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

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

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      Tim Scott Opposes Package Tying Aid to Israel and Ukraine

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      The South Carolina senator and 2024 presidential candidate said a “longer process” was needed to determine how much aid to send to Ukraine, while Israel demanded immediate attention.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said on Sunday that he would not support a request from President Biden to package aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and funding for border security, even though he has endorsed U.S. spending for each of those purposes.“I believe that leveraging the challenges in the war with Israel to get more assistance for Ukraine at that level of $60 billion is too much, and we need to have a single focus on bringing Congress together behind the support for Israel,” Mr. Scott, a 2024 Republican candidate, said on “This Week” on ABC News.At first, he indicated that his objection was mainly to the possibility of delaying aid to Israel by combining it with funding on which Congress is more divided. He said that he believed aid to Israel alone “would pass overnight,” and that a “splintered” package would be harder to pass.But when the interviewer, Jonathan Karl, asked whether he would actually vote against the package if it came to the Senate floor, Mr. Scott said he would.“I will in the current construct,” he said, adding that a “longer process” was needed to debate how much aid to send to Ukraine. “Israel is at the beginning of a long, protracted war,” he said. “I think we are much better off, better served as a nation, focusing our resources and our attention immediately on Israel, and continuing to provide the kind of level of accountability and responsibility the American people want to see as it relates to the resources for Ukraine.”His campaign did not elaborate on his comments, and pointed to a CNN interview in which he said largely the same thing, criticizing the package for including “more money for Ukraine than it does for Israel.”The request that Mr. Biden submitted to Congress on Friday included about $61 billion for Ukraine; $14 billion for Israel; $7 billion for Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific allies; $9 billion for humanitarian aid in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza; and $14 billion for border security in the United States.Mr. Scott is not the only Republican to object to putting those pieces in one package, an effort by the Biden administration to pressure lawmakers who oppose funding Ukraine to support the proposal in the interest of funding Israel, and vice versa.Vivek Ramaswamy, another Republican presidential candidate, denounced the proposal at a campaign event in Iowa on Saturday. Mr. Ramaswamy has long opposed aid to Ukraine, and he said at the event that Israel’s military objectives in Gaza were unclear and that helping Israel would risk a broader conflict in the Middle East.But Mr. Scott’s rejection of the package is notable because he is on the record as supporting every component.He has been one of the most outspoken Republican candidates in favor of helping Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion: He accused Mr. Biden last year of “waiting too long to provide too little support,” and he has described a Ukrainian victory as a matter of American interest, arguing that it would discourage a Russian incursion into NATO territory that would pull the United States into a wider war. He has endorsed sending weapons to Taiwan. And, in the same interview on Sunday in which he rejected the package, he called for funding to secure the southern border of the United States.Almost the entire Republican presidential field has endorsed military aid to Israel, but the candidates are divided on aid to Ukraine: In addition to Mr. Ramaswamy, former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida have said they want to cut it. Only a few, though, have voiced their positions on Mr. Biden’s proposal.Among them is former Vice President Mike Pence, who told NBC News on Sunday that he supported aid for Israel and Ukraine “together or separately.” More

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      Tim Scott’s Super PAC Cancels Fall TV Ad Buys

