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    Trump Plans Rally in Waco During Anniversary of Branch Davidian Standoff

    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

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    Don’t Be Fooled. Ron DeSantis Is a Bush-Cheney Republican.

    One of the strangest ads of the 2022 election cycle was an homage to “Top Gun,” featuring Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. In it, DeSantis is the “Top Gov,” setting his sights on his political enemies: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your governor speaking. Today’s training evolution: dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”The ad concludes with DeSantis in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, rallying viewers to take on the media’s “false narratives.”The imagery plays on the governor’s résumé. He was never a pilot, of course, but he was in the Navy, where he was a member of the Judge Advocate General Corps of military lawyers from 2004 to 2010. DeSantis served in Iraq and at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay and made his military career a centerpiece of his 2018 campaign for governor. “Service is in my DNA,” he wrote at the time. “My desire to serve my country has been my goal and my calling.”In recent weeks, we have learned a little more about what that service actually entailed, details that weren’t more widely known at the time of his 2018 race.As a lawyer at Guantánamo Bay, according to a report by Michael Kranish in The Washington Post, DeSantis endorsed the force-feeding of detainees.“Detainees were strapped into a chair, and a lubricated tube was stuffed down their nose so a nurse could pour down two cans of a protein drink,” Kranish wrote. “The detainees’ lawyers tried and failed to stop the painful practice, arguing that it violated international torture conventions.”The reason to highlight these details of DeSantis’s service at Guantánamo is that it helps place the Florida governor in his proper political context. The standard view of DeSantis is that he comes out of Donald Trump’s populist Republican Party, a view the governor has been keen to cultivate as he vies for leadership within the party. And to that end, DeSantis has made himself into the presumptive heir apparent to Trump in look, language and attitude.But what if we centered DeSantis in Guantánamo, Iraq and the war on terrorism rather than the fever house of the MAGA Republican Party, a place that may not be a natural fit for the Yale- and Harvard-educated lawyer? What if we treated DeSantis not as a creature of the Trump years but as a product of the Bush ones? How, then, would we understand his position in the Republican Party?For a moment in American politics — before Hurricane Katrina, the grinding occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial crisis that nearly toppled the global economy — George W. Bush represented the clear future of the Republican Party.And what was Bush Republicanism? It promised, despite the circumstances of his election in 2000, to build a new, permanent Republican majority that would relegate the Democratic Party to the margins of national politics. It was ideologically conservative on most questions of political economy but willing to bend in order to win points with key constituencies, as when Bush backed a large prescription drug program under Medicare.Bush’s Republicanism was breathtakingly arrogant — “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” one unnamed aide famously told The New York Times Magazine in 2004 — contemptuous of expertise and hostile to dissent, as when the president condemned the Democratic-controlled Senate of 2002 as “not interested in the security of the American people.”Bush’s Republicanism was also cruel, as exemplified in the 2004 presidential election, when he ran, successfully, against the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Americans, framing them as a threat to the integrity of society itself. “Marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots without weakening the good influence of society,” he said, endorsing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.Perhaps the most distinctive quality of Bush’s Republicanism — or rather, Bush’s Republican Party — was that it was still an elite-driven institution. He ran a Brooks Brothers administration, whose militarism, jingoism and cruelty were expressed through bureaucratic niceties and faux technical language, like “enhanced interrogation.”To me, DeSantis looks like a Bush Republican as much as or more than he does a Trump one. He shares the majoritarian aspirations of Bush, as well as the open contempt for dissent. DeSantis shares the cruelty, with a national political image built, among other things, on a campaign of stigma against trans and other gender-nonconforming Americans.Despite his pretenses to the contrary, DeSantis is very much the image of a member of the Republican establishment. That’s one reason he has the almost lock-step support of the organs of that particular elite, for whom he represents a return to normalcy after the chaos and defeat of the Trump years.It is not for nothing that in the fight for the 2024 Republican nomination, DeSantis leads Trump among Republicans with a college degree — the white-collar conservative voters who were Bush stalwarts and Trump skeptics.The upshot of all of this — and the reason to make this classification in the first place — is that it is simply wrong to attribute the pathologies of today’s Republican Party to the influence of Trump alone. If DeSantis marks the return of the Bush Republican, then he is a stark reminder that the Republican Party of that era was as destructive and dysfunctional as the one forged by Trump.You could even say that if DeSantis is the much-desired return to “normal” Republicans, then Republican normalcy is not much different from Republican deviancy.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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    Fact Check: The Ties Between Alvin Bragg and George Soros

    Donald Trump’s allies have accused the district attorney bringing a case against him as having been “bought” by Mr. Soros, the philanthropist. That is misleading, though the men do have a financial connection.WASHINGTON — As a potential indictment looms over former President Donald J. Trump, he and his allies have sought to tie the Manhattan district attorney bringing the case to a familiar Republican specter: George Soros, the financier and Democratic megadonor.Mr. Soros, who has backed Democratic candidates and causes as well as democracy and human rights around the world, has for years been a boogeyman on the right, confronting attacks that portray him as a “globalist” mastermind and that often veer into antisemitic tropes.The connections between him and Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, are real but overstated. In reality, Mr. Soros donated to a liberal group that endorses progressive prosecutors and supports efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system — in line with causes that he has publicly supported for years. That group used a significant portion of the money to support Mr. Bragg in his 2021 campaign.A spokesman for Mr. Soros said that the two men had never met, nor had Mr. Soros given money directly to Mr. Bragg’s campaign.Here’s a fact check.What Was Said“Alvin Bragg received in EXCESS OF ONE MILLION DOLLARS from the Radical Left Enemy of ‘TRUMP,’ George Soros.”