Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Trump’s calls to protest fall on weary, wary ears.

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      In Lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning, near the courthouse where Donald J. Trump was to be arraigned, Dion Cini, a Trump merchandise entrepreneur from Brooklyn and frequent presence at Trump rallies, waved an enormous flag that read TRUMP OR DEATH.“We’re living in history right now,” he told a scrum of mostly European reporters.But the crowd — for a demonstration convened by the New York Young Republican Club, where Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene would soon speak — was overwhelmingly made up of journalists. Trump supporters were so outnumbered that anyone in Make America Great Again attire was quickly swarmed by cameras.On Truth Social last month, Mr. Trump exhorted his supporters: “WE MUST SAVE AMERICA! PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!” But while his indictment has been met with outrage across right-wing media and social media, the offline response has so far been a far cry from the turnouts at his campaign rallies — much less the tens of thousands he drew to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, for the rally that became a violent attempt to avert the end of his presidency.Pro-Trump organizers and outside observers have pointed to a range of factors to explain the low turnout. They include the relatively short notice of the arraignment, the mixed messages from right-wing media figures and politicians like Ms. Greene — who last month stoked fear that an indictment protest could be infiltrated by “Feds/Fed assets” — and the question of what, exactly, a demonstration would accomplish.But the small crowds are also a testament to a political landscape that has changed since the explosive finale of Mr. Trump’s presidency.“The right has zero interest in repeating anything that even remotely resembles Jan. 6,” said Dustin Stockton, an organizer of the pro-Trump Stop the Steal rallies that culminated at the Capitol that day.The riot drew its incendiary force from its particular combination of rank-and-file Trump supporters and a smaller cohort of extremists who had found a footing in the Republican mainstream in the Trump years. Those constituencies grew closer in 2020, as Covid-19 lockdowns, racial justice protests and riots and finally Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election drew them together around a common set of grievances — grievances that were converted into a call to action by right-wing media and influencers, Republican politicians and Mr. Trump himself.Jon Lewis, a research fellow in the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said those conditions would be extraordinarily hard to replicate, even after a development as extraordinary as Mr. Trump’s indictment.“The further away we get from Jan. 6, the more it is being recognized as a unique perfect storm of events, of actors, of circumstances,” Mr. Lewis said.Since Jan. 6, rallies similar to those that gathered large crowds in 2020 have struggled to produce significant turnouts. An annual gun-rights rally in Richmond, Va., which brought tens of thousands of gun owners and militia members into the streets in January 2020, drew only hundreds in late January 2021. The crowds were similarly sparse at Inauguration Day protests in Washington and statehouses across the country days later.Demonstrations against Covid-19 vaccine mandates in late 2021 and early 2022 sought to recapture the energy of the “re-open” protests in the spring of 2020, and did draw several thousand to the National Mall in January 2022. But they mostly evaporated after states eased their Covid-19 policies that spring.Claims of a stolen 2020 election animated many prominent Republican candidates and grass-roots groups in last year’s midterm elections. But the most prominent election deniers lost, and the most significant demonstration over the candidates’ defeats, in Phoenix, drew only a couple of hundred people.A crucial missing element in all of these events was Mr. Trump himself. His ability to draw supporters to the new cause of his prosecution remains to be seen.But participants and observers have also pointed to the chilling effect of the law enforcement crackdowns and congressional investigations since Jan. 6. F.B.I. domestic terrorism investigations have more than doubled since 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office. Under the Biden administration, “you have seen the early signs of a sea change in how the U.S. government is approaching domestic violent extremism,” Mr. Lewis said.High-profile federal prosecutions related to Jan. 6 have swept up the national leaderships of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, some of whom have been convicted of sedition and other serious crimes. Individual rioters, many of whom documented their activities on Jan. 6 on social media, have faced detention and prosecution on lesser charges, or at least visits from federal agents.The result has been a climate of paranoia around the open social media organizing that was critical to the Stop the Steal demonstrations, as well as around large offline gatherings. This is particularly true in Washington, with its large federal law enforcement presence, and New York, where prosecutors have become particularly reviled figures on the right for their legal proceedings against the Trump Organization, the National Rifle Association, the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon and now Mr. Trump himself.Among right-wing organizers, “the overwhelming consensus is D.C. is a no-go zone, and New York has weaponized lawfare against everyone on the right,” said Mr. Stockton, who was raided in 2020 by federal agents for his role in a border-wall fund-raising venture involving Mr. Bannon, who has been charged by Manhattan prosecutors with defrauding contributors. (Mr. Bannon has pleaded not guilty and Mr. Stockton was never charged. Timothy Shea, another participant, was convicted of related federal charges in October.) “Everyone assumes there are traps everywhere.”While denunciations of the charges against Mr. Trump have dominated the conservative and right-wing media for weeks, the question of whether to protest them has been met with less unanimity.While some, like the former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, have called the moment a “time of sorting” and urged Trump supporters to “peacefully protest,” others have warned that the political risk of such a protest’s turning violent far outweighs the potential reward.“DO NOT PROTEST IN NYC TOMORROW,” the talk radio host John Cardillo, a former New York police officer, wrote on Twitter on Monday. “The Democrats want you to do that. They want people to get out of hand, be arrested, and be able to claim another J6.”And to some people and groups closely associated with the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Trump is a more ambivalent cause than he once was.“Remember what happened last time Trump called a protest? He threw everyone under the bus,” a local Proud Boys chapter in Illinois posted on Telegram last month, amid a series of memes depicting Trump protest organizers as undercover federal agents.But Joe McBride, a lawyer for a number of Jan. 6 defendants who said he has served as an intermediary between their families and Mr. Trump’s circle, said that “there’s certainly a sense of brotherhood” with the former president after his indictment.Karen Lichtbraun, a preschool teacher from New York who attended Tuesday’s demonstration in Manhattan, said the fear of arrest was one reason for the relatively modest turnout. “Look what’s happening with the people who participated in Jan. 6,” she said.But she noted that the rally site in deep blue Manhattan played a role as well.“It’s New York, unfortunately,” she said.Alexandra Berzon More

