Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Trump Is Nothing Without Republican Accomplices

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      During the first Republican debate of the 2024 presidential primary campaign last month, Donald Trump’s rivals were asked to raise their hands if they would support his candidacy, even if he were “convicted in a court of law.” Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election wasn’t just a potential criminal offense. It also violated the cardinal rule of democracy: Politicians must accept the results of elections, win or lose.But that seemed to matter little on the debate stage. Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand shot up first, and all the other leading candidates followed suit — some eagerly, some more hesitantly and one after casting furtive glances to his right and his left.Behavior like this might seem relatively harmless — a small act of political cowardice aimed at avoiding the wrath of the base. But such banal acquiescence is very dangerous. Individual autocrats, even popular demagogues, are never enough to wreck a democracy. Democracy’s assassins always have accomplices among mainstream politicians in the halls of power. The greatest threat to our democracy comes not from demagogues like Mr. Trump or even from extremist followers like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, but rather from the ordinary politicians, many of them inside the Capitol that day, who protect and enable him.The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new. It has confronted political leaders across the world for generations. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal. And in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and 1970s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz wrote that when mainstream politicians face this sort of predicament, they can proceed in one of two ways.On the one hand, politicians may act as loyal democrats, prioritizing democracy over their short-term ambitions. Loyal democrats publicly condemn authoritarian behavior and work to hold its perpetrators accountable, even when they are ideological allies. Loyal democrats expel antidemocratic extremists from their ranks, refuse to endorse their candidacies, eschew all collaboration with them, and when necessary, join forces with ideological rivals to isolate and defeat them. And they do this even when extremists are popular among the party base. The result, history tells us, is a political firewall that can help a democracy survive periods of intense polarization and crisis.On the other hand, too often, politicians become what Mr. Linz called semi-loyal democrats. At first glance, semi-loyalists look like loyal democrats. They are respectable political insiders and part of the establishment. They dress in suits rather than military camouflage, profess a commitment to democracy and ostensibly play by its rules. We see them in Congress and in governor’s mansions — and on the debate stage. So when democracies die, semi-loyalists’ fingerprints may not be found on the murder weapon.But when we look closely at the histories of democratic breakdowns, from Europe in the interwar period to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s to Venezuela in the early 2000s, we see a clear pattern: Semi-loyal politicians play a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians.Rather than severing ties to antidemocratic extremists, semi-loyalists tolerate and accommodate them. Rather than condemn and seek accountability for antidemocratic acts committed by ideological allies, semi-loyalists turn a blind eye, denying, downplaying and even justifying those acts — often via what is today called whataboutism. Or they simply remain silent. And when they are faced with a choice between joining forces with partisan rivals to defend democracy or preserving their relationship with antidemocratic allies, semi-loyalists opt for the latter.It is semi-loyalists’ very respectability that makes them so dangerous. As members of the establishment, semi-loyalists can use their positions of authority to normalize antidemocratic extremists, protect them against efforts to hold them legally accountable and empower them by opening doors to the mainstream media, campaign donors and other resources. It is this subtle enabling of extremist forces that can fatally weaken democracies.Consider the example of France. On Feb. 6, 1934, in the center of Paris, thousands of disaffected and angry men — veterans and members of right-wing militia groups — gathered near the national Parliament as its members were inside preparing to vote for a new government. They threw chairs, metal grates and rocks and used poles with razor blades on one end to try breach the doors of Parliament. Members of Parliament, frightened for their lives, had to sneak out of the building. Seventeen people were killed, and thousands were injured. Although the rioters failed to seize the Parliament building, they achieved one of their objectives: The centrist prime minister resigned the next day and was replaced by a right-leaning prime minister.Although French democracy survived the Feb. 6 attack on Parliament, the response of some prominent politicians weakened its defenses. Many centrist and center-left politicians responded as loyal democrats, publicly and unequivocally condemning the violence. But many conservative politicians did not. Key members of France’s main conservative party, the Republican Federation, many of whom were inside the Parliament building that day, sympathized publicly with the rioters. Some praised the insurrectionists as heroes and patriots. Others dismissed the importance of the attack, denying that there had been an organized plot to overthrow the government.When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step, blocking even modest efforts to hold the rioters to account. Protected from prosecution, many of the insurrection’s organizers were able to continue their political careers. Some of the rioters went on to form the Victims of Feb. 6, a fraternity-like organization that later served as a recruitment channel for the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government established in the wake of the 1940 German invasion.The failure to hold the Feb. 6 insurrectionists to account also helped legitimize their ideas. Mainstream French conservatives began to embrace the view — once confined to extremist circles — that their democracy was hopelessly corrupt, dysfunctional and infiltrated by Communists and Jews. Historically, French conservatives had been nationalist and staunchly anti-German. But by 1936, many of them so despised the Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, that they embraced the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” Four years later, they acquiesced to Nazi rule.The semi-loyalty of leading conservative politicians fatally weakened the immune system of French democracy. The Nazis, of course, finished it off.A half-century later, Spanish politicians responded very differently to a violent assault on Parliament. After four decades of dictatorship, Spain’s democracy was finally restored in the late 1970s, but its early years were marked by economic crisis and separatist terrorism. And on Feb. 23, 1981, as the Parliament was electing a new prime minister, 200 civil guardsmen entered the building and seized control at gunpoint, holding the 350 members of Parliament hostage. The coup leaders hoped to install a conservative general — a kind of Spanish Charles de Gaulle — as prime minister.The coup attempt failed, thanks to the quick and decisive intervention of the king, Juan Carlos I. Nearly as important, though, was the reaction of Spanish politicians. Leaders across the ideological spectrum — from communists to conservatives who had long embraced the Franco dictatorship — forcefully denounced the coup. Four days later, more than a million people marched in the streets of Madrid to defend democracy. At the head of the rally, Communist, Socialist, centrist and conservative franquista politicians marched side by side, setting aside their partisan rivalries to jointly defend democracy. The coup leaders were arrested, tried and sentenced to long prison terms. Coups became virtually unthinkable in Spain, and democracy took root.That is how democracy is defended. Loyal democrats join forces to condemn attacks on democracy, isolate those responsible for such attacks and hold them accountable.Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party more closely resembles the French right of the 1930s than the Spanish right of the early 1980s. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders have enabled authoritarianism at four decisive moments. First, rather than adhering to the cardinal rule of accepting election results after Joe Biden won in November, many Republican leaders either questioned the results or remained silent, refusing to publicly recognize Mr. Biden’s victory. Vice President Mike Pence did not congratulate his successor, Kamala Harris, until the middle of January 2021. The Republican Accountability Project, a Republican pro-democracy watchdog group, evaluated the public statements of 261 Republican members of the 117th Congress after the election. They found that 221 of them had publicly expressed doubt about its legitimacy or did not publicly recognize that Biden won. That’s 85 percent. And in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, nearly two-thirds of House Republicans voted against certification of the results. Had Republican leaders not encouraged election denialism, the “stop the steal” movement might have stalled, and thousands of Trump supporters might not have violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the election.Second, after Mr. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted to acquit him, even though many conceded that, in Senator Mitch McConnell’s words, the president was “practically and morally responsible” for the attack. The acquittal allowed Mr. Trump to continue his political career despite having tried to block the peaceful transfer of power. Had he been convicted in the Senate, he would have been legally barred from running again for president. In other words, Republican senators had a clear opportunity to ensure that an openly antidemocratic figure would never again occupy the White House — and 43 of them, including Mr. McConnell, declined to take it.Third, Republican leaders could have worked with Democrats to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising. Had both parties joined forces to seek accountability for the insurrection, the day’s events would have gone down in U.S. history (and would likely have been accepted by a larger majority of Americans) as a criminal assault on our democracy that should never again be allowed to occur, much like Spain’s 1981 coup attempt. Republican leaders’ refusal to support an independent investigation shattered any possible consensus around Jan. 6, making it far less likely that Americans will develop a shared belief that such events are beyond the pale.Finally, with remarkably few exceptions, Republican leaders say they will still support Mr. Trump even if he is convicted of plotting to overturn an election. Alternatives exist. The Republican National Committee could declare that the party will not nominate an individual who poses a threat to democracy or has been indicted on serious criminal charges. Or Republican leaders could jointly declare that, for the sake of democracy, they will endorse Mr. Biden if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. Such a move would, of course, destroy the party’s chances in 2024. But by keeping Mr. Trump out of the White House, it would help protect our democracy.If Republican leaders continue to endorse Mr. Trump, they will normalize him yet again, telling Americans that he is, at the end of the day, an acceptable choice. The 2024 race will become another ordinary red vs. blue election, much like 2016. And as in 2016, Mr. Trump could win.Republican leaders’ acquiescence to Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism is neither inevitable nor unavoidable. It is a choice.Less than a year ago in Brazil, right-wing politicians chose a different path. President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected in 2018, was an extreme-right politician who had praised torture, death squads and political assassination. Like Mr. Trump in 2020, Mr. Bolsonaro faced an uphill re-election battle in 2022. And like Mr. Trump, he tried to undermine public trust in the electoral system, attacking it as rigged and seeking to replace the country’s sophisticated electronic voting system with a paper ballot system that was more prone to fraud. And despite some dirty tricks on Election Day (police roadblocks impeded voter access to the polls in opposition strongholds in the northeast), Mr. Bolsonaro, like Mr. Trump, narrowly lost.But the similarities end there. Whereas most Republican leaders refused to recognize Mr. Biden’s victory, most of Mr. Bolsonaro’s major political allies, including the president of Congress and the newly elected governors of powerful states like São Paulo and Minas Gerais, unambiguously accepted his defeat at the hands of Lula da Silva, the winner on election night. Although Mr. Bolsonaro himself remained silent, almost no major Brazilian politician questioned the election results.Likewise, on Jan. 8, 2023, when angry Bolsonaro supporters, seeking to provoke a coup, stormed Congress, the office of the presidency and the Supreme Court building in Brasília, conservative politicians forcefully condemned the violence. In fact, several of them led the push for a congressional investigation into the insurrection. And when the Superior Electoral Court barred Mr. Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030 (for abusing his political power, spreading disinformation and making baseless accusations of fraud), the response among right-wing politicians was muted. Although the electoral court’s ruling was controversial, few Brazilian politicians have attacked the legitimacy of the court or defended Mr. Bolsonaro as a victim of political persecution.Not only is Mr. Bolsonaro barred from running for president in the next election, he is politically isolated. For U.S. Republicans, then, Brazil offers a model.Many mainstream politicians who preside over a democracy’s collapse are not authoritarians committed to overthrowing the system; they are careerists who are simply trying to get ahead. They are less opposed to democracy than indifferent to it. Careerism is a normal part of politics. But when democracy is at stake, choosing political ambition over its defense can be lethal.Mr. McConnell, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other top Republican leaders are not trying to kill democracy, but they have subordinated its defense to their own personal and partisan interests. Such reckless indifference could make them indispensable partners in democracy’s demise. They risk joining the long line of semi-loyal politicians littering the histories of interwar Europe and Cold War Latin America who sacrificed democracy on the altar of political expediency. American voters must hold them to account.Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (@dziblatt), professors of government at Harvard, are the authors of “The Tyranny of the Minority” and “How Democracies Die.”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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      Peter Navarro Convicted of Contempt of Congress Over Jan. 6 Subpoena

