Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Tap Dancing With Trump: Lindsey Graham’s Quest for Relevance

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      Lindsey Graham’s moment, it seemed, came on the evening of Jan. 6. With crews still cleaning up the blood and broken glass left by the mob that just hours before had stormed the Capitol, he took the Senate floor to declare, “Count me out” and “Enough is enough.”Half a year later, a relaxed Mr. Graham, sitting in his Senate office behind a desk strewn with balled napkins and empty Coke Zero bottles, says he did not mean what almost everybody else thought he meant.“That was taken as, ‘I’m out, count me out,’ that somehow, you know, that I’m done with the president,” he said. “No! What I was trying to say to my colleagues and to the country was, ‘This process has come to a conclusion.’ The president had access to the courts. He was able to make his case to state legislators through hearings. He was disappointed he fell short. It didn’t work out. It was over for me.”What was not over for the senator from South Carolina was his unlikely — to many people, confounding — relationship with that president, Donald J. Trump.For four years, Mr. Graham, a man who had once called Mr. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” exemplified the accommodations that so many Republicans made to the precedent-breaking president, only more vividly, volubly and candidly.But Mr. Graham’s reaffirmed devotion has come to represent something more remarkable: his party’s headlong march into the far reaches of Trumpism. That the senator is making regular Palm Beach pilgrimages as supplicant to an exiled former president who inspired the Capitol attack and continues to undermine democratic norms underscores how fully his party has departed from the traditional conservative ideologies of politicians like Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Mr. Graham’s close friend John McCain.To critics of Mr. Graham, and of Mr. Trump, that enabling comes at enormous cost. It can be seen, for example, in Republicans’ efforts to torpedo the investigations of the Capitol riot and in the way the party, with much of its base in thrall to Mr. Trump’s stolen-election lie, is enacting a wave of vote-suppressing legislation in battleground states.Mr. Graham, of course, describes his role in far less apocalyptic terms. Even as he proclaims — from under the hard gaze of a half-dozen photos of Mr. McCain — that the Republican Party is now “the Trump party,” even as he goes on Fox to declare that the party can’t “move forward” without the man who twice lost the popular vote, Mr. Graham casts himself as a singular force for moderation and sanity.Senator Lindsey Graham at a campaign rally last year with President Donald J. Trump.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe alone can fix the former president, he believes, and make him a unifying figure for Republicans to take back both houses of Congress next year and beyond. To that end, he says, he is determined to steer Mr. Trump away from a dangerous obsession with 2020.“What I say to him is, ‘Do you want January the 6th to be your political obituary?’” he said. “‘Because if you don’t get over it, it’s going to be.’”Many of Mr. Graham’s old friends on both sides of the aisle — and he still does not lack for them — grudgingly accepted as political exigency his original turn to Mr. Trump. His deviations from conservative orthodoxy, they understood, had left him precariously mistrusted back home. Now, though, they fear he has reached a point of no return.“Trump is terrible for the country, he’s terrible for the Republican Party and, as far as I’m concerned, he’s terrible for Lindsey,” said Mark Salter, a close McCain friend who was the ghostwriter for Mr. Graham’s autobiography.“Lindsey is playing high-risk politics,” said Senator Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat from Illinois who considers Mr. Graham a friend. “He is pinning the hopes of the Republican Party on a very unstable person.”What makes Lindsey run?Over the last four years, pundits and political analysts have endlessly teased the question. Yet what emerges from interviews with more than 60 people close to him, and with the senator himself, is a narrative less of transformation than of gyration — of an infinitely adaptable operator seeking validation in the proximity to power. It is that yearning for relevance, rooted in what he and others described as a childhood of privation and loss, that makes Mr. Graham’s story more than just a case study of political survival in the age of Trump.Raised just this side of poverty and left parentless early, Mr. Graham, 66, has from his school days chosen to ally himself with protective figures he calls “alpha dogs,” men more powerful than himself — disparate, even antagonistic, figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. McCain, the onetime prisoner of war so famously disparaged by Mr. Trump. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Mr. McCain privately remarked that his friend was drawn to the president for the affirmation.“To be part of a football team, you don’t have to be the quarterback, right?” Mr. Graham said in the interview. “I mean, there’s a value in being part of something.”It was in that role, amid unrelenting pressure from Mr. Trump and his sons, that Mr. Graham called Georgia’s top elections official in November to inquire about the vote tally in the state, which Mr. Trump lost by nearly 12,000. That call is now part of a criminal investigation of the Trump camp’s actions in Georgia.Yet nothing Mr. Graham does or says seems enough to satisfy the Trumps. That has left the self-described conciliator struggling to generate good will on both sides of the political divide.In mid-November, as he was publicly urging Mr. Trump to keep up the election fight, Mr. Graham made a previously unreported phone call to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., to revive a friendship damaged by his call for a special prosecutor to investigate the overseas business dealings of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter.It was short, and not especially sweet, according to three people with direct knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Graham told Mr. Biden that, in attacking Hunter, he had done only the bare minimum to satisfy Trump supporters back home. (A Graham spokesman disputed that account.)Mr. Biden, who viewed Mr. Graham’s statement as an unforgivable attack on his family responded by saying he would work with any Republican, but dismissed the approach as Mr. Graham trying to have it both ways, two people close to the president said.“Lindsey’s been a personal disappointment,” Mr. Biden said a few days later, “because I was a personal friend of his.”From Humble BeginningsIt is a truism of political biography that golf affords a window into both style and soul. And it has certainly played an important role in sustaining the precarious but durable Trump-Graham partnership. (That bond was on display in May, when the two men staged a Trump Graham Golf Classic fund-raiser, with an entry fee of $25,000.)Still, the senator’s frequent impromptu trips to Mar-a-Lago remain a bit of a puzzlement to the former president.“Jesus, Lindsey must really, really like to play golf,” Mr. Trump recently told an aide.The game — and the status conferred by playing with Mr. Trump — is no small thing to a man who grew up on the creaky lower rungs of the middle class, living in the back room of his family’s beer-and-shot pool hall, the Sanitary Cafe, in Central, S.C., a mill town at the midpoint of the freight line between Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C.His parents, Millie and F.J. Graham — known to everyone in town as Dude — worked 14-hour days and slept in the cramped apartment next to the bar’s two bathrooms, their kitchen separated by a curtain from the smoky tavern, with its jukebox, pinball machines and peeling laminate-wood counter. The future senator shared a single room with his parents, his sister, Darline, and the occasional patron, often coated in mill dust, who would wander in tipsily to watch TV with the family.A young Mr. Graham with his mother, Millie, in 1958.via Lindsey GrahamThe future senator being held by his father, F.J., several years earlier.via Lindsey GrahamMr. Graham was very close to both parents, and he finds it hard to discuss their loss without choking up. But his mother was the warmer presence; her husband was a wry but undemonstrative World War II veteran devoted to his family but preoccupied with keeping the business afloat and prone, in Mr. Graham’s early years, to drinking.“He had a tough side to him. He kept a gun behind the counter,” the senator’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, recalled in a recent interview, adding, “You knew that Mr. Dude was a kind, good man, but you weren’t going to mess with him.”It fell largely to Mr. Graham, 9 years older, to be parent to his sister. From his early teens, she recalled, it was Lindsey who helped her with her homework, Lindsey who gave her medicine when she was sick. Not too many years later, it would be Lindsey who told her that their mother was dying. “Lindsey took me to the end of the hall” at the hospital, she said. “He told me he didn’t know if she was going to make it.”The Grahams did not have the money or the time for real vacations, so to bond with his father, Lindsey decided they should take up golf. They began playing at a chewed-up county course, and it became such a weekly ritual that, to save on rental fees, Dude Graham eventually bought an old electric cart that could be charged, free, at the course’s cart shed.Mr. Graham with his sister, Darline, and his parents.via Lindsey GrahamShortly after Mr. Graham began attending the University of South Carolina, his mother was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. On weekends, he would ride a bus home to look after his sister. “It was just dark and lonely without him there,” she said.Fifteen months after their mother died, Ms. Nordone, still in middle school, woke up to discover Dude Graham dead, from a heart attack.