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      Donald Trump también debe responder ante la justicia

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      Por primera vez en la historia de Estados Unidos, un gran jurado ha acusado formalmente a un expresidente del país. Donald Trump estuvo durante años, como candidato, en la presidencia y tras su salida de ella, ignorando las normas y los precedentes democráticos y legales, intentando plegar al Departamento de Justicia y al poder judicial a sus caprichos y comportándose como si él no estuviese sujeto a las reglas.Como demuestra su acusación, sí lo está.El reiterado desprecio por la ley suele conducir a una acusación penal, y esa es la consecuencia a la que se enfrenta hoy Trump. Los fiscales federales y estatales hicieron bien en dejar de lado las preocupaciones por las consecuencias políticas, o la reverencia por la presidencia, e iniciar exhaustivas investigaciones penales sobre la conducta de Trump en al menos cuatro casos. La investigación del fiscal de distrito de Manhattan es la primera que conduce a una acusación formal.Trump transformó por completo la relación entre la presidencia y el Estado de derecho, y a menudo afirmaba que el presidente está por encima de la ley. De modo que es adecuado que sus actos como presidente y como candidato sean ahora ponderados oficialmente por jueces y jurados, con la posibilidad de que se enfrente a sanciones penales. Trump dañó gravemente las instituciones políticas y legales de Estados Unidos, y volvió a amenazarlas con llamados a protestas generales cuando fuera acusado. Sin embargo, esas instituciones han demostrado ser lo bastante fuertes para exigirle responsabilidades por ese daño.Un sano respeto por el sistema legal también requiere que los estadounidenses dejen de lado sus opiniones políticas a la hora de formarse un juicio sobre estos casos. Aunque Trump pidió habitualmente que el FBI investigara a sus enemigos, que fueran imputados o enfrentaran la pena de muerte, su indiferencia hacia las garantías procesales para los demás no debería negarle los beneficios del sistema, incluidos un juicio imparcial y la presunción de inocencia. Al mismo tiempo, ningún jurado debería extenderle ningún privilegio como expresidente. Debería seguir los mismos procedimientos que cualquier otro ciudadano.La acusación es aún confidencial, y es posible que no se conozcan los cargos contra Trump hasta dentro de unos días. Pero Alvin Bragg, el fiscal de distrito, ha estado investigando un caso de posible fraude e infracciones por parte de Trump en la financiación de su campaña, al ocultar los pagos que le hizo a la estrella del cine porno Stormy Daniels antes de las elecciones de 2016. Sus actos —utilizar dinero para silenciar a los críticos y ocultar información políticamente perjudicial— estuvieron mal. La pregunta que se le planteará al jurado es si esa conducta alcanza el umbral suficiente para ser susceptible de una condena por delito grave.Si son esas las acusaciones, la condena dependerá de demostrar que Trump participó en la falsificación de registros mercantiles mientras se infringía la ley sobre financiación de campañas, una estrategia jurídica un tanto novedosa. La falsificación de registros puede ser imputable como delito menor en Nueva York; para que sea un delito más grave, se debe probar que lo hizo junto con un segundo delito, en este caso, una posible vulneración de la ley en la financiación de la campaña. El expresidente, que aspira a un segundo mandato en 2024, ha negado las acusaciones y ha dicho que la causa presentada contra él por Bragg, demócrata, obedece a motivaciones políticas.Si bien algunos expertos jurídicos han cuestionado la teoría en que se apoya el caso de Bragg, no hay ninguna base para acusarlo de motivaciones políticas, una afirmación que Trump ha hecho durante muchos años, cada vez que se investigaba su conducta. Del mismo modo que a los miembros del jurado se les instruye para que ignoren las pruebas indebidamente introducidas en un juicio, también deberán ignorar todas las insinuaciones sin fundamento de los partidarios y los defensores de Trump en estos casos, y juzgarlas estrictamente por sus méritos.Tres de las otras investigaciones que podrían dar lugar a acusaciones son más graves, porque conllevan acusar a Trump, no solo de haber vulnerado la ley, sino también de haber abusado de su cargo presidencial.Las imputaciones contra él en Georgia están entre las más vergonzosas. Fani Willis, fiscal de distrito del condado de Fulton, está considerando presentar cargos penales contra varias personas, incluido Trump, por intentar anular los resultados de las elecciones presidenciales de 2020 en ese estado, que ganó el presidente Biden por 11.779 votos. Trump presionó repetidas veces al secretario de Estado de Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, para que “buscara” votos adicionales que pudieran cambiar el resultado de las elecciones en el estado, parte de un plan para socavar la voluntad de los votantes.Un gran jurado especial formado por Willis recomendó en febrero que se presentaran cargos en el caso; todavía se desconoce qué personas o acusaciones se incluirán en las recomendaciones del gran jurado o a quién podría intentar acusar Willis, si es que procede.Una investigación del Departamento de Justicia federal dirigida por un fiscal especial, Jack Smith, también podría dar lugar a acusaciones formales contra Trump. Smith está investigando los intentos del expresidente de impedir el traspaso pacífico del poder el 6 de enero de 2021, cuando Trump incitó a una turba armada que atacó el Capitolio de Estados Unidos, amenazando a los legisladores allí reunidos para certificar los resultados de las elecciones presidenciales. Un informe del Senado realizado por los dos partidos concluyó que siete muertes estaban relacionadas con el ataque.El equipo de Smith también está investigando al expresidente por su indebido manejo de los documentos clasificados que fueron retirados de la Casa Blanca y llevados a Mar-a-Lago, su residencia privada en Florida. En el caso se han recuperado unos 300 documentos clasificados. Los fiscales también están estudiando si Trump, sus abogados o miembros de su personal trataron de confundir a los funcionarios del Estado que pidieron la devolución de los documentos.Además de los cargos penales, Trump se enfrenta a varias demandas civiles. La fiscal general de Nueva York, Letitia James, ha demandado al expresidente por inflar de forma “flagrante” y fraudulenta el valor de sus activos inmobiliarios. Tres de los hijos adultos de Trump también figuran en la demanda. Un grupo de policías del Capitolio y legisladores demócratas han demandado al presidente, aduciendo que sus actos del 6 de enero incitaron a la turba que les provocó daños físicos y emocionales. E. Jean Carroll, una escritora que acusó a Trump de haberla violado, ha demandado al expresidente por difamación. Trump niega las acusaciones.Sin duda, procesar al expresidente ahondará las divisiones políticas existentes que tanto daño han hecho al país en los últimos años. Trump ya ha avivado esa división, al tachar a los fiscales que están detrás de las investigaciones —varios de ellos personas negras— de “racistas”. Afirmó en un mensaje publicado en las redes sociales que sería detenido, y se dirigió así a sus simpatizantes: “¡PROTESTEMOS, RECUPEREMOS NUESTRA NACIÓN!”