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      Kristi Noem’s Book: Four Takeaways

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      After a rough start to the rollout of her memoir, the South Dakota governor has continued to defend shooting her dog and to deflect on a false story about meeting Kim Jong-un.In one sense, Kristi Noem has had a wildly successful rollout of her new book: America can’t stop talking about it.But all the chatter is not for the reasons Ms. Noem, the conservative governor of South Dakota, might have expected when she finished “No Going Back,” a memoir that recounts her political career. The book appears aimed at raising her profile as a MAGA loyalist while former President Donald J. Trump weighs his choices for running mate. Just a month ago, Ms. Noem had been widely seen as a contender.Instead of talking up her conservative bona fides, however, Ms. Noem has spent the last week on national television defending a grisly account in the book in which she shoots her dog in a gravel pit. The killing of the dog, a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket, has drawn bipartisan criticism and scrutiny.The book, published on Tuesday, includes a number of other noteworthy details, some of which Ms. Noem has discussed in recent interviews. Here are four takeaways.At one point in Ms. Noem’s book, she describes a phone conversation she had with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential candidate. Ms. Noem claims the exchange was threatening, which Ms. Haley’s spokeswoman denied.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesNoem has a lot of criticism for other Republicans.Ms. Noem’s account of her time in office — first as South Dakota’s sole House representative and then as governor — includes many stories that broadly criticize Republicans for their electoral failures, while also targeting figures who have drawn the ire of Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Prosecutors Mine ‘How To Get Rich’ and Other Trump Books For Quotes

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      Prosecutors cannot force Donald J. Trump to testify at his criminal trial in Manhattan, but that does not mean they can’t use his words against him.On Tuesday, the prosecutors unearthed a series of damaging excerpts from books that the former president wrote, plucking out passages to help make their case against Mr. Trump. In essence, they called a past version of Mr. Trump to testify against his future self.In his own words, Mr. Trump described how he kept a focus on minute details and watched every penny that left his accounts, corroborating a core component of the prosecution’s case as they argue that he knew that his company falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star.On cross-examination, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, suggested that a ghost writer had been responsible for these words.Mr. Trump’s written words also described how he sees sexual potential in women that he encounters, a salient point in a trial tethered to encounters with women that he is accused of covering up. “All the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me,” he wrote.Prosecutors introduced the damning excerpts by questioning Sally Franklin, a witness who is an executive and editor, to read excerpts from “Trump: How to Get Rich” and “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” both of which were published by Ballantine, a Penguin Random House imprint.The jury heard Trump’s written words: “Every dollar counts in business, and for that matter, every dime.” The text continued, “Even in high end shops, I bargain,” adding, “I hate paying retail.”This was not the first time jurors heard Trump in his own words. Last week, prosecutors played video clips of him talking, and they have questioned witnesses about Mr. Trump’s infamous statement on the set of “Access Hollywood” that he would grab women by the genitals.But the judge would not allow prosecutors to play the tape for jurors, a decision that elevated the importance of the book passages, or any other opportunity to use Mr. Trump as a witness against himself.It might not be the only opportunity for jurors to hear from the former president. Although the prosecution cannot legally call him to testify, Mr. Trump could take the witness stand in his own defense, though it is unclear whether he will do so.For now, jurors heard his words via Ms. Franklin, who read ominous passages in which Mr. Trump spoke of how he treated his perceived enemies.“For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back,” she read from a book by Mr. Trump. It continued: “When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”As jurors listened, Mr. Trump’s smiling image on a book cover was plastered on screens across the courtroom, a sharp contrast from the scowl he sported throughout the testimony. More

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      Stormy Daniels Testifies at Trump’s Hush-Money Trial

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      For three weeks, witness after witness in Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial has spoken the name of Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose claim of a sexual encounter with the former president is at the center of the case. Today, jurors will hear from her.Ms. Daniels was called by prosecutors to take the witness stand in the Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday to testify against Mr. Trump. It will be her first time relaying her account while in the same room as Mr. Trump since her story of the encounter and a subsequent $130,000 payment to buy her silence became public six years ago.Much about that hush-money payment just before the 2016 election has been laid out in court from people who had key roles in the payment, as well as those on the periphery. They have described the mad scramble by Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, to buy her silence before the election and Mr. Trump’s reimbursement of him while in the White House. Now, Ms. Daniels gets to tell her side of the story.Ms. Daniels, 45, was born Stephanie Clifford and raised in Baton Rouge, La. She said her encounter with Mr. Trump happened in July 2006, after be came a televisision star with his reality show, “The Apprentice.”They met at the booth for a porn label, Wicked Pictures, at a golf tournament in Nevada, and there is a picture of them together there. Afterward, she said, he invited her to his hotel suite, and they had sex. He also invited her to appear on “The Apprentice,” she said, but she never did.Ms. Daniels has said they kept in contact over the following years. Mr. Trump even had a nickname for her, she said: “Honeybunch.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jeffrey McConney, Trump Trial Witness, Helped Reimburse Michael Cohen