“Don’t worry,” her brother told her, “I’ll always take care of you,” which he did as he ground his way through law school.Had this childhood led Mr. Graham to seek out father figures in his adult life? “That’s a tough question,” she replied. “I just don’t know.”Either way, his quicksilver mind and self-lacerating sense of humor made him a magnet for mentors and big brothers. Two of the earliest were his high school coach, Alpheus Lee Curtis, and Colonel Pete Sercer, the head of Air Force R.O.T.C. at the University of South Carolina, who guided him toward his first career, as a military lawyer, serving largely in Europe.Another mentor was Larry Brandt, his law partner when he returned to South Carolina. In an interview, Mr. Brandt recalled that Mr. Graham’s career in politics began when he was approached by both the local Republican and Democratic parties in 1992 to run for a state House seat held by an unpopular Democrat.“Lindsey came to me and said, ‘What do you think?’” said Mr. Brandt, a lifelong Democrat. “Lindsey and I talked a lot over time about issues, and there’s no doubt Lindsey was a Democrat on all social issues.”Ultimately, he said, Mr. Graham’s decision came down to calculation more than deep partisan feeling: The Democratic primary would be competitive; if he ran as a Republican, he would be able to devote himself to the general election.He won, and within a few years was elected to Congress, which in 1999 led to a career-making performance as a House manager in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Mr. McCain was so impressed with the barbed, folksy one-liners that he invited Mr. Graham back to his Senate office, where he declared himself a fan — and, oh, would Mr. Graham endorse him for president in 2000?Mr. Graham was House manager in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999.Douglas Graham/Congressional Quarterly, via Getty Images“I said, ‘Yeah,’” recalled Mr. Graham, who remembers thinking, in the moment, how far he had come from the Sanitary Cafe. “No one’s ever asked me to help them run for president. If Bush had asked me before him, I’d have probably said yes.”After Mr. Graham’s election to the Senate in 2002, the two became inseparable, communicating by flip-phone, often several times an hour, with Mr. Graham serving as sounding board, soother and tactical adviser. Their influence peaked as they supported the Iraq war before joining forces to question the Bush administration’s strategy and interrogation methods. They shared a vision for the Republican Party — inclusive, center-right, hawkish on foreign policy, more moderate on immigration and other domestic issues.But that ideal had long been fading when Mr. Graham joined Mr. McCain at his ranch in Sedona, Ariz., on election night 2016. Mr. Graham still believed Hillary Clinton would win in a romp, yet there he was, incredulously watching the returns come in for Mr. Trump, uttering profanities over and over and over.“I was in shock for a week,” Mr. Graham recalled. It did not take him long to make a decision. “Am I going to be fighting a rear-guard action here? Or am I going to try to work with him?”‘An Abiding Need to Be in the Room’Mr. McCain, whose own presidential aspirations ended after his loss to Barack Obama in 2008, had urged Mr. Graham to run in 2016. But he warned his friend against engaging in a one-on-one verbal brawl with Mr. Trump. Mr. Graham did not listen.“I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. I don’t know who you are and why you like this guy,” Mr. Graham said on CNN in late 2015, before quitting the race. “Here’s what you’re buying: He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot. He doesn’t represent my party.”Yet scarcely two months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, a grinning Mr. Graham could be found in the office of the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, chatting with Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s top advisers.The senator had been orchestrating his West Wing appearance, steadily softening his criticism of Mr. Trump on Fox, and working some of the network’s pro-Trump hosts, with the knowledge that the president would be watching. He had also had dinner with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.Mr. Graham’s presence bewildered some Trump aides, but not people who knew him. “He has an abiding need to be in the room, no matter what the cost,” said Hollis Felkel, a veteran South Carolina Republican political consultant.Mr. Graham said he was there to sell the president on a more hawkish foreign policy at a time when Mr. Trump was vowing quick withdrawals from Afghanistan. He was surprised, he said, how friendly the president was. Indeed, to hear Mr. Graham talk about his interactions with Mr. Trump is to be struck by how much he seems to relish them.“He came in and he was very gracious, like he’s trying to sell me a condo, showed me around,” Mr. Graham recalled.Mr. Graham said he reciprocated by praising his host’s political skills and pledging to support him when he could, especially on judicial nominations. He soon followed up with a flurry of phone conversations on politics, gossip and golf.That led to the prize Mr. Graham wanted from the start: an invitation to Mr. Trump’s club in Virginia.“Where it all changed is when we went for golf,” Mr. Graham said.Senator and president playing golf last summer at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Trump had his own motivations for making nice. He was an interloper who craved legitimacy, and found the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, unapproachable and humorless. Mr. Graham, according to Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist at the time, wasn’t a “stiff,” like so many others in Congress.“The senator closest to Trump was Lindsey Graham, and it’s not even a question,” Mr. Bannon said. “Have you met Lindsey Graham? I like him, and I think he’s the worst.”Like Mr. McCain, Mr. Trump was drawn to Mr. Graham’s ambidextrous, pragmatic politics — and his strategic amiability.“People apparently found the combination of my slight stature and gabby nature comical,” Mr. Graham wrote in his 2015 memoir, referring to a coping strategy learned in childhood. “I was expected to entertain folks. And I knew the more audacious I was the more entertaining I would be.”Mr. Trump also told his staff that he preferred the company of people he had turned — former enemies who had come to see that he was actually a good guy they could respect.Mr. McCain was decidedly not turned. While he understood the need to make peace with the party’s leader, he told Mr. Graham flatly that the president “is not one of us.”He kept his temper in check until Mr. Graham started raving about how “such a big, older guy” could put up an 18-hole score that nearly matched his age, according to a mutual friend.“My ass he shot a 70!” Mr. McCain yelled.“John was just surprised and to certain extent disappointed, but not really angry, with the closeness of the Lindsey Graham relationship with Trump,” said Joseph Lieberman, a former Democratic senator from Connecticut who was close to both lawmakers.When Mr. McCain’s aggressive brain tumor was diagnosed in the summer of 2017, Mr. Graham compartmentalized, comforting his friend and courting Mr. Trump.The president enlisted Mr. Graham and another McCain ally, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, to win over Mr. McCain on a key campaign promise, repealing Obamacare, and Mr. Graham eagerly agreed. Both assured White House officials they had persuaded Mr. McCain to vote “yes,” according to former West Wing aides involved in the talks.They had not. On July 28, a dying Mr. McCain returned to Washington to deliver his defiant thumbs-down, and it seemed, for a moment, that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party was not as tight as he claimed.There would be one more act. The McCain family had insisted that the president and his entourage would not be welcome at the senator’s state funeral, but Ivanka Trump, who had collaborated with Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, on the issue of human trafficking, insisted on attending. It was Mr. Graham who persuaded Ms. McCain to reluctantly extend an invitation to Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner.Afterward, Mr. McCain’s daughter Meghan angrily told the late-night host Stephen Colbert, “My father had been very clear about the line between the McCains and the Trumps.”Mr. Graham paid his respects after the death in 2018 of Senator John McCain, a longtime friend.Erin Schaff for The New York TimesBy this time, Trump aides were noticing a curious dynamic: It wasn’t just that the president absolved Mr. Graham for the Obamacare debacle; the senator was one of the few people who could get away with taking on Mr. Trump and his temper.The most common source of flare-ups was Afghanistan. During one golf outing, the two men got into a screaming match after Mr. Graham said he would rather deal with a bomb killing civilians in Kabul “than in Times Square.”Mr. Trump barked an expletive, shouted, “You guys have been wrong for 20 years,” and stomped off, according to a person who witnessed the exchange.A few minutes later, they were chatting amiably as if nothing had happened, the person said.Some of the president’s top advisers were growing annoyed by Mr. Graham’s pesky omnipresence — finagling flights on Air Force One, showing up at the West Wing on little notice. “Sometimes he’d just like to sit with the president in the dining room off the Oval at the end of the day,” a former senior White House official said.In early 2019, as the Trumps were sitting down to dinner, Mr. Graham phoned up the president’s assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, to say he was coming up to the White House residence with Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, to discuss a plan to address one of the many crises plaguing the administration.Mr. Trump obliged, Melania Trump felt put upon and nothing came of it, aides familiar with the episode said.