Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      In a Different Capitol Siege, Republicans in Oregon Call for Accountability

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      G.O.P. lawmakers in the state are calling for the resignation of a legislator who appears to have encouraged protesters to breach the State Capitol in December.A little more than two weeks before a mob of supporters of Donald J. Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, falsely claiming that he had won the election, a strikingly similar event had unfolded on the other side of the country, at the State Capitol in Oregon.There, in December, a restive crowd had breached the exterior doors and battled law enforcement officers in a building that is capped by a gold-leaf pioneer wielding an ax. The agitators, waving Trump flags and clad in body armor, wielded pepper spray and smashed windows. “Arrest Kate Brown!” the crowd chanted, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.Republicans in Congress have resisted a full, formal investigation into the much larger attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, but in Oregon, lawmakers facing new evidence about the Dec. 21 siege in Salem are taking a different approach. On Monday, the state’s House Republican caucus signed a letter encouraging the resignation of a colleague, Representative Mike Nearman, who in a newly discovered video appeared to be coaching protesters on how they might gain access to the building.The House Republican leader, Christine Drazan, said on Tuesday that she believed there was enough support in her caucus to expel Mr. Nearman from the State Legislature if he did not resign. Legislators in the state have never before expelled one of their own.“I would hope that Representative Nearman would make the decision to not be the first,” Ms. Drazan said in an interview.The protest in Salem was part of a series of demonstrations that broke out across the country after the Nov. 3 election as supporters egged on by Mr. Trump mobilized to contest an election they falsely believed had been stolen. Some of the protests targeted state leaders who had imposed lockdowns and mask orders to counter the coronavirus pandemic.In Salem on Dec. 21, dozens of people mobilized outside the Capitol, expressing frustration that the building had been closed to the public amid the pandemic. Carrying signs condemning the “lying lockdown” and shouting, “Let us in,” some in the crowd surged through an open door on the building’s north side before law enforcement officers moved to confront them.A larger crowd later managed to push in through the doorway but, facing a line of officers in riot gear, they did not reach the rotunda area or areas of the building where legislators were working. Officers later made some arrests and cleared the building.In the months since the breach, videos have made it clear that the crowd had assistance from someone on the inside. Security footage made public days afterward showed Mr. Nearman, who has represented a district that lies south and west of Salem for the past six years, opening a door in a way that allowed protesters inside as he left the building. Mr. Nearman, who walked around the building and re-entered it, faces misdemeanor charges of official misconduct and criminal trespass.After the first video emerged, Mr. Nearman said he did not condone violence but also said he believed that legislative proceedings should be open to the public.Then last week, new footage surfaced, suggesting not only that he may have expected protesters to enter the building, but that he had offered to help them. The video, earlier reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, appeared to be streamed online a few days before the December intrusion. It showed Mr. Nearman making public remarks in which he coyly gives out his own cellphone number with a suggestion that anyone who might need to enter the Capitol building could text him if they needed a way inside. He referred to the idea as “Operation Hall Pass.”“That is just random numbers that I spewed out. That’s not anybody’s actual cellphone,” Mr. Nearman said after giving out his cell number. “And if you say, ‘I’m at the West entrance’ during the session and text to that number there, that somebody might exit that door while you’re standing there. But I don’t know anything about that.”Barbara Smith Warner, a Democratic lawmaker from Portland who is the House majority leader, said she found it hard to believe that a sitting legislator would put everyone in the building at risk, not only by intentionally opening the door but by doing it in a premeditated way.“That is mind-boggling,” Ms. Smith Warner said. “If that’s not traitorous, I don’t know what is.”Mr. Nearman did not respond to messages seeking comment. In an interview with the conservative radio host Lars Larson, Mr. Nearman said he had been “clowning around” in the video and “setting up” for what he had assumed would be a peaceful protest. He said he had been speaking in the video to a group that was not known to be violent.“I’m willing to have some consequences for what I did, or whatever, but this is super extreme,” Mr. Nearman said.Ms. Smith Warner said she came to see the Dec. 21 siege as a kind of dress rehearsal for what happened in the nation’s Capitol a few weeks later, with the same types of grievances on display. While Republican legislators in Oregon had been largely silent about the December siege until now, she said, she applauded those who were now willing to take on the issue.“I don’t want to minimize that at least some of the Republicans here are doing the right thing,” Ms. Smith Warner said. “That is no small thing. I do think their base will consider that a betrayal.”The U.S. House voted in May to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, which left several people dead, injured law enforcement officers and had lawmakers fleeing for safety as a mob ransacked the complex. But that plan for a broader accounting of the day was stalled by Republicans in the Senate who appeared to fear the political consequences of an open-ended inquiry.In Oregon, House Speaker Tina Kotek announced that a bipartisan special committee would convene this week to consider whether Mr. Nearman should be expelled. Ms. Drazan, the Republican leader, said she believed that the matter should have been handled by a different committee but supported the idea of considering expulsion.If a resolution to expel goes to the full House, it would need 40 of the chamber’s 60 lawmakers to approve it. The chamber has 37 Democrats.Ms. Drazan said she did not see much of a parallel between the siege in Washington and the one in Salem, and said she preferred to keep her focus on events in Oregon rather than weighing in on how Republicans in Congress should handle the Jan. 6 events. She said she hoped Republican lawmakers would be as focused on doing the right thing in their own party as they have been on criticizing the opposing party.“I am just exhausted by national politics,” Ms. Drazan said. “They just need to get their act together. They need to start to serve the greater good.”Ms. Drazan noted that when Republican Party leadership in Oregon passed a resolution that embraced the unfounded conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6 attack was a left-wing “false flag” plot to frame Mr. Trump’s supporters, her caucus in the Legislature disavowed the resolution, declaring that there was no evidence of a false flag effort and that the election was over.“We have, I hope, a clear-minded view of what is public service and what is not,” Ms. Drazan said.Mr. Nearman was among those who signed the letter. More