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      Jeffrey S. McConney worked as the corporate controller at the Trump Organization and, prosecutors say, helped arrange the reimbursement for a $130,000 hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, who has long claimed to have had an affair with Donald J. Trump.That reimbursement is at the center of the criminal case against Mr. Trump. Prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office have accused Mr. Trump of falsifying business records by mislabeling the reimbursements in 2017 to Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, as “legal expenses.” Mr. Cohen made the payment to Ms. Daniels in the last days of the 2016 campaign.Mr. McConney, who took the witness stand on Monday, testified that he had a close relationship with his boss, Allen H. Weisselberg, then the company’s chief financial officer, who told him in 2017 that Mr. Cohen was owed money.He said that Mr. Weisselberg instructed him to send the money to Essential Consultants, the company Mr. Cohen had set up for the $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels. The checks that Mr. Cohen received throughout 2017 exceeded that amount because he was also paid a bonus and money to cover the taxes on the income.Mr. McConney also spoke about Mr. Trump’s constant focus on the outflow of cash at the Trump Organization. Mr. McConney joined the company in 1987 and about a year later, Mr. Trump noticed that its cash balances had decreased from the week before. He called Mr. McConney and said, “Jeff, you’re fired.”He was not actually fired, Mr. McConney said on Monday, but the incident served as a lesson about Mr. Trump’s attention to cash and bills.Mr. McConney got involved the following February, according to a statement of facts filed by prosecutors that identified him only as the “TO Controller,” using the abbreviation for Mr. Trump’s company. That month, prosecutors say, Mr. Cohen emailed an invoice to Mr. McConney for $35,000 worth of legal expenses in January 2017 and the same for February 2017.Prosecutors say that Mr. Weisselberg approved the payments, and then Mr. McConney asked another accounting division employee to issue them and to register them as “legal expenses.” The payments continued through 2017.Mr. McConney testified for several days last November in a civil fraud case against Mr. Trump that was brought by the New York State attorney general’s office. Mr. McConney was also a defendant in the case.After 35 years at the Trump Organization, he said on the stand that he could no longer handle working there amid its legal challenges.“I just wanted to relax and stop being accused of misrepresenting assets for the company that I loved working for,” he said in November.The judge who ruled in the civil fraud case, Arthur F. Engoron, barred Mr. McConney from serving as an officer or director of a New York company for three years and issued a lifetime ban on serving in a financial management role at a New York company. More

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      Candidates for Federal Office Can Raise Unlimited Funds for Ballot Measures

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      The Federal Election Commission quietly issued an advisory opinion last week allowing candidates to raise unlimited money for issue-advocacy groups working on ballot measures in elections in which those candidates are on the ballot.The opinion, issued in response to a request from a Nevada-based abortion rights group, could significantly alter the landscape in the fall in terms of the capacity that candidates aligned with these groups have to help them raise money.The decision applies to all federal candidates, but with a presidential election taking place in six months, the biggest attention will fall to that race. If Mr. Biden can solicit money for abortion-rights ballot measures, he can add to an already-existing fund-raising advantage that his team currently has over Mr. Trump.The decision, released publicly last week but little noticed, could affect turnout in battleground states like Nevada where razor-thin margins will determine the election. In Arizona, an abortion rights group said it had the number of signatures required to put a referendum on the ballot. Florida — a state that has voted reliably for Republicans in recent presidential races — has a similar measure on the ballot.The advisory opinion means that both Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump can raise money for outside groups pushing ballot measures. In the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision, abortion ballot measures are expected to be a key focus for Democrats this fall.“I think it’s quite significant,” said Adav Noti, of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, calling it an enormous change from prohibitions put in place by the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in 2002.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Not as Powerful as She Thinks She Is