‘I’m the Senator From South Carolina’Mr. McCain’s death in August 2018 had been a profound loss for Mr. Graham, and during the interview in his office, he nearly broke down describing the hours he spent at his friend’s hospital bedside, holding his hand, during those final days in Arizona.Yet he also acknowledged that the dissolution of the partnership had freed him to look after his own political interests, which entailed cozying up to the right-wing populists who increasingly dominated his party in South Carolina.“I jokingly refer to Senator Graham as Senator Graham 1.0 and the Senator Graham 2.0 who came along during the Trump years, the 2.0 being the preferred upgrade,” said Nate Leupp, chairman of the Greenville County Republicans and one of several party leaders in South Carolina who said they had long been wary of the senator’s “maverick alliances.”Mr. Graham’s 2016 presidential primary bid — a bit of a lark, intended to vault him to the national stage as a solo act — had been a humiliating reminder of how vulnerable he was at home: When he dropped out in December 2015, he was polling in single digits in South Carolina.His McCain-esque positions on immigration and trade, he admits, were part of the problem. “I adore John McCain. Yeah, he’s done more to mentor me and help me than any single person in politics,” Mr. Graham said. “But having said that, I’m the senator from South Carolina.”Perhaps the most sensitive issue for Mr. Graham was his bipartisan record on judicial appointments.Mr. Graham had long argued that presidents deserved to have their judicial nominees confirmed, and in 2010, he voted for Mr. Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan. It came at a cost: Anti-abortion protesters in South Carolina hanged him in effigy, and when he ran for re-election in 2014, six primary opponents popped up, each hammering him for being too liberal on the courts.Mr. Graham has played down the episode, but it clearly scarred him.“I have triplets, and I would probably do anything, including breaking the law, to protect them. He’s got a Senate seat,” Mick Mulvaney, the former acting White House chief of staff, said of Mr. Graham on a recent podcast.So when a second Supreme Court vacancy opened up in early 2016, Mr. Graham signed on to Mr. McConnell’s refusal to allow a Senate vote on the nomination of Merrick Garland, on the grounds that it came too close to the November election.And several people described a similar determination to prove his conservative bona fides in what was probably Mr. Graham’s most memorable public performance in the service of Mr. Trump: his outraged defense of Brett M. Kavanaugh, whom he had known for a decade, against sexual misconduct allegations during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings in September 2018.“You’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics!” Mr. Graham said.Yet if Mr. Graham’s performance won him kudos from skeptics back home, it did not translate into safety ahead of his re-election campaign. The election became a referendum, of sorts, on Mr. Graham’s shotgun conversion to Trumpism.In mid-2019, his eventual Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, began raising tens of millions of dollars from donors nationwide. And after a mid-September 2020 poll showed the candidates in a dead heat, Mr. Harrison raised $1 million in 24 hours, part of a $57 million quarter, the richest for any Senate candidate in history.“I’m getting overwhelmed,” Mr. Graham lamented to Sean Hannity on Fox. “LindseyGraham.com. Help me.”The senator campaigned for re-election last year. He won by 10 points.Gavin McIntyre for The New York TimesBehind the scenes, Mr. McConnell tapped his national fund-raising network, channeling $10 million to Mr. Graham’s cause, and two Ohio-based dark-money groups chipped in $4.4 million.As for Mr. Trump, he made one appearance with Mr. Graham in South Carolina and cut one campaign ad. But he did let Mr. Graham raise money off his brand, and, in the end, the senator raked in about $111 million, almost nine times what he had raised in 2014 and nearly as much as Mr. Harrison.Mr. Graham won by 10 points.After the ElectionEven with a renewed six-year lease on public life, Mr. Graham hasn’t stopped tap dancing.In the days following the election, he scrambled to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side, publicly urging him not to concede until he had exhausted all his legal challenges and listening calmly on late-night phone calls as the president raged about a stolen election. He even wrote a $500,000 check to aid Mr. Trump’s legal defense.But privately he was already reaching out to Mr. Biden and counseling Mr. Trump to ramp down his rhetoric. And he steadfastly refused to appear at news conferences with Mr. Trump’s legal team or repeat their false claims — which annoyed the president and infuriated his son Donald Jr., always a Graham skeptic, retweeting stories with a “#whereslindsey” hashtag when he felt the senator was not standing up for his father.The biggest source of residual anger inside the Trump bubble was Mr. Graham’s refusal, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to acquiesce to White House demands for hearings into Hunter Biden’s business dealings.Mr. Graham said all the right things on Fox, and hinted he would get to the bottom of the matter. But his staff advised him that it was impossible to tell reality from disinformation, so he delayed and deliberated, happily deferring to the homeland security committee.He had a better relationship with the president’s middle son, Eric, yet he, too, was growing frustrated that the senator would not even retweet claims of election fraud. At a family meeting, he fumed that Mr. Graham had always been “weak” and would pay a price because his father would be the most powerful Republican for years to come, according to a political aide who was within earshot. Mr. Trump was working the senator, too, according to people familiar with the exchanges.Mr. Graham said that what happened next had nothing to do with the pressure bearing down on him. But on Nov. 13, he called Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, the first of a series of interventions Mr. Trump and his allies were to make into the tallying of the results in Georgia.Mr. Raffensperger has said that Mr. Graham asked if there was a legal way, using the state courts, to toss out all mail-in votes from counties with high rates of questionable signatures. And a Raffensperger aide who was on the call said in an interview that Mr. Graham’s goal was getting as many ballots thrown out as possible.Even so, he made no overt request to discard ballots, according to another Raffensperger aide, Gabriel Sterling. As such, prosecutors investigating the Trump camp’s actions in Georgia would probably have difficulty establishing any wrongdoing by Mr. Graham.In the interview, Mr. Graham laughed off the idea that he had done anything wrong, saying he had called “Ratzenberger” simply to ask about auditing signatures.Around the same time, he made another call, to Governor Ducey in Arizona. His aim, Mr. Graham said, was not to overturn Mr. Biden’s narrow victory but to counter the “garbage” Mr. Trump was getting from his own legal team, according to an aide who was given a readout.In Mr. Graham’s mind, he had threaded the needle: He had professed loyalty and value to Mr. Trump while taking an unequivocal public stand, as Mr. Biden’s inauguration approached, opposing efforts to block certification of the election.Then came Jan. 6, and his presumed declaration of independence.Mr. Graham, in fact, began softening his tone almost immediately, following a tongue-lashing from the president and a confrontation, two days after the Capitol assault, with dozens of Trump supporters at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, chanting: “Traitor! Traitor!”Mr. Graham was escorted by security through a Washington airport in January while Trump supporters called him a traitor.Oreo Express/Via ReutersBy Jan. 13, when Mr. Trump was impeached on charges of inciting the riot, Mr. Graham was back on board, offering advice on how to quell a possible revolt by Republican senators. What followed, in the eyes of many Senate colleagues, was a frenzied overcorrection.Mr. Graham has become an ever-more-frequent face on Fox, denying the existence of systemic racism and decrying federal aid to Black farmers as “reparations.” He posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 bought as protection from marauding “gangs” and forcefully backed Ms. Cheney’s expulsion from House leadership. He has embraced the culture-war grandstanding that he and Mr. McCain mocked when they were a team — recently saying he would “go to war” against students at the University of Notre Dame for trying to block a Chick-fil-A on campus over the anti-L.G.B.T.-rights politics of its executives.Yet there are signs Mr. Graham may be playing an inside-outside game. He has placed himself at the center of a monthslong effort to draft bipartisan police-reform legislation and recently met with the Rev. Al Sharpton to hear him out on the bill. And when he tested positive for Covid-19 after being inoculated, he made a point of telling vaccine deniers in his own party to get their shots.During his near-weekly golfing trips to Mar-a-Lago, he said, he is still trying to persuade Mr. Trump to “take it down a notch.” He remains convinced he can get him to play by the rules, and not the other way around.Many of the people who have known him longest are not so sure.From his office in Walhalla, just up the road from Central, Mr. Graham’s old law partner, Mr. Brandt, has been thinking about something the senator told him during a visit eight or nine years ago.“Larry, you are too honest to survive in Washington,” Mr. Graham said. “Eighty-five percent of the people there would sell their mothers to keep their jobs.”Mr. Brandt ran into Mr. Graham at a local restaurant in 2017, as the senator was beginning to court Mr. Trump. Mr. Brandt took him to task, reminding him of their “85 percent” conversation. “I said, ‘Lindsey, don’t sell your mother,’” he recalled.Two years later, Mr. Graham called to say he was coming back to town, and could they have dinner? Mr. Brandt said he was eager to see him — and to give him an earful about his friendship with the president. Mr. Graham said sure, and promised to ring back.“I’m still waiting on that call,” Mr. Brandt said. More