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      In a memo, the super PAC told donors that it was not going to “waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative.”The main super PAC supporting Senator Tim Scott’s presidential campaign abruptly announced to donors in a memo that it was canceling millions of dollars in television ads it had reserved this fall, writing that Donald J. Trump’s strength was so ingrained among Republican voters that additional advertising would currently make little difference.“We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, a Republican strategist who is a co-chairman of the super PAC, wrote in the blunt memo to donors that was circulated on Monday. “We have done the research. We have studied the focus groups. We have been following Tim on the trail. This electorate is locked up and money spent on mass media isn’t going to change minds until we get a lot closer to voting.”A copy of the memo was obtained by The New York Times.The super PAC, called the Trust in Mission PAC, or TIMPAC, has been one of the largest advertisers in the race, spending roughly $5 million in Iowa alone this year. Mr. Scott’s poll numbers have hardly budged, however, and Mr. Trump remains far ahead.In addition to the super PAC, Mr. Scott’s campaign had also spent aggressively on television advertising, spending more than $12.5 million on ads to run through the end of November, the campaign said. That total far eclipses any other campaign, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. It’s not clear exactly how much the super PAC is canceling, though it could be $15 million or more. The group, according to data from AdImpact, has roughly $10 million reserved in just the next six weeks.“We are doing what would be obvious in the business world but will mystify politicos,” Mr. Collins wrote in the memo.The super PAC is likely to begin paying for some of Mr. Scott’s events as part of a move that was described as shifting resources elsewhere.The decision to cancel the ads and begin paying for some of Mr. Scott’s events comes a day after Mr. Scott revealed the deteriorating state of his campaign’s finances, which showed swelling spending and shrinking receipts.Mr. Scott had a robust $13.3 million cash on hand — including $11.6 million that can be used for the primary — but he raised only $4.6 million in the third quarter, down from $5.9 million the previous quarter. In the most recent period, Mr. Scott raised only a fraction of what former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida pulled in, and roughly one-tenth of Mr. Trump’s haul.He was even topped by Vivek Ramaswamy, who raised $7.4 million in the third quarter, about a third of which came from donors who gave less than $200.Mr. Scott’s campaign has been spending freely. When Mr. Scott entered the race in May, he brought with him $22 million left over from his last Senate re-election — and he has been steadily burning through that stockpile. In July alone, the campaign spent $5.4 million. In contrast, Ms. Haley’s campaign spent $3.5 million in the entire third quarter.Mr. Scott’s super PAC had entered July with only $15 million in cash on hand yet it soon made $40 million in television and digital reservations.That gap raised questions about how the super PAC had secured so much money so quickly. At the center of those questions is Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who previously had been one of Mr. Scott’s biggest benefactors but had not yet been among those donors who had given to the super PAC in the first half of the year. The canceled ads are likely to raise more questions about what financial role Mr. Ellison is playing.The super PAC said it would continue to spend on door-knocking programs, raising money online for Mr. Scott and holding events. The group claimed it was not giving up on the campaign entirely. Mr. Collins argued that Mr. Scott remained the “best fit” for Iowa voters and that for other campaigns and super PACs that fill the breach, “money will simply be wasted.” He wrote in the memo that two-thirds of Iowa caucusgoers will decide in the last six weeks before the caucus on Jan. 15, 2024 — not in the next six weeks.Regardless of the rationale, the decision will be seen in political circles as all but abandoning Mr. Scott.“Some will challenge our theory of the election,” Mr. Collins wrote, “but we would ask these critics to produce any evidence that shows any candidate, at this time, at any spending level, breaking through.”Matt Gorman, a spokesman for Mr. Scott, said in a statement that Mr. Scott’s campaign remained “built for the long haul — powered by the most primary cash on hand and the highest candidate favorability of anyone in the field.”He added, “On issues ranging from foreign policy to abortion, he has been the clearest and strongest voice, leading while others have followed.” More

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      GOP Candidates Are Pleading Their Case to Donors to Take on Trump

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      Rivals to Donald J. Trump and their strategists told financiers that time is running out to build up a viable alternative to the former president.With less than 100 days until the Iowa caucuses, Donald J. Trump’s leading rivals continue to engage in a pitched battle with one another as much as with him, igniting fears that internal divisions were threatening to doom efforts to find a fresh face for the Republican Party in 2024.From Dallas to Park City, Utah, top Republican donors gathered behind closed doors this week as talk intensified about the need to cull the G.O.P. field. In private remarks to donors in Utah, Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations, delivered a blunt message that it was time to pick sides and invest if there was any chance to prevent another Trump nomination.