— Mr. Trump, in a Truth Social post on Monday“Alvin Bragg is bought by George Soros. He allows violent criminals to walk the streets of New York City, but will prosecute the likely Republican nominee (and former president) on a baseless misdemeanor charge. These people are trying to turn America into a third-world country.”— Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, in a Twitter post on Saturday“Alvin Bragg is bought and paid for by George Soros and has repeatedly showed his hatred for President Trump based on purely political motives.”— Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, in a Twitter post on SaturdayThese claims are exaggerated.While the link between Mr. Bragg and Mr. Soros exists, arguments that the district attorney was “bought” by the philanthropist are misleading.Mr. Bragg announced his candidacy for the position in June 2019. Nearly two years later, on May 8, 2021, the political arm of Color of Change, a progressive criminal justice group, endorsed him. It pledged to spend $1 million on direct mailers, on-the-ground campaigning and voter turnout efforts on his behalf. (It did not donate to Mr. Bragg’s campaign directly.) A few days later, on May 14, Mr. Soros contributed $1 million to the group, which intended to help Mr. Bragg with the money.Color of Change did not meet its pledge. It eventually spent nearly $500,000 in support of Mr. Bragg. That amounted to about 11 percent of the group’s $4.6 million in total spending during the 2021-22 election cycle, according to the campaign finance website Open Secrets..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.A spokeswoman for the political arm of Color of Change said that the group reviewed and interviewed reform-minded district attorney candidates each election cycle, and that the process was independent of funders. Mr. Soros was just one of many large donors to the group. Past donors included members of the wealthy Pritzker family, the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys.Mr. Bragg was not the only candidate Color of Change endorsed and aided through organizing efforts in 2021. The group also helped re-elect Larry Krasner, the district attorney of Philadelphia, by contacting more than 300,000 voters and sending nearly 200,000 pieces of direct mail on his behalf. In addition, it operated phone banks, ran advertisements and mobilized voters to support a local candidate in Virginia and a ballot initiative in Minneapolis.Nor was Mr. Soros’s $1 million contribution particularly unusual. Mr. Soros gave to the group multiple times before it endorsed Mr. Bragg; he personally donated $450,000 between 2016 and 2018, and his political action committee, Democracy PAC, gave $2.5 million in 2020.Neither Mr. Soros nor Democracy PAC contributed directly to Mr. Bragg’s campaign, according to Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros.“George Soros and Alvin Bragg have never met in person or spoken by telephone, email, Zoom, etc.,” Mr. Vachon said. “There has been no contact between the two.”Mr. Vachon also noted that Mr. Soros had been open about his yearslong support of progressive prosecutors. In a 2022 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Soros explained his thoughts on overhauling the criminal justice system and wrote that “the idea we need to choose between justice and safety is false.”“I have supported the election (and more recently the re-election) of prosecutors who support reform,” he wrote. “I have done it transparently, and I have no intention of stopping.” More

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    Sex, Lies and … Trump. What More Can You Ask For?

    One thing we can be sure of: If this Stormy Daniels thing hurts Donald Trump politically, it will be for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with sex.Nobody cares whether or not the two of them once had an, um, intimate assignation. Although I do enjoy recalling that Daniels has referred to it as “the worst 90 seconds of my life.”Right now, the most pressing question is whether Trump committed a crime during the 2016 presidential campaign when his people paid Daniels to keep quiet about their mini-affair, an affair Trump denies ever took place. His lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and served more than a year in prison, but that apparently hasn’t caused Trump to question his own conduct.“The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair,” Trump tweeted a few years back. “Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll in this transaction.”We will stop here to note that our former president was a little off when it came to the word “role.” Only mentioning because it gives me an opportunity to recall that he once sent me a missive calling me a liar with “the face of a pig” in which he misspelled “too.”But about the sex. Our political history shows that while people are extremely interested in hearing about politicians’ bad behavior, they don’t base their votes on it.We’ve got a Republican presidential primary coming our way, and if Ron DeSantis is a big player, I think we can presume the Florida governor will win any morality standoff. This guy is apparently a very devoted husband. Whose wife, frankly, seems to be the brains behind his political career.DeSantis has been more or less following his party’s game plan, which is to change the subject when Trump’s legal problems come up and attack Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for presumably bringing the charges.“I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said recently. “I just, I can’t speak to that.”Aha! The mention-by-attacking-the-mention approach! And the adding of “alleged” to all discussions of the affair. Much better than the DeSantis tactic of citing “people like our founding fathers” when it comes to exemplary private behavior. Once you get past George Washington it doesn’t take long before you are face to face with Thomas Jefferson’s four-decade entanglement with the enslaved Sally Hemings.The grand tradition of political sex scandals goes back a long way. The ancient Romans, after all, speculated about whether the emperor Nero and his mother had an incestuous … thing going. In early America, even deeply nonrambunctious John Adams was a target — people gossiped that he’d dispatched Gen. Charles Pinckney across the Atlantic to fetch four beautiful Englishwomen for them to share. (“I declare on my honor, if this be true, General Pinckney has kept them all four to himself and cheated me of my two,” Adams declared.)The people who are really affected by this sort of public gossip are the politicians who are the target, some of whom suffer greatly. Can’t believe Bill Clinton isn’t haunted by the fact that if one quote of his goes down in history, it’ll probably be, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”Or take my favorite subject, Grover Cleveland, who was the target of huge headlines claiming, inaccurately, that he’d fathered an illegitimate child. None of that bothered the citizenry — he won the popular vote for president in three straight elections. But the publicity tortured him, and for years his opponents enjoyed singing, “Ma, Ma, where’s Pa?”Not sure Grover ever totally got over it, even when his supporters got to retort, “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.”Now, publicity is never going to be an instrument of torture for Donald Trump. In fact, he’s reportedly all jazzed up about the possibility of doing one of the famous “perp walks” in which a suspect is paraded by Manhattan law officers past reporters after he’s arrested.And as we’ve seen, the American voters who liked Trump to begin with aren’t going to be turned off by a sex scandal. DeSantis’s support among Republicans actually seems to be dropping, maybe even sinking.There are way better lines of attack. Which do you think is worse for a president of the United States?A. Tried to bully a Georgia official into changing the election results.B. Ignored Justice Department demands that he return a pile of classified government documents he took with him when he left office.C. Incited his followers to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.D. No, no, I’m getting a headache.We haven’t even gotten to his advice to people who don’t love their children. That was part of a recent Trump video, in which he bragged that thanks to his reforms, farmers’ children wouldn’t have to pay inheritance tax on agricultural property.And Trump said he had also benevolently taken into consideration landowners who “don’t love your children so much.”Yes! “And there are some people that don’t,” he continued. “And maybe deservedly so, it won’t matter because frankly, you don’t have to leave them anything.”OK, Don Jr., this sort of thing might actually make you a sympathetic figure.