Trump, Donald J

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      Trump’s Trial Could Bring a Rarity: Consequences for His Words

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      The former president has spent decades spewing thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself. That tendency is now working against him in his Manhattan criminal case.“So that’s not true? That’s not true?”The judge in control of Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial had just cut off the former president’s lawyer, Todd Blanche. Mr. Blanche had been in the midst of defending a social media post in which his client wrote that a statement that had been public for years “WAS JUST FOUND!”Mr. Blanche had already acknowledged during the Tuesday hearing that Mr. Trump’s post was false. But the judge, Juan M. Merchan, wasn’t satisfied.“I need to understand,” Justice Merchan said, glaring down at the lawyer from the bench, “what I am dealing with.”The question of what is true — or at least what can be proven — is at the heart of any trial. But this particular defendant, accused by the Manhattan district attorney’s office of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal, has spent five decades spewing thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself within minutes, sometimes within the same breath, with little concern for the consequences of what he said.Mr. Trump has treated his own words as disposable commodities, intended for single use, and not necessarily indicative of any deeply held beliefs. And his tendency to pile phrases on top of one another has often worked to his benefit, amusing or engaging his supporters — sometimes spurring threats and even violence — while distracting, enraging or just plain disorienting his critics and adversaries.If Mr. Blanche seemed unconcerned at the hearing that he was telling a criminal judge that his client had said something false, it may have been simply because the routine has become so familiar.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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      Trump Turns on R.F.K. Jr. Amid Concerns He Could Attract Republican Voters

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      Former President Donald J. Trump is sharpening his attacks on the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as new polls show an overlap between their core supporters.In a series of posts on his Truth Social media platform on Friday night, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, took aim at both Mr. Kennedy and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.“RFK Jr. is a Democrat ‘Plant,’ a Radical Left Liberal who’s been put in place in order to help Crooked Joe Biden, the Worst President in the History of the United States, get Re-Elected,” Mr. Trump wrote.Mr. Trump, who had privately discussed the idea of Mr. Kennedy as a running mate, echoed what Democrats have been saying for months about Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy — that it could swing the election. He also appeared to be adopting a new derisive nickname for him.“A Vote for Junior’ would essentially be a WASTED PROTEST VOTE, that could swing either way, but would only swing against the Democrats if Republicans knew the true story about him,” he said.Mr. Kennedy fired back on Saturday in his own social media post.“When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged,” he wrote on X. “President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”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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      Justice Alito Is Holding Trump to a Different Standard

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      I mentioned it in passing in my Friday column, but I was struck — disturbed, really — by one specific point made by Justice Samuel Alito during Thursday’s oral arguments in Trump v. United States.Alito began innocuously enough: “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully if that candidate is the incumbent.”“Of course,” answered Michael Dreeben, the lawyer arguing the case for the Department of Justice.“Now,” Alito continued, “if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”The implication of Alito’s question is that presidential immunity for all official acts may be a necessary concession to the possibility of a politically motivated investigation and prosecution: Presidents need to be above the law to raise the odds that they follow the law and leave office without incident.If this sounds backward, that’s because it is.There have been, in the nearly 236 years since Americans ratified the Constitution, 45 presidents. Of those, 10 sought but did not win re-election. In every case but one, the defeated incumbents left office without incident. There was no fear that they would try to overturn the results or subvert the process, nor was there any fear that their successors would turn the power of the state against them. Thomas Jefferson did not try to jail John Adams after the close-fought 1800 election; he assured the American people that “we are all republicans, we are all federalists.” Jimmy Carter did not sic the F.B.I. on Gerald Ford in the wake of his narrow victory; he thanked him for “all he has done to heal our land.”By Alito’s lights, this should not have been possible. Why would a president leave if he could be prosecuted as a private citizen? The answer is that the other nine people who lost had a commitment to American democracy that transcended their narrow, personal or partisan interests.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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      Schumer Says Bill to Aid Ukraine and Israel Shows Congress Isn’t Broken