. Con ese lenguaje, estaba repitiendo el grito de guerra que precedió a los disturbios en el Capitolio. Las autoridades de la ciudad de Nueva York, que no se arriesgan a que se repitan los actos de los partidarios de Trump, se han estado preparando para la posible agitación.Esas acusaciones del expresidente están claramente dirigidas a socavar las denuncias contra él, protegerse de las consecuencias de su mala conducta y utilizar los casos para su beneficio político. Los dos fiscales de distrito en estas causas son demócratas electos, pero su raza y sus afinidades políticas no tienen ninguna relevancia para los procesos judiciales. (Smith no está afiliado a ninguno de los dos partidos). No obstante, el presidente de la Cámara de Representantes, Kevin McCarthy, demostró de inmediato la intención de su partido de politizar la imputación al calificar a Bragg de “fiscal radical” que persigue “la venganza política” contra Trump. McCarthy no tiene la jurisdicción sobre el fiscal de distrito de Manhattan ni le corresponde interferir en un proceso penal y, sin embargo, se ha comprometido a que la Cámara de Representantes determine si la fiscalía de Bragg está recibiendo fondos federales.La decisión de procesar a un expresidente es una tarea solemne, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta las profundas fisuras nacionales que Trump exacerbará, inevitablemente, a medida que se acerque la campaña de 2024. Pero el costo de no buscar la justicia contra un dirigente que puede haber cometido esos delitos sería aún más alto.El Comité Editorial es un grupo de periodistas de opinión cuyas perspectivas están sustentadas en experiencia, investigación, debate y ciertos valores arraigados por mucho tiempo. Es una entidad independiente de la sala de redacción. More

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      Donald Trump, Now Under Indictment

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      Readers speculate about the impact and wisdom of bringing the hush money charges.To the Editor:Re “Trump Indicted” (nytimes.com, March 30):Our country is struggling to determine if Donald Trump’s hush money payments to Stormy Daniels warrant his indictment. Some consider this action as inconsequential compared with his actions in Georgia in an effort to overturn the election or with his coup plot on Jan. 6.To them the hush money payment and concealment were just a continuation of his immoral personal and business practices before his election and of minimal significance.It was, however, in fact a brazen attempt to influence the results of the election. His actions in Georgia and his attempted coup were brazen attempts to ensure his re-election. They all reveal a basic principle of Trump actions: One can cheat if necessary to attain or retain power.Each action was an equally serious attack on the core principles of our democracy. Each one must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.Only this will ensure that he does not try them again.Sidney Weissman Highland Park, Ill.To the Editor:Folks, be careful what you wish for. Yes, the evidence is compelling that Donald Trump paid hush money to silence Stormy Daniels.But let’s be pragmatic. The worst transgression that Mr. Trump committed was against his wife, who bears the deep and endless scars of humiliation. And if the D.A. decides to test the uncharted waters by linking the Stormy Daniels payoff to election violations, he not only enrages Mr. Trump’s base but also sets himself up for failure.Why then provoke Mr. Trump’s legion with a spark to cause mayhem when more damaging charges against Mr. Trump are under review?Howard QuinnBronxTo the Editor:Without in any way minimizing or discounting the politics surrounding an indictment, what I find really galling is that an indictment of Donald Trump, whether in New York or Georgia, will provide him with yet another opportunity to raise funds from his benighted constituency.Lawrence WeismanWestport, Conn.To the Editor:Most major, non-right-wing media in this country, publicly and privately, have been asking themselves for years about Donald Trump: How does he get away with this stuff? Seeing a man with no experience in government and no clearly demonstrated ability to lead the government and the public beyond his core supporters, we wondered: When will the shoe drop?With the indictment in the Stormy Daniels case, and potential indictments in Georgia and in other investigations, people who are not in love with him will have to stop and think: Should this guy really be president again?When Mr. Trump first ran in 2016, most of the public knew him only as a figure on television and by his pumped-up P.R. reputation as a successful business executive. That image was fixed.An indictment, with even more coming, could shock people out of complacent attitudes and force urgent reassessment. Stay tuned.Doug TerryOlney, Md.The writer is a former radio and television reporter and a current documentary producer.To the Editor:Most know the parable of the emperor who parades around naked, asserting that he is wearing the most beautiful garments in the world. His faithful subjects, afraid of being deemed disloyal fools, dismiss the reality they see and praise the emperor’s apparel.In today’s world, a former president struts about claiming to be clothed in innocence. His followers, fearful of his wrath, ignore their own eyes, affirming his innocence.In the old fable, it was a child who perceived the stark reality and proclaimed the obvious, that the emperor had no clothes. In the present-day story, it will be up to a jury to see through the ex-president’s preening about in his fake cloak of innocence and to declare the naked truth: “Guilty!”Stephen F. GladstoneShaker Heights, OhioTo the Editor:I cannot help but be surprised at the consistently sexist ways in which the national media not only nonchalantly reduces Stephanie Gregory Clifford to her professional pornographic name, Stormy Daniels, but also refers to her simply as a “porn star,” a “porn actress,” an “adult film star,” etc.Ms. Clifford’s appearance in two well-recognized films by Judd Apatow (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”), her roles as a successful producer and director in the adult film industry, as well as her relative success as an American businesswoman are hardly ever mentioned.Her role as a young successful American businesswoman (even if we don’t approve of the industry in which she works), and the professionalism and grace with which Stephanie Gregory Clifford has dealt with the legal troubles of a former American president, deserve their proper recognition and definitely more validation by the national media.Alejandro LugoPark Forest, Ill.The writer has taught anthropology and gender studies at several universities in the last three decades and is a co-editor of “Gender Matters: Rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo.”To the Editor:I feel as if I am forever forced to watch a Trump soap opera called “Days of His Lies.”William Dodd BrownChicago More

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      Trump ya no controla a su movimiento