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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    The DeSantis Foreign Policy: Hard Power, but With a High Bar

    The Florida governor has never been the internationalist that some old-guard Republicans wanted or imagined him to be. A close reading of his record reveals how he might lead the U.S. abroad.When Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida made headlines recently by undercutting U.S. support for Ukraine, Republican hawks, many of whom cling to him as their only hope to defeat former President Donald J. Trump, wondered if they had misread him as an ideological ally.Mr. DeSantis ditched his previous backing for Ukraine to align himself with the increasingly nationalistic Republican base, which he will need to win the 2024 presidential primary if he runs. But he was never the committed internationalist that some old-guard Republicans had wanted or imagined him to be.Until now, Mr. DeSantis served as a Rorschach test for Republicans. There was, conveniently, something in his record to please each of the party’s ideological factions, and he had every incentive to be all things to all Republicans for as long as he could get away with it.Hawks had claimed Mr. DeSantis as their own for his fervent support of Israel and his denunciations of China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. And restraint-oriented Republicans had claimed Mr. DeSantis for his 2013 decision, as a congressman, to break with Republican hawks and oppose President Barack Obama’s requests to intervene militarily in Syria.Mr. DeSantis during a visit to Jerusalem in 2019. He has been a fervent supporter of Israel. Jeffrey Schweers – Usa Today NetworkYet, despite his policy shifts and inconsistencies — this week, he said he had failed to make himself clear on Ukraine and called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a “war criminal” — Mr. DeSantis’s worldview is not a mystery.Unusually for a governor, Mr. DeSantis, whose spokeswoman declined interview requests, has a long paper trail on foreign policy. A close reading of more than 200 of his speeches, votes, writings and television commentaries over the past decade, as well as interviews with his peers, reveal the makings of a DeSantis Doctrine.‘Just a Jacksonian’Tucked between the campaign boilerplate in Mr. DeSantis’s new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” is a short chapter describing how his service in Iraq, as an officer in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps, reinforced his doubts about former President George W. Bush’s “messianic impulse.”“Bush sketched out a view for American foreign policy that constituted Wilsonianism on steroids,” Mr. DeSantis writes, referring to former President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic liberal internationalism after World War I. He recalls his reaction to a line in Mr. Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”“I remember being stunned,” Mr. DeSantis writes. “Does the survival of American liberty depend on whether liberty succeeds in Djibouti?”Mr. DeSantis’s analysis of Mr. Bush’s attempt to use the military to “socially engineer a foreign society” is the sort of thing one hears from conservative elites who call themselves Jacksonians, after President Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century populist. Though The New York Times could find no public record of the Florida governor describing himself as a Jacksonian, the word kept coming up in interviews with people who know Mr. DeSantis.“I think he’s kind of dead-center where Republican voters are, which is to say that he’s neither an isolationist nor a neoconservative, he’s just a Jacksonian,” said David Reaboi, a conservative national security strategist whom Mr. DeSantis has hosted at the governor’s mansion.Mr. Reaboi was referring to a 1999 essay by the academic Walter Russell Mead, “The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy,” which is still in heavy circulation on the intellectual right. It defines a Jacksonian as having a narrow conception of the U.S. national interest: protection of its territory, its people, its hard assets and its commercial interests overseas.A Jacksonian does not dream of implanting “American values” on foreign soil. He or she believes that if the U.S. military is to be deployed, it should use as much force as necessary to achieve a quick, clearly defined “victory,” with as few American casualties as possible. A Jacksonian cares little about lopsided casualty counts — so long as they’re in America’s favor — or about international law.Unlike Mr. Trump, a fellow Jacksonian but one who operates on pure instinct and would never dream of suffering through a foreign policy treatise, Mr. DeSantis has read deeply and has formed a philosophy about America’s place in the world. But you will rarely hear Mr. DeSantis invoke abstract values to justify the use of force — as some of his potential 2024 rivals and current party leaders have done.He has not framed the Ukraine war as a battle for “freedom,” as former Vice President Mike Pence has done, or as a mission to defend the post-World War II international security framework, as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, has done. If Mr. DeSantis is elected president, there is unlikely to be any more Biden-esque talk of “autocracies versus democracies.” In Mr. DeSantis’s framing, these are the idealistic mutterings of a “Wilsonian.”Tucked between the campaign boilerplate in Mr. DeSantis’s new book are ideas similar to those one hears from conservative elites who call themselves Jacksonians, after President Andrew Jackson, the 19th-century populist.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s former House colleagues could not recall him ever worrying about whether girls got an education in Afghanistan or whether democracy could be spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Instead, they recall him expressing a hard-nosed and narrow view of the American national interest.“After law school, Governor DeSantis didn’t take a Wall Street job or join a human rights N.G.O.,” said Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who served with Mr. DeSantis in the House and remains close to him. “He joined the military, which both reflected his worldview and probably further shaped it, as did his choice to serve six years on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”Mr. DeSantis favors a robust U.S. military. A President DeSantis would most likely increase military spending; as a House member, he spoke approvingly of Mr. Trump’s increase of the Pentagon’s budget.In Iraq, one of Mr. DeSantis’s jobs was to provide counsel to commanders on the rules governing the battlefield. He saw his role as being a “facilitator, not an inhibitor,” he writes in his new book. He chafed at what he viewed as overly restrictive rules of engagement..