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      The majority leader says the measure to help Ukraine and other recent bipartisan efforts show there is a path to success on Capitol Hill. But deep partisan differences and institutional problems remain.Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, insists that Congress isn’t broken — it just has a stubborn glitch.As he celebrated approval this week of a major national security spending measure to aid Ukraine and Israel that took months of wrangling and strategizing, Mr. Schumer said the success of the package validated his view that bipartisanship can prevail once extreme elements on Capitol Hill are sidelined.“I don’t think that Congress is dysfunctional,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. “It’s that there are some dysfunctional people in Congress, and we can’t let them run the show.”The majority leader said that the passage of the foreign aid bill, the renewal of a warrantless electronic surveillance program and the approval of government funding for the year have shown that Congress can still function if its damaging glitch — right-wing lawmakers invested in chaos — is dealt out.“They are nasty, they are negative and they don’t want to get anything done at all,” Mr. Schumer said of far-right Republicans in the House. He noted that Congress had been able to move ahead on big issues once Speaker Mike Johnson and a significant bloc of House Republicans decided to marginalize the ultraconservatives, even though it has prompted a threat to Mr. Johnson’s speakership.“The idea that Congress can’t function in this modern world with technology and everything else — which admittedly makes it harder — has been disproved by a whole lot of things that succeeded in a bipartisan way,” he said. “But in each case, the hard right had to be resisted.”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 an Immigrant ‘Invasion’ Grows in Republican Ads and Speech

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      Once relegated to the margins of the national debate, the word is now part of the party’s mainstream message on immigration.A campaign ad from a Republican congressional candidate from Indiana sums up the arrival of migrants at the border with one word. He doesn’t call it a problem or a crisis.He calls it an “invasion.”The word invasion also appears in ads for two Republicans competing for a Senate seat in Michigan. And it shows up in an ad for a Republican congresswoman seeking re-election in central New York, and in one for a Missouri lieutenant governor running for the state’s governorship. In West Virginia, ads for a Republican representative facing an uphill climb for the Senate say President Biden “created this invasion” of migrants.It was not so long ago that the term invasion had been mostly relegated to the margins of the national immigration debate. Many candidates and political figures tended to avoid the word, which echoed demagoguery in previous centuries targeting Asian, Latino and European immigrants. Few mainstream Republicans dared use it.But now, the word has become a staple of Republican immigration rhetoric. Use of the term in television campaign ads in the current election cycle has already eclipsed the total from the previous one, data show, and the word appears in speeches, TV interviews and even in legislation proposed in Congress.The resurgence of the term exemplifies the shift in Republican rhetoric in the era of former President Donald J. Trump and his right-wing supporters. Language once considered hostile has become common, sometimes precisely because it runs counter to politically correct sensibilities. Immigration has also become more divisive, with even Democratic mayors complaining about the number of migrants in their cities.Democrats and advocates for migrants denounce the word and its recent turn from being taboo. Historians and analysts who study political rhetoric have long warned that the term dehumanizes those to whom it refers and could stoke violence, noting that it appeared in writings by perpetrators of deadly mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Pa.; El Paso, Texas; and Buffalo, N.Y., in recent years.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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      Watchdog Group Accuses Trump Campaign of Violating Finance Law

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      A campaign watchdog group filed a formal complaint to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday accusing Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and related political committees of concealing payments of $7.2 million in legal fees by paying them through an unrelated shell company in violation of campaign finance law.At the center of the complaint, from the Campaign Legal Center, is the company that received the payments, Red Curve. The company is run by Bradley Crate, who is also the treasurer for the Trump campaign and four related political committees listed in the complaint, as well as for 200 other candidates and committees.In its complaint, the Campaign Legal Center said that the Trump political committees had used Red Curve, which did not appear to offer legal services, “as a conduit to conceal payments for legal services.” The group filed its complaint hours after The Daily Beast published an article about the payments to Red Curve.Neither Red Curve nor representatives of the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment.“This apparent payment scheme, however, violates the reporting requirements of the Federal Election Campaign Act,” the complaint said, “which requires that committees provide detailed information about who they are paying for services, and how much they are paying for those services.”The complaint also said that Red Curve advanced payments for the legal costs to the Trump committees as part of the payment scheme, potentially violating a campaign finance law that prevents corporations from giving money to candidates.“What Red Curve was doing was basically making a contribution,” said Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center. “If it’s treated as a corporation under federal campaign finance law, then that’s illegal on its face.”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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      Arizona Republicans Who Supported Repealing an Abortion Ban Face Blowback