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      The verdict made Mr. Navarro the second top adviser to former President Donald J. Trump to be found guilty of contempt for defying the House committee’s investigation.Peter Navarro, a former trade adviser to President Donald J. Trump, was convicted on Thursday of two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The verdict, coming after nearly four hours of deliberation in Federal District Court in Washington, made Mr. Navarro the second top adviser of Mr. Trump’s to be found guilty in connection to the committee’s inquiry. Stephen K. Bannon, a former strategist for Mr. Trump who was convicted of the same offense last summer, faces four months in prison and remains free on appeal.Mr. Navarro, 74, stood to the side of his lawyers’ table, stroking his chin as the verdict was read aloud. Each count carries a maximum of one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. A hearing to determine his sentence was scheduled for January.Speaking outside the courthouse afterward, Mr. Navarro repeatedly vowed to appeal his conviction.“I am willing to go to prison to settle this issue, I’m willing to do that,” he said. “But I also know that the likelihood of me going to prison is relatively small because we are right on this issue.”The jury’s decision handed a victory to the House committee, which had sought to penalize senior members of the Trump administration who refused to cooperate with one of the chief investigations into the Capitol riot.The trial also amounted to an unusual test of congressional authority. Since the 1970s, referrals for criminal contempt of Congress have rarely resulted in the Justice Department’s bringing charges. Mr. Navarro was indicted last June on two misdemeanor counts of contempt, one for failing to appear for a deposition and another for refusing to provide documents in response to the committee’s subpoena.The rapid pace of the trial reflected, in part, the fact that the case turned on a straightforward question, whether Mr. Navarro had willfully defied lawmakers in flouting a subpoena. Even before the trial began, Judge Amit P. Mehta, who presided over the case, dealt a blow to Mr. Navarro by ruling that he could not use in court what he has publicly cast as his principal defense: that Mr. Trump personally directed him not to cooperate and that he was protected by those claims of executive privilege.Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and a strident critic of China, devised some of the Trump administration’s most adversarial trade policies toward the country. Once the pandemic took hold, he helped coordinate the United States’s response by securing equipment like face masks and ventilators. But after the 2020 election, he became more focused on plans to keep Mr. Trump in power.Mr. Navarro was of particular interest to the committee because of his frequent television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud.He also documented those assertions in a three-part report on purported election irregularities, as well as in a memoir he published after he left the White House. In the book, Mr. Navarro described a strategy he had devised with Mr. Bannon known as the Green Bay Sweep, aimed at overturning the results of the election in key swing states that had been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr.But when the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify last February, he repeatedly insisted that Mr. Trump had ordered him not to cooperate. By asserting executive privilege, he argued, the former president had granted him immunity from Congress’s demands.The question of executive privilege prompted more than a year of legal wrangling over whether Mr. Navarro could invoke that at a time when Mr. Trump was no longer president. Judge Mehta ruled last week that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee.Asked after his verdict why he had not merely asked Mr. Trump to provide testimony that corroborated his claims, Mr. Navarro said the former president was too preoccupied with his own legal troubles.“You may have noticed that he’s fighting four different indictments in three different jurisdictions thousands of miles away, OK?” he said. “We chose not to go there.”In closing arguments on Thursday, prosecutors and defense lawyers dueled over whether Mr. Navarro’s refusal to cooperate with the committee amounted to a willful defiance of Congress, or a simple misunderstanding.“The defendant, Peter Navarro, made a choice,” said Elizabeth Aloi, a prosecutor. “He didn’t want to comply and produce documents, and he didn’t want to testify, so he didn’t.”Detailing the House committee’s correspondence with Mr. Navarro, Ms. Aloi said that even after the panel asked Mr. Navarro to explain any opposition he had to giving sworn testimony, he continued to stonewall.“The defendant chose allegiance to President Trump over compliance with the subpoena,” she said. “That is contempt. That is a crime.”Stanley Woodward Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Navarro, countered that the government had not successfully shown that Mr. Navarro’s failure to comply was anything other than “inadvertence, accident or mistake.” Mr. Woodward presented next to no evidence in Mr. Navarro’s defense and instead sought to poke holes in the government’s case that Mr. Navarro had deliberately disregarded the committee.“Where was Dr. Navarro on March 2, 2022?” Mr. Woodward asked, referring to the date that Mr. Navarro was instructed to appear before the panel.“We don’t know,” he said. “Why didn’t the government present evidence to you about where Dr. Navarro was or what he was doing?”Prosecutors also emphasized the role that Mr. Navarro’s falsehoods may have played in drawing scores of rioters to Washington to disrupt Congress’s certification of the results.That caused Mr. Woodward to bristle, telling the jury that the government was relying on emotional descriptions to tarnish Mr. Navarro’s image, rather than proving he ever intended to blow off lawmakers.Others in Mr. Trump’s inner circle cooperated with the panel in a more limited fashion and avoided criminal charges.Two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Roger J. Stone Jr. and Michael T. Flynn, appeared before the committee but declined to answer most of its questions by citing their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and his deputy, Dan Scavino, each negotiated terms with the committee to provide documents but not testimony.During the trial, prosecutors emphasized that Mr. Navarro could have taken a similar tack. The panel had informed Mr. Navarro that if he sought to invoke privilege, he should do so in person, as well as list any documents he believed were protected.“Even if he believed he had an excuse, it does not matter,” Ms. Aloi told members of the jury moments before they left the courtroom to deliberate. “He had to comply with the subpoena no matter what, and assert any privileges in the way Congress set forth.” More

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      What Happens if Mitch McConnell Resigns Before His Senate Term Ends?

