republican establishment and affirmed, in the wake of an insurrectionary attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former president, by a large number of House and Senate Republican lawmakers who voted to question the results.Other examples of the Republican Party’s contempt for democratic principles include the efforts of Republican-led state legislatures to write political majorities out of legislative representation with extreme partisan gerrymanders; the efforts of those same legislatures to raise new barriers to voting in order to disadvantage their political opponents; and the embrace of exotic legal claims, like the “independent state legislature theory,” meant to justify outright power grabs.In just the past few months, we’ve seen Tennessee Republicans expel rival lawmakers from the State Legislature for violating decorum by showing their support for an anti-gun protest on the chamber floor, Florida Republicans suspend a duly elected official from office because of a policy disagreement, Ohio Republicans try to limit the ability of Ohio voters to amend the State Constitution by majority vote, Wisconsin Republicans float the possibility that they might try to nullify the election of a State Supreme Court justice who disagrees with their agenda and Alabama Republicans fight for their wholly imaginary right to discriminate against Black voters in the state by denying them the opportunity to elect another representative to Congress.It is very clear that given the power and the opportunity, a large portion of Republican lawmakers would turn the state against their political opponents: to disenfranchise them, to diminish their electoral influence, to limit or even neuter the ability of their representatives to exercise their political authority.So again, to the extent that “the Constitution” stands in for “American democracy,” Romney is right to say that much of his party just doesn’t believe in it. But if Romney means the literal Constitution itself — the actual words on the page — then his assessment of his fellow Republicans isn’t as straightforward as it seems.At times, Republicans seem fixated on the Constitution. When pushed to defend America’s democratic institutions, they respond that the Constitution established “a republic, not a democracy.” When pushed to defend the claim that state legislatures have plenary authority over the structure of federal congressional elections and the selection of presidential electors, Republicans jump to a literal reading of the relevant parts of Article I and Article II to try to disarm critics. When asked to consider gun regulation, Republicans home in on specific words in the Second Amendment — “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — to dismiss calls for reform.Trump tried to subvert American democracy, yes, but his attempt rested on the mechanisms of the Electoral College, which is to say, relied on a fairly literal reading of the Constitution. Both he and his allies took seriously the fact that our Constitution doesn’t require anything like a majority of the people to choose a president. Attacks on representation and personal freedom — the hyper-gerrymandering of legislatures to preserve and perpetuate minority rule and the attempts to limit or restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other Americans — have operated within the lines drawn by the Constitution, unimpeded or even facilitated by its rules for structuring our political system.Republicans, in other words, do seem to believe in the Constitution, but only insofar as it can be wielded as a weapon against American democracy — that is, the larger set of ideas, intuitions, expectations and values that shape and define political life in the United States as much as particular rules and institutions.Because it splits sovereignty between national and subnational units, because it guarantees some political rights and not others, because it was designed in a moment of some reaction against burgeoning democratic forces, the Constitution is a surprisingly malleable document, when it comes to the shaping of American political life. At different points in time, political systems of various levels of participation and popular legitimacy (or lack thereof) have existed, comfortably, under its roof.Part of the long fight to expand the scope of American democracy has been an ideological struggle to align the Constitution with values that the constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need to function. To give one example among many, when a Black American like George T. Downing insisted to President Andrew Johnson that “the fathers of the Revolution intended freedom for every American, that they should be protected in their rights as citizens, and be equal before the law,” he was engaged in this struggle.Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.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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      Joe Biden’s Greatest Strength Is Also His Greatest Vulnerability