“Get in the game,” Ms. Haley urged them, according to two people who were present at the event.But given Mr. Trump’s durable lead, some political financiers are considering staying on the sidelines. For those donors who aren’t, the choice has increasingly narrowed to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Ms. Haley, whose fortunes have been lifted by her performance in the first two debates. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is a factor as well, given the $25 million his super PAC has remaining in television ad reservations in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina in the next three months.On Friday, teams of advisers to Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley and Mr. Scott descended on Dallas for separate presentations to an exclusive gathering of some of the most influential Republican donors in the nation, a group known as the American Opportunity Alliance. They met at a property owned by the billionaire Republican financier Harlan Crow, who has gained attention and scrutiny for his close relationship with Justice Clarence Thomas.The crowd included some of the party’s biggest contributors or their top representatives, megadonors like Paul Singer and Ken Griffin who can spend tens of millions of dollars. And the stakes produced pointed presentations, according to more than a half-dozen people who were in the room or had been briefed on the remarks.The DeSantis team argued that any effort to push him out of the race would backfire for the anti-Trump cause. Three top DeSantis campaign strategists — James Uthmeier, David Polyansky and Ryan Tyson — presented internal polls showing that 90 percent of his supporters would drift to Mr. Trump if Mr. DeSantis were to exit the race. Ms. Haley’s supporters, they said in contrast, would flow to Mr. DeSantis if she departed.The DeSantis team suggested that Mr. Trump had to be stopped in Iowa, and that Mr. DeSantis was the only one positioned to do so. And they acknowledged Mr. DeSantis’s past struggles, describing themselves as having fought back to a stronger position.Gov. Ron DeSantis in Nashua, N.H., on Friday. His team has told donors that any effort to push him out of the race would backfire on the anti-Trump cause.John Tully for The New York TimesMs. Haley’s advisers, Betsy Ankeny and Jon Lerner, showed their own internal surveys, which placed Ms. Haley ahead of Mr. DeSantis in New Hampshire and South Carolina and had the two of them tied in Iowa. Mr. DeSantis had stalled, they argued, and she was rising.In a sign of the threat Ms. Haley poses to Mr. DeSantis, Never Back Down — the leading pro-DeSantis super PAC — is readying an anti-Haley ad campaign and has tested several attacks, including her ties to China, according to a person familiar with the matter. Such a move would be a watershed moment, as DeSantis advisers have long insisted the primary is a two-man contest between the governor and Mr. Trump.Mr. Scott, whose team had not initially been invited to Dallas, was represented by Jennifer DeCasper, Zac Moffatt and Erik Iverson. They revealed that Mr. Scott would enter October with $11.6 million cash on hand for the primary — more than either Mr. DeSantis or Ms. Haley.Ms. DeCasper pitched Mr. Scott’s toughness and his willingness to stand up to Mr. Trump. She invoked when he confronted Mr. Trump for the former president’s equivocations after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va.“We’ve never flown to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, to ask permission for anything,” she said.The dueling presentations underscored the degree to which the race to be the main alternative to Mr. Trump is playing out in donor meetings as much as on the ground in the early states.Ms. Haley, campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday, made explicit the power of wealthy donors to narrow the field. “I think it’s up to the voters, and I think it’s up to the donors to decide which candidates should get off the stage,” Ms. Haley said as she filed to appear on the ballot in the state.For months, donors have had private discussions not just about the possibility of collectively backing a single alternative to Mr. Trump, but whether wealthy backers of low-polling candidates could encourage those candidates to drop out to consolidate anti-Trump support.In recent days, Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis have made a series of announcements pitching political insiders on their respective momentum. Mr. DeSantis on Thursday announced his first ad reservation of the race, saying he would spend $2 million in Iowa. That came a week after he started shifting one-third of his staff from Tallahassee to Iowa to bolster his operation in the state.Ms. Haley rolled out her fund-raising haul, revealing she had more cash on hand for the primary than Mr. DeSantis, $9.1 million to $5 million. She also announced the opening of her first office in Iowa and the addition of two staff members in the state, bringing her total to four.For veterans of the 2016 primary, the obsessive focus on the race to be in second place is inflicting a serious sense of déjà vu.