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      The longtime Republican leader froze up during a news conference on Wednesday in Kentucky. The second such episode in recent weeks, it stirred speculation about his future in the Senate.For the second time in a little over a month, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longtime Republican leader, froze up during a news conference on Wednesday, elevating concerns about his health and his ability to complete his term that ends in January 2027.At an event hosted by the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Mr. McConnell, 81, who was elected to his seventh term in 2020, paused for about 30 seconds while responding to a reporter’s question about his re-election plans.The abrupt spell — like one at the U.S. Capitol in July — happened in front of the cameras. In March, a fall left him with a concussion. He suffered at least two other falls that were not disclosed by his office.Mr. McConnell has brushed off past questions about his health, but speculation is swirling again about what would happen in the unlikely event that he retired in the middle of his term.How would the vacancy be filled?For decades in Kentucky, the power to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Senate was reserved exclusively for the governor, regardless of whether an incumbent stepped down, died in office or was expelled from Congress.But with Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, in the state’s highest office, Republican lawmakers used their legislative supermajorities to change the state law in 2021.Under the new law, a state executive committee consisting of members of the same political party as the departing incumbent senator will name three candidates the governor can choose from to fill the vacancy on a temporary basis. Then a special election would be set, and its timing would depend on when the vacancy occurs.At the time that G.O.P. lawmakers introduced the change, Mr. McConnell supported the measure. Mr. Beshear, who is up for re-election this November, vetoed the bill, but was overridden by the Legislature.Who might follow McConnell in the Senate?Several Republicans could be in the mix to fill the seat in the unlikely scenario that Mr. McConnell, the longest-serving leader in the Senate, stepped down including Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general; Ryan Quarles, the agricultural commissioner; Kelly Craft, a former U.N. ambassador under former President Donald Trump and Representative Andy Barr.Photographs by Jon Cherry for The New York Times; Grace Ramey/Daily News, via Associated Press and Alex Brandon/Associated Press.In a state won handily by former President Donald J. Trump, several Republicans could be in the mix should Mr. McConnell, the longest-serving leader in the Senate, step down.But replacing him with a unflagging ally of the former president could rankle Mr. McConnell, who has become a fairly sharp, if cautious, critic of Mr. Trump after the former president’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.One name to watch could be Daniel Cameron, the state’s attorney general, who is challenging Mr. Beshear in the governor’s race and has been considered at times an heir apparent to Mr. McConnell.Should he lose his bid for governor — which drew an early endorsement from Mr. Trump — talk of succession could be inevitable despite his connection to the former president.Ryan Quarles, the well-liked agricultural commissioner, might also be a contender. He lost this year’s primary to Mr. Cameron in the governor’s race.Kelly Craft, a former U.N. ambassador under Mr. Trump, who finished third in that primary, has the political connections to seemingly be part of the conversation. She is married to a coal-industry billionaire, who spent millions on advertising for her primary campaign.And then there is Representative Andy Barr, who has drawn comparisons to Mr. McConnell and who described Mr. Trump’s conduct as “regrettable and irresponsible,” but voted against impeachment after the riot at the Capitol.What have McConnell and his aides said about his health?Both times that Mr. McConnell froze up in front of the cameras, his aides have said that he felt lightheaded.But his office has shared few details about what caused the episodes or about his overall health. He missed several weeks from the Senate this year while recovering from the concussion in March, which required his hospitalization.Mr. McConnell, who had polio as a child, has repeatedly played down concerns about his health and at-times frail appearance.“I’m not going anywhere,” he told reporters earlier this year.How is Congress dealing with other lawmakers’ health issues?For the current Congress, the average age in the Senate is 64 years, the second oldest in history, according to the Congressional Research Service.Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California who is the chamber’s oldest member at 90, has faced health problems this year that have prompted growing calls for her to step down.In February, she was hospitalized with a severe case of shingles, causing encephalitis and other complications that were not publicly disclosed. She did not return to the Senate until May, when she appeared frailer than ever and disoriented.This month, she was hospitalized after a fall in her San Francisco home.Longtime senators are not the only ones in the chamber grappling with health concerns.John Fetterman, a Democrat who was Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, suffered a near-fatal stroke last May and went on to win one of the most competitive Senate seats in November’s midterm elections.Nick Corasaniti More

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      Trump’s Indictments: Key Players in the 2020 Election Effort

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      It can be unsettling to see just how many people got involved in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 race. The mania spread far and wide to encompass administration officials, party apparatchiks and random MAGA foot soldiers. We’ve broken them down into six main groups. At the dark heart of the […] More

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      N.H. GOP Fights 14th Amendment Bid to Bar Trump From Ballot

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      In New Hampshire, Republicans are feuding over whether the 14th Amendment bars Donald J. Trump from running for president. Other states are watching closely.New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary is quickly becoming the leading edge for an unproven legal theory that Donald J. Trump is disqualified from appearing on the ballot under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.A long-shot presidential candidate has filed a lawsuit in state court seeking an injunction to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. And a former Republican candidate for Senate is urging the secretary of state to bring a case that could put the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court.On Wednesday, Free Speech for the People, a liberal-leaning group that unsuccessfully tried to strike House Republicans from the ballot in 2022, sent a letter to the secretaries of state in New Hampshire, as well as Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin, urging them to bar Mr. Trump from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.These efforts employ a theory that has been gaining traction among liberals and anti-Trump conservatives: that Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, disqualify him under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars people from holding office if they took an oath to support the Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”The theory has been gaining momentum since two prominent conservative law professors published an article this month concluding that Mr. Trump is constitutionally disqualified from running for office.But even advocates of the disqualification theory say it is a legal long shot. If a secretary of state strikes Mr. Trump’s name or a voter lawsuit advances, Mr. Trump’s campaign is sure to appeal, possibly all the way to the Supreme Court, where the 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices nominated by Mr. Trump.