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      In February 2020, just before the world shut down, I was waiting for Joe Biden to speak on a Friday night in Henderson, Nev. The next morning I watched Bernie Sanders rally a fairly young, largely Latino crowd in a packed Las Vegas high school cafeteria. The Biden event, held when it looked as if he would not win the nomination, was smaller and more subdued. On the other side of a rope separating media from attendees, a group of Biden supporters were talking about how stressful it would be to be president at their and Mr. Biden’s age. As I remember it, one of them said, “But he feels he has to do it.”Not much has changed about the substance of their conversation since then, other than three long years: Mr. Biden, at 80, is the oldest U.S. president ever. If and when he announces a re-election campaign, he will put into play the idea of an even older president, eventually 86 years old. “Is age a positive thing for him? No,” Nancy Pelosi recently told Maureen Dowd, before adding that age is “a relative thing.” For reasons ultimately only Mr. Biden can know, it seems he feels he has to do it.There’s a straightforward dimension to the problem: The effects of age can get beyond your control, and it’d be a safer bet to leave office before the risk probability elevates to a danger zone. Barney Frank decided well in advance that he would retire from Congress at 75, then did so in his early 70s. You could feel that would be the right choice for Mr. Biden or any other leader over a certain age threshold, and be done with this topic. But age and health knot together different contradictions in America. Everything’s so weird now. Tech types, athletes and people of means are spending millions to keep their bodies youthful, and to defeat decline, if not death. We live in this society where people frequently talk about their resentment of older leadership — and elect and re-elect older leaders.Donald Trump would also, were he to win and serve out a second term, turn 82, and you could view the final days of the first Trump White House through this prism. Nearly a quarter of the Congress was over 70 last year, Insider found, up from 8 percent in 2002. Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican and Iowa’s senior senator, won re-election at age 89 last fall. Two of the most powerful and defining congressional leaders of most of our lives — Mitch McConnell and Ms. Pelosi — are in their 80s, and until the recent hockey line change in House leadership, much of the Democratic congressional leadership was over 70. The Treasury secretary is 76. Two Supreme Court justices are in their 70s; in the last decade, death changed the ideological balance of the court.If he runs for this second term, squarely in this space of all these contradictions, Mr. Biden is making the same ask as he did during the 2020 election — to trust him, to trust that he will be proven right about himself. Qualitatively, Mr. Biden represents familiarity and stability, which both derive from his age and sit in uneasy tension with it.Mr. Biden premised his 2020 campaign on his singular ability to win the presidency, when a good number of people in politics and media didn’t think he could win even the nomination. He predicted a level of congressional function that many people found nostalgic to the point of exotic. This skepticism was, on a deep level, about his age and whether his time had passed and whether he was too distant from the political realities of the 2020s. The thing is: Mr. Biden was right before. He did win the nomination. He did win against Donald Trump. The first two years of the Biden presidency did involve a productive and occasionally bipartisan U.S. Congress. On some level, people like me were wrong. This whole presidency originated with Mr. Biden being right about himself, and therefore his age.And maybe he will be right again! That’s a real possibility, under-discussed in these conversations. Age is relative, as Ms. Pelosi said. Medical science keeps improving, and people keep living longer, healthier lives. Presidents can focus on the big picture and delegate the rest. Mr. Biden’s own parents lived to 86 and 92. Having purpose, professional or otherwise, can rejuvenate all our lives. He looked pretty lively during that State of the Union earlier this month, and certainly in Ukraine and Poland.A generation of old men, from Clement Attlee to Konrad Adenauer, rebuilt Europe after the catastrophic 1930s and 1940s, back when people lived much shorter lives. Mr. Adenauer, the first leader of West Germany, actually served until age 87. We haven’t lived through anything like World War II, but as we convulse through two decades of staggering technological change, that might explain the resurgence of some older and familiar leaders over the last decade. Maybe rather than resenting this generational hold on power that Mr. Biden represents, some segment of people is relieved by the continuity that he offers, and by his distance from our daily lives.It’s complicated to leave office when you have real power. If you were Mr. Sanders (81) or Mitt Romney (75), why would you walk away? Mr. Sanders and Mr. Romney retain their essential selves as public figures — they don’t seem especially changed by age. Neither has said whether he’s going to run again. But if they still feel vital and able, and they are in a position of actual agency and responsibility, then it’s hard to see why they should leave public life.The risk, though, registers at a different pitch with the presidency. Even if we’re not expecting the president to catch a bullet in his teeth or something, we have 100 senators and one president. Hundreds of federal judges, and nine Supreme Court justices. Some stuff matters more than others.This was a problem even at the very beginning of the country’s history. During the Constitutional Convention, a proposal arose about how to proceed if the president were unable to serve. According to James Madison’s notes, the delegate John Dickinson asked “What is the extent of the term ‘disability’ & who is to be the judge of it?” Nobody’s ever precisely resolved this dilemma, even with the 25th Amendment.Mr. Biden could be wrong. He could lose the election because of the way voters perceive his age, or he could make it to a second term