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      Biden, Congress and the Eroding Separation of Powers

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      A curious constitutional drama unfolded in the nation’s capital last week. Having failed to pass a moratorium on evictions, members of Congress took to the steps of the U.S. Capitol to demand that President Biden impose one.For his part, Mr. Biden strode into the White House briefing room and suggested that the prerogative to make policy on the issue lay with Congress.Soon enough, though, Mr. Biden relented, and Democrats celebrated. As policy, it was a progressive victory. Constitutionally, it was both troubling and bizarre.The issue was not simply whether the moratorium was constitutional, though the federal courts have questioned the statutory authority the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed. The underlying constitutional derangement pertained to the way members of Congress and the president were eager to endorse each other’s authority without exercising their own.Democrats might protest that they had no choice but to turn to the White House because Republicans would not support a legislative moratorium. That may be, but the framers would have expected the defense of legislative power to take precedence over a policy dispute.The framers assumed that each branch of government would maintain the separation of powers by jealously guarding its authority from encroachments by the others. The evictions episode was less tug of war than hot potato: Congress wanted the president to use executive authority, and the president wanted the legislature to legislate.Democrats are not the only ones refusing to defend legislative authority. Republicans denigrating the House investigation into the insurrection of Jan. 6 — a physical assault on one branch of government incited by another — are unwilling even to defend the institution bodily.The acid test of separation of powers is whether members of Congress are willing to assert their authority against a president of their own party. Democrats failed that on evictions, just as Republicans did by handing off authority to Donald Trump. Given this bipartisan consensus for presidential authority, it may be time to acknowledge reality: The concept of the separation of powers — which depends on members of Congress unifying to protect legislative power — has collapsed in the United States. We have become a de facto parliamentary system in which competing parties battle for executive power. The problem is that we have acquired all the vices of such a system but none of its virtues.A parliamentary system typically has the effects of discouraging demagogues and ensuring competence, by seasoning leaders on the journey from the backbenches to the ones at the front. By contrast, three presidents who served before Joe Biden — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Mr. Trump — arrived in the White House as either newcomers or latecomers to national office. Parliamentary systems also feature vigorous debates with real consequences. Governments rise and fall on the basis of their legislative agendas. Debates in Congress are largely stagecraft, with actual governing being relegated to a vast executive branch empowered to turn vague laws into detailed policy.The primary vice of parliamentary systems is their incompatibility with the separation of powers. James Madison felt this separation was so important that the lack of it was “the very definition of tyranny,” even if concentrated powers were exercised benignly. Montesquieu warned that when executive and legislative power are mixed, “there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.”The separation of powers should not be romanticized. The only president to rise fully above party was the first one, and George Washington took office before parties solidified. But even after that, the fact that presidents and members of Congress were elected by different means, with different institutional loyalties, still enabled them to curb each other’s abuses.There are almost no curbs now. One might say elections control presidents, but Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 presidential contest, which culminated in Jan. 6, showed that check is fragile. In addition, a single official who can marshal the direct power of his or supporters may be particularly dangerous, as Mr. Trump’s incitement leading up to and on Jan. 6 also demonstrated.These are palpable risks today. Between elections, presidents essentially run American government. Republicans and Democrats in Congress play the auxiliary part of either supporting or opposing whoever occupies the White House. Congress generally cedes the initiative on legislation to the executive branch, reserving for itself the role of merely reacting to the president.This obsession with the presidency also crowds out other advantages the separation of powers should provide. Legislators are chosen geographically in the United States, which ought to mean they reflect not only local interests but also the nuances of diverse views about national politics. Instead, many elections at all levels are proxies for national issues that are increasingly seen as civilizational battles. When Americans vote for members of Congress today, they are largely voting for parties that increasingly operate in lock step. In 2020, 16 out of 435 congressional districts voted for different parties for the White House and House of Representatives. That is less than 4 percent of congressional districts, down from as much as 40 percent in the 1970s and 1980s.Also lost in the collapse of geographic representation is Madison’s definition of the representative’s role: to “refine and enlarge the public views.” That presumes both acquaintance with those views and the judgment required to align them with the public’s true interest.Legislative debates now rotate around the president, often because the presidency is seen as an instrument for defending or capturing a legislative majority. That is characteristic of a parliamentary system. But because one is either for or against the president, a system that orbits the White House strips legislators of their ability to exercise independent judgment from issue to issue.If legislative issues are simply symbols of presidential fortunes, we should expect partisan gridlock: Alliances will solidify around the presidency or the majority rather than shifting from issue to issue. Democrats and Republicans may be able to push a president slightly in one direction or another, or block him or her altogether, but the presidency remains the center of attention. The bipartisan infrastructure deal, for example, originated in negotiations not between members of Congress but between them and the White House.Finally, by empowering all three branches of government to check one another, the separation of powers forces the nation to look at issues from different angles: the immediate and parochial perspectives of representatives, the national view of presidents and the constitutional outlook of the courts.The problems with abandoning the separation of powers may be difficult to see if one supports the current president, but it should not take much imagination to contemplate why you wouldn’t like having the bulk of national powers being exercised by a president with whom you disagree. Presidents now sit atop vast administrative apparatuses. They could easily abuse this power, such as by rewarding friends and punishing adversaries. The point for Montesquieu and Madison was not whether they actually did, but whether they could. And the ability to abuse power often leads to the abuse itself.The deliberate adoption of a parliamentary system would still entail these risks. But it might at least have conferred some of that system’s benefits. As it stands — with Congress unwilling to unite against even a physical assault incited by the president — we have maintained the empty shell of the separation of powers around the core of a partisan system. The result is a system capable of abusing citizens but not governing them. It would be difficult to conjure a worse combination.Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy.”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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      Jan. 6: A Failed Coup Plot but, Yes, a Coup Plot