“When it gets to the Supreme Court, as it surely will, this will test the dedication of the justices to principles of law, more than almost anything has for a very long time,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard who believes the insurrection disqualification clearly applies to Mr. Trump, “because they will obviously realize that telling the leading candidate of one major political party, ‘no, no way, you’re not eligible’ is no small matter.”However long the odds of success, discussion of the amendment is bubbling up across the country. In Arizona, the secretary of state said he had heard from “concerned citizens” about the issue, and the Michigan secretary of state said she was “taking it seriously.” In Georgia, officials are looking at precedent set by a failed attempt to use the 14th Amendment to disqualify Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from the ballot in the 2022 midterms.But New Hampshire has jumped out as the early hotbed of the fight.The New Hampshire Republican Party said this week that it would challenge any effort to remove Mr. Trump, or any other candidates who have met requirements, from the ballot.“There’s no question that we will fight, and we’ll use all of the tools available to us to fight anyone’s access being denied on the ballot,” said Chris Ager, a Republican state committeeman in New Hampshire. “And if there’s a lawsuit, we are likely to intervene on behalf of the candidate to make sure that they have access. So we take it very seriously that the people of New Hampshire should decide who the nominee is, not a judge, not a justice system.”Chris Ager, a Republican state committeeman in New Hampshire, shaking Mr. Trump’s hand at the state party meeting in January.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLate last week, Bryant Messner, a former Trump-endorsed candidate for U.S. Senate, who goes by Corky, met with New Hampshire’s secretary of state, David M. Scanlan, to urge him to seek legal guidance on the issue. After Politico first reported the meeting, Mr. Scanlan and John M. Formella, the state’s attorney general, issued a joint statement saying that “the attorney general’s office is now carefully reviewing the legal issues involved.”Other secretaries of state have also been seeking legal guidance.“We’re taking a very cautious approach to the issue,” Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, said in an interview. “We’re going to be consulting with lawyers in our office and other folks who will eventually have to deal with this in the courts as well. We don’t anticipate that any decision that I or any other election administrator might make will be the final decision. This will get ultimately decided by the courts.”Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, said his office had already heard from “concerned citizens” regarding Mr. Trump’s eligibility under the 14th Amendment.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesThough the argument is particularly appealing to liberals who view Mr. Trump as a grave threat, most of the recent momentum on this topic has come from conservative circles.Mr. Messner, a self-described “constitutional conservative,” said he was seeking to create case law around the issue. He said he had not yet filed a legal challenge because he first wanted the secretary of state to open up the candidate filing period and decide whether he would accept Mr. Trump’s filing. He argued that the lawsuit filed on Sunday by a Republican candidate, John Anthony Castro, was unlikely to advance because the filing period has not yet opened.“Section 3 has not been interpreted,” Mr. Messner said in an interview. “So, my position is let’s find a way for this to get into the court system as soon as possible. And then hopefully we can expedite through the legal system, to get it to the Supreme Court as soon as possible.”The precedent is by no means settled. A case filed against then-Representative Madison Cawthorn, Republican of North Carolina, ended with Judge Richard E. Myers II of U.S. District Court, an appointee of Mr. Trump, siding with Mr. Cawthorn. The judge ruled that the final clause of Section 3 allowed for a vote in Congress to “remove” the disqualification and that the passage of the Amnesty Act of 1872 effectively nullified the ban on insurrectionists.But on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit overruled that argument, saying the Amnesty Act clearly applied only to confederates, not future insurrectionists. The case was declared moot after Mr. Cawthorn lost his re-election in the 2022 primaries.Other cases may also come into play. An administrative law judge in Georgia ruled that plaintiffs failed to prove that Ms. Greene, Republican of Georgia, was in fact an insurrectionist. And cases against Representatives Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, Republicans of Arizona, were similarly dropped.Advocates of the disqualification clause fear that judges and secretaries of state could decide that any case against Mr. Trump will have to wait until a jury, either in Fulton County, Ga., or Washington, D.C., renders judgment in the two criminal cases charging that Mr. Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia indicated that previous cases involving Ms. Greene would continue to guide his office, and that “as secretary of state of Georgia, I have been clear that I believe voters are smart and deserve the right to decide elections.”“In Georgia, there is a specific statutory process to follow when a candidate’s qualifications for office are challenged,” Mr. Raffensperger said in a statement. “The secretary of state’s office has and will continue to follow the appropriate procedures in state law for any candidate challenges.”There has been one settled case since Jan. 6 that invoked the 14th Amendment. In September, a judge in New Mexico ordered a county commissioner convicted of participating in the Jan. 6 riot removed from office under the 14th Amendment. He was the first public official in more than a century to be barred from serving under a constitutional ban on insurrectionists holding office. More

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      Ramaswamy Relies on Denialism When Challenged on Flip-Flopping Positions