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      Are We Destined for a Trump Coup in 2024?

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      I wrote my weekend column about three ways that Donald Trump might be prevented from plunging the country into crisis in 2024, should he reproduce both his 2020 defeat and his quest to overturn the outcome: first, through the dramatic electoral overhauls favored by progressives; second, through a Bidenist politics of normalcy that prevents the G.O.P. from capturing the House or Senate; or third, through the actions of Republican officials who keep their heads down and don’t break with Trump but, as in 2020, refuse to go along if he turns another loss into an attempted putsch. More

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      Rejecting Biden’s Win, Rising Republicans Attack Legitimacy of Elections

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      The next generation of aspiring G.O.P. congressional leaders has aggressively pushed Donald Trump’s false fraud claims, raising the prospect that the results of elections will continue to be challenged through 2024.A Republican House candidate from Wisconsin says he is appalled by the violence he witnessed at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into the siege at the Capitol. But he did not disagree with G.O.P. lawmakers’ effort to overturn the presidential election results that night.In Michigan, a woman known as the “MAGA bride” after photos of her Donald J. Trump-themed wedding dress went viral is running for Congress while falsely claiming that it is “highly probable” the former president carried her state and won re-election.And in Washington State, the Republican nominee for governor last year is making a bid for Congress months after finally dropping a lawsuit challenging his 2020 defeat — a contest he lost by 545,000 votes.Across the country, a rising class of Republican challengers has embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was illegitimate, marred by fraud and inconsistencies. Aggressively pushing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he was robbed of re-election, these candidates represent the next generation of aspiring G.O.P. leaders, who would bring to Congress the real possibility that the party’s assault on the legitimacy of elections, a bedrock principle of American democracy, could continue through the 2024 contests.Dozens of Republican candidates have sown doubts about the election as they seek to join the ranks of the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying President Biden’s victory. There are degrees of denial: Some bluntly declare they must repair a rigged system that produced a flawed result, while others speak in the language of “election integrity,” promoting Republican re-examinations of the vote counts in Arizona and Georgia and backing new voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in battleground states.They are united by a near-universal reluctance to state outright that Mr. Biden is the legitimately elected leader of the country.Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, a company hired by the Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate to review the state’s 2020 election results, moving supplies last month at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.Courtney Pedroza for The New York Times“I would not have voted to certify Jan. 6, not without more questions,” said Sam Peters, a Nevada Republican who is campaigning for a Las Vegas-area House seat. He said he was not sure that Mr. Biden had legitimately won Nevada, even though the president did so by more than 33,000 votes.It’s unclear how long the reluctance to accept unfavorable electoral outcomes will remain a central focus of the party, and to what degree Republicans might support widespread election challenges up and down the ballot in the future.But Republicans’ unwavering fealty to the voter fraud myth underscores an emerging dynamic of party politics: To build a campaign in the modern G.O.P., most candidates must embrace — or at least not openly deny — conspiracy theories and election lies, and they must commit to a mission of imposing greater voting restrictions and making it easier to challenge or even overturn an election’s results. The prevalence of such candidates in the nascent stages of the party primaries highlights how Mr. Trump’s willingness to embrace far-flung falsehoods has elevated fringe ideas to the mainstream of his party.Over a year before the midterm elections, many of the fledgling primary races remain in flux, with scores of potential candidates still weighing bids. The Census Bureau’s delays in producing detailed population data have pushed the redistricting process back until at least September, which has impeded the recruitment of candidates for both parties.The result is that Republicans who have jumped into campaigns early tend to be those most loyal to Mr. Trump and the party base. Several among this new class of Republicans are likely to win their races, helped by historical trends favoring the party out of the White House, and a head start on fund-raising and meeting potential voters.Victories by these Republicans would expand the number of congressional lawmakers who have supported overturning the 2020 results, raising new doubts about whether Americans can still count on the routine, nonpartisan certification of free and fair elections.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman, is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump. Mr. Richardson said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 results.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesMr. Peters already has a list of questions he would ask before voting to certify the 2024 election results, should he be in Congress then.“I’ll want to know that the elections have been transparent and that the states that have certified their elections did not have significant issues and questions that still haven’t been answered,” he said in a recent interview. “I want to know that the states have certified them properly.”Mr. Trump and his allies remain relentlessly focused on the false claims about the election. Steve Bannon, the on-and-off Trump adviser, said in an interview late last month with NBC News that challenging the results of the 2020 election was a “litmus test” for Republican candidates running in 2022 primary races. The former president has been pushing reviews of last year’s results, like a widely criticized Republican-commissioned audit in Arizona, and he continued his effort in a speech in North Carolina last weekend.Some party strategists fear that the denials of the election outcome could hurt candidates who progress to the general election in the crucial swing districts Republicans must win to take control of Congress.Polling shows a significant disconnect between Republicans and independent voters. A recent survey from Quinnipiac University found that two-thirds of Republicans believed Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate, an opinion shared by just 28 percent of independent voters.