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      More from our inbox:What Trump WroughtBard College, Banned by RussiaThe Truth About CondosLooking at Pictures at the Library  Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs, via alexandr6868, OLIVIER DOULIERY/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “What if There Wasn’t a Coup Plot?,” by Christopher Caldwell (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Aug. 1):I think Mr. Caldwell and I must have very different definitions of the word “coup.” He argues that the “day’s events are ambiguous.”Let us review them: President Donald Trump, having lost a legitimate election, gathers a crowd of supporters, then he and his closest allies harangue them with stories about how he really won the election. The crowd is encouraged to assault the Capitol in order to disrupt the certification of the election — they must “stop the steal.”As a result, an angry mob descends upon the Capitol, overwhelms the police and breaks into the building, seeking to harm elected representatives while Mr. Trump cheerfully watches the unfolding events on TV.If that’s not a coup, please tell me what it is. Does Mr. Caldwell believe that, had his mob been successful, had the certification process been perverted under the threat of violence, Mr. Trump would not have eagerly grasped the opportunity to stay in office?The events of Jan. 6 were not just a “political protest that got out of control,” but a deliberate attempt to undermine a peaceful and legitimate transfer of power. That Mr. Trump’s coup failed is not evidence of the absence of a plot, but testimony to the incompetence that characterized the former president’s entire term in office — incompetence for which we must be, in this one instance, profoundly grateful.Stephen McLaughlinRichmond, Calif.To the Editor:Christopher Caldwell could not be more wrong in describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as “something familiar: a political protest that got out of control.” A “political protest” is when people gather to shout slogans, wave signs, listen to speeches and otherwise voice their opinions.In contrast, many of those who invaded the Capitol after listening to Donald Trump were armed with weapons such as stun guns and bear spray. As Mr. Caldwell himself acknowledges, they called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence. In short, they were prepared not for protest, but for violently assaulting, and possibly murdering, elected officials and the people protecting them.Mr. Caldwell writes that “the stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk.” If so, it was far closer to being at risk than I’ve witnessed in my lifetime — or ever hope to again.Jeffrey BendixCleveland Heights, OhioTo the Editor:Christopher Caldwell asserts that “without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential.” He goes on to suggest that Democrats, including members of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, deliberately sought to provide an advantage to Democratic candidates by expanding access to absentee voting.Contrary to Mr. Caldwell’s assertions, there is no evidence that expanded absentee voting benefited Democratic candidates in the 2020 election. These findings are consistent with those of earlier studies that found no effect of absentee voting rules on partisan outcomes.Alan AbramowitzAtlantaThe writer is a professor of political science at Emory University.To the Editor:I stopped reading this article when I came to this sentence: “The most dramatic and disruptive episode of Mr. Trump’s resistance to the election was Jan. 6, and that day’s events are ambiguous.”Mr. Caldwell’s opinion on anything is in question if he thinks the events of Jan. 6 are “ambiguous.”Ann Marie JoyceBraintree, Mass.What Trump Wrought Al Drago/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re ​ “Biden’s​ Climate Plans Hobbled After an Exodus Under Trump​” ​(​front page​, Aug. 2):After the terrible destruction wrought by the Trump presidency, we are all finding that it’s easy to tear down but hard to rebuild. Sadly, many Americans mistrust our government to such an extent that they enthusiastically support ​Donald ​Trump’s celebration of the worst and his corresponding suppression of the best.This is most noticeable in the loss of American prestige abroad, but ​Mr. ​Trump’s influence was such that it permeates every aspect of our government. It will take years to rebuild what ​he​ was able smash in a single term.Let’s hope that ​Mr. ​Trump never makes it back to the White House. If he does, he will quickly undo all the rebuilding done by the current administration​ ​and continue his destruction of the American government. ​ It will be a destruction of such a scale and degree that future administrations and future generations will be hard pressed to reverse it.Tim ShawCambridge​, M​ass.Bard College, Banned by RussiaBard had embraced its Russian connection, hosting Russian students at its campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Richard Beaven for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“In Banning Bard College, Russia Sends a Message” (news article, Aug. 6) understates the problem posed by Russia’s designation of Bard College as an “undesirable” organization. Even for Bard College itself, the designation affects much more than its existing and planned programs in Russia.The law, aimed at all foreign NGOs, has real teeth and it imposes criminal and administrative penalties, including substantial fines and serious prison time, for being a member of or a financial contributor to an undesirable organization.That now includes all of Bard College faculty members who may wish to visit Russia for any reason, such as scientific collaboration with their Russian colleagues (who would also be placed in legal jeopardy), as well as Bard College alumni contributing to Bard and other Bard donors.In July 2022 Russia will host the International Congress of Mathematicians in St. Petersburg. It remains to be seen how this new designation of Bard College will affect that meeting.Ilya KapovichNew YorkThe Truth About CondosThe remaining condos at Champlain Towers South being demolished with a controlled explosion in Surfside, Fla., on July 4.Giorgio Viera/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “I Know All About Condo Living. Let’s Fix It​.​” (Opinion guest essay, July 31​)​:As a former member of a condominium board in a small New England city, I appreciated reading David B. Habe​r​’s blunt piece about the perils of condominiums.It is true that some residents refuse to support needed capital repair projects because the related costs hit them directly in the purse. Evidently, they believe ​that ​condos relieve them of the responsibility to, figuratively speaking, maintain the roof over their head.Real estate agents who boast of a condo’s “low fees” are a serious part of the problem. They have created the impression that low fees represent prudent financial management. Nothing could be further from the truth.If real estate agents helped potential condominium buyers investigate deeper into a building’s long​-​term maintenance plans, and the appropriate budgets to realize those plans, we’d have far fewer crises.Charles T​.​ ClarkStonington, C​onn.Looking at Pictures at the LibraryA librarian at the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library examines the “Rear Views” file.Gus Powell for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Treasures in the Stacks” (Arts pages, Aug. 4):I was deeply concerned to read about the New York Public Library’s plan to remove the invaluable Picture Collection from circulation.As a media historian who has been studying the collection for years, and as a professor who uses the collection as a teaching tool for visual culture classes, I have frequently quoted the longtime head of the Picture Collection, Romana Javitz, in my work, and her words are as true today as in 1936:“There is so exhilarating a continuity in the usefulness of this type of library service that both the organization of the material and its development is never static. It keeps both staff and public alert and arouses a lively stream of cooperative reports from the public from whom we receive an amazing percentage of constructive and understanding suggestion, always in the spirit of keeping the collection one of live preservation and availability.”I know of no other collection that treats pictures in this way. Rather than any individual picture, what is crucial to preserve is the model it represents of a picture collection as an alive and available physical site.Diana KaminMaplewood, N.J. More

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      Biden’s Honeymoon Is Over, and He Knows It

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      The first seven months of the Biden presidency have been easy compared with what’s coming down the pike.Key provisions of Covid relief legislation came to an end on Aug. 1, with more set to follow — including a cessation of moratoriums on evictions and mortgage foreclosures, termination of extended unemployment benefits (which carried $300-a-week supplemental payments) and a stop to enhanced food stamp subsidies and student loan forbearance.The prospect of millions of families forced from their homes as Covid variants infect growing numbers of people provoked frenzied attempts by the White House and congressional Democrats to take emergency steps to halt or ameliorate the potential chaos and a possible tragedy of national proportions.On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered a 60-day freeze on evictions — although the order faces possible rejection by the courts.