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      El intercambio más revelador en el mitin de Donald Trump en Waco, Texas, el sábado, no vino del propio Trump. Ocurrió al principio, cuando Ted Nugent, una vieja estrella del rock, animaba a la multitud. “Quiero que me devuelvan mi dinero”, gritó. “No autoricé ningún dinero a Ucrania, a un tipo raro y homosexual”.Momentos después, en Real America’s Voice, un canal de televisión de extrema derecha, el excorresponsal de Fox News Ed Henry calificó de “asombrosas” las palabras de Nugent “sobre Zelenski” y sobre el financiamiento a Ucrania. Luego resumió la carrera hacia el fondo del movimiento trumpista en una frase sucinta: “Está canalizando el sentir de muchos estadounidenses”.En efecto. Y también todos los oradores del maratónico mitin de Trump. Uno tras otro, miraron a una multitud enardecida y adepta a las conspiraciones y consintieron, alimentaron y avivaron cada elemento de su furiosa visión del mundo. No vi a ningún verdadero líder en el escenario de Trump, ni siquiera al propio Trump. Vi una colección de seguidores, cada uno compitiendo por el afecto del verdadero poder en Waco, la turba populista adulada.Para entender la dinámica social y política de la derecha moderna, hay que comprender cómo es que millones de estadounidenses se inocularon contra la verdad. Durante las primarias republicanas de 2016 no faltaron líderes ni comentaristas republicanos dispuestos a poner en evidencia a Trump. John McCain y Mitt Romney, los dos candidatos presidenciales anteriores del partido, incluso dieron el extraordinario paso de condenar a su sucesor en términos inequívocos.Sin embargo, cada vez que Trump se enfrentaba a la oposición, él y sus aliados llamaban a los críticos “elitistas”, “noticias falsas”, “débiles” o “cobardes”. Era mucho más fácil decir que los detractores de Trump tenían el “síndrome de enajenación de Trump”, o que eran “simples títeres de la clase dominante”, que comprometerse con una crítica sustancial. Así comenzó la adulación a la mente populista (irónico para un movimiento que se deleitaba llamando “copos de nieve” —que no aguantan nada— a los estudiantes progresistas).El desacuerdo en la derecha se convirtió de inmediato en sinónimo de falta de respeto. Si “nosotros, el pueblo” (el término que los partidarios de Trump aplican a lo que ellos llaman el “Estados Unidos de verdad”) creemos algo, entonces el pueblo merece que sus políticos y expertos reflejen esa opinión.Lo vemos en los documentos internos de Fox News que salieron a la luz en el litigio por difamación de Dominion, en el que Dominion Voting Systems demandó a Fox News por difundir afirmaciones falsas sobre las máquinas de votación después de las elecciones de 2020. En repetidas ocasiones, los líderes y personalidades de Fox que no parecían creer que las elecciones de 2020 fueron robadas se refirieron a la necesidad de “respetar” a su audiencia al decirles lo contrario. Para estos empleados de Fox, respetar a la audiencia no significaba transmitir la verdad (un verdadero acto de respeto). Por el contrario, significaba alimentar el hambre insaciable de los espectadores por confirmar sus teorías conspirativas.Fui testigo directo de este fenómeno al principio de la era Trump. Conversaba con un pequeño grupo de pastores evangélicos sobre cómo los evangélicos blancos ya no valoraban la buena reputación de los políticos. En comparación con otros grupos cristianos y estadounidenses no afiliados, los evangélicos blancos pasaron de ser el grupo menos propenso en 2011 a creer que “un funcionario electo que comete un acto inmoral en su vida personal puede, a pesar de ello, comportarse con ética y cumplir su deber” al grupo más propenso a excusar a los políticos inmorales en 2016, según una encuesta del Public Religion Research Institute/Bookings Institution.En esa conversación hablé de la Resolución de la Convención Bautista del Sur de 1998 sobre la moralidad de los funcionarios públicos. Aprobada durante el punto álgido del escándalo en torno a la aventura de Bill Clinton con Monica Lewinsky, declaraba un compromiso cristiano con la integridad política en términos inequívocos. “La tolerancia de las faltas graves por parte de los líderes”, decía, “cauteriza la conciencia de la cultura, engendra inmoralidad desenfrenada y anarquía en la sociedad, y sin duda resulta en el juicio de Dios”.Cuando le recordé esas palabras al grupo, un pastor de Alabama planteó una objeción: “Eso les va a parecer elitista a muchos miembros de mi congregación”. Yo estaba confundido. Un pastor bautista me estaba diciendo que a su congregación le parecería “elitista” una declaración reciente de creencia bautista. Quedó claro que muchos bautistas creían en su propia resolución cuando se refería a Clinton, pero no cuando se refería a Trump.Los políticos siempre tienen la tentación de ser complacientes, pero rara vez se ve una abdicación tan completa de cualquier cosa que se acerque a un verdadero liderazgo moral o político como lo que ocurrió en el mitin de Waco. Comenzó con esa ridícula e irrelevante declaración sobre Volodímir Zelenski (¿qué tiene que ver su orientación sexual con la rectitud de la causa ucraniana?); continuó con Mike Lindell, de MyPillow, quien repitió aseveraciones electorales totalmente falsas y terminó con un airado, aunque repetitivo, discurso de Trump, también plagado de falsedades.Y si se piensa por un momento que hay algún arrepentimiento en el mundo de Trump por la insurrección del 6 de enero de 2021, el mitin ofreció una respuesta contundente. Antes de su discurso, Trump se puso de pie —con la mano sobre el corazón— mientras escuchaba una canción llamada “Justicia para todos”, que grabó con algo llamado el “Coro de la Prisión J6”, un grupo de hombres encarcelados por asaltar el Capitolio. La canción consiste en que el coro canta el himno nacional mientras Trump recita el juramento a la bandera.Es habitual criticar el movimiento trumpista como un culto a Donald Trump, pero eso ya no es del todo correcto. Sigue teniendo una influencia enorme, pero ¿acaso los verdaderos sectarios abuchean a su líder cuando se desvía del guion aprobado? Sin embargo, eso es lo que ocurrió en diciembre de 2021, pues una parte de la multitud de un mitin en Dallas abucheó a Trump cuando dijo que se había puesto un refuerzo de la vacuna contra la covid. ¿Y alguien cree que Trump es aficionado a QAnon? Sin embargo, en 2022 impulsó contenido explícito de Q en Truth Social, su plataforma de redes sociales preferida.Quizá haya habido un momento en el que Trump de verdad dirigiera su movimiento. Ese tiempo ya pasó. Ahora es su movimiento el que manda. Alimentado por teorías de la conspiración, está hambriento de confrontación, y mítines como el de Waco demuestran su dominio. Como el pirata que se planta frente al personaje de Tom Hanks en la popular película de 2013 Capitán Phillips, la derecha populista se planta frente al Partido Republicano, los medios conservadores e incluso los republicanos de base reticentes y lanza un único y sencillo mensaje: “Ahora yo soy el capitán”.David French es columnista de opinión del New York Times. Es abogado, escritor y veterano de la Operación Libertad Iraquí. Es un exlitigante constitucional y su libro más reciente es Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. @DavidAFrench More

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      At the Waco Rally and Beyond, Trump’s Movement Now Commands Him

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      The most telling exchange in Donald Trump’s Waco, Texas, rally on Saturday didn’t come from Trump himself. It came at the beginning, when the aging rock star Ted Nugent was warming up the crowd. “I want my money back,” he yelled. “I didn’t authorize any money to Ukraine, to some homosexual weirdo.”Moments later, speaking on Real America’s Voice, a far-right television channel, the former Fox News correspondent Ed Henry called Nugent’s words “about Zelensky” and about funding for Ukraine, “amazing.” He then summed up the Trumpist movement’s race to the bottom in one succinct line: “He is channeling what a lot of Americans feel.”Yes, he is. And so did virtually every speaker at Trump’s marathon rally. One after another, they looked at a seething, conspiracy-addled crowd and indulged, fed, and stoked every element of their furious worldview. I didn’t see a single true leader on Trump’s stage, not even Trump himself. I saw a collection of followers, each vying for the affection of the real power in Waco, the coddled populist mob.To understand the social and political dynamic on the modern right, you have to understand how millions of Americans became inoculated against the truth. Throughout the 2016 Republican primaries, there was no shortage of Republican