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.“It is unacceptable to send someone wearing our nation’s uniform to a combat zone with one hand tied behind his back,” Mr. DeSantis writes. “War is hell, and it puts the lives of our military personnel at risk if operations get mired in bureaucracy and red tape.”Mr. DeSantis’s Jacksonianism predates the presidency of Mr. Trump.In 2013 and 2014, Mr. DeSantis broke with Republican hawks who were encouraging Mr. Obama to intervene militarily in Syria. Mr. DeSantis rejected the idea of missile strikes to respond to President Bashar al-Assad’s use of gas. And he voted against an amendment that would have authorized Mr. Obama to train and equip vetted Syrian rebels, because “mujahedeen fighters in Syria are not moderates nor are they pro-American.”Contempt for the State Department and the United NationsMr. DeSantis has often cited the writings of the late conservative intellectual Angelo Codevilla — and in particular his 2010 book, “The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It.”Mr. Codevilla, whose book came out at the height of the Tea Party movement, describes a permanent “ruling class” in Washington that looks down on the rest of the country and “makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America.”This ruling class — a phrase Mr. DeSantis has co-opted — includes both the Republican and Democratic Party establishments. In his telling, these elites have pursued an unpatriotic agenda: They have assigned the U.S. military unwinnable and therefore demoralizing missions, and have been too generous to foreigners.Mr. DeSantis is widely seen as the strongest potential challenger to former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThis mental model defines how Mr. DeSantis thinks about the State Department and international institutions like the United Nations.In a floor speech on Jan. 5, 2017, Mr. DeSantis called for defunding the U.N. until the Security Council revoked a resolution condemning Israeli settlements as violations of international law.Mr. DeSantis derides the foreign policy professionals at the State Department to such an extent that it’s difficult to imagine him meeting with them, let alone listening to their advice. Mr. DeSantis has complained that the State Department is “Arabist in outlook” and “all in” with the Muslim Brotherhood.To the right of Trump on IsraelIn the early days of the Trump administration, the most pro-Israel president in living memory wasn’t pro-Israel enough for Mr. DeSantis, who was still a congressman. On Jun. 1, 2017, Mr. DeSantis issued a statement condemning Mr. Trump for delaying a decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.Public records show that Mr. DeSantis took only three foreign trips as a House member and has taken one foreign trip as governor. All were to Israel.In March 2017, Mr. DeSantis flew to Israel and scouted potential sites for the U.S. Embassy to heap public pressure on Mr. Trump to keep his campaign promise. Mr. DeSantis later pushed Mr. Trump to recognize the Golan Heights as Israeli territory — another controversial move.Mr. DeSantis has promised to be the “most pro-Israel governor in America” — a stance that helps him with both Jewish and evangelical constituents in Florida.Mr. DeSantis inserting a prayer for a safe Florida hurricane season in the Western Wall in Jerusalem during a visit in 2019. Jeff Schweers – USA TODAY NETWORKHe has used his powers as governor to pressure American companies to drop their boycotts of Israel. He took on Unilever over the decision by one of its companies, Ben & Jerry’s, not to sell ice cream in the occupied territories. Mr. DeSantis added Unilever to Florida’s “scrutinized companies” list, and Unilever reversed its decision. He used the same tactic against Airbnb — successfully pressuring the company to reverse itself over eliminating listings in Israeli settlements.As president, Mr. DeSantis would not be expected to dissuade Israel from annexing further land. He has referred to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” using the biblical names for the territory used by right-wing Israelis.During his first year in office, Mr. Trump briefly gestured at considering the Palestinian point of view. He even hosted the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, at the White House. It is hard to imagine Mr. DeSantis doing the same.In early 2018, when Mr. Trump was still aiming for what he called “the ultimate deal” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Mr. DeSantis told the Heritage Foundation that a peace deal was not “worth spending capital on.”China superhawkAs governor, Mr. DeSantis has sought to restrict Chinese investments in Florida. His actions against the Chinese Communist Party suggest that as president, his China policy would be more comprehensively aggressive than Mr. Trump’s. But he seems to care less about trade issues than Mr. Trump did, and more about security concerns.Mr. DeSantis appears less likely to chase a Chinese trade deal, as Mr. Trump did for most of his presidency, and more likely to accelerate efforts to block Chinese investments in the U.S., especially in the high-tech and security sectors. (President Biden has kept Mr. Trump’s China tariffs.)In February, the DeSantis office announced a proposal to ban TikTok and “other social media platforms with ties to China” from state government devices.Mr. DeSantis has promised legislation to stop people or companies with China ties from buying “agricultural land and lands surrounding military bases,” and he plans to ban gifts to Florida universities from people or companies connected to the Chinese Communist Party.Political calculation and inconsistenciesMr. DeSantis’s recent statement that defending Ukraine was not a vital U.S. interest came after CNN unearthed comments he made in 2015 — which were circulated by people in Mr. Trump’s orbit — urging Mr. Obama to do more to defend Ukraine against Russia. As soon as Mr. DeSantis pivoted, the Trump campaign attacked him as a flip-flopping fake.If it was a politically calculated shift by Mr. DeSantis, it would not have been the first.On Sept. 9, 2013, Mr. DeSantis told Fox News that he accepted the Obama administration’s evidence that the Syrian government had gassed its people. But this, Mr. DeSantis argued, did not justify missile strikes against Syria, which he said risked escalating the conflict.Mr. DeSantis sounded different when the president firing missiles in response to Syrian gas was Mr. Trump. In a Fox News appearance on April 15, 2018, Mr. DeSantis said, “The strikes did what they were intended to do.”Nor has Mr. DeSantis been entirely consistent in his Jacksonianism. Speaking on a foreign policy issue that is politically potent in Florida, he can sound positively Wilsonian. He told the Venezuelan people in 2017, “We hear your cries of freedom.”Mr. DeSantis encouraged Mr. Trump — who ended up pushing unsuccessfully for regime change in Venezuela — “to apply additional pressure on the Maduro regime.” More

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    The Unsettling Truth About Trump’s First Great Victory

    Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory continues to confound election experts. How could American voters put such a fractious figure into the White House?This is more than an academic question. For the third time, Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.Three books, published in the years following Trump’s election — “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” by John Sides of Vanderbilt, Michael Tesler of the University of California-Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of U.C.L.A.; “White Identity Politics” by Ashley Jardina of George Mason University; and “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity” by Lilliana Mason of Johns Hopkins — shed light on Trump’s improbable political longevity.Each points to the centrality of racial animosity.Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, for example, cite 2016 American National Election Studies data that asked four questions in order to explore dimensions of white identity: “the importance of white identity, how much whites are being discriminated against, the likelihood that whites are losing jobs to nonwhites, and the importance of whites working together to change laws unfair to whites.”The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level.Now, this earlier scholarship notwithstanding, three political scientists are presenting an alternative interpretation of the 2016 election. In their Feb. 28 paper “Measuring the Contribution of Voting Blocs to Election Outcomes,” Justin Grimmer of Stanford, William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, also of Stanford, write:We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups (Sides, Tesler and Vavreck, 2017; Mason, Wronski and Kane, 2021). Using the ANES, however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012, came from whites with moderate racial resentment. This result holds despite the fact that the relationship between vote choice and racial resentment was stronger in 2016 and 2020 than in other elections.How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true? Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau write:Decomposing the change in support observed in the ANES data, we show that respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views.In an email, Marble provided more detail:Whites with high levels of racial resentment supported Trump at a historically high rate compared to prior Republican presidential candidates. Yet, between 2012 and 2016, the number of people who scored at the high end of the racial resentment scale declined significantly. As a result, there were simply fewer high racial resentment voters for Trump to win in 2016 and 2020 than there were in earlier eras. At the same time, the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.I asked Grimmer to explain the significance of his work with Marble and Tanigawa-Lau.Responding by email, Grimmer wrote:Our findings provide an important correction to a popular narrative about how Trump won office. Hillary Clinton argued that Trump supporters could be placed in a “basket of deplorables.” And election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete. Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.I asked Sides, Tesler and Vavreck for their assessment of the Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau paper. They provided a one-paragraph response affirming, in the phrase “identity-inflected issues,” the crucial role of racial resentment:There are of course many complexities in characterizing changes in aggregate election outcomes over time. Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.John Kane, a political scientist at N.Y.U. and a co-author with Lilliana Mason and Julie Wronski of “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support,” which was cited in the Grimmer paper, suggested that the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:Trump’s surprising win in 2016 was not due to a large increase in Republican votes among the most racially resentful Americans. Instead, Trump’s support grew the most, relative to prior Republican candidates’, among whites with relatively moderate racial resentment scores. This potentially surprising finding is explained by the shifting distribution of racial resentment in the population.Grimmer’s point, Kane wrote, isto highlight the fact that, if we don’t account for a group’s size in the population (e.g., how many racially resentful people there are) and how many of them actually turn out to vote, we could incorrectly infer that certain groups have become more or less supportive of particular parties over time. I fully agree with this point and really do think it’s extremely important for people to understand.That said, Kane continued,The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population, and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).Other scholars who have explored issues of race and politics were generally supportive of the Grimmer paper.Andrew Engelhardt, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, wrote by email:I find this argument persuasive because understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?” Along these lines, according to Engelhardt,Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.“I like this piece,” Alexander George Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote. “It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”In his email, Theodoridis argued:Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors. The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means. It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale. Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, was explicitly supportive of the Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau methodology. Writing by email, Westwood argued:It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group. The limitation in Sides-Vavreck-Mason-Jardina is that they find a strong relationship between racial attitudes and Trump support, but while predictive of individual vote choice these results lead to relatively few total votes for Trump.Westwood contends thatthe important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believethat Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate. Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win. Racist appeals can win votes, but it is critical to remember that this number is smaller than the votes gained by speaking on economic concerns of moderate white voters (many of whom were uncomfortable with Trump’s racist rhetoric and were voting solely based on economic policy).Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racists voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”Other scholars were more cautious in their response to the Grimmer paper. Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, commented by email:The 2016 presidential election included ballots cast by more than 128 million Americans, and so any one narrative used to explain that election will be partial and incomplete. So I think it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation. That said, I published an article in 2021 in Political Behavior titled “The Activation of Prejudice and Presidential Voting,” which I entirely stand by.Hopkins said his paper demonstrates thatwhite Americans’ prejudice against Black Americans was more predictive of their vote choice in 2016 than it had been in 2012. Importantly, it also shows that levels of prejudice against Black Americans were more predictive of voting in the 2016 G.O.P. primary than in the 2016 general election. But Grimmer and colleagues are looking at a different question using different data, so I don’t consider the analyses to be contradictory.One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, pointed out in an email that the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining:I think what Justin Grimmer would say is that racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time. Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower. And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment, Hetherington wrote,Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment. In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior. Put another way, racial resentment has a bigger effect. But that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment. In this case, I think it reflects that there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.I began my examination of the Grimmer paper concerned that he and his co-authors might be drawing large conclusions from statistical oddities. After further examining the data and going over the commentary of the scholars I contacted, my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge. Restoring American politics to an even keel will be far tougher than many of us realize.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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    Michael Cohen’s Long Arc From Trump Ally to Chief Antagonist

    He once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. Now, he’s hoping to help prosecutors put him away.When Michael D. Cohen stood before a federal judge to ask for leniency, he attributed much of his behavior to the influence of one man: Donald J. Trump.“Time and time again,” Mr. Cohen told the judge at his sentencing in late 2018, “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”Ever since, Mr. Cohen has made it his work to expose those deeds. He testified for roughly seven hours at a congressional hearing in 2019, describing Mr. Trump as a liar and a cheater who made racist remarks. Mr. Cohen also met with the special counsel Robert S. Mueller II’s investigators and federal prosecutors in New York. And he was the impetus for the New York attorney general’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s business practices, laying the groundwork for a lawsuit that accused the former president of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars.Mr. Cohen’s transformation from trusted fixer to chief antagonist — a 180-degree turn against a man he once vowed to take a bullet for — upended his life. He went to prison for 13 months and then faced home confinement for more than a year. He endured years of attacks from Mr. Trump’s allies, ultimately emerging with a book deal, cable news appearances and a podcast, “Mea Culpa.”Now, Mr. Cohen is poised to seize his biggest moment yet: a day in court against Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump could be indicted in Manhattan as soon as this week.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMr. Cohen is the key witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into a hush-money payment to a porn star named Stormy Daniels. The payment, which Mr. Cohen said he made at Mr. Trump’s direction during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, blocked Ms. Daniels from telling her story of an affair with Mr. Trump years earlier.Mr. Cohen has met with the prosecutors some 20 times and recently testified before a grand jury that could indict Mr. Trump as soon as this week, people with knowledge of the matter said. And he has provided documentation that bolsters his testimony, the people added.Mr. Trump has denied having any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels and accused the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, of carrying out a political “witch hunt” against him.Mr. Trump’s team and Mr. Cohen’s critics maintain he is playing a cynical game based on rescuing his reputation and capitalizing on his guilty plea. But his supporters — in Congress, in the Democratic Party and on his expansive social media presence — credit him with a high-risk decision to challenge a president, and force the first significant cracks in Mr. Trump’s edifice.This account of the long, strange and now historically consequential arc of Mr. Trump’s once-loyal lawyer and fixer is drawn from interviews with nearly a dozen people who know him, and records from his various legal entanglements. Collectively, they paint a portrait of a complicated witness — a convicted liar and an opportunist, but also a compelling presence, who notes that his lies were on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and whose emotional vulnerability and blunt recitation of history prosecutors may rely on to charm a jury.“I know there’s a debate about the utilization of Michael as a witness, and that is going to be a colorful cross-examination,” said Norman Eisen, who served as the counsel for House Democrats during the first impeachment inquiry and developed a relationship with Mr. Cohen over the course of multiple meetings.“In dealing with me, he has never varied from our first meeting in 2019 to today in the details of what happened both in the hush money and in the larger financial frauds.”‘He has his purpose’Mr. Cohen had long idolized Mr. Trump, and then went to work for him.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersMr. Cohen, the son of a Holocaust survivor, was a 2003 New York City Council candidate and a mega-fan of Mr. Trump’s public persona before going to work for him. He got the job after impressing Mr. Trump, defending him at a condo board meeting at a Trump building in 2006.And he endeared himself to Mr. Trump by trying to be an indispensable aide and pit bull adviser to a real-estate developer and reality-television star.Part of his role became anticipating Mr. Trump’s whims and desires, and interpreting directions spoken in what Mr. Cohen would later describe as “code.”Mr. Trump had a penchant for compartmentalizing his life. When one of Mr. Trump’s friends asked Mr. Trump why he kept Mr. Cohen around, Mr. Trump replied, “He has his purpose.”That purpose, Mr. Cohen later said, included cleaning up some of Mr. Trump’s messes.In October 2016, while visiting his daughter in London, Mr. Cohen received calls from top executives at The National Enquirer, which had forged close ties to Mr. Trump over the years. They warned that Ms. Daniels was looking to sell her story.Within days, Mr. Cohen hammered out the hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, securing Ms. Daniels’s silence at a crucial moment for the campaign.When Mr. Trump won the presidency soon after, Mr. Cohen did not accompany him to Washington, and left behind full-time employment at the Trump Organization to set up an office at the law firm Squire Patton Boggs in Midtown Manhattan.The Trump presidency was shaping up to be lucrative for Mr. Cohen: He soon had a roster of corporate clients, including a private equity firm, a large pharmaceutical company and even AT&T, as he held himself out as the personal lawyer to the president.But one issue trailed him: a complaint had been filed with the Federal Election Commission by the good-government group Common Cause about his payment to Ms. Daniels, which was publicly revealed in January 2018 by The Wall Street Journal.Soon, Mr. Cohen acknowledged to the F.E.C. and The New York Times that he had made the payment, insisting he did it on his own and that neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign had been a party to it. But he would not say whether Mr. Trump had been aware of the payment.At that time in Washington, Mr. Mueller’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with Russians in 2016, and whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice, was proceeding