“Any call for a moratorium, based on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, is likely to face obstacles,” Biden told reporters, adding that the “bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”In a June report, the Census Bureau found that 1,401,801 people 18 and older living in rental housing were “very likely” to be evicted and 2,248,120 were “somewhat likely.” In addition, 345,556 people were “very likely” to lose their homes through mortgage foreclosure, and 746,030 were “somewhat likely” to face foreclosure and the loss of their homes. The combined total was 4.7 million adults.The eviction crisis has come at a time when an additional series of potentially damaging developments have come to the fore.The rate of inflation has been rising at its fastest pace in over a decade — to 5.4 percent in June, from 1.4 percent in January when Biden took office, with no end in sight. The number of homicides grew by 25 percent from 2019 to 2020, and the 2021 rate, 6.2 homicides per 100,000 residents, is on track to become, according to The Washington Post, “the highest recorded in the United States in more than 20 years.”The number of illegal border crossings has more than doubled during Biden’s seven months in office, raising the potential for immigration to become a central campaign issue once again, both next year and in 2024.U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that in June of this year the enforcement agency “encountered 188,829 persons attempting entry along the Southwest Border,” a 142 percent increase from the 78,000 in January 2021 when Biden assumed the presidency.As the 2022 and 2024 elections get closer, Biden is in a race to keep public attention on policies and initiatives favorable to the Democratic Party and its candidates against the continuing threat that inflation, crime, urban disorder and illegal immigration — all issues that favor the Republican Party — take center stage.The danger for Biden if crime and immigration become a primary focus of public attention is clear in polling data. The RealClearPolitics average of the eight most recent polls shows Biden’s favorability at plus 7.5 points (51.1 positive and 43.6 negative) and that the public generally approves of his handling of the Covid pandemic, of jobs, of the economy and of the environment.Regarding Biden’s handling of crime and immigration, however, the numbers go negative. In the July 17-20 Economist/YouGov Poll, 38 percent of voters approved of his handling of crime, and 45 percent disapproved. In the Economist/YouGov poll taken a week later, Biden’s numbers on immigration were worse: 35 approving, 50 disapproving.The Biden administration has initiated a set of programs designed to “stem the flow of guns into the hands of those responsible for violence” — the centerpiece of its anti-crime program — but the Economist/YouGov poll found in its July 24-27 survey that 30 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of gun issues while 48 percent disapproveWhat does this all portend? Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied by email to my inquiry:The Biden administration has done a good job so far avoiding hard-to-defend, controversial positions on Republican hot button issues. That is really all they need to do. It is more likely that Covid and economic conditions will matter more in determining the Democratic Party’s fate in November.Cain argues thatthe best defense for the Democrats is to go on the offense in 2022 and remind voters about who Trump is and what the Republican Party has become. The resistance to supporting vaccination among Trumpist Republican officials could hurt the party’s national image substantially in 2022 if the unvaccinated are to blame for our inability to put this issue behind us.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, has a very different take. In an email he wrote:The Democrats have lost a great deal of credibility when it comes to crime and policing by thoughtlessly adopting slogans like ‘defund the police’ without considering what the phrase means, how policies based on the idea might lead to surges in crime, or how the slogan might backfire in the face of rising crime and lawlessness.Biden, Westwood continued,was smart to distance himself from these factions, but many of those he needs in Congress and in state houses have been much less careful. Without a serious repositioning on criminal justice policies, the Democrats face the midterms with a gaping self-inflicted wound.Biden received a lift last week in keeping a bread-and-butter agenda front and center from an unexpected source, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. McConnell abandoned his Dr. No stance toward all things Democratic and joined 16 fellow Republicans in support of a key motion to take up a $1 trillion infrastructure spending bill. If enacted into law, the measure would legitimize Biden’s claim that he is capable of restoring a semblance of bipartisanship in the nation’s capital.McConnell has not fully explained his political reasoning, but his tactical shift suggests that he thinks the wind remains at Biden’s back, making the Republican strategy of destruction a much riskier proposition, at least for the moment.Early indicators suggest that in some ways Biden has yet to face the kind of voter opposition that characterized the administrations of his predecessors from both parties at this stage in their presidencies.Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, tweeted on Aug. 2:Still no sign of strong grassroots or conservative media opposition focused on Biden or congressional agenda At this point in Obama admin, it was clear August congressional recess would be full of boisterous town halls. Infrastructure doesn’t get base animated.Similarly, G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist for The Economist, wrote on Aug. 1 that there is a long-term “trend by which the people react in a thermostatic manner against the party in power,” with the public mood shifting to the right during Democratic presidencies and to the left during Republican presidencies.So far during the Biden presidency, Morris wrote, the expected tilt toward conservatism has not materialized:Where we go from here is a big question. As stated, the thermostatic model would predict a reversion in 2021 in the conservative direction. But the issue remains open; the public has not appeared very thermostatic on, say, immigration policy over the last year, and their demand for public spending is still very high.The trickiest issues facing the Biden administration are crime and urban disorder because these are issues that play to the advantage of conservatives, who have demonstrated expertise in weaponizing them.The June 29-July 6 USA Today/Ipsos poll found that “concerns about crime and gun violence have surged to the top of issues that worry Americans” and, in an ominous note for the Biden administration,Crime and public safety is the issue on which the Republican Party now holds its strongest advantage. By 32 percent to 24 percent, those polled said the G.O.P. was better at handling crime.There is considerable disagreement over the optimal strategy for Democrats to adopt when addressing crime — along with widespread concern over the party’s credibility on the issue itself.Rebecca Goldstein, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, emailed to say that she believes “the Biden Administration has correctly read the political winds by doubling the amount they are requesting for police hiring grants in 2022 compared to the 2021 appropriation, and also requesting eight-figure sums for police training and body-worn cameras.”These initiatives, Goldstein continued, are “not the outcome that any of last summer’s activists would have wanted. But the Biden Administration has realized that some of those proposals, particularly defunding or abolishing police agencies, were politically dead on arrival.”The crucial question, in Goldstein’s view, iswhether the administration will be able to convincingly advertise its support for police, and for police oversight and reform, while neither alienating some of the activists who mobilized to help Biden win in 2020 and might be put off from putting in the same sweat equity in 2022 or 2024, nor succumbing to the longstanding critique from the right that Democrats are “soft on crime.” This is a tightrope that even the most skilled politician might not be able to walk.Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, argued in an email that trying to engage voters on crime and other issues that have worked to the advantage of the Republican Party in the past is a fool’s errand:The Democratic Party has been losing voters who want economic benefits from the federal government but who are supporting Republican candidates because of their conservative positions on social and cultural issues. Biden can’t win back voters by engaging on these issues. Any positions he takes will raise the salience of these issues and that’s not helpful for him.Crime and policing, Feldman noted,are largely local concerns. Immigration is a potential minefield so the best he can do is to try to keep it from becoming a major media story. Given his limited options, any attempt to address these concerns would just give Republicans an opportunity to portray him in an unfavorable light. Providing concrete economic benefits to people while reducing the volume on social/cultural issues is the best way forward in 2022 and 2024.Aaron Chalfin, a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees that engaging the debate over crime is inherently risky for Democrats:In my view, the political liabilities for the Democrats are probably fairly substantial. The surge in violence is rapid and has reversed 20 years of progress in just 18 short months. While I think the cause of the violence has little to do with Democratic political priorities at the national level, it seems likely that the Democrats will be held to account given the rhetoric around “Defund” that is associated with the left wing of the party.Lawrence Sherman, director of the Cambridge Center for Evidence-Based Policing at the University of Cambridge, agrees that “the greatest threat to Biden on policing and disorder comes from the left,” but he differs from some of his colleagues in arguing that Biden should take the issues of crime and urban dysfunction head on.Sherman contends that public anxieties over crime are just one part of a larger, more comprehensive “fear of chaos.” In that more expansive context, Sherman continued, Biden has strengthened his credentials as an adversary of disorder through his workon Covid and the economy, for which his competence grows more impressive daily in comparison to Trump’s. Climate change will also become a bigger issue (favoring Biden) for the swing vote, with smoke, heat and floods proving more scary than an unprecedented spike in murders. In a politics of fear, the targets of fear become identified with different candidates, and Biden’s