leaders and commentators who were willing to call out Trump. John McCain and Mitt Romney, the party’s two previous presidential nominees, even took the extraordinary step of condemning their successor in no uncertain terms.Yet every time Trump faced pushback, he and his allies called critics “elitist” or “fake news” or “weak” or “cowards.” It was much easier to say the Trump skeptics had “Trump derangement syndrome,” or were “just establishment stooges,” than to engage with substantive critique. Thus began the coddling of the populist mind (ironic for a movement that delighted in calling progressive students “snowflakes”).Disagreement on the right quickly came to be seen as synonymous with disrespect. If “we the people” (the term Trump partisans apply to what they call the “real America”) believe something, then the people deserve to have that view reflected right back to them by their politicians and pundits.We see this in the internal Fox News documents that surfaced in the Dominion defamation litigation, in which Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for broadcasting false claims about its voting machines after the 2020 election. Repeatedly, Fox leaders and personalities who did not seem to believe the 2020 election was stolen referred to the need to “respect” their audience by telling them otherwise. For these Fox staffers, respecting the audience didn’t mean relaying the truth (a true act of respect). Instead, it meant feeding viewers’ insatiable hunger for confirmation of their conspiracy theories.I saw this phenomenon firsthand early in the Trump era. I was speaking to a small group of Evangelical pastors about how white Evangelicals no longer valued good character in politicians. Compared to other Christian groups and unaffiliated Americans, white Evangelicals went from the group least likely to believe that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties” in 2011 to the group most likely to excuse immoral politicians in 2016.In that conversation I discussed the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention Resolution On Moral Character Of Public Officials. Passed during the height of the scandal around Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, it declared a Christian commitment to political integrity in no uncertain terms. “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders,” it said, “sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”When I reminded the group of that language, a pastor from Alabama raised an objection. “That’s going to sound elitist to lots of folks in my congregation,” he said. I was confused. Here was a Baptist pastor telling me that his congregation would find a recent statement of Baptist belief “elitist.” It became clear that many Baptists believed their own resolution when it applied to Clinton, but not when it applied to Trump.Politicians are always tempted to pander, but rarely do you see such a complete abdication of anything approaching true moral or political leadership as what transpired at the Waco rally. It began with that ridiculous and irrelevant statement about Zelensky (what does his sexual orientation have to do with the rightness of Ukraine’s cause?); continued with MyPillow’s Mike Lindell repeating wildly false election claims; and ended with an angry, albeit boilerplate Trump stump speech that was also littered with falsehoods.And if you think for a moment that there’s any Trumpworld regret over the Jan. 6 insurrection, the rally provided a decisive response. At the beginning of Trump’s speech, he stood — hand over his heart — while he listened to a song called “Justice for All,” which he recorded with something called the “J6 Prison Choir,” a group of men imprisoned for storming the Capitol. The song consists of the choir singing the national anthem while Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance.It’s common to critique the Trumpist movement as a Donald Trump cult, but that’s not quite right anymore. He’s still immensely influential, but do true cultists boo their leader when he deviates from the approved script? Yet that’s what happened in December 2021, when parts of a Dallas rally crowd booed Trump when he said he’d received a Covid vaccine booster. And does anyone think that Trump is a QAnon aficionado? Yet in 2022 he boosted explicit Q content on Truth Social, his social media platform of choice.There may have been a time when Trump truly commanded his movement. That time is past. His movement now commands him. Fed by conspiracies, it is hungry for confrontation, and rallies like Waco demonstrate its dominance. Like the pirate standing in front of Tom Hanks in the popular 2013 film “Captain Phillips,” the populist right stands in front of the G.O.P., conservative media, and even reluctant rank-and-file Republicans and delivers a single, simple message: “I’m the captain now.”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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      As Trump Rallies in Texas, His Followers Shore Up His 2024 Bid

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      Despite a pattern of dangerous, erratic behavior, the former president remains a strong front-runner for his party’s nomination. His durability stems from his most loyal supporters.WACO, Texas — In the last 28 months, former President Donald J. Trump has been voted out of the White House, impeached for his role in the Capitol riot and criticized for marching many of his fellow Republicans off an electoral cliff in the 2022 midterms with his drumbeat of election-fraud lies.He dined at home with a white supremacist in November. He called for the termination of the Constitution in December. He declared himself “more angry” than ever in January. He vowed to make retribution a hallmark of a second term in the White House in March.He has embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, described President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a genius and used a gay joke to mock a fellow Republican. He has become the target of four criminal investigations, including one in New York that he warned might result in “potential death & destruction.”Still, Mr. Trump remains a strong front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. At least one reason for this political durability was assembled Saturday morning outside the airport in the central Texas city of Waco in various combinations of red caps, antagonistic T-shirts and MAGA-button flair — the Trump die-hards.Starting before 8 a.m., more than nine hours before the former president was set to take the stage at the first rally of his 2024 campaign, his supporters streamed across dirt roads and formed an ever-growing line that zigzagged across the grass and bluebonnets, with a forest of Trump flags flying nearby. One sign nodded to both the F.B.I.’s search of Mr. Trump’s Florida property and the federal agency’s siege 30 years ago of a religious sect’s compound in this Texas city: “Remember the Alamo, Remember Waco, Remember Mar-a-Lago.”It is Mr. Trump’s base of hard-core followers, who show up to his rallies in force, that has allowed him to maintain his grip on the party despite a pattern of dangerous, discordant behavior that would have sunk most traditional politicians.Whether or not Mr. Trump can expand his support beyond his loyalists, as he must do to win a general election, remains an open question for Republican primary voters. But the loyalty of his superfans remains as strong as ever.They fly “Trump or Death” flags from Jeep Wranglers outside Mar-a-Lago. Many have fallen out with family and friends over their devotion to the former president. They view themselves as mistreated and unappreciated, and view Mr. Trump as not so much a man but a cause. “Jesus, Freedom & Trump” read the T-shirt worn by one woman who went to see the former president in Iowa recently.Amid overlapping investigations and the looming possibility of arrest, the ardor of these supporters has not faded but, many said, has grown only stronger.