Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Giuliani Sat for Voluntary Interview in Jan. 6 Investigation

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      The onetime personal lawyer for Donald Trump answered questions from federal prosecutors about the former president’s efforts to remain in power after his 2020 election loss.Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, was interviewed last week by federal prosecutors investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, people familiar with the matter said.The voluntary interview, which took place under what is known as a proffer agreement, was a significant development in the election interference investigation led by Jack Smith, the special counsel, and the latest indication that Mr. Smith and his team are actively seeking witnesses who might cooperate in the case.The session with Mr. Giuliani, the people familiar with it said, touched on some of the most important aspects of the special counsel’s inquiry into the ways that Mr. Trump sought to maintain his grip on power after losing the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr.“The appearance was entirely voluntary and conducted in a professional manner,” said Ted Goodman, a political adviser to Mr. Giuliani.A proffer agreement is an understanding between prosecutors and people who are subjects of criminal investigations that can precede a formal cooperation deal. The subjects agree to provide useful information to the government, sometimes to tell their side of events, to stave off potential charges or to avoid testifying under subpoena before a grand jury. In exchange, prosecutors agree not to use those statements against them in future criminal proceedings unless it is determined they were lying.Prosecutors working for Mr. Smith asked Mr. Giuliani about a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were actually won by Mr. Biden, one person familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. They focused specifically on the role played in that effort by John Eastman, another lawyer who advised Mr. Trump about ways to stay in office after his defeat.Mr. Giuliani also discussed Sidney Powell, a lawyer who was briefly tied to Mr. Trump’s campaign and who made baseless claims about a cabal of foreign actors hacking into voting machines to steal the election from Mr. Trump, the person said.Ms. Powell, who was sanctioned by a federal judge for promoting conspiracy theories about the voting machines, also took part in a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020 during which Mr. Trump was presented with a brazen plan — opposed by Mr. Giuliani — to use the military to seize control of voting machines and rerun the election.The person said that prosecutors further asked Mr. Giuliani about the scene at the Willard Hotel days before the attack on the Capitol. Mr. Giuliani and a group of close Trump advisers — among them, Mr. Eastman, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Mr. Trump’s current adviser Boris Epshteyn — had gathered at the hotel, near the White House, to discuss strategies before a violent mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, disrupting the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump.Shortly before Mr. Smith was appointed to his job as special counsel, the Justice Department issued a subpoena to Mr. Giuliani.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe proffer session with Mr. Giuliani, elements of which were reported earlier by CNN, came as Mr. Smith’s team pressed ahead with its election interference inquiry of Mr. Trump even as it prepares for the former president’s trial on separate charges of putting national security secrets at risk and obstructing government efforts to recover classified documents.The prosecutors have been bringing witnesses before a grand jury and conducting separate interviews of others as they seek to assemble a fuller picture of the various ways in which Mr. Trump and his allies were promoting baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him and seeking to reverse his electoral defeat.In some cases, they appear to be gauging whether they can elicit useful information without necessarily agreeing to formal cooperation deals.Last week, The New York Times reported that prosecutors were in negotiations to reach a proffer agreement with Michael Roman, the former director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign. Mr. Roman was also instrumental in helping put together the so-called fake elector plan.The push to assemble slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Mr. Biden is one of a number of components of Mr. Smith’s investigation. Prosecutors have also scrutinized whether Mr. Trump and his allies bilked donors by raising money through false claims of election fraud, examined efforts to use the Justice Department to give credence to election-fraud claims and sought to piece together a detailed picture of the role played by Mr. Trump in inciting the attack on the Capitol and the disruption of the congressional certification of his loss.It remains unclear whether Mr. Giuliani will face charges in the special counsel’s investigation. He is also under scrutiny on many of the same subjects by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is pursuing a wide-ranging investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss in that swing state.As part of Mr. Smith’s inquiry, prosecutors questioned Mr. Roman’s deputy, Gary Michael Brown, last week in front of a grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington that has been investigating the attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the election. Federal prosecutors on Wednesday are also scheduled to interview Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, who took a call from Mr. Trump in early January 2021 during which the former president asked him to “find” sufficient votes that would put him over the top in the election in that state.A longtime ally of Mr. Trump who served two terms as New York City’s mayor, Mr. Giuliani effectively led the former president’s attempts to overturn his defeat in the last presidential race and has for months been a chief focus of the Justice Department’s broad investigation into the postelection period. His name has appeared on several subpoenas sent to former aides to Mr. Trump and to a host of Republican state officials involved in the plan to create fake slates of electors.Last year, shortly before Mr. Smith was appointed to his job as special counsel, the Justice Department issued a subpoena to Mr. Giuliani for records related to his representation of Mr. Trump, including those that detailed any payments he had received. A group of federal prosecutors including Thomas Windom had been pursuing various strands of the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power before Mr. Smith’s appointment and they continue to play key roles in the investigation.Among the things that prosecutors have been examining are the inner workings of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising vehicle, Save America PAC. The records subpoenaed from Mr. Giuliani could include some related to payments made by the PAC, according to a person familiar with the matter.More recently, prosecutors have been asking questions about Mr. Trump’s false claims that his defeat in the election was caused by widespread fraud, and how he aggressively raised money off those claims. The prosecutors have drilled down on the issue of whether people around Mr. Trump knew that he had lost the race, but continued raising money off the fraud claims anyway.The session with Mr. Giuliani came as Mr. Smith’s team pressed ahead with its election