“It’s one of those things that is in the water with these very online, very loud and very active primary voters,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist and veteran of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush’s presidential campaigns. “It’s a problem and it’s dangerous for the party to continue to flirt with this conspiracy theory, but I don’t think Republicans are really paying a price for it.”The election-skeptical Republicans span safe districts and battlegrounds. Derrick Van Orden, running for a second time in a Democratic-held district in western Wisconsin that Mr. Trump carried in 2020, published an op-ed article defending his attendance at the Jan. 6 rally near the Capitol, saying he had gone to “stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”A “Stop the Steal” demonstrator outside the Capitol on Jan. 3 as members of the new Congress were sworn in. Three days later, rioting Trump supporters broke into the building.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMany Republicans are simply trying to deflect the question of Mr. Biden’s legitimacy with pledges to crack down on voter fraud, rebuild “election integrity” and support more voting restrictions.In December, State Senator Jen Kiggans of Virginia, campaigning for a competitive U.S. House seat based around Norfolk, issued a nearly 900-word statement on Facebook detailing her commitment to restoring “voter confidence” but making no mention of Mr. Biden or whether she disputed the 2020 results. (Her primary opponent, Jarome Bell, said during an interview with Mr. Bannon that people involved in election fraud should be sentenced “to death.”)“I agree with you 100% that it is right to question the electoral process and to hold those accountable who are responsible for ensuring our elections are conducted fairly with the utmost integrity,” Ms. Kiggans wrote in her statement.Even Republican candidates who acknowledge Mr. Biden as the legitimate winner say potential fraud needs to be addressed. Mary Ann Hanusa, a former official in President George W. Bush’s administration who is running for Congress in Iowa, said she would have voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, but she added that because of the coronavirus, changes to voting practices in several states “were made outside of law and when you do that, it really opens up the door to fraud.”Senate primaries so far seem to be competitions to decide which candidates can cast themselves as the strongest allies of Mr. Trump and his quixotic quest to overturn the election results.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who spoke at Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, is seeking a promotion to the Senate. Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, whom Mr. Trump endorsed during his speech on Saturday night, introduced his Senate campaign with a video promising to “make sure our elections are fair” — a barely coded reference to Mr. Trump’s claims.In Ohio, a super PAC called the USA Freedom Fund is attacking official and prospective candidates for being insufficiently loyal to the former president and “America First” principles, while backing Josh Mandel, the Republican former Ohio state treasurer.“I am the only candidate in Ohio who gets up wherever he speaks around the state and has the guts to say this election was stolen from Donald J. Trump,” Mr. Mandel said last month on a podcast hosted by Mr. Bannon.Perhaps no 2022 House candidate embodies the new Republican ethos more than Loren Culp, a former one-man police department from rural Republic, Wash., who made his name by refusing to enforce a new state gun law in 2018. He spent weeks refusing to concede the governor’s race last year, and he sued state officials before dropping his lawsuit in January under pressure from the state attorney general.In an interview last week, Mr. Culp said he believed fraud had cost him the election, despite his loss by more than half a million votes to Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.Now Mr. Culp is running to unseat Representative Dan Newhouse, a four-term Republican from a conservative and largely rural central Washington district who voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January. Mr. Culp said that he had a better chance of winning a House election than a statewide one because, he argued, Washington’s all-mail election system makes fraud too easy to perpetuate in the Seattle area.Loren Culp, right, Republicans’ nominee for governor of Washington last year, at a rally in Mount Vernon in August. He spent weeks refusing to concede the race and sued state officials.Elaine Thompson/Associated Press“I don’t believe that a real conservative will win a statewide race in Washington until we go back to in-person voting,” Mr. Culp said, echoing the skepticism of mail voting that Mr. Trump pushed for months leading into November. “Congressional districts are smaller geographical areas with less people dealing with the ballots. So it’s a whole lot easier to keep tabs on things.”Republican candidates’ 2020 skepticism comes as the party’s base voters, moving in near-lockstep with Mr. Trump and influential voices in the conservative media, have told pollsters that they, too, believe Mr. Biden was not the legitimate winner. G.O.P. candidates say it does not take much for their constituents to raise questions about the election to them.In South Carolina, Ken Richardson, a school board chairman who is challenging Representative Tom Rice, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, said his events were regularly delayed because voters inundated him with questions about the election.“When I go to give a speech, it takes 10 to 15 minutes before I can start, because the election is the first thing anybody wants to talk about,” Mr. Richardson, who said he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election, said in a recent interview. “I go ahead and let them get it out of their system and then I can get started.”“There’s definitely a reason to doubt,” he added. “There’s doubt out there.”And then there is Audra Johnson, who became briefly famous in 2019 after wearing a “Make America Great Again” wedding dress created by Andre Soriano, a conservative fashion designer.Ms. Johnson is now running against Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, a Republican who supported impeachment. She believes Mr. Trump was the rightful winner last year and said that, if elected, she would work to audit voting machines, enact a national voter identification law and create more “transparency” in election results.“It’s coming down to the point where anybody can vote in our elections,” she said. “That’s not how the system is supposed to be set up.” More