“In October of 2015, you had Jeb Bush machine gunning Marco Rubio and Rubio going after Ted Cruz, and nobody was really laying a hand on Trump,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who was a top adviser to Mr. Rubio at the time.“It’s shaping up to be a repeat of 2016,” Mr. Conant added of the current contest. He said that this time, it was even worse for the Trump challengers. “Now, even if you combined everyone’s poll numbers that was on the debate stage, you’d still be under Trump.”A recent national poll from Fox News showed Mr. Trump at 59 percent, virtually unchanged from September. Mr. DeSantis was the next closest at 13 percent, with Ms. Haley in third, with 10 percent.Still, most of Mr. Trump’s rivals tread cautiously when it comes to criticizing the former president.On Monday, Mr. DeSantis made his first appearance on MSNBC, the type of network he had spent years deriding as “corporate media,” a sign of his need for political oxygen and coverage. And while he swiped at how a Trump nomination would be a distraction — citing documents found near toilets in Mar-a-Lago — he evaded a follow-up question about whether Americans should be concerned Mr. Trump was loose with the nation’s secrets, the charge at the center of the special counsel’s criminal indictment.“Well, look, I think that’s an allegation — it remains to be seen,” Mr. DeSantis began, before pivoting to a defense of Mr. Trump.Later in the week, Mr. DeSantis criticized Mr. Trump for his attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and on Israel’s intelligence services for missing the impending terrorist attack by Hamas. The issue is potent for a number of pro-Israel and politically conservative donors, and Mr. DeSantis’s allies and advisers see it as a Trump vulnerability.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, said that if donors “don’t pick a candidate, Trump is going to be the nominee.”John Tully for The New York TimesSpencer Zwick, who oversaw Senator Mitt Romney’s fund-raising operation when he ran for president in 2012 and who organized the Utah conference, said Ms. Haley “was probably the strongest in making the case” that donors needed to mobilize to stop Mr. Trump from winning. Other attendees included former Vice President Mike Pence, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.“If you don’t pick a candidate, Trump is going to be the nominee,” Mr. Christie warned the donors, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The New York Times.But the lower-polling Mr. Christie urged the donors not to focus on whom they thought could win — “Your track record shows that you don’t” know how to predict that, he said to laughter — but whom they thought would be the best president.“How about we try that one?” Mr. Christie said. More

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      Trump and Other GOP Candidates Use Israel-Gaza to Criticize Biden

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      Republicans renewed their opposition to President Biden’s decision to unfreeze $6 billion for humanitarian purposes as part of recent hostage release negotiations.Republican presidential candidates seized on the Hamas attack on Israel Saturday to try to lay blame on President Biden, drawing a connection between the surprise assault and a recent hostage release deal between the United States and Iran, a longtime backer of the group.Former President Donald J. Trump, who has frequently presented himself as a unflinching ally of Israel and who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2018, blamed Mr. Biden for the conflict.While campaigning on Saturday in Waterloo, Iowa, he said the attacks had occurred because “we are perceived as being weak and ineffective, with a really weak leader.”On several occasions, Mr. Trump went further, saying that the hostage deal was a catalyst of the attacks. “The war happened for two reasons,” he said. “The United States is giving — and gave to Iran — $6 billion over hostages.”In exchange for the release of five Americans held in Tehran, the Biden administration agreed in August to free up $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil revenue funds for humanitarian purposes. The administration has emphasized that the money could be used only for “food, medicine, medical equipment that would not have a dual military use.”A senior Biden administration official responded to the comments by Mr. Trump — as well as to criticism by other Republican candidates — by calling them “total lies” and accusing the politicians of having either a “complete misunderstanding” of the facts or of participating willingly in a “complete mischaracterization and disinformation of facts.”Another Biden administration official, Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said in a statement, “These funds have absolutely nothing to do with the horrific attacks today, and this is not the time to spread disinformation.”Mr. Trump, the G.O.P. front-runner, was not alone in assailing Mr. Biden, as the entire Republican field weighed in on the attacks on Saturday.In a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida faulted the Biden administration for its foreign policy decisions in the Middle East.