“I think it’s really disgusting,” said Leslie Splendoria, 71, who arrived early in Waco and said she had supported Mr. Trump since his first presidential run. “They’re trying to do anything they can to get rid of him.” She came to the event from Hutto, Texas, north of Austin, with her ex-husband, her daughter, her 3-year-old granddaughter and a small wagon of supplies for the long wait in line.“No one is safe,” said her daughter, Kimberly Splendoria, 38, wearing a red MAGA sweatshirt and a Trump hat and holding her daughter, Gigi. “They can just throw you in jail, indict you.”“Look at what happened on Jan. 6,” said Bob Splendoria, Leslie’s ex-husband. “You happened to be there and they arrest you.” He and Leslie said they had wanted to attend the protest in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but could not make it. Both said they would not have entered the Capitol.Hours later, Mr. Trump arrived, his plane buzzing the crowd with a flyover before landing.His speech was a familiar festival of grievances and focused heavily on his legal jeopardy, portraying his expected indictment by a New York grand jury as a result of what he claimed was a Democratic conspiracy to persecute him. He also argued that the United States was turning into a “banana republic.”One of the early speakers at the event, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, told attendees that he had pushed for Waco as the rally site after a call from Mr. Trump seeking suggestions. Speaking later to reporters, Mr. Patrick said he preferred Waco because it was centrally located and could attract Trump supporters from around the state. He said he had been unaware that it was the 30th anniversary of the bloody standoff with the Branch Davidians. “Nobody knew until some of you brought it up,” he said.Mr. Trump’s political strength has long proved difficult to fully measure. While polls show that he enjoys a commanding advantage in a Republican primary field, most surveys also show that about half of the party’s voters would prefer another nominee at this early phase in the 2024 contest.His final swing of campaign rallies before the midterm elections in November avoided key battleground states, where independent voters who largely disliked Mr. Trump had been expected to tilt results. His rallies last year instead included stops in Iowa and Ohio, two states that he had twice won easily.A recent call by Mr. Trump for his supporters to protest a potential indictment from the Manhattan district attorney received a tepid response and, in some cases, was met with pushback from other Republican leaders.Still, the support that Mr. Trump has coalesced has given him the luster of an incumbent in the primary contest. That means to overtake the former president, other Republican contenders face the difficult task of first peeling support away from Mr. Trump before they can persuade those same voters to back their own bid for the nomination.In Waco, some rallygoers were skeptical of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief potential rival.“I like DeSantis, I do, but the ground that needs to be covered is going to take Trump to get it done,” said Jeff Fiebert, 69, a farmer who described himself as a die-hard Trump supporter and who moved to Waco from California during the pandemic, a move he said was motivated almost entirely by politics.Asked what Mr. Trump could do that Mr. DeSantis could not, he said the former president was the kind of person “who goes into the bar and knocks all the bottles off the shelf just to see where they land.” Mr. DeSantis, he added, does not do that sort of thing.While the field of official Republican challengers remains small — Mr. DeSantis, for example, is still months away from an expected formal announcement — Mr. Trump has continued to tend to his die-hard supporters. He invited a handful of his most devoted rallygoers to his Mar-a-Lago resort in November for his official campaign announcement, and delivered private remarks to many of them in a small ballroom before his public speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference three weeks ago.Mr. Trump has spent years on the campaign trail persuading supporters to interpret pressure on him — from his opponents, law enforcement and members of Congress — as attacks on them. That is why some of his allies believe that becoming the first former president to face criminal charges — as expected in the Manhattan district attorney’s case — could carry political upside for Mr. Trump, at least in a Republican primary.“And no matter what happens,” Mr. Trump wrote this week in an email seeking supporters’ campaign contributions, “I’ll be standing right where I belong and where I’ve always been since the day I first announced I was running for President…Between them and YOU.”Trump rallygoers often explain their continued backing of Mr. Trump in terms of gratitude. They say he has stood up for them and, as a result, has been targeted with investigations into his company’s finances, his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.“I think it just helps him,” said Courtney Sodolak, 37, a nurse from outside Houston who arrived early in Waco.Ms. Sodolak, who was wearing a shirt that read, “Guns Don’t Kill People, Clintons Do,” connected the treatment of Mr. Trump to her own experience being kicked off social media platforms. She said she had been removed for posting conservative content, including images of Kyle Rittenhouse and of people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.“I’ve been through 60 Facebooks,” she said. “I can’t even have one in my own name.”The legal scrutiny of Mr. Trump, Ms. Sodolak maintained, is similarly unfair.“It makes him more relatable to what real people go through,” she said. “The social injustice.” More

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      Former Trump Officials Must Testify in 2020 Election Inquiry, Judge Says

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      The ruling paves the way for testimony from Mark Meadows and others. Separately, a Trump lawyer appeared before a grand jury looking into the former president’s handling of classified documents.A federal judge has ruled that a number of former officials from President Donald J. Trump’s administration — including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows — cannot invoke executive privilege to avoid testifying to a grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The recent ruling by Judge Beryl A. Howell paves the way for the former White House officials to answer questions from federal prosecutors, according to two people briefed on the matter.Judge Howell ruled on the matter in a closed-door proceeding in her role as chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, a job in which she oversaw the grand juries taking testimony in the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump. Judge Howell’s term as chief judge ended last week.The existence of the sealed ruling was first reported by ABC News.Mr. Trump’s lawyers had tried to rebuff the grand jury subpoenas issued to more than a half-dozen former administration officials in connection with the former president’s efforts to remain in office after his defeat at the polls. The lawyers argued that Mr. Trump’s interactions with the officials would be covered by executive privilege.Prosecutors are likely to be especially eager to hear from Mr. Meadows, who refused to be interviewed by the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Meadows was a central player in various efforts to help Mr. Trump reverse the election outcome in a number of contested states.Before he stopped cooperating with the committee, Mr. Meadows provided House investigators with thousands of text messages that gave them a road map of events and people to interview. He has also appeared before a fact-finding grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., investigating the efforts to overturn the election, according to the grand jury’s forewoman, who described him as not very forthcoming.Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, did not respond to a phone call on Friday seeking comment.Other officials whose grand jury testimony Judge Howell compelled in her order vary in significance to the investigation, and in seniority. They include John McEntee, who served as Mr. Trump’s personnel chief and personal aide; Nick Luna, another personal aide; Robert C. O’Brien, who was national security adviser; Dan Scavino, who was a deputy chief of staff and social media director in the White House; John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence; Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s speechwriter and adviser; and Ken Cuccinelli, who served as acting deputy secretary of homeland security.Word of the ruling came as the Justice Department pressed ahead in its parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them. The twin federal investigations are being led by Jack Smith, the special counsel who was appointed after Mr. Trump announced his latest candidacy in November.In the documents case, one of the central witnesses, M. Evan Corcoran, a lawyer who represented Mr. Trump in the inquiry, appeared before a grand jury on Friday after both Judge Howell and a federal appeals court in Washington rejected his attempts to avoid answering questions by asserting attorney-client privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with the matter..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In making her ruling last week to force Mr. Corcoran to testify, Judge Howell upheld the government’s request to invoke the crime-fraud exception, a provision of the law that allows prosecutors to work around attorney-client privilege if they have reason to believe that legal advice or services were used to further a crime. The judge also said that Mr. Corcoran would have to turn over some documents related to his representation of Mr. Trump.Judge Howell’s order exposed the continuing legal peril confronting Mr. Trump, as it noted that Mr. Smith’s team had made “a prima facie showing that the former president committed criminal violations,” according to people familiar with the decision.Her order made clear that prosecutors have questions not just about what Mr. Trump told Mr. Corcoran as he prepared to respond to a grand jury subpoena seeking any remaining classified material in Mr. Trump’s possession, but who else may have influenced what Mr. Corcoran told Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the ruling.In December, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, Timothy Parlatore, also appeared in front of the grand jury, to answer questions about a subpoena prosecutors had issued in May seeking all classified material in the possession of the custodian of records for Mr. Trump’s presidential office.Mr. Parlatore said on Friday that he had gone in front of the grand jury because at that point Mr. Trump’s office no longer had a custodian of records. He also said that he had been involved in several efforts to comply with the subpoena in the weeks and months after the F.B.I., acting on a search warrant in August, hauled away hundreds of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.Among the things that Mr. Parlatore said he discussed with the grand jury were additional searches he oversaw at the end of last year, of other properties belonging to Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla.During the search of the storage site, investigators found at least two more documents with classified markings.During his grand jury testimony, Mr. Parlatore said he also mentioned an empty folder bearing the words “classified evening summary” that had remained on Mr. Trump’s bedroom night stand even after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago.He said prosecutors immediately drew up a subpoena for the folder, demanding its return.“The D.O.J. is continuously stepping far outside the standard norms in attempting to destroy the long-accepted, long-held, constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege,” a Trump spokesman said in a statement, saying the cases are political and that “there is no factual or legal basis or substance to any case against President Trump.”Prosecutors in Mr. Smith’s office have also been pressing forward with seeking grand jury testimony in a separate investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office. 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      Trump Plans Rally in Waco During Anniversary of Branch Davidian Standoff

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      In the chapel at Mount Carmel, the longtime home of the Branch Davidian sect outside Waco, Tex., the pastor preaches about the coming apocalypse, as the sect’s doomed charismatic leader David Koresh did three decades ago.But the prophecies offered by the pastor, Charles Pace, are different from Mr. Koresh’s. For one thing, they involve Donald J. Trump.“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” Mr. Pace said in an interview. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”Mr. Trump, embattled by multiple investigations and publicly predicting an imminent indictment in one, announced last week that he would hold the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign on Saturday at the regional airport in Waco.The date falls in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the weekslong standoff involving federal agents and followers of Mr. Koresh that left 82 Branch Davidians and four agents dead at Mount Carmel, the group’s compound east of the city.More than 80 Branch Davidians died during the standoff at their compound outside Waco.Tim Roberts/AFP via Getty ImagesMr. Trump has not linked his Waco visit to the anniversary. Asked whether the rally — the former president’s first in the city of 140,000 — was an intentional nod to the most infamous episode in Waco’s history, Steven Cheung, the campaign’s spokesman, replied via email that the Waco site was chosen “because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas’ biggest metropolitan areas — Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio — while providing the necessary infrastructure to hold a rally of this magnitude.”But the rally comes amid a spate of increasingly aggressive statements by Mr. Trump claiming his persecution at the hands of prosecutors, and the historical resonance has not been lost on some of his most ardent followers.“Waco was an overreach of the government, and today the New York district attorney is practicing an overreach of the government again,” said Sharon Anderson, a retiree from Etowah, Tenn., who is traveling to Waco for Saturday’s event, her 33rd Trump rally.Mr. Pace said he believed it was “a statement — that he was sieged by the F.B.I. at Mar-a-Lago and that they were accusing him of different things that aren’t really true, just like David Koresh was accused by the F.B.I. when they sieged him.”“I’m going to the rally, for sure,” he added.The attention to Mr. Trump’s choice of locale highlights the long political afterlife of the Waco standoff. A polarizing episode in its own time, the deadly raid was invoked in the 1990s by right-wing extremists including Timothy McVeigh, often to the dismay of the surviving Branch Davidians. It has remained a cause for contemporary far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.