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      Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims

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      Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.WASHINGTON — In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.Mr. Trump chose Mr. Meadows, an ultraconservative congressman from North Carolina, to serve as his fourth and final chief of staff last March. A founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Mr. Meadows was among Mr. Trump’s most loyal and vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, and had been a fierce critic of the Russia investigation.Mr. Meadows’s involvement in the former president’s attack on the election results was broadly known at the time.In the days before Christmas, as Mr. Trump pressed the lead investigator for Georgia’s secretary of state to find “dishonesty,” Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to view an election audit in process. Local officials called it a stunt that “smelled of desperation,” as investigations had not found evidence of widespread fraud.Mr. Meadows also joined the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump repeatedly urged the state’s top elections official to alter the outcome of the presidential vote.Yet the newly unearthed messages show how Mr. Meadows’s private efforts veered into the realm of the outlandish, and sought official validation for misinformation that was circulating rampantly among Mr. Trump’s supporters. Italygate was among several unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 elections that caught fire on the internet before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Those theories fueled the belief among many of the rioters, stoked by Mr. Trump, that the election had been stolen from him and have prompted several Republican-led states to pass or propose new barriers to voting.The emails were discovered this year as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Justice Department officials were involved in efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss.“This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department in his election subversion scheme.”A spokesman for Mr. Meadows declined to comment, as did the Justice Department. Mr. Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.The requests by Mr. Meadows reflect Mr. Trump’s belief that he could use the Justice Department to advance his personal agenda.On Dec. 15, the day after it was announced that Mr. Rosen would serve as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to push the Justice Department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn his election loss. Mr. Trump also urged Mr. Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company.During the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Trump continued to push Mr. Rosen to do more to help him undermine the election and even considered replacing him as acting attorney general with a Justice Department official who seemed more amenable to using the department to violate the Constitution and change the election result.None of the emails show Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, agreeing to open investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so.Ting Shen for The New York TimesThroughout those weeks, Mr. Rosen privately told Mr. Trump that he would prefer not to take those actions, reiterating a public statement made by his predecessor, William P. Barr, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Mr. Meadows’s outreach to Mr. Rosen was audacious in part because it violated longstanding guidelines that essentially forbid almost all White House personnel, including the chief of staff, from contacting the Justice Department about investigations or other enforcement actions.“The Justice Department’s enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president. That’s the key idea that gave rise to these policies,” said W. Neil Eggleston, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel. “If the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Nevertheless, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen multiple times in the end of December and on New Year’s Day.On Jan. 1, Mr. Meadows wrote that he wanted the Justice Department to open an investigation into a discredited theory, pushed by the Trump campaign, that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County had been widespread enough to change the results in Mr. Trump’s favor.Mr. Meadows had previously forwarded Mr. Rosen an email about possible fraud in Georgia that had been written by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign. Two days after that email was sent to Mr. Rosen, Ms. Mitchell participated in the Jan. 2 phone call, during which she and Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to reconsider his findings that there had not been widespread voter fraud and that Mr. Biden had won. During the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him the votes necessary to declare victory in Georgia.Mr. Meadows also sent Mr. Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico, a state that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani had said in November was rife with fraud. A spokesman for New Mexico’s secretary of state said at the time that its elections were secure. To confirm the accuracy of the vote, auditors in the state hand-counted random precincts.And in his request that the Justice Department investigate the Italy conspiracy theory, Mr. Meadows sent Mr. Rosen a YouTube link to a video of Brad Johnson, a former C.I.A. employee who had been pushing the theory in videos and statements that he posted online. After receiving the video, Mr. Rosen said in an email to another Justice Department official that he had been asked to set up a meeting between Mr. Johnson and the F.B.I., had refused, and had then been asked to reconsider.The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of three entities looking into aspects of the White House’s efforts to overturn the election in the waning days of the Trump administration. The House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general are doing so as well.Mr. Rosen is in talks with the oversight panel about speaking with investigators about any pressure the Justice Department faced to investigate election fraud, as well as the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.He is also negotiating with the Justice Department about what he can disclose to Congress and to the inspector general given his obligation to protect the department’s interests and not interfere with current investigations, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Rosen said last month during a hearing before the oversight committee that he could not answer several questions because the department did not permit him to discuss issues covered by executive privilege.Mr. Durbin opened his inquiry in response to a Times article documenting how Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official who had found favor with Mr. Trump, had pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded election fraud claims. The effort almost ended in Mr. Rosen’s ouster.Last month, Mr. Durbin asked the National Archives for any communications involving White House officials, and between the White House and any person at the Justice Department, concerning efforts to subvert the election, according to a letter obtained by The Times. He also asked for records related to meetings between White House and department employees.The National Archives stores correspondence and documents generated by past administrations. More

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      At Once Diminished and Dominating, Trump Prepares for His Next Act