“Iran has helped fund this war against Israel, and Joe Biden’s policies that have gone easy on Iran has helped to fill their coffers,” he said. “Israel is now paying the price for those policies.”In a statement issued through the White House, Mr. Biden pledged solidarity with Israel and said that he had spoken with Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister.“The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel,” Mr. Biden said.Yet while the G.O.P. candidates rallied around Israel on Saturday, there is a divide in the party between foreign policy hawks and those who favor a more isolationist approach.In addition to criticizing Mr. Biden on Saturday, former Vice President Mike Pence had harsh words for fellow Republicans who prefer a more hands-off approach to conflicts abroad.“This is what happens when @POTUS projects weakness on the world stage, kowtows to the mullahs in Iran with a $6 Billion ransom, and leaders in the Republican Party signal American retreat as Leader of the Free World,” Mr. Pence wrote on X. “Weakness arouses evil.”Other Republican candidates, including Nikki Haley, who was an ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump, and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina denounced the attacks as acts of terrorism.“Make no mistake: Hamas is a bloodthirsty terrorist organization backed by Iran and determined to kill as many innocent lives as possible,” Ms. Haley said in a statement.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey echoed the criticism of his Republican rivals in a social media post, calling the release of $6 billion by the Biden administration to Iran “idiotic.” Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Mr. Hutchinson similarly sought to connect the attack with the release of humanitarian funds for Iran.Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, called the attacks “barbaric and medieval” in a post on X.“Shooting civilians and kidnapping children are war crimes,” he wrote. “Israel’s right to exist & defend itself should never be doubted and Iran-backed Hamas & Hezbollah cannot be allowed to prevail.”Michael Gold More

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      Why Non-Trump Republicans Must Join Or Die. (They’ll Probably Still Die.)

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      I’m not sure that an assembly of presidential candidates has ever given off stronger loser vibes, if I may use a word favored by the 45th president of the United States, than the Republicans who debated at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this week.A snap 538/Washington Post/Ipsos poll and a CNN focus group showed Ron DeSantis as the night’s winner, and that seems right: After months of campaigning and two debates, DeSantis is still the only candidate not named Donald Trump who has a clear argument for why he should be president and a record that fits his party’s trajectory and mood.On the stage with his putative rivals, that makes him the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Against Trump, that’s probably going to be good for an extremely distant second place.The path that I (and others) once saw for the Florida governor, where he would run on his political success and voters would drift his way out of weariness with Trump’s destructive impact on Republican fortunes, has been closed off — by DeSantis’s own struggles, the rallying effect of Trump’s indictments and now Trump’s solid general-election poll numbers against Joe Biden. The path other pundits claimed to see for non-Trump candidates, where they were supposed to run directly against Trump and call him out as a threat to the Republic, was never a realistic one for anything but a protest candidate, as Chris Christie is demonstrating.So what remains for Trump’s rivals besides loserdom? Only this: They can refuse to simply replay 2016, refuse the pathetic distinction of claiming momentum from finishing third in early primaries and figure out a way to join their powers against Trump.This is not a path to likely victory. Trump is much stronger than eight years ago, when the crowded battle for second and third place in New Hampshire and South Carolina helped him build unstoppable momentum and the idea of a Ted Cruz-Marco Rubio unity ticket was pondered but never achieved. He’s also much stronger than Bernie Sanders four years ago, when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar traded the ego-inflating satisfactions of delegate accumulations for a place on Joe Biden’s bandwagon.But unity has been the road not taken for anti-Trump Republicans thus far, and it feels like the only scenario in which this race stays remotely interesting after the Iowa results.One problem, of course, is that unity still requires a standard-bearer — it would have been Cruz first and Rubio second in 2016, for instance, which is probably one reason Rubio didn’t make