interference inquiry of Mr. Trump.John Tully for The New York TimesThe House select committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 first raised questions publicly about Mr. Trump’s fund-raising, and the special counsel’s team has picked up on that thread. Among other questions they have asked witnesses is whether their lawyers are being paid for by the political action committee that became a repository for money raised off Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud.Investigators have walked through a timeline with various witnesses, including asking people about election night and what Mr. Giuliani may have been telling Mr. Trump before his defiant speech declaring he had won the election, as well as about Jan. 6 and Mr. Trump’s actions that day.The special counsel’s office has focused on Mr. Trump’s mind-set and who was telling him he lost, according to people familiar with the questions. Among the questions has been whether there were concerns raised among people working with the campaign as to the language used in television ads about fraud in December 2020, and who signed off on the ad copy.Prosecutors also subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence, who was a key focus of Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in power as Mr. Trump tried to pressure him to use his ceremonial role overseeing congressional certification to block Mr. Biden from being certified. More

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      This Is Why Trump Lies Like There’s No Tomorrow

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      Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency. This challenges commonplace beliefs about the American political system. How could such a deceitful and duplicitous figure win the White House in the first place and then retain the loyalty of so many voters after his endless lies were exposed?George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M and a retired editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, states the case bluntly: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president.” What’s more, “There is no one that is a close second.”Trump’s deceptions have been explored from several vantage points. Let’s take a look at one line of analysis.In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:Lying in the name of the collective good occurs commonly. Such lies are frequently told in business, politics, sports, and many other areas of human life. These lies are so common that they have acquired a specific name, the “blue lie” — purportedly originating from cases where police officers made false statements to protect the police force or to ensure the success of the government’s legal case against an accused.How does that relate to the willingness of Republican and conservative voters to tolerate Trump’s lies — not just to tolerate them, but to cast votes for him again and again?In a 2017, a Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” by Jeremy Adam Smith, argues that Lee’s workhighlights a difficult truth about our species: we are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit.If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”Lee’s insights provide a partial explanation for the loyalty-to-Trump phenomenon, but gaining an understanding of Trump’s intractable mendacity requires several approaches.The deference, or obeisance, of so many seemingly well-informed Republican leaders and millions of Republican voters to Donald Trump’s palpably false claims — the most egregious and damaging of which is the claim the 2020 election was stolen from him — raises an intriguing question: How can this immense delusion persist when survival pressures would seem to foster growing percentages of men and women capable of making discerning, accurate judgments?In their March 10 paper, “The Cognitive Foundations of Ideological Orthodoxy: Threat Avoidance, Ingroup Mobilization and Signaling,” Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, pose the question this way:Navigating the world and solving problems would seem, by default, to be best done with beliefs that fulfill the epistemic goal of faithfully portraying how things are. Prima facie, one would thus expect selection to favor belief formation systems that prioritize accuracy and motivations to flexibly correct those beliefs in the face of compelling evidence and arguments, including in the domain of ideological beliefs.How, in this context, do powerful “orthodox mind-sets” emerge, the authors ask, mind-sets that restrict free thinking, armed with a “disproportionate righteousness with which they try to protect cherished narratives.”Marie and Petersen argue that these “orthodox mind-sets” may derive from three main cognitive foundations:First, oversensitive dispositions to detect threat, from human outgroups in particular. Second, motivations to try to mobilize in-group members for cooperative benefits and against rival groups, by using moral talk emphasizing collective benefits. Third, (unconscious) attempts to signal personal devotion to accrue prestige within the in-group.The prevalence of orthodox mind-sets in some realms of our political system is difficult to comprehend for those who are not caught up in it.In his June 23 article, “Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6,” my Times colleague Robert Draper captures how deeply entrenched conspiracy thinking has become in some quarters.“A far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced ‘J6’ as the animating force of their lives,” Draper writes. For these true believers, along with a faction of House Republicans, “Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceful Trump supporters, followed by a continuing Biden administration campaign to imprison and torment innocent conservatives.”Trump, over the past two years, has become “even more extreme, his tone more confrontational, his accounts less tethered to reality,” according to The Washington Post:Now, as Trump seeks to return to the White House, he speaks of Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day.” He says there was no reason for police to shoot the rioter attempting to break into the House chamber, and he denies there was any danger to his vice-president, Mike Pence, who was hiding from a pro-Trump mob that was chanting for him to be hanged.Another way to look at the issue of Trump’s deceptions is through his eyes.In the chapter “Truth” in “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning,” Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, has his own explanation of “why Donald Trump lies more than any other public official in the United States today, and why his supporters, nonetheless, put up with his lies.”For Trump, McAdams writes,Truth is effectively whatever it takes to win the moment, moment by moment, battle by battle — as the episodic man, shorn of any long-term story to make sense of his life, struggles to win the moment.Among the many reasons that Trump’s supporters excuse his lying is that they, like Trump himself, do not really hold him to the standards that human persons are held to. And that is because many of his supporters, like Trump himself, do not consider him to be a person — he is more like a primal force or superhero, more than a person, but less than a person, too.Part of Trump’s skill at persuading millions of voters to go along with his prevarications is his ability to tap into the deep-seated anger and resentment among his supporters. Anger, it turns out, encourages deception.In “Mad and Misleading: Incidental Anger Promotes Deception,” Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer of Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrate through a series of experiments thatAnger promotes the use of self-serving deception. The decision to engage in self-serving deception balances concern for oneself (i.e. self-interest) and concern for others (i.e. empathy). The greater concern individuals exhibit for themselves and the lower concern for others, the more deceitful they are likely to be.When individuals feel angry, Yip and Schweitzer continue,they are more likely to deceive others. We find that angry individuals are less concerned about the welfare of others, and consequently more likely to exhibit self-interested unethical behavior. Across our studies, we link incidental anger to self-serving deception.