only to suffer a serious illness in office. Would the country default to a discomfort with visible age and slant one way on Mr. Biden, or take a more nuanced view?In the fall, while thinking over some of these concerns, I saw Senator John Fetterman speak to a large Saturday afternoon crowd in an indoor sports complex in Scranton, Pa. Mr. Fetterman isn’t old — he’s 53 — but he did suffer a stroke and begin recovery while campaigning for office.That day in Scranton, though he moved fluidly and alertly, he struggled some with the cadence of his speech, which was mostly one-liners about Dr. Mehmet Oz. But the event opened up into a gentler moment when he asked, “How many one [sic] of you in your own life have had a serious health challenge? Hands. Personally. Any of you?” Tons of hands went silently up from the synthetic grass. “How many of your parents?” Nearly all the remaining hands went up and stayed up while he ticked off a few other close relations. Though this eventually segued into another joke about Mr. Oz, the silent, serious quality of this call-response was not how the campaign often played online and in the media, where Mr. Fetterman’s condition became a weapon to be bashed over him. The politics of health and age can be brutal.Last week, Mr. Fetterman entered Walter Reed medical center to treat depression. Annie Karni reported that Mr. Fetterman’s recovery has continued to be challenging as he adjusts to new accommodations and limitations. Though he initially faced criticism for not disclosing enough about his condition, over the last several months he has been public about the changes he has gone through and the accommodations he requires, and about depression, something millions of people face but politicians have rarely disclosed.Aging is different than depression or stroke recovery; but like those experiences, there is no shame in aging, and there’s also no suggesting that everything’s easy about it. The choice for Mr. Biden is only an elevated version of the one many people deal with: When will you know it’s time to retire or step back, and when to keep going? All of us are aging, gaining and losing capacities in ways we may not even be aware of.There’s no automatic test that will prove someone is “too old,” and even if there were, nobody would want to take it.You can drive yourself crazy with war games about the ways an election could go. What if Mr. Biden were to run and face a much younger candidate, instead of Mr. Trump? What if he stepped aside in favor of a younger potential successor who then lost to Mr. Trump, invalidating the entire premise of Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign?All that there is, in the end, is Mr. Biden’s request — to trust that he is right about himself. He’s been right before, and may well be right again. But the reason this question lingers is the unstable ground of the answer: The source of what makes people worry about the president is also the source of his power and appeal.Ms. Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Will Trump and Biden Gang Up on DeSantis?

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      If President Biden sometimes sounded a lot like Donald Trump during his State of the Union address, boasting about a record of economic nationalism, the imitation may soon run the other way. Biden’s attacks on congressional Republicans for being allegedly eager to cut Medicare and Social Security were a clear preview of how he hopes to run against the G.O.P. in 2024. But they were also a possible preview of how Trump may try to reclaim his own party’s nomination — by reprising his 2016 campaign’s rejection of Tea Party austerity and attacking potential rivals (which means, primarily, Ron DeSantis) as libertarian dogmatists who don’t care about the middle class.That strategy was previewed a bit recently by Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Their subject was the so-called Fair Tax, a longstanding fascination for certain right-wing activists that proposes to replace the U.S. tax code with a sales tax. This would yield certain advantages in economic efficiency; it would also result in a dramatic tax increase on the middle class.In the heyday of the Tea Party, when implausible policy proposals were all the rage, the Fair Tax was endorsed by many of today’s 2024 hopefuls: by Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and, yes, by DeSantis himself. Which gives Trump a license to accuse all these potential rivals of supporting a middle-class tax hike — and the Semafor writers quote a Trumpworld source basically promising an attack along those lines, to force Trump’s rivals to “answer for what they supported and what they’ve advocated in the past.”That same quote could easily apply to the proposed entitlement changes that many Republicans (again, including DeSantis) embraced in the same era, under the influence of Paul Ryan’s budget blueprints. Those proposals were serious rather than crankish, if ill-timed for a moment when there was more fiscal space than deficit hawks believed. But they were also seriously unpopular, and Trump’s discarding of them was crucial to his success in 2016. And having discarded them then, he’s well positioned to go after DeSantis and others now — in imitation of not only his prior campaign but also, as National Review’s Philip Klein points out, the strategy pursued by Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, when he sank Rick Perry’s candidacy in part by blasting Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”This means that the non-Trump G.O.P. can expect to spend the looming presidential race facing similar attacks from the Biden White House and the Trump