the deal — and DeSantis’s edge over his rivals isn’t wide enough for them to feel they need to defer to him.Another problem, central to Trump’s resilience, is that the different non-Trump voters want very different things. Some want DeSantis’s attempts to execute populist ambitions more effectively or the novel spin on Trumpism contained in Vivek Ramaswamy’s performance art. Others want the promise of a George W. Bush restoration offered by Nikki Haley and Tim Scott; others still want the Never Trump absolutism of Christie. Would Ramaswamy’s voters go for Scott and Haley? Doubtful. Would Scott’s or Christie’s voters accept DeSantis? Probably, but he hasn’t made the sale.Meanwhile, despite Trump’s claim that he won’t pick as his vice president anyone who has run against him, he’s been known to change his mind — and that reality influences the ambitions of Ramaswamy (who at least hopes for a Buttigieg-style cabinet spot), Scott (who seems he’s been running to be V.P. from the start) and even Haley. So, too, does the possibility that a conviction before the Republican convention somehow prevents his coronation, creating theoretical incentives for delegate accumulation, however remote the odds.All of these incentives are probably enough to prevent real consolidation. But if the non-Trump Republicans were serious enough about their larger cause, they would be planning now for the morning after Iowa. If Haley or (less plausibly) Scott comes in second and DeSantis falls to third, the Florida governor should drop out and endorse the winner. If DeSantis wins but Haley is leading in New Hampshire, then he should offer a place on his ticket, and she should accept. Christie should then obviously drop out pre-New Hampshire and endorse the Iowa winner as well. (Ramaswamy, I assume, would eventually endorse Trump.)Since this maneuvering could still just lead to Trump winning primaries by “only” 60-40 instead of 52-21-14-7-6, a final impediment to consolidation is just the fear of looking a little bit ridiculous — like Cruz and Carly Fiorina campaigning as supposed running mates in the waning moments of the 2016 primaries.And that, too, is also part of how Trump has always steamrollered his Republican opponents. They tend to hesitate, Prufrock-like, on the brink of boldness, while he rolls the dice without a single qualm or doubt.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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      Latino Republicans Call Debate a Missed Opportunity to Reach Voters

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

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      None of the Republicans on the Debate Stage Are Going to Topple Trump

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      Donald Trump won’t be defeated with sound bites. He won’t be bested with wordplay. Ron DeSantis carped repeatedly that Trump was “missing in action” at the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, while Chris Christie called Trump a coward and christened him “Donald Duck.” How very clever.And how totally futile. They were throwing darts at the absent front-runner when missiles are in order.Trump has a mammoth lead over all of them, and there’s no sign that it’s shrinking. He’s skating to the party’s presidential nomination. Along the way, he’s doing quadruple axels of madness, triple toe loops of provocation. He’s fantasizing about executing a respected general, and he’s fetishizing firearms, his words coming close to incitements of violence. He’s not sorry for the Jan. 6 riots. To my ears, he’d like more where that came from.But did any of the seven candidates onstage at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., talk about that? Nope. Mike Pence criticized Trump for wanting to consolidate too much power in Washington, D.C. DeSantis argued that Trump, if elected president again, could serve only one term, while DeSantis, a newcomer to the White House, could serve two.Christie, the bravest of a timid bunch, gave eloquent voice to how profoundly Trump had divided the country, pitting friend against friend and relative against relative, and while that’s sadly true, that’s also beside the point.The point is that Trump has zero respect for democracy and has aspirations for autocracy. The point is that he keeps scaling new pinnacles of unhinged. The point is that he needs to win the presidency so that he doesn’t have to worry about living out his days where he belongs: behind bars.And perhaps the only shot that any of those seven candidates have to stop him and prevent the irreversible damage he’d do to the United States with four more years is to call a tyrant a tyrant, a liar a liar, an arsonist an arsonist. None of them did.They’re too frightened of his and his followers’ wrath. So forgive me if I chortled every time they talked about leadership, which they talked about often on Wednesday night. They’re not leaders. They’re opportunists who are letting an opportunity slip away from them.The hopelessness of their quest for the presidency and their deepening awareness of that were reflected in all the