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      On social media, Arizona lawmakers are accused of being baby killers, cowards and traitors.State Representative Matt Gress, a Republican in a moderate slice of Phoenix, was in line at his neighborhood coffee shop on Thursday when a customer stopped and thanked him for voting to repeal an 1864 law that bans abortion in Arizona.“I know you’re taking some heat,” he told Mr. Gress.More than some.Shortly after the repeal bill squeaked through the Arizona House on Wednesday with support from every Democrat, as well as Mr. Gress and two other Republicans, anti-abortion activists denounced Mr. Gress on social media as a baby killer, coward and traitor. The Republican House speaker booted Mr. Gress off a spending committee. And some Democrats dismissed his stance as a bid to appease swing voters furious over the ban during an election year.In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Gress said that he was trying to chart a middle path through a wrenching debate over abortion that has consumed Arizona politics in the two weeks since the State Supreme Court revived the Civil War-era ban.“There are extremes on both ends here,” he said. “To go from abortion being legal and constitutionally protected to nearly a complete ban overnight is not something that the electorate is going to be OK with.”Mr. Gress, 35, a former teacher and school-board member, worked as a budget director under Arizona’s previous governor, the Republican Doug Ducey. He was first elected in 2022 to represent a swath of Phoenix and Scottsdale that spreads from middle-class neighborhoods through strip malls, desert parks and wealthy gated communities.He speaks with the measured cadences of someone who has appeared on plenty of news programs, and had focused his attention on homelessness and teacher pay before abortion erupted into an all-consuming legislative battle.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 Say Trump Keeps Breaking Gag Order, With Four New Violations

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      Prosecutors on Thursday accused former President Donald J. Trump of violating a gag order four additional times, saying that he continues to defy the judge’s directions not to attack witnesses, prosecutors and jurors in his hush-money trial.“He’s doing what the order tells him not to do,” said Christopher Conroy, a prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney.As Mr. Conroy laid out what he said were violations, Mr. Trump whispered to his lawyer Todd Blanche and frowned. After they spoke, Mr. Blanche rubbed his face several times.With the latest allegations, prosecutors now say that Mr. Trump has violated the gag order 15 times in less than two weeks. The judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, is expected to rule soon on earlier violations and could hold the former president in contempt or issue a fine. The new instances include two separate attacks on his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, once during a recent television interview and another while speaking to reporters in the hallway outside the Lower Manhattan courtroom. Another violation, prosecutors said, stemmed from a recent interview in which Mr. Trump referred to the jury as “95 percent Democrats.”The fourth example, prosecutors said, took place before the trial began on Thursday, at a campaign stop with construction workers in Manhattan. There, Mr. Trump called David Pecker, the former National Enquirer publisher who took the witness stand for a third time on Thursday, “a nice guy.”Prosecutors accused Mr. Trump of sending a message to Mr. Pecker and other witnesses to be “nice,” or get attacked. They said they would submit the additional violations to the court.Justice Merchan imposed the gag order on Mr. Trump in late March, barring him from making public statements about any witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or court staff, as well as their families. But within a week, Mr. Trump found a loophole in the order and repeatedly attacked the judge’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant.In a hearing earlier this week on the 10 previous violations, lawyers for Mr. Trump argued that the former president had been exercising his right to respond to attacks. Prosecutors noted that the gag order did not include exceptions for Mr. Trump to respond to those who criticize him. More