“Many people are angry about how they have been left behind in the current economic climate,” Schweitzer told the magazine The Greater Good in 2017. “Trump has tapped into that anger, and he is trusted because he professes to feel angry about the same things.”Trump, Schweitzer said, “has created a siege-like mentality. Foreign countries are out to get us; the media is out to get him. This is a rallying cry that bonds people together.”In some cases, lying by autocratic political leaders can be an attempt to weaken norms and institutions that restrict the scope of their actions.In their 2022 paper, “Authoritarian Leaders Share Conspiracy Theories to Attack Opponents, Promote In-Group Unity, Shift Blame, and Undermine Democratic Institutions,” Zhiying (Bella) Ren, Andrew M. Carton, Eugen Dimant and Schweitzer argue that such leaders use conspiracy theories “to undermine institutions that threaten their power” and “in some cases are even motivated to promote chaos.”More recent work suggests that the focus on anger as a driving force in supporting populist and authoritarian leaders in the mold of Donald Trump masks a more complex interpretation.In their paper “Does Anger Drive Populism?” published this month, Omer Ali of Duke, Klaus Desmet of Southern Methodist University and Romain Wacziarg of U.C.L.A. find that “a more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism.”“The incidence of anger,” they write,is positively related with the vote share of populist candidates, but it ceases to predict the populist vote share once we consider other dimensions of well-being and negative emotions.Hence, low subjective well-being and negative emotions in general drive populism, rather than anger in particular. This comes as a surprise in light of the growing discourse linking “American rage” and populism.While levels of anger, gloom and pessimism correlate with receptivity to populist appeals and to authoritarian candidates, another key factor is what scholars describe as the “social identity” of both leaders and followers.In a provocative recent paper, “Examining the Role of Donald Trump and His Supporters in the 2021 Assault on the U.S. Capitol: a Dual-agency Model of Identity Leadership and Engaged Followership,” S. Alexander Haslam, a professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Queensland, and 11 colleagues from the United States, Australia and England analyze the Jan. 6, 2001, mob assault and dispute the argument that “Leaders are akin to puppet masters who either influence their followers directly or not at all. Equally, followers are seen either as passive and entirely dependent on leaders or as entirely independent of them.”Instead, the 12 authors contend, a more nuanced analysis “recognizes the agency of both leaders and followers and stresses their mutual influence.” They call this approach “a dual-agency model of identity leadership and engaged followership in which both leaders and followers are understood to have influence over each other without being totally constrained by the other.”The authors describe a phenomenon in which Trump and his most ardent followers engage:Identity leadership refers to leaders’ capacity to influence and mobilize others by virtue of leaders’ abilities to represent, advance, create and embed a sense of social identity that is shared with potential followers.In the process, Trump’s supporters lose their connection to real-world rules and morality:Regardless of how others see them, followers themselves will rarely understand their actions in destructive terms. Instead, they typically perceive both the guidance of their leader and the objectives they are pursuing as virtuous and are willing to undertake extreme actions.This willingness to take extreme action grows out of a duality in the way people experience their identities:Humans have the capacity to define themselves not simply as individuals (i.e., in terms of personal identity as “me” and “I,” with unique traits, tastes and qualities) but also as members of social groups (i.e., in terms of social identity as “we” and “us,” e.g., “us conservatives,” “us Trump supporters,” “we Americans”).Social identities, they write, “are every bit as real and important to people as personal identities,” butthe psychological understandings of self that result from internalizing social identity are qualitatively distinct from those which flow from personal identities. This is primarily because social identities restructure social relations in ways that give rise to, and allow for the possibility of, collective behavior.Social identities become increasingly salient, and potentially more destructive, in times of intense partisan hostility and affective polarization, accentuating a climate of “us against them” and the demonization of the opposition.“In order for identity leadership to be effective,” the authors write,it is important that leaders construe the goals toward which a group is working as both vital and virtuous. In precisely this vein, another central feature of Trump’s address (on Jan. 6) to those who went on to attack the Capitol was his insistence on the righteousness of their cause.The authors then quote Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally on the ellipse near the White House shortly before the assault on the Capitol:As this enormous crowd shows, we have truth and justice on our side. We have a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts. We love our country. We have overwhelming pride in this great country and we have it deep in our souls. Together, we are determined to defend and preserve government of the people, by the people and for the people.At the same time, Trump portrayed his adversaries as the epitome of evil: “Trump reminded them not only of the good work they were doing to fight ‘bad’ actors and forces, but also of the challenges that this ‘dirty business’ presented.”Again, Haslam and his co-authors quote Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally:Together, we will drain the Washington swamp and we will clean up the corruption in our nation’s capital. We have done a big job on it, but you think it’s easy. It’s a dirty business. It’s a dirty business. You have a lot of bad people out there.Critically, the 12 scholars write, Trump “did not provide them with explicit instructions as to what to do,” noting that “he didn’t tell anyone to storm the barricades, to invade the speaker’s office, or to assault police and security guards.” Instead, Trump “invoked values of strength, determination and a willingness to fight for justice (using the word “fight” 20 times) without indicating who they should fight or how,” setting a goal for his followers “to ensure that the election results were not certified and thereby to ‘stop the steal’ without specifying how that goal should be achieved.”For Trump supporters, they continue,Far from being a day of shame and infamy, this was a day of vindication, empowerment and glory. The reason for this was that they had been able to play a meaningful role in enacting a shared social identity and to do so in ways