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      In clashes with the news media and his rivals, the Republican upstart has retreated from past comments and lied about on-the-record statements.In his breakout performance in the Republican primary race, Vivek Ramaswamy has harnessed his populist bravado while frequently and unapologetically contorting the truth for political gain, much in the same way that former President Donald J. Trump has mastered.Mr. Ramaswamy’s pattern of falsehoods has been the subject of intensifying scrutiny by the news media and, more recently, his G.O.P. opponents, who clashed with him often during the party’s first debate last Wednesday.There are layers to Mr. Ramaswamy’s distortions: He has spread lies and exaggerations on subjects including the 2020 election results, the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol and climate change. When challenged on those statements, Mr. Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is the first millennial Republican to run for president, has in several instances claimed that he had never made them or that he had been taken out of context.But his denials have repeatedly been refuted by recordings and transcripts from Mr. Ramaswamy’s interviews — or, in some cases, excerpts from his own book.Here are some notable occasions when he sought to retreat from his past statements or mischaracterized basic facts:A misleading anecdoteAt a breakfast round table event organized by his campaign on Friday in Indianola, Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy recounted how he had visited the South Side of Chicago in May to promote his immigration proposals to a mostly Black audience.He boasted that nowhere had his ideas on the issue been more enthusiastically received than in the nation’s third most populous city, where his appearance had followed community protests over the housing of migrants in a local high school.“I have never been in a room more in favor of my proposal to use the U.S. military to secure the southern border and seal the Swiss cheese down there than when I was in a nearly all-Black room of supposedly mostly Democrats on the South Side of Chicago,” he said.But Mr. Ramaswamy’s retelling of the anecdote was sharply contradicted by the observations of a New York Times reporter who covered both events.The reporter witnessed the audience in Chicago pepper Mr. Ramaswamy about reparations, systemic racism and his opposition to affirmative action. Immigration was barely mentioned during the formal program. It was so absent that a Ramaswamy campaign aide at one point pleaded for questions on the issue. With that prompting, a single Republican consultant stood up to question Mr. Ramaswamy on his proposals.Trump criticismAt the first Republican debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey accused Mr. Ramaswamy of changing positions on Donald Trump.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesIn one of the more heated exchanges of last week’s G.O.P. debate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey criticized Mr. Ramaswamy for lionizing Mr. Trump and defending his actions during the Jan. 6 attack.He sought to cast Mr. Ramaswamy as an opportunist who was trying to pander to Mr. Trump’s supporters by attributing the riot to government censorship during the 2020 election.“In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Ramaswamy bristled and said, “That’s not true.”But in his 2022 book “Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence,” Mr. Ramaswamy had harsh words for Mr. Trump and gave a more somber assessment of the violence.“It was a dark day for democracy,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”When asked by The Times about the excerpt, Mr. Ramaswamy insisted that his rhetoric had not evolved and pointed out that he had co-written an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal five days after the Jan. 6 attack that was critical of the actions of social media companies during the 2020 election.“Also what I said at the time was that I really thought what Trump did was regrettable,” he said. “I would have handled it very differently if I was in his shoes. I will remind you that I am running for U.S. president in the same race that Donald Trump is running right now.”Mr. Ramaswamy parsed his criticism of the former president, however.“But a bad judgment is not the same thing as a crime,” he said.During the debate, Mr. Ramaswamy also sparred with former Vice President Mike Pence, whose senior aide and onetime chief of staff Marc Short told NBC News the next day that Mr. Ramaswamy was not a genuine populist.“There’s populism and then there’s just simply fraud,” he said.By blunting his message about the former president’s accountability and casting himself as an outsider, Mr. Ramaswamy appears to be making a play for Mr. Trump’s base — and the G.O.P. front-runner has taken notice.In a conversation on Tuesday with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck, Mr. Trump said that he was open to selecting Mr. Ramaswamy as his running mate, but he had some advice for him.“He’s starting to get out there a little bit,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s getting a little bit controversial. I got to tell him: ‘Be a little bit careful. Some things you have to hold in just a little bit, right?’”Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11Since entering the race, Mr. Ramaswamy has repeatedly floated conspiracy theories about a cover-up by the federal government in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a narrative seemingly tailored to members of the G.O.P.’s right wing who are deeply distrustful of institutions.In a recent profile by The Atlantic, he told the magazine, “I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the twin towers.”While he acknowledged that he had “no reason” to believe that the number was “anything other than zero,” Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that the government had not been transparent about the attacks.“But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to,” he said.Yet when Mr. Ramaswamy was asked to clarify those remarks by Kaitlan Collins of CNN two nights before last week’s debate, he backtracked and accused The Atlantic of misquoting him.“I’m telling you the quote is wrong, actually,” he said.Soon after Mr. Ramaswamy claimed that his words had been twisted, The Atlantic released a recording and transcript from the interview that confirmed that he had indeed been quoted accurately.When asked in an interview on Saturday whether the audio had undercut his argument, Mr. Ramaswamy reiterated his contention that the news media had often misrepresented him.“I think there’s a reason why,” he said, suggesting that his free-flowing way of speaking broke the mold of so-called scripted candidates. “I just don’t speak like a traditional politician, and I think the system is not used to that. The political media is not used to that. And that lends itself naturally then to being inaccurately portrayed, to being distorted.”Mr. Trump’s allies have used similar justifications when discussing the former president’s falsehoods, citing his stream-of-consciousness speaking style. His allies and supporters have admired his impulse to refuse to apologize or back down when called out, an approach Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed.Mr. Ramaswamy said that he was asked about Sept. 11 while discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and his repeated calls for an accounting of how many federal agents were in the field that day. His campaign described The Atlantic’s recording as a “snippet.”At the start of The Times’s conversation with Mr. Ramaswamy, he said that he assumed that the interview was being recorded and noted that his campaign was recording, too.