apace. So were congressional investigations into Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that discussions about a Trump Tower project in Moscow stopped in January 2016. That turned out to be a lie, for which he would later fault Mr. Trump; the discussions went on until June 2016, into the presidential campaign.Mr. Mueller’s team was also scrutinizing Mr. Cohen, including for the hush-money deal, but soon handed off that inquiry to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.The inquiry came to a head in April 2018, when F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Cohen’s office, home and a hotel where his family stayed while repair work went on at their apartment, taking emails, business records and other material. The event went off like a political bomb: The personal lawyer for a sitting president was the subject of an F.B.I. search based on probable cause that a crime was committed.It also imploded Mr. Cohen’s life. He confided in friends at the time that he was suicidal.As the search garnered wall-to-wall news coverage, Mr. Cohen received a call from Mr. Trump at the White House, with a message: stay strong.But as Mr. Cohen’s legal bills piled up, officials at the family-run Trump Organization began to balk at paying his lawyer, planting the seeds for Mr. Cohen’s break from a man he once idolized.A Seat at the Witness TableMr. Cohen was the sole witness at a 2019 hearing in Congress, where he likened Mr. Trump to “a mobster.”Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWithin months, the fracture between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen was clear.Mr. Cohen soon hired Lanny Davis, a Democrat and a veteran Washington lawyer who worked in Bill Clinton’s White House.Mr. Davis had seen Mr. Cohen on television and reached out to Stephen Ryan, Mr. Cohen’s lawyer at the time. Soon, Mr. Davis and Mr. Cohen were virtually inseparable.In August of 2018, the federal prosecutors in the Southern District readied charges against Mr. Cohen for the hush money and a range of unrelated financial crimes. Mr. Davis said the prosecutors threatened to charge Mr. Cohen’s wife, Laura, with the tax crimes as well.Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in that case, and later, in another case brought by Mr. Mueller related to his congressional testimony about the potential Trump hotel deal in Moscow.At his first plea hearing, on the hush-money payment, Mr. Cohen pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, who he said directed him to pay it, an accusation that prosecutors later substantiated.Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison.Mr. Davis told Mr. Cohen that he had a path to winning back his credibility, but it wasn’t going to be enough to simply say he was sorry for what he had done. He would have to fully come clean about Mr. Trump, Mr. Davis said. Mr. Cohen told Mr. Davis he was ready.After his split with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen forged a relationship with Lanny Davis, left, a longtime Democrat who became his lawyer.Alex Brandon/Associated PressThey directed their effort at congressional Democrats, who were heading into their third year of investigations into Mr. Trump.In February 2019, Democrats announced that Mr. Cohen would appear at an unusual public hearing, the sole witness discussing the 45th president.Even before he arrived, Mr. Trump’s allies tried to intimidate him. Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, posted on Twitter an accusation that Mr. Cohen had been unfaithful to his wife — and she might not be loyal while he was in prison. Two of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina, wrote a joint op-ed attacking Mr. Cohen as a “liar.”But when Mr. Cohen assumed a seat at a witness table for what would become a daylong event, he appeared prepared for the onslaught. He fought back, potentially foreshadowing how he might respond to attacks from Mr. Trump’s lawyers on the witness stand in the Manhattan case.“By coming today, I have caused my family to be the target of personal, scurrilous attacks by the president and his lawyer trying to intimidate me from appearing before this panel,” Mr. Cohen said in opening remarks at the congressional hearing. “Mr. Trump called me a rat for choosing to tell the truth, much like a mobster would do when one of his men decides to cooperate with the government.”As Mr. Jordan tried to rattle him, Mr. Cohen replied sternly, “Shame on you.”And Mr. Cohen delivered a striking prediction about what might happen the following year: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” he said.Representative Elijah Cummings, Democrat from Baltimore and the committee chair, who knew Mr. Davis and had invited Mr. Cohen, told him “I know that you are worried about your family, but this is a part of your destiny.”In May 2019, Mr. Cohen began serving his time at a minimum security facility at Otisville, N.Y. It was there that he began to meet with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.Mr. Cohen was released in May 2020 on a medical furlough. But he was soon thrown back in prison by the Trump administration’s Bureau of Prisons, after he refused to sign a document stating he would not write a book, something he was doing.About two weeks later, a judge ordered him released, saying the move was “retaliatory.” He has told friends that he spent 51 days overall in solitary confinement.Twenty VisitsAgain and again in recent years, Mr. Cohen has visited the Manhattan district attorney’s office for meetings with prosecutors.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersBy early 2022, Mr. Cohen was home from prison and his visits with prosecutors moved to their offices in Lower Manhattan. Beginning in January of this year, he seemed to visit almost weekly, staging impromptu news conferences outside to tell reporters that his former boss was in trouble.Mr. Cohen is hardly a perfect witness. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly attack his character and invoke his criminal record. Some appear eager to cross-examine him.This week, at the request of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, one of Mr. Cohen’s former legal advisers testified before the grand jury in hopes of undercutting Mr. Cohen’s credibility. The witness, Robert J. Costello, briefly advised Mr. Cohen when he was facing the federal investigation in 2018, but they had a falling out as Mr. Cohen began taking public swipes at Mr. Trump.Mr. Costello, who was close with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said he told the grand jury that Mr. Cohen was a liar. Mr. Cohen, in turn, said on MSNBC that Mr. Costello “lacks for any sense of veracity.”His cable news appearances, in which he makes off-the-cuff remarks about Mr. Trump and the investigation, have become quite frequent. Even the prosecutors who are relying on Mr. Cohen — and have decided to stake a large part of their case on his testimony — occasionally shake their heads at his media presence, according to a person close to the case.But Mr. Cohen, who has said he feels the need to defend himself publicly, has largely won the at least qualified approval of the district attorney’s office. In his book, Mark F. Pomerantz, the prosecutor who helped lead the investigation until early 2022, wrote that Mr. Cohen had impressed him as “smart but manipulative.”“He struck me as a somewhat feral creature,” Mr. Pomerantz continued. “Most importantly, I thought he was telling the truth.”Mr. Pomerantz argued that Mr. Cohen would play well with jurors, and that his anger at Mr. Trump could be explained: “He was angry with Trump because Trump had seduced Cohen into his criminal orbit, and Cohen had been the only one of Trump’s enablers to have gone to prison. Cohen was angry with himself for allowing himself to be seduced by Trump.”Mr. Cohen’s comprehensive knowledge of the hush-money case is likely another draw for prosecutors. The former fixer could connect all the dots that led to the payment. He liaised with each witness, and with Mr. Trump himself.On the first day of his grand jury testimony this month, when Mr. Cohen stopped outside the courthouse to entertain questions from reporters, he harkened back to what he had told the judge five years earlier.“This is all about accountability,” he said. “He needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.” More