campaign. Making the similarity too obvious could backfire on Trump. But the peril for the G.O.P. is that even if Trump can’t beat DeSantis by harping on his past positions, he will still be reinforcing for swing voters the liberal narrative that (non-Trump) Republicans care only about the rich.In one sense that narrative shouldn’t be too hard for DeSantis to counteract, since his record as governor of Florida is more moderate than libertarian — with increases in teacher pay, support for environmental protection and so on — and it’s not clear that voters care that much about long-ago votes if they aren’t tied to specific policy proposals now.But the question is what exactly DeSantis’s more of-the-moment policy proposals would be, in a fiscal landscape constrained by inflation for the first time in decades. There’s certainly a scenario in which he abjures austerity and embraces pro-family and industrial-policy spending, maybe even finds a few modest tax increases that own the professional-class liberals, and thereby evades the Trump-Biden pincer.But it won’t be easy to pull off. Especially because part of Trump’s strength has always been that he doesn’t need the Republican Party’s donor class in the way that normal politicians do, while DeSantis will need to rally that class if he’s going to dethrone the former president. And the price of their support will be, most likely, something that isn’t particularly popular: not an idea from the fringes like Fair Tax or a big entitlement overhaul proposal, necessarily, but at the very least a budget-eating tax cut that probably won’t be populist in any way.Again, 2012 is an interesting precedent. Part of what killed Romney in that general election was that even though he championed Social Security against Perry and declined to embrace any crankish tax proposals, he still ended up saddled with a tax overhaul plan that donors and activists liked but that was easy for the Democrats to attack.It’s not hard to imagine a DeSantis candidacy that rallies the establishment and defeats Trump only to end up in a similar general‌-‌election position. Which suggests one way in which Trump’s populist attacks on other Republicans could actually be helpful to the party’s chances. They’ll leave no doubt, for DeSantis or any other figure, about the political weaknesses of traditional right-wing policymaking. And they might force an early adaptation that otherwise could come, like Romney’s attempted pivots in 2012, as too little and too late.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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      In Utah, a Trump Loyalist Sends an S.O.S. to Romney

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      The appeal carried the unmistakable whiff of desperation. That it was delivered on live television only heightened the dramatic tension.A Utah Republican, Senator Mike Lee, was publicly begging a fellow Utah Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, for a simple act of solidarity: an endorsement in his campaign for re-election. One that, in Mr. Lee’s telling, could amount to no less than an act of salvation, as he battles for political survival against an unexpectedly fierce challenger, the independent candidate Evan McMullin.“Please, get on board,” Mr. Lee said, looking into the camera and addressing Mr. Romney by name on Tuesday night. “Help me win re-election. Help us do that. You can get your entire family to donate to me.”But Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney are not merely fellow Utah Republicans. And this was not just any television show.Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney were — and evidently remain — antagonists in the lingering drama of Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Lee played a key role in support of President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election and cling to power. Mr. Romney was a stalwart opponent of it.And Mr. Lee was making his appeal to Mr. Romney on Tuesday night on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program — a venue in which Mr. Romney has been routinely roasted, for years, before audiences of millions of conservative viewers.The irony of the moment seemed lost on both Mr. Lee and the show’s host, though that may have been a bit of a shared ruse.Either way, audacity was in abundant supply.Mr. Lee’s plea for Mr. Romney’s assistance, after all, came after Mr. Lee’s votes in opposition to three bipartisan bills that Mr. Romney helped to pass, on infrastructure, gun safety and semiconductor manufacturing. Mr. Lee denounced the infrastructure bill, for one, as “an orgiastic convulsion of federal spending.”The S.O.S. to his fellow senator also appeared to ignore Mr. Lee’s own actions of intraparty sabotage, dating back a dozen years: Mr. Lee refused to endorse Mr. Romney’s 2018 Senate campaign. He declined in 2012 to endorse the senior senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, even as his own chief of staff openly predicted Mr. Hatch’s defeat. And Mr. Lee first won his own seat in 2010 by orchestrating the defeat of a popular Republican senator, Robert F. Bennett, during the state’s Republican convention.What Mr. Lee was not ignoring, however, was a new poll published in Utah’s Deseret News this week showing Mr. Lee leading Mr. McMullin 41 percent to 37 percent, with 12 percent undecided. Self-described moderates made up a plurality of those undecided voters, as the center of Utah’s political spectrum seems to be agonizing over which candidate to coalesce behind.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.