that allowed them to translate their leader’s stirring analysis and vision into material reality.Leaders gain influence, Haslam and his collaborators argue,by defining parameters of action in ways that frame the agency of their followers but leave space for creativity in how collective goals are accomplished. Followers in turn exhibit their loyalty and attachment to the leader by striving to be effective in advancing these goals, thereby empowering and giving agency to the leader.In the case of Jan. 6, 2021, they write:Donald Trump’s exhortations to his supporters that they should “fight” to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election was followed by an attack on the United States Capitol. We argue that it is Trump’s willing participation in this mutual process of identity enactment, rather than any instructions contained in his speech, that should be the basis for assessing his influence on, and responsibility for, the assault.In conclusion, they argue:It is important to recognize that Trump was no puppet master and that his followers were far more than puppets. Instead, he was the unifier, activator, and enabler of his followers during the dark events of Jan. 6, 2021. As such, rather than eclipsing or sublimating their agency, he framed and unleashed it.The power of Trump’s speech, they contend,lay in its provision of a “moral” framework that impelled his audience to do work creatively to “stop the steal” — fueling a dynamic which ultimately led to insurrection. The absence of a point at which Trump instructed his supporters to assault Capitol Hill makes the assault on Capitol Hill no less his responsibility. The crimes that followers commit in the name of the group are necessarily crimes of leadership too.On Jan. 7, 2021, a full 30 hours after the assault on the Capitol began, Trump condemned the assault in videotaped remarks: “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” he said, adding, “To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”During a CNN town hall in May, however, Trump called Jan. 6 “a beautiful day” and declared that he was “inclined to pardon” many of the rioters.In a January paper, “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argues that Trump has unleashed profoundly anti-democratic forces within not only Republican ranks but also among a segment of independent voters:The most confirmed Republican denialists believe that large malevolent forces are at work in world events, racial minorities are given too much deference in society and America’s destiny is a Christian one. Among independents, the most confirmed denialists are Christian nationalists who resent what they view as the favored position of racial minorities.Stewart continues:The belief that Donald Trump was denied the White House in 2020 because of Democratic Party fraud is arguably the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of the federal government since the Civil War, if not in American history. It is hard to think of a time when nearly two-fifths of Americans seemed honestly to believe that the man in the White House is there because of theft.It remains unknown whether Trump will be charged in connection with his refusal to abide by all of the legal requirements of democratic electoral competition. Even so, no indictment could capture the enormity of the damage Trump has inflicted on the American body politic with his bad faith, grifting and fundamentally amoral character.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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      A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime

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      If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.Not a crime: Federal crimes.All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.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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      Trump Campaigns in Michigan, a Battleground That’s Tinted Blue

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      With their party out of power, some Republicans in the state are worried that the former president could cost Michigan its status as a swing state.In front of a sold-out crowd on Sunday evening in Novi, Mich., former President Donald J. Trump lamented the decline of the automobile industry under Democratic rule and said he “stood up to China” to save thousands of manufacturing jobs.It was a speech he might have given in 2020. But then the script changed. In his first campaign visit to the state this year, Mr. Trump paired rants about free trade and manufacturing with culture-war jabs against liberals and criticism of his main Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.The latter remarks received the most raucous applause at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner, which was giving Mr. Trump its man of the decade award.Statewide, however, the Republican Party is at a crossroads, with internal disputes among Trump-aligned factions whose candidates have faced a series of losses in recent years and an establishment wing that has all but lost any semblance of power.Mr. Trump’s full-throated embrace of election denialism and a crusade against “wokeism,” echoed by his most ardent supporters, have left some Michigan Republicans wondering about his chances in a general election — and if there is any possibility of stopping his candidacy before then.Though Mr. Trump won Michigan in his 2016 presidential bid, Republicans have struggled to garner statewide voter support since. They lost the governorship to Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, in 2018, and then faced another major loss in 2020 when Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the White House.But 2022 may have stung the most: For the first time in 40 years, Michigan Republicans lost control of both State Legislature chambers and failed to recapture the governorship, putting them out of power entirely. That year featured a wide array of candidates backed by Mr. Trump, many of whom embraced false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and subsequently lost their races.Oakland County underscores the party’s tumultuous past few years: Still G.O.P.-controlled in 2016, the region in the Detroit suburbs, home to the state’s largest population of Republicans, is now controlled by Democrats.Establishment Republicans have raised concerns that Mr. Trump himself is to blame for sustained losses, and that Michigan will slowly lose its swing-state status with his loyalists at the helm. Kristina Karamo, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022 and made voter fraud and election denial central to her campaign, won control of the state party apparatus in February.“Donald Trump decapitated the entire Republican establishment in Michigan,” said Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who plans to support another candidate in the growing Republican primary field for president.“The reality is that other than Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, all he’s done is lose,” Mr. Roe added. “So at some point, conservative voters in America have to decide if they want to be loyal to Donald Trump or if they care about the future of our country.”Party officials said more than 2,500 people were on hand for the event.