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      The former president speaks on Saturday to the North Carolina Republican convention, as he resumes political speeches and rallies.WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump, the former president of the United States, commutes to New York City from his New Jersey golf club to work out of his office in Trump Tower at least once a week, slipping in and out of Manhattan without attracting much attention.The place isn’t as he left it. Many of his longtime employees are gone. So are most of the family members who once worked there with him and some of the fixtures of the place, like his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen, who have since turned on him. Mr. Trump works there, mostly alone, with two assistants and a few body men.His political operation has also dwindled to a ragtag team of former advisers who are still on his payroll, reminiscent of the bare-bones cast of characters that helped lift a political neophyte to his unlikely victory in 2016. Most of them go days or weeks without interacting with Mr. Trump in person.But as he heads to the North Carolina Republican convention on Saturday night, in what is billed as the resumption of rallies and speeches, Mr. Trump is both a diminished figure and an oversized presence in American life, with a remarkable — and many say dangerous — hold on his party.Even without his favored megaphones and the trappings of office, Mr. Trump looms over the political landscape, animated by the lie that he won the 2020 election and his own fury over his defeat. And unlike others with a grievance, he has been able to impose his anger and preferred version of reality on a substantial slice of the American electorate — with the potential to influence the nation’s politics and weaken faith in its elections for years to come.Still blocked from Twitter and Facebook, he has struggled to find a way to influence news coverage since leaving office and promote the fabrication that the 2020 election was stolen from him.Some party leaders, like the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, are pretending he doesn’t exist anymore, while being deferential when Mr. Trump cannot be ignored.Others, like Senator Rick Scott of Florida, have tried to curry favor by presenting Mr. Trump with made-up awards to flatter his ego and keep him engaged in helping Senate Republicans recapture a majority in 2022.Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, said Mr. Trump had defied the model of ex-presidents who lose an election and tend to fade away, and the experience of Richard M. Nixon, who was treated like a pariah in the way Mr. Trump has managed to avoid.As for being simultaneously big and small, Mr. Beschloss said: “He’s big if the metric is that politicians are afraid of him, which is one metric of power in Washington. Many Republican leaders are terrified of him and abasing themselves in front of him.”Jason Miller, an adviser to the former president, agreed on Mr. Trump’s control over the party.“There are two types of Republicans inside the Beltway,” Mr. Miller said. “Those who realize President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party and those who are in denial.”Even in defeat, Mr. Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2024 in every public poll so far. Lawmakers who have challenged his dominance of the party, like Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who implored her colleagues to reject him after the Jan. 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol, have been booted from Republican leadership.From his strange dual perch of irrelevance and dominance, Mr. Trump has been narrowly focused on three things — his repeated, false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and his support for efforts to try to overturn the results; the state and local investigations into the practices of the Trump Organization; and the state of his business.Mr. Trump, who White House officials said watched with pleasure as his supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted the Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College vote, has told several people he believes he could be “reinstated” to the White House this August, according to three people familiar with his remarks. He has been echoing a theory promulgated by supporters like Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, and Sidney Powell, the lawyer being sued for defamation by election machine companies for spreading conspiracy theories about the safety of their ballots.President Biden’s victory, with more than 80 million votes, was certified by Congress once the Jan. 6 riot was contained. There is no legal mechanism for reinstating a president, and the efforts by Republicans in the Arizona Senate to recount the votes in the state’s largest county have been derided as fake and inept by local Republican officials, who say the result is a partisan circus that is eroding confidence in elections.Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has zeroed in on the Arizona effort and a lawsuit in Georgia to insist that not only will he be restored to office, but that Republicans will also retake the majority in the Senate through those same efforts, according to the people familiar with what he has been saying.Mr. Trump’s supporters demonstrated outside the Dallas County elections office in Dallas in November.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesHe has pressed conservative commentators and writers to echo his claims that the election was rigged. His focus has intensified in recent weeks, coinciding with the empaneling of a special grand jury by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, into his businesses.Frustrated by the lack of coverage, he has expressed his anger in news releases that still refer to him as the “45th President of the United States.”“Next time I’m in the White House there will be no more dinners, at his request, with Mark Zuckerberg and his wife,” he said in a statement on Friday after Facebook announced it would keep its ban against him in place for at least two years. “It will be all business!”Last week, he shut down his blog after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant, according to a person familiar with his thinking.Some of his aides are not eager to engage with him on his conspiracy theories and would like to see him press a forward-looking agenda that could help Republicans in 2022. People in his circle joke that the most senior adviser to the former leader of the free world is Christina Bobb, a correspondent with the far-right, eternally pro-Trump One America News Network, whom he consults regularly for information about the Arizona election audit.It remains to be seen what he says about the 2020 election during his appearance in North Carolina.Mr. Trump was eager to take back the microphone on Saturday night in Greenville, where aides said he planned to attack Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, as well as the Biden administration.“Joe Biden wants American taxpayers to pay reparations,” Mr. Trump was expected to say, according to an aide involved in drafting the speech. “I want the Chinese to pay American taxpayers reparations.”Mr. Trump’s first post-presidential rally is scheduled for later in June, followed by more appearances both for himself, paid for by his super PAC, and on behalf of House Republicans who support his agenda, advisers said.He has been so eager for an audience that he is even billed as a speaker who will appear live, via Jumbotron, at a rally in New Richmond, Wis., where the other headliners are Diamond and Silk, the MAGA movement social media stars, and Dinesh D’Souza, who received a presidential pardon from Mr. Trump for a felony conviction of making illegal campaign contributions.Despite the modest nature of some of the events he is interested in attaching his name to, even some his biggest detractors are loath to write him off.“I wish I was more confident it was ridiculous,” said Bill Kristol, a prominent “Never Trump” conservative. “It’s missing the forest through the trees to fail to see how strong he is.”Contractors packing boxes containing ballot tallies during the much-criticized Arizona Senate’s review of the vote in state’s largest county.Courtney Pedroza for The New York TimesBoth of his 2020 campaign managers, Bill Stepien and Brad Parscale, are on Mr. Trump’s payroll and still involved in his world. But Mr. Trump is episodically enraged with most members of his team.This time around, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law who oversaw his 2020 campaign operation, has mostly dropped out, telling the small circle of advisers around the ex-president that he wants to focus on writing his book and establishing a simpler relationship with Mr. Trump, where he is just a son-in-law. Donald Trump Jr. has stepped in as the most politically involved family member in his father’s life.Susie Wiles, the veteran Florida political consultant whom the former president and everyone in his orbit credit with winning the critical state in 2016 and again in 2020, oversees Mr. Trump’s fund-raising operation from Florida, shepherding the weekly conference call of the skeletal team that still runs the post-presidential operation.In the evenings, Mr. Trump has attended fund-raisers at his Bedminster, N.J., golf course, both for his own political action committee and for Republican candidates.But he has been eager to get back to holding rallies, announcing states where he planned to travel to before his team had finalized any venues or dates.“If you’re a one-term president, you usually go quietly into the night,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian. “He sees himself as leading the revolution, and he’s doing it from the back of a golf cart.” More