shouting and cross-talk. Dear Lord, what a din — overlapping voices, operatic voices. It was like some misbegotten a cappella competition or the trailer for a movie I hope never to see: “Pitch Imperfect.” My ears will be ringing until the next Republican debate, scheduled for early November in Miami. Those poor Floridians. With DeSantis as their governor, haven’t they suffered enough?Instead of taking Trump sufficiently to task, instead of explaining in full why just about any one of them would be preferable to the madman of Mar-a-Loco, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott quarreled about drapes. Yes, drapes. He said she squandered $50,000 of federal money on them when she was the United Nations ambassador, she said she didn’t, and they both grew very exercised about it. Where was that passion on the subject of Trump?Instead of savaging him, the seven candidates tore into one another, seemingly vying not to catch up to Trump but to be declared the No. 1 alternative, like a beauty pageant runner-up poised to fulfill the winner’s duties and wear the winner’s tiara should the need arise.DeSantis was more aggressive than ever, a contender of faded promise making a last stand. He crammed in his entire biography: working-class upbringing, Ivy League but held his nose, volitional military service, father of three.Haley tussled with him, with Scott and especially with Vivek Ramaswamy, who was yet again the political equivalent of a jack-in-the-box, popping up every time you hoped that he’d finally been squished down. Haley called nonsense on his nonsense, telling him: “Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.” It wasn’t very kind, but it was wholly relatable.Ramaswamy tried humility on for size (“I’m here to tell you, no, I don’t know it all”), but it didn’t really fit. He’s too frenetic and too splenetic, and he had the wrong hair for it, a kind of cartoon pompadour that puzzled me.But not as much as Pence’s demeanor did. He kept trying for jokes in a voice that wasn’t remotely jokey, and he reached for conviction in a manner that lacked any trace of it. It’s not more support from voters that he most needs. It’s a transfusion.“You hear the fire in all of our voices,” he said at one point, but I couldn’t detect so much as a flickering Bic disposable lighter in his. I suspect that he won’t be in the hunt for much longer. Try hard not to miss him.From the others, there was plenty of heat, and there were even important exchanges that delineated significant fault lines in the Republican Party. DeSantis and Ramaswamy objected to the continued flow of enormous aid to Ukraine; Haley deemed that reckless. DeSantis defended his extreme efforts to restrict abortion; Christie advocated something a tad closer to moderation.But what will that matter if none of them chip away at Trump’s lead? There have now been two Republican presidential debates. Trump has proudly skipped and obnoxiously counterprogrammed both of them. And his punishment from his supposed rivals has been a dainty slap on the wrist.The moderators on Wednesday night were just as gentle on him, never posing a question as pointed as one during the first debate, when the candidates were asked whether they’d support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he became a felon.Instead, one of the moderators, Dana Perino, wondered which of the seven people onstage “should be voted off the island” to winnow the field of Trump alternatives. That was hugely revealing: She was suggesting that one of them had to go, when the candidate who needs exiling is the one who didn’t bother to take the stage.At least Christie recognized and remedied that, saying, “I vote Donald Trump off the island.” It was the right choice, rendered in the wrong words and wrong tone. This isn’t a reality show. It’s no episode of “Survivor.” It’s a matter of our country’s survival. But from the way seven candidates danced around the danger of Trump, you’d never know it.For the Love of SentencesLucinda WilliamsRahav Segev for The New York TimesIn a sublime reflection in The Bitter Southerner about what Lucinda Wiliams’s music means to him, Wyatt Williams (no relation) wrote: “The songs we hear as children end up being a lot like our fathers; we go on hearing them in our heads even when they’re not around.” (Thanks to Eileen Van Schaik of Shoreline, Wash., for flagging this.)In The New Yorker, Rachel Syme pondered the sartorial oddity of a leading fashion designer: “The Thom Browne look has often been compared to Pee-wee Herman’s archly nerdy costume or to Don Draper’s office wear after a few rounds through the dryer, but it calls to my mind, too, some mischievous scamp out of a Roald Dahl book who is always conspiring to put a dead hamster in the headmistress’s bed.” (Joanne Strongin, Port Washington, N.Y.)Also in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman distilled the conflict from which the plot of “The Iliad” proceeds: “And with that puerile quarrel between stubborn warlords over the right to own and to rape a girl, Western literature begins.” (Joyce Erickson, Seattle)And Anthony