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThat perceived choice, however, was a nonstarter in Novi on Sunday, where dinner attendees paid at least $250 for a ticket. Organizers said over 2,500 people packed the Suburban Collection Showplace.In an hourlong speech, Mr. Trump frequently attacked Mr. Biden, looking past the primaries and ahead to a possible general election rematch. He criticized the president for what he called a “maniacal push” for electrical vehicles that would lead to the “decimation” of the state’s auto industry.But he also continued what is now a yearslong tirade about voting security. In attendance was Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer known for carrying out frivolous lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, who received a standing ovation when acknowledged by Mr. Trump.And the former president received significant crowd approval when he said he would sign an executive order to cut funding from schools that support critical race theory and “transgenderism.”Rather than fault Mr. Trump for recent losses, many pointed the blame back on party officials, if they acknowledged that Republicans had lost their elections at all.“It needs a little bit more leadership. I think they seem to sway sometimes, and I don’t like that,” said Lisa Mackey of Plymouth, Mich. “We all have to work together, regardless of what side of the fence you’re on, but I think sometimes they’re not looking out for our best interests.”Mr. Trump praised Ms. Karamo, saying that she was a “hard worker who’s working very hard to keep this an honest election.” And some attendees, like Monica Job of Armada, Mich., offered their praise as well: “When she lost and then ran for the state party, that showed she’s not a quitter,” Ms. Job said.Doubts that the state party leadership can steer Republicans to victory in 2024 have become increasingly widespread — party activists are discussing how to generate funding outside the party apparatus, said Jamie Roe, a Republican strategist in the state, who is unrelated to Jason Roe.“I don’t think they’re communicating very effectively with the broad base of the party,” he said. “I just think that we have opportunity, and I’m praying that we don’t forgo those opportunities.” More

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      Former Trump Campaign Official in Talks to Cooperate in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The office of the special counsel is negotiating with Michael Roman, who was closely involved in the efforts to create slates of pro-Trump electors in states won in 2020 by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Michael Roman, a top official in former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 campaign, is in discussions with the office of the special counsel Jack Smith that could soon lead to Mr. Roman voluntarily answering questions about a plan to create slates of pro-Trump electors in key swing states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to a person familiar with the matter.If Mr. Roman ends up giving the interview — known as a proffer — to prosecutors working for Mr. Smith, it would be the first known instance of cooperation by someone with direct knowledge of the so-called fake elector plan. That plan has long been at the center of Mr. Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The talks with Mr. Roman, who served as Mr. Trump’s director of Election Day operations, were the latest indication that Mr. Smith is actively pressing forward with his election interference investigation even as attention has been focused on the other case in his portfolio: the recent indictment of Mr. Trump in Florida on charges of illegally keeping hold of classified documents and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.In the past few weeks, several witnesses with connections to the fake elector plan have appeared in front of a grand jury in Federal District Court in Washington that is investigating the ways in which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to reverse his defeat to Mr. Biden. Among them was Gary Michael Brown, Mr. Roman’s onetime deputy, who was questioned in front of the grand jury on Thursday.Mr. Roman did much of the legwork in putting together the fake elector plan and in finding ways to challenge Mr. Trump’s losses in several key battleground states, according to emails reviewed last summer by The New York Times. Mr. Roman, the emails show, coordinated with several other lawyers and aides to Mr. Trump in seeking to assemble support to create the false slates of electors in states like Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.Among those with whom Mr. Roman worked closely, the emails showed, were Boris Epshteyn, a lawyer and political adviser on the campaign who has since served as something like Mr. Trump in-house counsel, and Jenna Ellis, another lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after his defeat to Mr. Biden on how to challenge the election results.In March, as part of a disciplinary proceeding by bar officials in her home state of Colorado, Ms. Ellis admitted that she had knowingly misrepresented facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud had led to Mr. Trump’s defeat.The emails reviewed by The Times showed Mr. Roman and others discussing options to try to prevent Mr. Biden from being certified as the winner of the election. He reported details of their activities to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, who championed Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud.The fake-elector strategy was arguably the longest-running and most expansive of the multiple efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It involved a sprawling cast of pro-Trump lawyers, state Republican officials and White House aides in an effort that began before some states had even finished counting their ballots.The plan culminated in a campaign by Mr. Trump and others to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use the false slates to subvert congressional certification of the outcome of the election in front of a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. That proceeding was interrupted when a violent mob of Mr. Trump’s followers stormed the Capitol and chased lawmakers away.Even some of those connected to efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office appeared to acknowledge the electors plan was legally dubious.“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who was helping to organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a December 2020 email to Mr. Epshteyn.In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that calling them “alternate” electors was probably better than “fake” electors, adding a smiley face emoji.The F.B.I. formally opened an investigation into the fake elector plan in April 2022, according to people familiar with the matter, and federal prosecutors issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas to Republican officials in states like Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada two months later.Two top Republican officials from Nevada who were involved in the plan — Jim DeGraffenreid and Michael McDonald — gave testimony to the grand jury in Washington two weeks ago, on the same day that Mr. Trump was arraigned in Miami in the classified documents case.Throughout the winter and into the spring, a steady stream of witnesses — some of them exceptionally close to Mr. Trump — were subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury and answer questions about the fake-elector plan and other efforts by the former president to cling to power after losing the election.Among those who were forced to show up were Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel; Mark Meadows, his onetime chief of staff; and former Vice President Mike Pence. Most of these witnesses sought to limit the scope of their testimony by asserting various forms of privilege in a long-running, closed-door legal battle that ultimately failed.In a separate avenue of inquiry, the Justice Department seized the cellphones of a handful of lawyers connected to the fake elector scheme in June 2022. Those included John Eastman, a California law professor who advised Mr. Trump on the plan, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was nearly installed as acting attorney general and who helped to draft a letter to state officials in Georgia recommending that they create a slate of pro-Trump electors.By last July, the Justice Department had created a team of prosecutors — working under the code name Project Coconut — to sort through the various communications seized from Mr. Eastman, Mr. Clark and another former Justice Department lawyer, Ken Klukowski, for any that were potentially protected by attorney-client or executive privilege, according to a person familiar with the matter.This so-called filter team grew in size and scope, the person said, as investigators obtained more data from other subjects of the inquiry, including Mr. Meadows; Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who recruited Mr. Eastman to work on the fake-elector plan; and Mr. Epshteyn.Adam Goldman More