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      In an interview last week, NewsNation’s Blake Burman asked Speaker Mike Johnson about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and before Burman could finish his question, Johnson responded with classic Southern scorn. “Bless her heart,” he said, and then he told Burman that Greene wasn’t proving to be a serious lawmaker and that he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her.Strangely enough, Johnson’s dismissal of Greene — on the eve of her potential effort to oust him from the office he won in October — spoke as loudly as his decision to put a vote for Ukraine aid on the floor in the first place. In spite of the Republican Party’s narrow majority in the House and the constant threat of a motion to vacate the chair, he will not let MAGA’s most extreme lawmaker run the place.To understand the significance of this moment, it’s necessary to understand the changing culture of the MAGAfied Republican Party. After eight years of Donald Trump’s dominance, we know the fate of any Republican politician who directly challenges him — the confrontation typically ends his or her political career in the most miserable way possible, with dissenters chased out of office amid a hail of threats and insults. Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are but a few of the many Republicans who dared to defy Trump and paid a high political price.But there’s an open question: Does the MAGA movement have the same control over the Republican Party when Trump isn’t directly in the fray? Can it use the same tactics to impose party discipline and end political careers? If the likes of Greene or Steve Bannon or Matt Gaetz or Charlie Kirk can wield the same power, then the transformation of the party will be complete. It won’t be simply in thrall to Trump; it will be in thrall to his imitators and heirs and perhaps lost to the reactionary right for a generation or more.I don’t want to overstate the case, but Johnson’s stand — together with the Democrats’ response — gives me hope. Consider the chain of events. On April 12, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago and received enough of a blessing from Trump to make it clear that Trump didn’t want him removed. Days before a vote on Ukraine aid that directly defied the MAGA movement, Trump said Johnson was doing a “very good job.”Days later, Johnson got aid to Ukraine passed with more Democratic votes than Republican — a violation of the so-called Hastert Rule, an informal practice that says the speaker shouldn’t bring a vote unless the measure is supported by a majority within his own party. Greene and the rest of MAGA exploded, especially when Democratic lawmakers waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor. Greene vowed to force a vote on her motion to end Johnson’s speakership. She filed the motion in March as a “warning” to Johnson, and now she’s following through — directly testing her ability to transform the House.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Talk of Escape: Trump’s Possible Return Rattles D.C.

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      At Washington dinner parties, dark jokes abound about where to go into exile if the former president reclaims the White House.It has become the topic of the season at Washington dinner parties and receptions. Where would you go if it really happens?Portugal, says a former member of Congress. Australia, says a former agency director. Canada, says a Biden administration official. France, says a liberal columnist. Poland, says a former investigator.They’re joking. Sort of. At least in most cases. It’s a gallows humor with a dark edge. Much of official Washington is bracing for the possibility that former President Donald J. Trump really could return — this time with “retribution” as his avowed mission, the discussion is where people might go into a sort of self-imposed exile.Whether they mean it or not, the buzz is a telling indicator of the grim mood among many in the nation’s capital these days. The “what if” goes beyond the normal prospect of a side unhappy about a lost election. It speaks to the nervousness about a would-be president who talks of being a dictator for a day, who vows to “root out” enemies he called “vermin,” who threatens to prosecute adversaries, who suggests a general he deems disloyal deserves “DEATH,” whose lawyers say he may have immunity even if he orders the assassination of political rivals.“I feel like in the past two weeks that conversation for whatever reason has just surged,” said Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration official who became a vocal critic of the former president. “People are feeling that it’s very obvious if a second Trump terms happens, it’s going to be slash and burn.”That’s all fine with Mr. Trump and his allies. In their view, Washington’s fear is the point. He is the disrupter of the elite. He is coming to break up their corrupt “uniparty” hold on power. If establishment Washington is upset about the possibility that he returns, that is a selling point to his base around the country that is alienated from the people in power.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Donor Retreat, Trump Calls Biden Administration the ‘Gestapo’

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      Fresh from his criminal trial in New York, Donald J. Trump delivered a frustrated and often obscene speech, lasting roughly 75 minutes, at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, attacking one of the prosecutors pursuing him and comparing President Biden’s administration to the Nazis.“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Mr. Trump told donors who attended the event at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”Before making the comparison, Mr. Trump baselessly insisted that the various indictments against him and his allies in several states were being orchestrated by the Biden administration.He said that, before his indictment, he was gentler on Mr. Biden, despite the outcome of the 2020 election. “You have to respect the office of the presidency,” Mr. Trump said. “And I never talk to him like this.”Mr. Trump entered the event to the recording of the national anthem that he made with a group of people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to disrupt the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral college win. Mr. Trump praised the song.In his speech, he complained repeatedly about the criminal trial in Manhattan, to which he will return on Monday, insisted that Democrats use “welfare” to cheat in elections and said he would need an attorney general with “courage” as he mocked his former attorney general, William P. Barr, who recently endorsed Mr. Trump after having spoken critically of him since the administration ended.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More