fears now seem paramount: Covid, Climate and Chaos.Trump’s actions leading up to and during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by Trump loyalists seeking to disrupt the vote count have opened the door for Biden to take the initiative on law and order and, in doing so, to counter the image of the Democratic Party as soft on crime, Sherman argued:“After what Trump did on Jan. 6, Biden has been able to stress his own historic support for the police as emblematic of his opposition to chaos,” Sherman wrote in an email:The “defund the police” movement probably did help to lose Dem seats in the House in 2020, and may increasingly be blamed for the huge spike in violent crime. But as long as Biden remains strong in his position that policing “works” to prevent crime, and that it is essential to saving Black lives, he will attract the suburban swing vote.Biden should take the initiative, Sherman argues, with “a major policing initiative,” and that initiative should stress “hot spots policing,” the focusing of police resources on small sections of urban areas, “under 5 percent of land in most cities,” while “pulling way back on stop and frisk everywhere else, especially suburban traffic stops, like the late Sandra Bland.”Biden goes into battle with one crucial advantage: He, his appointees and his advisers have more experience in the trenches of elections, legislative fights and bureaucratic maneuvering than the top personnel of any recent administration.On the other hand, if what his voters need is equality — that is, resource redistribution — experienced advisers may not be enough.Mart Trasberg and Hector Bahamonde, of Wake Forest University and the Universidad de O’Higgins in Chile, authors of “Inclusive institutions, unequal outcomes: Democracy, state capacity, and income inequality,” pointed out in an email that redistribution is exceptionally hard to achieve in an advanced democracy like the one in operation in the United States:The increase in inequality through market processes puts pressure on fiscal policy, making it difficult to increase redistribution via taxes and transfers. With increasing foreign investment flows and more developed financial sectors, domestic and international corporate and financial elites become stronger actors in domestic politics. Given that these changes are slow-moving and incremental, disorganized voters are not able to vote for a higher taxation of income-concentrating elites. Of course, other mechanisms are likely at play: political elites trick voters to vote on identity issues that do not concern socio-economic redistribution.In the end, much of the dynamism that powers today’s political competition comes back to — or down to — racial and cultural conflict. Can Biden find a redistributive workaround — and protect voting rights at the same time? The fate of the Democratic Party depends on it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Just Because Trump Is Ridiculous, It Doesn’t Mean He Isn’t Dangerous

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      It may well be that “real” authoritarians don’t actually lose elections. But at this point in time, we can safely say that there’s no question that Donald Trump was determined to overturn the 2020 presidential election and end American constitutional government in order to stay in office.According to my colleague Katie Benner, reporting for The Times, Trump repeatedly pressured the Justice Department to “just say the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me” so that “he and his allies in Congress could use the assertion to try to overturn the results,” as indicated in notes taken by Richard Donoghue, who was then the acting deputy attorney general.As with the entire effort to overturn the results of the election, Trump’s behavior was as clumsy as it was in earnest. He truly wanted the Justice Department to give him a pretext for some kind of (presumably drastic) action, but the most he could do in pursuit of this goal was to complain to top officials on the phone. “The conversations often included complaints about unfounded voter fraud conspiracy theories,” Benner notes, “and admonishments that department leaders had failed to fight hard enough for Mr. Trump, the officials said.”But a haphazard attempt is still an attempt. That Trump is an absurd figure does not mean we should treat his drives and desires as unthreatening. This was true when he was in office, and it is true now, while he is still trying to “stop the steal.”The plot that began the night of the election when Trump demanded that the states stop counting ballots — “We want all voting to stop” — has not actually come to an end. It is continuing, pushed forward by the former president and his allies in and out of government. And the current narrative behind the plot — that Trump is the rightful president, that Biden stole the election and that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a righteous rebellion against Democratic fraud and subversion — has all but migrated into the Republican Party mainstream.For a clear picture of the former president’s influence on the Republican Party, look no further than the effort to investigate the attack on the Capitol. Republican leaders in the House and Senate opposed and then killed a bipartisan Sept. 11-style commission to study the events of Jan. 6, on the grounds that it would be a “purely political exercise,” as Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, put it.When, in response, House Democrats announced a select committee to investigate the attack (under the direct control of Speaker Nancy Pelosi), House Republican leaders were furious. “This select committee is likely to pursue a partisan agenda to politicize the Jan. 6 attack instead of conducting a good faith investigative effort into the actions leading up to and the security failures of the 6th,” Steve Scalise, the House minority whip, said.Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was given a chance to appoint Republican representatives to the select committee. He chose members known for their total devotion to Trump, like Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana, who both refused to certify the election results in January and signed a brief to the Supreme Court asking the justices to overturn the presidential results. Pelosi removed Jordan and Banks from the commission, bringing on another round of outrage and partisan blowback.In short, Republican leaders have refused to commit to an actual investigation of the storming of the Capitol. The reason is simple: Trump has made cooperation grounds for expulsion from the party. The virtual pariah status of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — the two Republican members Pelosi named to the commission — is proof enough.But events in Washington are not the only evidence of how Trump’s obsessions have become the obsessions of much of the Republican Party. Republican voters themselves are all-in on the former president’s message. Fifty-three percent of Republicans view Trump as the true president, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May, and about half of Republicans believe the Capitol attack was the work of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad,” according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll in March.At the state level, Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are fighting to engineer a pretext for “stop the steal” ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections. In Arizona, this has taken the form of an “audit” of the 2020 vote organized by the state Republican Party.It would be easy to dismiss the Arizona audit as a joke, a parade of clownish incompetence not unlike the efforts of Trump in the aftermath of the election. According to The Associated Press, the company hired to conduct the audit had no prior experience with elections, broke rules for handling ballots and took nearly twice the allotted time to complete the process.What’s more, its owner has supported the former president’s efforts to spread false conspiracy theories about the election. Trump, for his part, has endorsed the audit, praising its organizers in a speech in Arizona last week. “We’re gathered here in Phoenix to show our support for election integrity and for the brave and unyielding conservative warriors in the Arizona State Senate,” he said.The audit has encouraged other Republicans in other 2020 battleground states to attempt similar shenanigans, part of a national strategy to delegitimize last year’s election results. As Jane Mayer recently described in great detail in The New Yorker, there is a network of conservative groups spending millions to promote “election integrity” and bolster Republican efforts to change state election laws.It is not hard to see the endgame here, especially if Trump makes another bid for the White House after capturing the Republican nomination for a third time. Not an after-the-fact fight to “stop the steal,” but a pre-emptive attempt to make sure the election can’t be “stolen” — that is, won — by his opponent.The American political system is barreling toward another crisis. Of course there’s no guarantee that the crisis will happen. But the current complacency coming from much of the political establishment does not leave one confident that we’ll avoid it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Already Distorting Jan. 6, G.O.P. Now Concocts Entire Counter-Narrative