“We’re now doing mutually on the record, so just F.Y.I.,” he said.Pardoning Hunter BidenIn one of many clashes with the news media, Mr. Ramaswamy accused The New York Post of misquoting him in an article about Hunter Biden.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesNo news outlet has been off-limits to Mr. Ramaswamy’s claims of being misquoted: This month, he denounced a New York Post headline that read: “GOP 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ‘open’ to pardon of Hunter Biden.”The Aug. 12 article cited an interview that The Post had conducted with him.“After we have shut down the F.B.I., after we have refurbished the Department of Justice, after we have systemically pardoned anyone who was a victim of a political motivated persecution — from Donald Trump and peaceful January 6 protests — then would I would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward,” Mr. Ramaswamy was quoted as saying.The next morning on Fox News Channel, which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp, Mr. Ramaswamy told the anchor Maria Bartiromo that the report was erroneous.“Maria, that was misquoted and purposeful opposition research with the headline,” he said. “You know how this game is played.”The Post did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ramaswamy described the headline as “manufactured” and said it was part of “the ridiculous farce of this gotcha game.”Aid to IsraelMr. Ramaswamy clashed with Fox News host Sean Hannity Monday night when confronted with comments he has made about aid to Israel. Mr. Ramaswamy accused Mr. Hannity of misrepresenting his views.“You said aid to Israel, our No. 1 ally, only democracy in the region, should end in 2028,” Mr. Hannity said in the interview. “And that they should be integrated with their neighbors.”“That’s false,” Mr. Ramaswamy responded.“I have an exact quote, do you want me to read it?” Mr. Hannity asked.Mr. Ramaswamy’s rhetoric about support for Israel has shifted.During a campaign event in New Hampshire earlier this month, Mr. Ramaswamy called the deal to provide Israel with $38 billion over 10 years “sacrosanct.” But a few weeks later in an interview with The Free Beacon, a conservative website, he said that he hoped that Israel would “not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.” by 2028, when the deal expires.Wearing masksIn the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic, the Masks for All Act, a bill proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont that aimed to provide every person in the United States with three free N95 masks, appeared to receive an unlikely endorsement on Twitter — from Mr. Ramaswamy.“My policy views don’t often align with Bernie, but this strikes me as a sensible idea,” he wrote in July 2020. “The cost is a tiny fraction of other less compelling federal expenditures on COVID-19.”Mr. Ramaswamy was responding to an opinion column written for CNN by Mr. Sanders, who is a democratic socialist, and Andy Slavitt, who was later a top pandemic adviser to Mr. Biden. He said they should have picked someone from the political right as a co-author to show that there was a consensus on masks.But when he was pressed this summer by Josie Glabach of the Red Headed Libertarian podcast about whether he had ever supported Mr. Sanders’s mask measure, he answered no.When asked by The Times for further clarification, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged that he was an early supporter of wearing masks, but said that he no longer believed that they prevented the spread of the virus. He accused his political opponents of conflating his initial stance with support for mask mandates, which he said he had consistently opposed.An analogy to Rosa Parks?Mr. Ramaswamy appeared to compare Edward J. Snowden to Rosa Parks before immediately distancing himself from the comment.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesWhen he was asked by the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on his show in June whether he would pardon the former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden for leaking documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, Mr. Ramaswamy said yes and invoked an unexpected name: the civil rights icon Rosa Parks.He said that Mr. Snowden, a fugitive, had demonstrated heroism to hold the government accountable.“Part of what makes that risk admirable — Rosa Parks long ago — is the willingness to bear punishment he already has,” he said. “That’s also why I would ensure that he was a free man.”To Mr. Hewitt, the analogy was jarring.“Wait, wait, wait, did you just compare Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden?” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy immediately distanced himself from such a comparison, while then reinforcing it, suggesting that they had both effectuated progress of a different kind.“No, I did not,” he said. “But I did compare the aspect of their willingness to take a risk in order for at the time breaking a rule that at the time was punishable.” More

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      When I Tell You Nikki Haley Is Pathetic, That’s an Understatement

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      I wish it were as simple as that one Republican debate.I wish the Nikki Haley onstage in Milwaukee last week — who called out Donald Trump for his profligate government spending, who implored her fellow Republicans to approach the issue of abortion more sensibly and less sadistically, who made a meal of Vivek Ramaswamy — were guaranteed to be the Nikki Haley on the campaign trail next week, next month or next year.But I have this thing called a memory, and as one of my favorite classic rock bands pledged, I won’t get fooled again. Past Haley, present Haley, future Haley: They’re all constructs, all creations, malleable, negotiable, tethered not to dependable principle but to reliable opportunism. That’s the truth of her. That’s the hell of her.I say “hell” because what she displayed on that debate stage was the precise mix of authority and humanity that fueled her political rise, made her a political star and stirred speculation that she might be the country’s first woman president. I understand why so many observers got so excited. Haley was exciting.She has undeniable smarts and formidable talent, as Vivek Ramaswamy learned. She treated his so-called foreign policy as so many nonsense words scrawled with crayon in a toddler’s coloring book. Then she tore the pages of that book to shreds, doing to it in mere seconds what she has done to her own reputation over the past seven years.I could trace all her zigs and zags since early 2016: her initially ardent opposition to Trump’s candidacy, her speedy capitulation, her stint in his administration as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and so on. But they were covered in an excellent essay in The Times by Stuart Stevens early this year, and a span of mere months, from December 2020 to April 2021, tells the saga of her signature spinelessness just as well.That December, she sat down with the journalist Tim Alberta, then with Politico, for one of several interviews for an epic profile of her that he was writing. For a month Trump had been denying the results of the presidential election, spreading his conspiracy theories, undermining the peaceful transfer of power and doing profound damage to the country. And while Haley let Alberta know that she had the president’s ear and had called him in the middle of it all, she made equally clear that she hadn’t felt a smidgen of responsibility to talk some sense and decency into him.