“We are winning this race, and Mike Lee is panicked,” Mr. McMullin said in an interview on Wednesday.Evan McMullin is not far behind Mr. Lee according to a Deseret News poll that also shows a high number of undecided voters.Rick Bowmer/Associated PressIn fact, Mr. McMullin’s task of uniting independents, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans remains daunting in Utah, a state that gave Mr. Trump 58 percent of the vote in 2020. When Mr. McMullin ran for president in 2016 as an independent, he netted 21.5 percent in his home state. (One of those voters was Mr. Lee.)Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, which conducted the poll, stressed that Mr. Lee “is still in the driver’s seat,” but, he said, with so many centrist voters still undecided, “this is one still to watch.”The FiveThirtyEight polling average still has Mr. Lee up by 7.6 percent.“Let’s be clear, Mike Lee is leading this race,” said Matt Lusty, an adviser to the Lee campaign. “Every reliable poll shows Senator Lee with a significant lead, and our internal polling gives us even greater confidence in the strong support he has across the state.” Mr. Lee himself declined to comment.But no contest in the country is as closely tied to the failed efforts to deny President Biden’s victory as the Utah Senate race. And no other race is as squarely centered on the fate of representative democracy.Mr. Lee appears particularly spooked by the $6.3 million in campaign contributions — a small portion of that through ActBlue, an online Democratic fund-raising tool — that have flowed to Mr. McMullin, who has vowed to caucus with neither party if he wins..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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.Mr. Lee was exaggerating a little when he told Mr. Carlson, “Evan McMullin is raising millions of dollars off of ActBlue, the Democratic donor database, based on this idea that he’s going to defeat me and help perpetuate the Democratic majority.” But his fears were clear.Mr. Romney, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has explained his decision not to endorse Mr. Lee or Mr. McMullin by saying “both are good friends.”But the personal divide between him and Mr. Lee over the events surrounding the 2020 election remains deep, and is playing a role now, according to Stuart Stevens, a senior official in Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential run who is also an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Romney became the first senator from a president’s party ever to vote to convict him after Mr. Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial, when he sided with Democrats to try to throw Mr. Trump out of office for abuse of power, for conditioning military aid to Ukraine on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s launching an investigation into Mr. Biden.Mr. Romney again voted to convict Mr. Trump in 2021 for inciting the attack on the Capitol.Mr. Lee, in contrast, was an active participant in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office. He cheered Mr. Trump on for weeks in late 2020, and privately offered in a text to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”Mr. Lee also endorsed a plan to have legislatures in “a very small handful of states” carried by Mr. Biden put forward pro-Trump electors, as part of a scheme to allow Vice President Mike Pence to reject Mr. Biden’s victory.Ultimately, Mr. Lee backed away from those plans and voted to certify Mr. Biden’s election, unlike eight of his Senate colleagues, a point that the Lee campaign stresses.But turning against a plan as it was failing does not exonerate him, Mr. McMullin argues.“Senator Lee, who called himself a constitutional conservative and who swore an oath to the Constitution, betrayed the Constitution in an effort to overturn the will of the people by recruiting fake electors to topple American democracy,” Mr. McMullin said in the interview. “It was one of the most egregious betrayals of the American republic in its history.”Senators Mike Lee, left, and Mitt Romney during former President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment hearings in January 2020. Mr. Romney voted to convict.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIt is, in some sense, that inconstancy that has gotten Mr. Lee in trouble: his willingness to challenge the powers in his own party, then tack back when his base demands it.“Reaping what he sowed is a good way to put it,” quipped Christopher F. Karpowitz, co-director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University.Mr. Lee led the floor fight to stop Mr. Trump’s nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention, called for Mr. Trump to exit the race after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, and voted for Mr. McMullin in protest. Then he became one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters.“Politics is an ongoing character test, and the people of Utah are going to have to ask themselves if he’s passed,” said Mr. Stevens, the former Romney aide.How real a threat Mr. McMullin poses to Mr. Lee’s re-election remains to be seen. Both sides produce internal polls that serve their purposes, Mr. Lee’s showing him with a double-digit lead, Mr. McMullin’s showing him barely overtaking the incumbent.It’s entirely possible that Mr. Lee’s dire-sounding appearance on Fox News proves a reprise of the pleas that Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, made toward the end of his 2020 re-election run as he watched his Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, rake in a record $57 million in a single quarter, $132 million in total, for his challenge: All panic aside, Mr. Graham ultimately won by more than 10 percentage points.Still, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of two Republicans serving on the House Jan. 6 Committee, will campaign with Mr. McMullin next week in Salt Lake City, trying to rally disaffected Republicans, a crucial bloc after Utah Democrats decided not to field their own candidate. The state’s most important Democrats, Mayor Jenny Wilson of Salt Lake County and former Representative Ben McAdams, are backing Mr. McMullin.Though Mr. McMullin says the preservation of democracy is the organizing theme of his campaign, he has branched out to tar Mr. Lee as “the most ineffective member of the Senate,” contrasting his ideological stands with Mr. Romney’s productivity.And, as Mr. Lee’s campaign tries to project an air of confidence, his appearance on Mr. Carlson’s show projected anything but.Pressing Mr. Romney to do the right thing as a Republican, he repeatedly warned Fox viewers that Mr. Romney’s mere neutrality could give Mr. McMullin — “a closeted Democrat,” as he put it — a victory, and ensure continued Democratic control of the Senate.On Wednesday, Mr. Lusty, the Lee campaign adviser, said his boss still hoped that Mr. Romney would come around. “Senator Lee sees it as important for all members of the party to stand together,” he said.But if Mr. Lee had truly hoped to change Mr. Romney’s mind, there were few avenues likely to be less persuasive than Mr. Carlson’s show.As Mr. Lee spoke, Mr. Romney’s picture was shown with a beret and handlebar mustache crudely superimposed, over the caption “Pierre Delecto Strikes Again” — the nom de plume Mr. Romney once got caught using on Twitter.“Mitt Romney has stood up to withering criticism from Trump and others,” said Mr. Karpowitz, the B.Y.U. professor. “I’m not sure Tucker Carlson is going to move him.” More

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      in Elections

      Gail Collins: I Was Wrong About Mitt Romney (and His Dog)

      by

      Sean DongI’ve been thinking about columns I’ve come to regret over the years. Hmm, lots of potential there. But let me go back to Mitt Romney.When Romney was running for president, I tried to see how many times I could find a way to mention that the candidate once drove to Canada with a dog strapped to the roof of his car.The result was sort of epic. People wound up counting and I used the story more than 80 times. Which was … kind of a lot.In my defense, I was supposed to be writing diverting columns about the 2012 presidential race, which featured Romney versus then-incumbent Barack Obama. Romney had gotten national attention as the Massachusetts moderate who pushed through a breakthrough state public health care plan that became a prelude to Obamacare, but he suddenly lost interest in that kind of thing and began referring to himself as “a severely conservative Republican governor.”This will give you an idea of both his politics and his verbal dexterity. Those of us who were around then also won’t forget his claim that as governor he pressed for more sexual balance in staff hiring and got himself “binders full of women.”Anyhow, those little breaks were few and far between. The campaign was extremely boring, and I really did have to stretch to find some fun ways to approach it. Obama was deeply, deeply offended when I hunted down an old Chicago associate who revealed he was a mediocre poker player.But Romney was the real challenge. The story about the dog on the roof came from a Boston Globe profile in which his son told a reporter about the time their pet pooped from his perch and messed up the car’s rear window.It was supposed to be an example of Romney’s sense of organization. Got that car and dog hosed down at a nearby service station.I’d probably have stopped mentioning it if Romney, when asked about the story, had said something like: “Yeah, it was back when my sons were little — nobody could possibly drive from Massachusetts to Canada with five boys and an Irish setter hopping around the back. And you know, he was in a really safe crate.”But no, he just bristled and retorted, “The dog likes fresh air.”The campaign progressed. And I was getting kind of desperate. I’m sure you’ve long since blocked it out of your memory banks, but Romney was a truly sleep-inducing candidate. It was sort of a high point when he mentioned that he cared desperately about “Americans” except, um, not “the very poor.”This was after a big primary win in Florida when he added that “there’s no question it’s not good being poor.”OK, that was a very long time ago. Since then, Donald Trump got elected president and those of us who make fun of politicians for a living moved into a land of perpetual opportunity. During which I got to point out nine million times that in an earlier stage of his career, Trump had sent me a copy of one of my columns, scribbling “a dog with the face of a pig” next to my picture and also managing to misspell the word “too.”He’s not president now, of course, but Trump is running still, claiming the election was stolen, dancing a happy dance for the N.R.A. conventioneers, bragging that on his watch Putin “would never, ever have gone into Ukraine.” Romney is now in the Senate, where he was the only Republican who voted to remove Trump from office during both of his impeachments and, recently, was the only Republican to vote against repealing Joe Biden’s mask mandate.He also, of course, supports Mitch McConnell and his party’s agenda. If you don’t agree with that, it’s hard to get all that nostalgic about what might have been. But the one lesson I take away from my Seamus period is that there are some things that are way worse than boring.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