Lane reflected on the liberties that the director Kenneth Branagh and the screenwriter Michael Green took in adapting Agatha Christie’s “Hallowe’en Party,” set outside London, into the new movie “A Haunting in Venice,” set amid canals. “I’m already looking forward to their next reworking of Christie: ‘The Body in the Library,’ perhaps, relocated to the freezer aisle of a Walmart,” Lane wrote. (Abigail Smith, Downingtown, Pa.)In The Washington Post, Petula Dvorak characterized the brief window in which pawpaws are available and ripe enough to eat: “They are like some of D.C.’s other ephemeral delights — cherry blossoms or the optimism and innocence of freshman members of Congress.” (Joan Tindell, Tucson, Ariz.)In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce explained Attorney General Merrick Garland’s bind during his recent clash with Republicans at a House Judiciary Committee hearing: “Garland rope-a-doped as best he could, but there were too many dopes for him to rope.” (Peter Braverman, Bethesda, Md.)In Vanity Fair, Carl Hiaasen put Trump and DeSantis side by side: “Some claim Trump has a better sense of humor, but it was DeSantis who appointed a Jan. 6 rioter to the state board that oversees massage parlors.” (Sue Jares, Los Angeles)In The Times, Pamela Paul examined the embattled House speaker: “As Kevin McCarthy announced the impeachment inquiry, you could almost see his wispy soul sucked out Dementor-style, joining whatever ghostly remains of Paul Ryan’s abandoned integrity still wander the halls of Congress.” (Jeff Merkel, Fairbanks, Alaska, and Michael Berk, San Diego, among many others)Also in The Times, Bret Stephens previewed the Republican debate in Seussian style: “I expect Ramaswamy to irritate, DeSantis to infuriate, Christie to needle, Pence to remind me of a beetle, Scott to smile and Haley to win by a mile. But I doubt it will move the dial.” (Nancy Breeding, Raleigh, N.C., and Andrew Robinson, Syracuse, N.Y., among others) Bret also noted: “Politics used to be debating ideas. Now it’s about diagnosing psychosis.” (Pierre Mullie, Orléans, Ontario, and Margaret Velarde, Denver, among others)David French analyzed Trump’s recent shadings of his position on abortion, saying: “He is not convictionally pro-life. He is conveniently pro-life.” (Paul Dobbs, Relanges, France)And Tim Kreider, in a lovely essay about aging and vulnerability, inventoried the infirmities (“arthritic hips, ovarian cysts, herniated discs, breast cancer”) that set in as we move from middle to old age: “It’s as if we were all devices made by some big tech company, designed to start falling apart the instant the warranty expires and to be ingeniously difficult to repair, with zero support for older models.” (Mike Rogers, Wilmington, N.C., and Maureen Burke, Sausalito, Calif., among others)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.On a Personal NoteJohn TurturroCole Barash for The New York TimesOur lives are accidents of a sort. We have only so much control over them. We get no say in the genes that we inherit, and while they’re not the whole of our destinies, they’re big parts of them — seeds that are certain to flower, bombs that are sure to detonate. We’re born into circumstances that liberate or limit us. We’re the beneficiaries of good timing, or we’re the victims of the opposite.John Turturro knows that well. The actor, director and writer had a mentally ill brother, Ralph, who spent many of his 70 years at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens. John visited him there frequently, got to know the place well and shared those memories in a moving 2015 presentation for the storytelling forum the Moth that you can find here. It’s funny, it’s soulful, and it builds to a poignant metaphor whose elegance takes you by surprise.I had students in a class of mine at Duke watch it in advance of a recent Zoom visit from John, who’d agreed to talk with them about a book they were reading, “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?” by Susan Sheehan. It’s a classic of meticulous journalism, chronicling the odyssey of a woman with schizophrenia and her parents as they struggle, often in vain, to calm her turmoil — to bring nothing more and nothing less than a steady peace and baseline contentment to her days. For several years, John has been working to adapt it into a mini-series.He wants people to understand that mental illness doesn’t have the tidy arc that movies tend to give it. That it’s not a problem reliably solved by extra heaps of love. That it’s sometimes an endless road.And the patients and families traveling it? They could be us. They’re just like us: They’re pushing through hardships that, yes, may be more daunting than other people’s, but they’re pushing nonetheless, with merciful instances of levity and cherished moments of grace. Such instances and moments flicker throughout “Is There No Place on Earth for Me?,” and John’s Moth presentation brims with them.The book and the talk are lessons in the randomness of our lives. They’re also exhortations to meet it with whatever dignity and tenacity we can muster. More