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      Pence Calls Systemic Racism A ‘Left-Wing Myth'

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      Former Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday described systemic racism as a “left-wing myth” during a speech hosted by a Republican group in New Hampshire, adopting the racial politics of his former boss, President Donald J. Trump.But Mr. Pence, a potential candidate for a 2024 presidential run, also distanced himself from the former president, describing the Jan. 6 attack as “a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol.”“President Trump and I’ve spoken many times since we left office,” Mr. Pence said. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see eye-to-eye on that day.”The speech illustrated the careful balance Mr. Pence is aiming to strike in squaring the rhetoric of the Republican Party under Mr. Trump while standing by his opposition to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.After focusing much of his speech on touting the achievements of the Trump administration, Mr. Pence took aim at “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education, asserting that young children are being taught “to be ashamed of their skin color.”“It is past time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic racism,” Mr. Pence said at the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner hosted by the Hillsborough County Republicans in Manchester, N.H.“America is not a racist country,” Mr. Pence said to raucous applause, two days after President Biden commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.Republicans have launched an energetic campaign in recent months aiming to dictate how historical and modern racism in America is taught in schools, and Mr. Pence indicated his support of efforts to ban critical race theory through legislation advanced in Republican-led states. Mr. Pence had previously targeted critical race theory in tweets and in his first speech in April after leaving office.Mr. Pence’s appeal to racial politics went beyond education. Discussing efforts to defund law enforcement agencies, the former vice president said “Black lives are not endangered by police, Black lives are saved by police,” co-opting the language of Black Lives Matter — a movement he had shunned in office. More

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      A Stanford Student Mocked the Federalist Society. It Jeopardized His Graduation.