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    The Politics of a Trump Indictment

    If you intend to indict and try a former president of the United States, especially a former president of the United States whose career has benefited from the collapse of public trust in the neutrality of all our institutions, you had better have clear evidence, all-but-obvious guilt and loads of legal precedent behind your case.The case that New York prosecutors are apparently considering bringing against Donald Trump, over hush-money payments made to Stormy Daniels that may have violated campaign finance laws, does not have the look of a slam dunk. The use of the phrase “novel legal theory” in descriptions of what the case might entail is not encouraging.Neither are the doubts raised by writers and pundits not known for their sympathy to Trump. Or the fact that we have a precedent of a presidential candidate indicted over a remarkably similar offense — the trial of John Edwards for his payments to Rielle Hunter — that yielded an acquittal on one count and a hung jury on the rest.The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky precedent is a little less legally relevant, involving perjury rather than campaign-finance law. But the Clinton scandals established a general principle that presidents are above the law as long as the lawbreaking involved minor infractions covering up tawdry sex. If a potential Trump prosecution requires overturning that principle, then prosecutors might as well appear in court wearing Democratic Party campaign paraphernalia; the effect will be the same.That effect does not need to benefit Trump politically to make such a prosecution unwise or reckless. An indictment could hurt him at the polls and still be a very bad long-term idea — setting a precedent that will pressure Republican prosecutors to indict Democratic politicians on similarly doubtful charges, establish a pattern of legal revenge‌ seeking against the out-of-power party and encourage polarization’s continued transformation into enmity.But of course, the political question is inescapable: Will an indictment help Trump or hurt him in his quest to reclaim the Republican nomination and the presidency?Two generalizations are relatively easy to make. Even a partisan-seeming indictment won’t do anything to make Trump more popular with the independent voters who swing presidential elections; it will just be added baggage for a politician already widely regarded as chaotic and immoral and unfit for the office.At the same time, even an airtight indictment would be regarded as persecution by Trump’s most devoted fans. So whether or not there’s a wave of MAGA protests now, you would expect the spectacle of a prosecution to help mobilize and motivate his base in 2024.Alexander Burns of Politico argues that these two points together are a net negative for Trump. After all, he doesn’t need to mobilize his base. They will mostly be there for him, no matter what; he needs to persuade the doubtful and exhausted that he’s their man in 2024. And if even a few of these voters get weary of another round of Stormy Daniels sleaze, then he’s worse off. Burns writes, “If each scandal or blunder binds 99 percent of his base closer to him and unsettles 1 percent, that is still a losing formula for a politician whose base is an electoral minority. Trump cannot shed fractional support with every controversy but make it up on volume.”I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. That’s because in addition to the true base voter (who will be with Trump in any case) and the true swing voter (who probably pulled the lever for Joe Biden last time), there’s the Republican primary swing voter: the voter who’s part of Trump’s base for general election purposes but doesn’t love him absolutely, the voter who’s open to Ron DeSantis but swings between the two Florida Republicans, depending on the headlines at the moment.I can tell you two stories about how this kind of voter reacts to an indictment. In one, Trump does well with this constituency when he’s either out of the news or on the offensive and does worse when he seems weakened, messy, a loser. Hence the DeSantis bump in polling immediately after the 2022 midterms, when the underperformance of Trump’s favored candidates damaged his mystique and his flailing afterward made him look impotent. Hence his apparent recovery in polling more recently, as he’s taken the fight to DeSantis without the Florida governor striking back, making Trump look stronger than his not-yet-campaigning rival.Under this theory, even a politicized and partisan indictment returns Trump to a flailing position, making him seem like a victim rather than a master of events, a stumbling loser caught in liberal nets. So the Republican swing voter behaves like the general-election swing voter and recoils, and the disciplined DeSantis benefits.But there’s an alternative story, in which our Republican swing voter is invested not in specific candidates so much as in the grand battle with the liberal political establishment. In this theory the DeSantis brand is built on his being a battler, a scourge of cultural liberalism in all its forms, while Trump has lost ground by appearing more interested in battling his fellow Republicans, even to the point of hurting the G.O.P. cause and helping liberals win.What happens, though, when institutional liberalism seems to take the fight to Trump? (Yes, I know a single prosecutor isn’t institutional liberalism, but that’s how this will be perceived.) When the grand ideological battle is suddenly joined around his person, his position, his very freedom?Well, maybe that seems like confirmation of the argument that certain Trumpists have been making for a while — that there’s nothing the establishment fears more than a Trump restoration, that “they can’t let him back in,” as the former Trump White House official Michael Anton put it last year. And so if you care most about ideological conflict, it doesn’t matter if you don’t love him as his true supporters do; where Trump stands, there you must stand as well.This is the rally-to-Trump effect that seems most imaginable if an indictment comes — not a burst of zeal for the man himself but a repetition of the enemy-of-my-enemy dynamic that’s been crucial to his resilience all along.Of course, since at least some Democrats would be happy to see Trump rather than DeSantis as the nominee, you could argue that in this scenario the spoiling-for-a-fight conservatives would be essentially letting themselves be manipulated into fighting on the wrong battlefield, for the wrong leader, with the wrong stakes.But persuading them of that will fall to DeSantis himself, whose own campaign will make one of these two narratives of Republican psychology look prophetic ‌— the first in victory, the second in defeat.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