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      A new version of the attack amounts to a disinformation campaign aimed at giving cover to the party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.In the hours and days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, rattled Republican lawmakers knew exactly who was to blame: Donald J. Trump. Loyal allies began turning on him. Top Republicans vowed to make a full break from his divisive tactics and dishonesties. Some even discussed removing him from office.By spring, however, after nearly 200 congressional Republicans had voted to clear Mr. Trump during a second impeachment proceeding, the conservative fringes of the party had already begun to rewrite history, describing the Capitol riot as a peaceful protest and comparing the invading mob to a “normal tourist visit,” as one congressman put it.This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, spinning a new counternarrative of that deadly day. No longer content to absolve Mr. Trump, they concocted a version of events in which accused rioters were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.This rendering of events — together with new evidence that Mr. Trump had counted on allies in Congress to help him use a baseless allegation of corruption to overturn the election — pointed to what some democracy experts see as a dangerous new sign in American politics: Even with Mr. Trump gone from the White House, many Republicans have little intention of abandoning the prevarication that was a hallmark of his presidency.Rather, as the country struggles with the consequences of Mr. Trump’s assault on the legitimacy of the nation’s elections, leaders of his party — who, unlike the former president, have not lost their political or rhetorical platforms — are signaling their willingness to continue, look past or even expand his assault on the facts for political gain.The phenomenon is not uniquely American.“This is happening all over the place — it is so much linked to the democratic backsliding and rising of authoritarian movements,” said Laura Thornton, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It’s about the same sort of post-truth world. You can just repeat a lie over and over and, because there’s so little trust, people will believe it.”Behind the Republican embrace of disinformation is a calculus of both ambition and self-preservation. With members of the select committee hinting that they could subpoena Trump aides, allies on Capitol Hill and perhaps Mr. Trump himself, the counterfactual counterattack could pre-emptively undercut an investigation of the riot.As videos shown during the hearing gave harrowing new reminders of the day’s violence, leading House Republicans claimed that Ms. Pelosi — a target of the mob — had been warned about the violence in advance but failed to prevent it.From his private club in New Jersey, Mr. Trump suggested that Ms. Pelosi should “investigate herself,” yet again falsely insinuating that antifa and Black Lives Matter — not his followers — caused the destruction on Jan. 6 and that a democratically decided election had been stolen from him.All the while, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican, who once led his party in condemning both the riot and Mr. Trump’s role in it, made no visible attempt to stop the flood of fabrications, telling reporters he had not watched the hearing and had little new to say about the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.House Republicans’ desire to bury the attack on their own workplace has created a dysfunctional governing atmosphere. Ms. Pelosi has increasingly treated them as a pariah party, unworthy of collaboration or trust, and has expressed deep disdain for Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, whom she called a “moron” this past week.A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.“Anytime you mention his name, you’re not getting an answer from me,” she told reporters. “Don’t waste my time.”Almost as soon as the police retook control on Jan. 6, hard-core defenders of Mr. Trump in Congress began recasting the gruesome scenes of violence that left five people dead.Mr. McCarthy, the California Republican, responded differently at first: He angrily demanded that Mr. Trump stop the rioters, according to an account he gave fellow Republicans at the time. A week later, as the House moved to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy said that “the president bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters” and called for a fact-finding commission.But in the months since, that early resolve has given way to an out-and-out intent to bury the attack. Mr. McCarthy, who is trying to win back the majority in 2022, moved quickly to patch things up with Mr. Trump, gave latitude to far-right members of his caucus and worked furiously to block the creation of an independent 9/11-style commission.This past week, just before the officers began to deliver anguished testimony about the brutality they had endured, Mr. McCarthy repeatedly laid blame not with Mr. Trump, the rioters or those who had fueled doubts about the election outcome, but with Ms. Pelosi, one of the invading mob’s chief targets.“If there is a responsibility for this Capitol, on this side, it rests with the speaker,” Mr. McCarthy said.Officers who defended the Capitol, like Harry Dunn, delivered emotional testimony at the first hearing of a House select committee this past week.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesRepresentative Elise Stefanik of New York, the recently selected House conference chairwoman, went even further, saying Ms. Pelosi “bears responsibility” as speaker “for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6” and deriding her as “an authoritarian who has broken the people’s house.”Ms. Pelosi is not responsible for the security of Congress; that job falls to the Capitol Police, a force that the speaker only indirectly influences. Republicans have made no similar attempt to blame Mr. McConnell, who shared control of the Capitol at the time.Outside the Justice Department, meanwhile, a group of conservative lawmakers gathered to accuse prosecutors of mistreating the more than 500 people accused in the Jan. 6 riot.Encouraged by Mr. Trump, they also echoed far-right portrayals of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot trying to break into the House chamber, as a patriotic martyr whose killing by the police was premeditated.As if to show how anti-democratic episodes are ping-ponging around the globe, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in June seized on Ms. Babbitt’s killing — calling it an “assassination” — to deflect questions about his own country’s jailing of political prisoners.Some senior Republicans insist that warnings of a whitewash are overwrought.“I don’t think anybody’s going to be successful erasing what happened,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “Everybody saw it with their own eyes and the nation saw it on television.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi has increasingly treated House Republicans as a pariah party, unworthy of collaboration or trust.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesFor Mr. Cornyn and other lawmakers, continuing to talk about the attack is clearly an electoral loser at a time when they are trying to retake majorities in Congress and avoid Mr. Trump’s ire.Most Republican lawmakers instead simply try to say nothing at all, declining even to recount the day’s events, let alone rebuke members of their party for spreading falsehoods or muddying the waters.Asked how he would describe the riot, in which a hostile crowd demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, his brother, Representative Greg Pence of Indiana, responded curtly, “I don’t describe it.”Yet the silence of party stalwarts, including nearly all of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the attack and the Republican senators who voted to convict him, has created an information void that hard-right allies of Mr. Trump have readily filled. And they have found receptive audiences in a media environment replete with echo chambers and amplifying algorithms.In a July poll by CBS News, narrow majorities of Trump voters said they would describe the attack as an example of “patriotism” or “defending freedom.”That silence follows a familiar pattern: Rather than refute false allegations about a stolen election and rampant voter fraud, many leading Republicans have simply tolerated extremist misinformation. Perhaps no one’s silence has been more significant than that of Mr. McConnell, who criticized Mr. Trump and his party in the immediate aftermath of the attack, denouncing it as a “failed insurrection” fueled by the former president’s lies.A group of conservative members of Congress called a hasty news conference outside the Justice Department to accuse prosecutors of treating the arrested rioters unfairly.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesSince Mr. Trump’s impeachment acquittal by the Senate in February, when Mr. McConnell declared him “practically and morally responsible,” the minority leader has all but refused to discuss Jan. 6. The quiet acquiescence of party leaders has effectively left Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois as the only two Republicans still willing to speak out against a majority of their party.“Clearly there were security failings at the Capitol, but there was a mob that tried to prevent us from carrying out our constitutional duty,” Ms. Cheney said in an interview. “It’s very hard for me to understand why any member of Congress of either party would want to whitewash that.”Ms. Cheney has already paid a price: Republicans ousted her this spring from their No. 3 leadership position, replacing her with Ms. Stefanik.Now, House hard-liners want to expel her and Mr. Kinzinger from the Republican conference altogether, portraying them as “snitches” and “spies” in league with Democrats.The message is clear: Adherence to facts cannot overcome adherence to the party line. More

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      Why Do Republicans Hate Cops?

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      WASHINGTON — It was, I must admit, a virtuoso performance by Sean Hannity.Not since the sheriff in “Blazing Saddles” put a gun to his own head and took himself hostage has anyone executed such a nutty loop de loop. More