“Here was Haley, someone with a reputation for speaking candidly to Trump, someone who had the courage as governor to remove the Confederate flag from her state capitol, admitting that she hadn’t bothered to challenge him — even in private — on a deception that threatened the stability of American life,” Alberta marveled. “Why not?”Haley answered Alberta: “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged.” For Haley, that absolved her of any patriotic duty and Trump of any blame for the havoc that he was wreaking. The guilty parties, she told Alberta, were the lawyers abetting his delusions. Astonishingly, she seemed not to grasp that she was abetting right alongside them.Her rationalizations “were so strained that they called into question her own judgment,” Alberta wrote. “This was a test for Haley, an early opportunity to define herself on a question of great national urgency. And she was failing.”But wait. Along came the insurrection of Jan. 6, and Haley suddenly snapped to. She talked to Alberta on Jan. 12. She told him she was “disgusted” by Trump’s treatment of Mike Pence. “When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” she said.Trump, she seethed, “went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.” A belated epiphany. An inspiring vow. Cue the orchestra.Stop the music. By April, her ire was embers and her vow a puff of smoke. At a public appearance in Orangeburg, S.C., she told The Associated Press that if Trump decided to run for president again, she would support him and would not seek the Republican Party’s nomination herself. (Ha!)He was still publicly excoriating Pence, but she was singing a new song about that. “I think former President Trump’s always been opinionated,” she said, as if that were just a cute little character quirk.What had changed since January? The Senate had acquitted Trump of the charges that led to his second impeachment. Many other Republican leaders had moved on from any denunciations of his actions on Jan. 6. And his hold on the party’s base had proved enduring.So Haley’s “shouldn’t have followed him” yielded to her falling in line — for the time being.When I tell you that’s pathetic, it’s an understatement. More

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      Hearings in Two Trump Jan. 6 Cases Set for Monday

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      Proceedings before federal judges in Washington and Atlanta could begin to address some of the many complexities and scheduling challenges in the cases against the former president.By the end of Monday, another piece could be put in place in the complicated jigsaw puzzle of the four criminal cases facing former President Donald J. Trump: A date could be chosen for Mr. Trump’s federal trial on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.At a hearing on Monday morning in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was considering widely differing proposals for the date of the trial, and could select one.In dueling court papers filed this month, the government and Mr. Trump’s lawyers each proposed ambitious schedules for the trial, with prosecutors asking for the case to be put before a jury as early as Jan. 2 and the defense requesting that it be put off for more than two years, until April 2026. As Judge Chutkan considered the arguments, another legal proceeding related to Mr. Trump was set to play out on Monday in federal court in Atlanta, underscoring the complexity of bringing the charges against him to trial.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., recently proposed starting a trial in her case against Mr. Trump, on charges of tampering with the 2020 election in that state, in March. But that date remains somewhat uncertain not only because of the jockeying among prosecutors over the timing of the different cases, but also because some of Mr. Trump’s 18 co-defendants in the case have asked for the trial to start as early as this fall while others want to slow things down.At the same time Judge Chutkan took the bench in Washington, a federal judge in Atlanta was scheduled to hold a hearing to determine if one of those co-defendants in the Georgia case, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, can remove his charges from the state judicial system and have them heard in federal court.Mr. Meadows has argued that he is immune to the state charges because all of the acts underlying the accusations against him were performed as part of his official duties as a federal official. But prosecutors working for Ms. Willis have countered that the charges relate to Mr. Meadows’s political activities during a re-election campaign, which fall outside of his formal government responsibilities.Mr. Meadows was on the line in January 2021, when Mr. Trump placed a call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “find” enough votes for Mr. Trump to win the election there. Prosecutors issued a subpoena last week to have Mr. Raffensperger, among others, testify at the hearing in Atlanta.In most legal proceedings, the selection of a trial date is a largely mundane matter, depending on the number of defendants, the amount of evidence, and the schedules of the judge, prosecutors and defense lawyers.But the timetables for Mr. Trump’s four trials have taken on outsize importance. That is not only because there are so many of them, each one needing a slot, but also because they are unfolding against Mr. Trump’s crowded calendar as the candidate leading the field for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination.As a further complication, Mr. Trump has made no secret in private conversations with his aides of his desire to solve his jumble of legal problems by winning the election. If either of the two federal trials he is confronting is delayed until after the race and Mr. Trump prevails, he could seek to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general simply dismiss the matters altogether.At Monday’s hearing in Washington on the federal election charges, Judge Chutkan has said she also intends to discuss a schedule for handling the small amount of classified material that may emerge as evidence in the case. If she ultimately agrees to the government’s request to start the trial in January, it would be the first of Mr. Trump’s four cases to be tested in a courtroom.Prosecutors from the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, brought the case early this month, filing an indictment against Mr. Trump in Washington after months of intense investigation. The indictment charges the former president with three overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted.Another one of Mr. Trump’s trials, in which he has been charged with 34 felonies connected to hush money payments to a porn star in the run-up to the 2016 election, is set to start in March in a state court in Manhattan. Another, in which he stands accused of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents after leaving office, is set to go before a jury in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., near the end of May. More