“Donald Trump is the anointed of God,” said Charles Pace, a pastor who preaches about the coming apocalypse. “He is the battering ram that God is using to bring down the Deep State of Babylon.”Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAlex Jones, the conspiracy-theorist broadcaster who helped draw crowds of Trump loyalists to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, rose to prominence promoting wild claims about the Waco standoff. The longtime Trump associate and former campaign adviser Roger Stone dedicated his 2015 book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” to the Branch Davidians who died at Mount Carmel.“Waco is a touchstone for the far right,” said Stuart Wright, a professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Tex., and an authority on the standoff.He said Mr. Trump’s decision to begin his campaign there, if intentional in its nod to the siege, would echo Ronald Reagan’s August 1980 speech affirming his support of “states’ rights” at a county fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town known for the murder of three civil rights activists 16 years earlier.“There’s some deep symbolism,” Mr. Wright said.Mr. Trump has a long history of statements that feed the far right, even as he claims that was not his intent. That list includes his equivocating response to the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one woman dead; his message to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in a presidential debate; and his exhortations to supporters in Washington just before many stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn his defeat.As state and federal investigations have drawn closer to him in recent months, he has often portrayed himself in embattled or even apocalyptic terms. When F.B.I. agents searched his Mar-a-Lago resort in August looking for classified documents, he issued a statement declaring himself “currently under siege.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Coalition conference this month, he described the 2024 presidential election as “the final battle” and vowed “retribution.” As word circulated this month of a possible indictment from a New York grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s role in payments made to a porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign, he posted a message to supporters in all-caps to “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”Early Friday, still awaiting the grand jury’s action, Mr. Trump posted that the “potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country.”Newt Gingrich, a prominent critic of the federal government’s handling of the standoff during his time as House speaker, noted a major theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign: “the degree to which the federal government is corrupt and incompetent.”Whether or not the historical resonance of his Waco rally was intentional, Mr. Gingrich said, “It would certainly fit as a symbol of federal overreach and a symbol of a Justice Department run amok.”Parnell McNamara, the sheriff of McLennan County, home to Waco, said he did not believe there were security concerns beyond the ordinary preparations for a presidential campaign rally.“Him coming here, to me, is just a totally different situation, and really has nothing to do with that,” he said in reference to the 1993 raid, for which he was present as a U.S. marshal. “I have not heard anybody even bring that up.”Visitors to Mount Carmel. The standoff at the Branch Davidian compound has inspired pilgrimages and conspiracy theorists.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesOn Feb. 28, 1993, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms mounted a raid to serve a search and arrest warrant at the compound belonging to the Branch Davidians, a splinter sect of Seventh-day Adventists then under the leadership of Mr. Koresh. Federal investigators suspected Mr. Koresh of possessing illegal weapons. A gunfight erupted, four A.T.F. agents and six Branch Davidians were killed, and a 51-day standoff began.It ended on April 19, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke off negotiations with Mr. Koresh and advanced with tanks. Mr. Koresh and 75 of his followers, many of them children, were killed as a fire consumed the compound.The Branch Davidians mostly eschewed politics. But the siege was overseen by the administration of a Democratic president and set off by an investigation of a Christian sect over a weapons charge, at a time when the National Rifle Association had begun stoking fears about the federal government seizing Americans’ guns, factors that help make it a cause on the right.An independent inquiry completed in 2000, led by the former Republican senator John Danforth, faulted federal agencies for their lack of transparency regarding the standoff, while also seeking to dispel many of the most lurid conspiracy theories.But by then, the Branch Davidians had already been embraced as martyrs by the far-right extremists of the era, including many members of a rapidly expanding “patriot” or militia movement and Mr. McVeigh, who visited Waco during the siege of Mount Carmel and bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the burning of the compound.David Thibodeau, a survivor of the siege who came from a “very Democratic liberal family,” found the embrace odd.“David and the people at Mount Carmel weren’t political at all,” he said. But he said he appreciated the attention of the right-wing groups when the survivors were struggling to make sense of their experience and were treated as pariahs in other political circles.“Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say except for people on the right,” Mr. Thibodeau said.Funds for the construction of the chapel at Mount Carmel were raised by Mr. Jones, whose obsession with Waco conspiracy theories led to his firing in 1999 from the Austin radio station KJFK and the start of his own media empire, Infowars.Invocations of Waco persisted into the next generation of militias and other extremists that emerged in response to Barack Obama’s presidency and supported Mr. Trump’s. In 2009, the founder of the Three Percenters movement warned of “No More Free Wacos” in an open letter to then-attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. The Oath Keepers issued a statement warning that the Bundy family could be “Waco’d” in their standoff with the federal government in 2014.Waco will host Donald Trump’s first campaign rally of the 2024 race on Saturday. A Trump flag flew at the site of the former Branch Davidian compound on Thursday.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAccording to Newsweek, in 2021, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys and a onetime F.B.I. informant, denounced the agency as the “enemy of the people” in a Parler post, writing: “Remember Waco? Are your eyes opened yet?”A Texas Proud Boys chapter made a pilgrimage to the Mount Carmel chapel on the anniversary of the raid last year, according to Mr. Pace, whose politicized, QAnon-inflected theology is rejected by some other Branch Davidians. “They come out and pay their respects, and find out what really happened here,” Mr. Pace said.Mr. Danforth, a Republican, lamented the changes in his party in the Trump years that had brought the conspiracy theories that his report had aimed to dispel into the political mainstream. “It’s the prevailing view of Republicans today that no matter what the facts show, the system is broken, our election system doesn’t work, we shouldn’t have confidence in elections, there’s no finality, it’s all a steal,” he said.Asked whether his Waco report would be widely accepted today, he said, “No. It’s just a very different time.” More