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      Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6

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      An ecosystem of true believers is promoting a tale of persecution rather than prosecution that has migrated to the heart of presidential politics.Six months since the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol completed its work, a far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced “J6” as the animating force of their lives.They attend the criminal trials of the more prominent rioters charged in the attack. They gather to pray and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the outer perimeter of the District of Columbia jail, where some two dozen defendants are held. Last week, dozens showed up at an unofficial House hearing convened by a handful of Republican lawmakers to challenge “the fake narrative that an insurrection had occurred on Jan. 6,” as set forth by Jeffrey Clark, a witness at the hearing and a former Justice Department official who worked to undo the results of the 2020 election.The 90-minute event was a through-the-looking-glass alternative to the damning case against former President Donald J. Trump presented last year by the Jan. 6 committee. In the version advanced by five House Republicans who attended the hearing — Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ralph Norman, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Troy Nehls — as well as conservative lawyers and Capitol riot defendants, Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceful Trump supporters, followed by a continuing Biden administration campaign to imprison and torment innocent conservatives.Writ large, their loudest-in-the-room tale of persecution rather than prosecution might be dismissed as fringe nonsense had it not migrated so swiftly to the heart of presidential politics. Mr. Trump has pledged to pardon some of the Jan. 6 defendants if he returns to the White House, and his chief challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has signaled he may do the same.Representatives Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, both Republicans, were among the members of Congress who held a hearing criticizing the Jan. 6 prosecutions.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMore than half, or 58 percent, of self-described conservatives say that Jan. 6 was an act of “legitimate political discourse” rather than a “violent insurrection,” according to a poll three months ago by The Economist/YouGov.The counternarrative is in part animated by a series of particularly stiff sentences for the Jan. 6 defendants, including one of more than 12 years in prison handed down on Wednesday for a rioter who savagely assaulted a D.C. police officer, Michael Fanone.The audience for the hearing in the Capitol Visitor Center included several of the most avid and successful promoters of the Jan. 6 counternarrative.Among them were Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and QAnon adherent who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer during the riot and is now heralded as a martyr by the far right; Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy Reffitt, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in the riot and who now helps organize nightly vigils at the D.C. jail; Tayler Hansen, who has claimed to possess videotaped evidence of antifa elements instigating the violence at the Capitol, but who did not respond to a request from The New York Times to view the footage; and Tommy Tatum of Mississippi, who describes himself as an independent journalist and has inferred from various unidentified characters who appear in his own footage that sophisticated teams of plainclothes federal agents orchestrated the breach of the Capitol.The Jan. 6 deniers range from true believers to flighty opportunists, with fevered arguments among them as to who is which. Mr. Tatum and William Shipley, a lawyer who has represented more than 30 Jan. 6 defendants, have for example accused each other on Twitter of cynical profiteering.Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter, Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot during the riot, attended the hearing at the Capitol Visitor Center.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOne generally admired within the group is Julie Kelly, a former Illinois Republican political consultant, cooking class teacher and pandemic lockdown critic who writes for the conservative website American Greatness. Ms. Kelly has asserted that the Biden administration is “on a destructive crusade to exact revenge against supporters of Donald Trump” and has accused Mr. Fanone, who was beaten unconscious by the rioters at the Capitol, of being a “crisis actor.” She was a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show before Fox fired him in April.Last month, aides to Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Ms. Kelly and two other conservative writers, John Solomon of Just the News and Joseph M. Hanneman of The Epoch Times, permission to ferret through the Capitol’s voluminous Jan. 6 security footage, the only journalists other than Mr. Carlson to obtain such access.In an interview the day before the House hearing, Ms. Kelly said she was scouring the video in hopes of learning the provenance of the infamous gallows that were seen on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. “Did Trump supporters go there and build that? I doubt it,” she said. Ms. Kelly also hopes to learn whether nefarious “agitators” were already inside the Capitol before the breach. She variously termed Jan. 6 “an inside job” and a “fed-surrection.”Ms. Kelly recounted a meeting she and a fellow supporter of Jan. 6 defendants, Cynthia Hughes, had last September with Mr. Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She said she told the former president that the defendants felt abandoned by him: “They’re saying to me: ‘We were there for him. Why isn’t he here for us?’” Ms. Hughes informed Mr. Trump that the federal judges he appointed were “among the worst” when it came to the treatment of the riot defendants.Surprised, Mr. Trump replied, “Well, I got recommendations from the Federalist Society.” Ms. Kelly said he then asked, “What do you want me to do?” She replied that he could donate to Ms. Hughes’s organization, the Patriot Freedom Project, which offers financial support to the defendants. Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC subsequently gave $10,000 to the group.Former President Donald J. Trump has pledged to pardon some of the Jan. 6 defendants if he returns to the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOthers in the ecosystem contend that Mr. Trump’s contribution to the cause is manifest by the slings and arrows he has himself suffered since that day. “I call him Jan. Sixth-er Number One,” said Joseph D. McBride, perhaps the most visible of the lawyers representing the defendants. “He’s under the gun. He’s being investigated and indicted.”Mr. McBride’s clients include Richard Barnett, who posed for a photograph with his foot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, as well as Ryan Nichols, who exhorted fellow protesters to target elected officials, yelling, “Cut their heads off!”Mr. McBride also represented two Stop the Steal rally organizers subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, Ali Alexander and Alex Bruesewitz. It was Mr. Bruesewitz who introduced Mr. McBride to Donald Trump Jr., which led to several invitations to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.“I’ve lost count at this point,” Mr. McBride said, adding that the club “is a good place to network.”Mr. McBride was also a frequent guest on Mr. Carlson’s show, including the time he claimed that a mysterious man seen at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his face obscured in red paint was “clearly a law enforcement officer.” Shown evidence later that week by a HuffPost reporter that the man was a well-known habitué of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games, Mr. McBride replied: “If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care.”He did acknowledge a certain dubiousness to the claim that the mostly white male conservatives who showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6 had the judicial deck stacked against them.“Pre-Jan. 6, anytime you heard the term ‘two-tier system of justice,’ it’s Blacks, it’s Latinos, it’s the infringed, it’s the poor, it’s the drug addicted, it’s the marginalized, it’s the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. That coalition of victims, Mr. McBride insisted, now included the MAGA supporters he represented.Joseph McBride, left, and his client Richard Barnett, center, arriving for a court hearing in Washington.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesInsha Rahman, the vice president for advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, agrees, up to a point. Mr. McBride and the others are raising “unfortunately a fact of life for over two million Americans who are behind bars,” said Ms. Rahman, who has visited the D.C. jail several times and concurs that its conditions are inhumane, though no worse, she said, than detention facilities in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.Still, she said, the privileges afforded the Jan. 6 pretrial detainees in their particular wing — individual cells, a library, contact visits, the ability to participate in podcasts — “are not at all typical.”“But I don’t want to call that special treatment,” Ms. Rahman said. “That’s the floor for what every incarcerated person in America should have a right to expect.”For now, the protagonists of the alternative Jan. 6 narrative are not particularly focused on prison reform. Nor are they willing to give up.As Mr. McBride said: “Do I think we’ll ever get to the bottom of it? We still haven’t solved the J.F.K. assassination.” More

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      Every Trump Indictment Tells a Story

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      Let’s assume, because it seems like a reasonable assumption, that we have not reached the end of the indictments that will be handed down against Donald Trump. Let’s assume that either the case in Georgia, where he is being investigated for election tampering, or the special counsel’s continuing investigation in Washington, will yield a prosecution related to his conduct between the November 2020 election and the riot on Jan. 6.In that case, Trump’s various indictments would double as a road map to his presidency and his era — each fitting with a different interpretation of the Trump phenomenon, and only together giving the fullest picture of his times.The first indictment, New York’s case against Trump for campaign finance violations related to his alleged affair with the adult thespian Stormy Daniels, fits neatly into the narrative of the Trump era that’s often called “anti-anti-Trump.” This interpretation concedes, to some degree at least, Trump’s sleaziness and folly, but then it invariably insists that his enemies in the American establishment are actually more dangerous — because they’re “protecting democracy” by trampling its norms, embracing conspiracy theories and conducting pointless witch hunts.It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of the anti-anti-Trumpist case than an ideological prosecutor in a Democratic city indicting a former president on a charge considered dubious even by many liberal legal experts. “Norms,” indeed: The Stormy Daniels case looks like Resistance theater, partisan lawfare, exactly the kind of overreach that Trump’s defenders insist defines the entirety of anti-Trumpism.The new federal indictment, for which Trump was arraigned in Miami on Tuesday, moves us into different terrain. This time the case seems legitimate, and even if charges brought under the Espionage Act have a fairly checkered history, on its face the indictment makes a strong case that Trump asked for this, that he invited the prosecution, that he had plenty of opportunities to stay within the law and chose to obstruct, evade and dissemble instead.But at the same time one would need a heart of stone not to find the whole class‌ified-documents affair a little bit comedic: blackly comic, to be sure, in the vein of the Coen Brothers, but for all its serious aspects still essentially absurd. The boxes piled high in the gaudy Mar-a-Lago bathroom is an indelible image for anyone who interprets the Trump era as a vainglorious clown show, with its pileup of scandals driven by narcissism and incompetence, and its serious-minded interpreters worrying about the Authoritarian Menace or the Crisis of Democracy when the evidence before their eyes was usually much shallower and stupider, not the 1930s come again but a reality television mind-set run amok.In the end, though, the reality-television reading was insufficient, because Trump groped his way into genuinely sinister territory — seeking what would have been a constitutional crisis if his postelection wishes had been granted and inspiring mob violence when he didn’t get his way.That aspect of his presidency still awaits its juridical illumination. But we may well get it, and if there is a prosecution related to his postelection conduct, it will complete a presidential triptych — with the persecuted Trump, the farcical Trump and the sinister Trump each making an appearance in our courts.As a matter of electoral politics, Trump’s resilience as a primary candidate depends upon Republican voters interpreting the entire triptych in the light of its first installment — such that his enemies’ overreach is the only thing that his admirers and supporters see, and both his more absurd behaviors and his most destructive acts are assumed to be exaggerated or invented, just so much liberal hype and NeverTrump hysteria.This perspective is false, but it is well entrenched among Republicans and has the advantage of simplicity. Meanwhile, Trump’s rivals for the nomination are stuck playing “on the one hand, on the other hand” games — constantly insisting that Trump has been unfairly treated, because Republican voters believe as much and clearly want to hear it stated, while trying to gently nurture the idea that he brings some of this mistreatment on himself and a different Republican might be just as effective without the constant grist for enemies and prosecutors.In a general election environment, though, we have strong evidence from the recent midterms that many swing voters reverse the Republican interpretation of the triptych, and read the whole of Trumpism in light of its darkest manifestation. Both the liberal overreach they might have opposed and the Trumpian shenanigans they might have tolerated are subsumed by a desire to avoid a repeat of Jan. 6, a revulsion against G.O.P. candidates who seem intent on replaying Trump’s destabilizing behavior.It’s possible to imagine that the multiplication of indictments, the constant action in the courts, eventually helps Republican voters who don’t share this interpretation to recognize how many of their fellow Americans do hold it, making Trump seem too unelectable at last.But Trump has always thrived by persuading a critical mass of Republicans to live inside his reality, not anybody else’s. And inside that gaudy mansion, the walls have room for just one outsize, garish portrait: “The Martyrdom of Donald Trump.”