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      The Stanford student sent a satirical flier that drew a complaint from the conservative group. The university then placed a hold on his diploma.It was the final day of classes at Stanford Law School, May 27, when Nicholas Wallace said he was blindsided by a message from one of the deans informing him that his graduation was in jeopardy for potential misconduct.His offense: sending an email flier to fellow law students in January that he pretended was from the Federalist Society, a prominent conservative and libertarian group with a chapter at the law school.The satirical flier promoted a discussion about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, featuring Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The title of the mock event: “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.”The chapter’s leaders were not amused. They filed a complaint on March 27 with the university, which said in a message to Mr. Wallace that it wasn’t until May 22 that the complainants had asked the administration to pursue the matter.“I was astounded,” Mr. Wallace, 32, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I couldn’t believe that without any more than this letter of concern they placed my graduation and everything I’ve worked for for the last three years, they’ve placed that under threat.”Mr. Wallace’s predicament drew national attention from both free speech groups and conservatives. It served as another example of the intense debate over political speech on college campuses in America.In response to questions on Wednesday, a spokesman for Stanford University said in an email that Mr. Wallace would be allowed to graduate after all after administrators consulted with the university’s legal counsel, who concluded the matter involved issues of protected speech.“In cases where the complaint is filed in proximity to graduation, our normal procedure includes placing a graduation diploma hold on the respondent,” said the spokesman, E.J. Miranda. “The complaint was resolved as expeditiously as possible, and the respondent and complainant have been informed that case law supports that the email is protected speech.”Mr. Miranda said that the university would also review its procedures for placing holds on student diplomas in judicial cases close to graduation.The president of the campus chapter of the Federalist Society did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday night.Mr. Hawley, who received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University, was widely criticized for objecting to the certification of the presidential election results. Mr. Paxton has drawn scrutiny for his appearance at a rally in support of Donald J. Trump in Washington on the day of the siege.Representatives for Mr. Hawley and Mr. Paxton did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday night.Grabbing attention itself was Mr. Wallace’s satirical flier, which he said he had emailed to a Listserv forum for law school students on Jan. 25, nearly three weeks after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.The flier said that the event was being presented by the Federalist Society on Jan. 6.“Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,” the flier said, offering Grubhub coupons to the first 30 students who R.S.V.P.’d for the fictitious program. “Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.”Two days after the satirical flier was sent by Mr. Wallace, it was the focus of a fact check article by USA Today, which reported that the email was a form of satire.In a complaint to the university, unidentified officers of the Federalist Society chapter said that Mr. Wallace’s email had caused significant harm and had led other organizations to cancel their events with the group.“Wallace defamed the student group, its officers, Senator Josh Hawley, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton,” the complaint said. “Wallace, impersonating the Stanford Federalist Society, wrote on the flyer that ‘Riot information will be emailed the morning of the event,’ insinuating that the student group was encouraging and hosting a riot. He also wrote that Attorney General Paxton advocates for ‘overturn[ing] the results of a free and fair election’ by ‘calling on a violent mob to storm the Capitol.’ And he wrote that Senator Hawley believes that violent insurrections are justified.”The names of the complainants were redacted from the complaint, which was posted online on Monday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group working to defend free speech on college campuses. Mr. Wallace had sought the group’s help.“By instituting an investigation and placing a hold on Wallace’s degree days before his graduation, Stanford betrays its legal and moral commitments to respect its students’ expressive rights,” the group said in a letter on Tuesday to one of the law school’s deans.The flap drew the notice of Slate magazine. The writer of that article, Mark Joseph Stern, was the featured speaker in a conversation about the Federalist Society that Mr. Wallace said he had organized about a month after he sent the satirical email.Mr. Wallace’s cause was also taken up by Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard University.“Mocking an ideologically-based group can’t be made a basis for denying academic privileges in any open society worthy of respect,” Mr. Tribe wrote on Twitter. “If accurate, this report shows Stanford Law School to be unworthy of treatment as an academic institution.”George T. Conway III, one of the founders of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, also rallied behind Mr. Wallace.“As someone who been involved with the Federalist Society for over 35 years, I agree that this is totally ridiculous,” Mr. Conway said on Twitter, responding to Mr. Tribe.Mr. Wallace, who is from Ann Arbor, Mich., and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that he is supposed to take the bar exam this summer in his home state and then start a job with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C.He said that he would not have been able to take the bar exam without his law school diploma, which he will receive on June 12. More

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      Is America’s Democracy Slipping Away?

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      On Jan. 6, as Donald Trump was revving up the rioters who would attempt an insurrection at the Capitol, just a short distance away, he said to them: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” More