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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      Republicans Have Made Their Choice

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      In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Republican officeholders had three choices.They could stick with and defend Donald Trump and his riotous allies, and if they were members of the House or Senate, they could vote in support of the effort to overturn the results of the election, in a show of loyalty to the president and, in effect, the rioters.Or they could criticize and condemn the president as conservative dissenters, using their voices in an attempt to put the Republican Party back on a more traditional path.Or they could leave. They could quit the party and thus show the full extent of their anger and revulsion.But we know what actually happened. A few Republicans left and a few complained, but most remained loyal to the party and the president with nary a peep to make about the fact that Trump was willing to bring an end to constitutional government in the United States if it meant he could stay in office.We have been watching this dynamic play out a second time with Trump’s indictment on federal espionage charges for mishandling classified documents as a private citizen. The most prominent Republican officeholders wasted no time with their full-throated denunciations of the indictment, the Department of Justice and the Biden administration.“Let’s be clear about what’s happening: Joe Biden is weaponizing his Department of Justice against his own political rival,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican leader in the House. “This sham indictment is the continuation of the endless political persecution of Donald Trump.”“This indictment certainly looks like an unequal application of justice,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, who serves as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. “You can’t help but ask why this is happening. It feels political, and it’s rotten.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that the indictment was a “weaponization of federal law enforcement” that “represents a mortal threat to a free society,” and former vice president Mike Pence said he was “deeply troubled to see this indictment move forward” and vowed to “clean house” at the highest levels of the Justice Department if elected president.The only notable congressional Republican to really condemn Trump was Senator Mitt Romney of Utah. “By all appearances, the Justice Department and special counsel have exercised due care, affording Mr. Trump the time and opportunity to avoid charges that would not generally have been afforded to others,” he said in a statement. “Mr. Trump brought these charges upon himself by not only taking classified documents, but by refusing to simply return them when given numerous opportunities to do so.”All of this is typical. With vanishingly few exceptions, Republicans are unwilling to discipline Trump or withdraw their support for his political leadership or even just criticize him for his actions. The most we’ve seen, Romney aside, is a nod to the fact that these are serious charges. This is a “serious case with serious allegations,” said Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who nonetheless added that this prosecution represented a “double standard” and that “You can’t protect Democrats while targeting and hunting Republicans.”There are several ways to think about most Republicans’ reluctance to break with Trump in the face of his egregious lawbreaking and contempt for constitutional government, but I want to focus on two in particular.The first concerns something that exists wherever there is a relationship between an individual and an institution: the loyalty of the individual to the institution. Political parties in particular are designed to inculcate a sense of loyalty and shared commitment among their members. This is especially true for officeholders, who exist in a web of relationships and obligations that rest on a set of common interests and beliefs.Loyalty makes it less likely that a dissenter just walks away, especially when there isn’t a plausible alternative. Few Trump-critical Republicans, for instance, are willing to become Democrats. What’s more, as the economist A.O. Hirschman observed in his classic text, “Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” strong loyalty to an institution like a political party might lead a dissenting or disapproving individual to hold on to his or her membership even more tightly, for fear that exit might open the door to even worse outcomes.“The ultimate in unhappiness and paradoxical loyalist behavior,” Hirschman wrote, “occurs when the public evil produced by the organization promises to accelerate or to reach some intolerable level as the organization deteriorates; then, in line with the reasoning just presented, the decision to exit will become ever more difficult the longer one fails to exit. The conviction that one has to stay on to prevent the worst grows stronger all the time.”Assuming this is all true, how then do we explain the reluctance to criticize or condemn? For that, we can look to the history of the modern Republican Party, stretching back to Richard Nixon. And what do we see? We see a pattern of presidential criminality and contempt for the Constitution, backed in each instance by most Republican officeholders and politicians.For Nixon, it was Watergate. For Ronald Reagan, it was Iran-contra. For George W. Bush, it was the sordid effort to fight a war in Iraq and the disgraceful use of torture against detainees. For Donald Trump, it was practically his entire presidency.Most things in life, and especially a basic respect for democracy and the rule of law, have to be cultivated. What is striking about the Republican Party is the extent to which it has, for decades now, cultivated the opposite — a highly instrumental view of our political system, in which rules and laws are legitimate only insofar as they allow for the acquisition and concentration of power in Republican hands.Most Republicans won’t condemn Trump. There are his millions of ultra-loyal voters, yes. And there are the challenges associated with breaking from the consensus of your political party, yes. But there is also the reality that Trump is the apotheosis of a propensity for lawlessness within the Republican Party. He is what the party and its most prominent figures have been building toward for nearly half a century. I think he knows it and I think they do too.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