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      Mike Johnson, Like Pence, Does What Passes for Brave in Today’s GOP: His Job

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      In the Republican Party of 2024, styled in the image of former President Donald J. Trump, a norm-preserving, consensus-driven act — even a basic one — can be a career-ending offense.The accolades directed at Speaker Mike Johnson in recent days for finally defying the right wing of his party and allowing an aid bill for Ukraine to move through the House might have seemed a tad excessive.After all, a speaker’s entire job is to move legislation through the House, and as Saturday’s vote to pass the bill demonstrated, the Ukraine measure had overwhelming support. But Mr. Johnson’s feat was not so different from that of another embattled Republican who faced a difficult choice under immense pressure from hard-right Republicans and was saluted as a hero for simply doing his job: former Vice President Mike Pence.When Mr. Pence refused former President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the electoral vote count by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — even as an angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray invaded the Capitol and chanted “hang Mike Pence” — the normally unremarkable act of performing the duties in a vice president’s job description was hailed as courageous.Mr. Pence and now Mr. Johnson represent the most high-profile examples of a stark political reality: In today’s Republican Party, subsumed by Mr. Trump, taking the norm-preserving, consensus-driven path can spell the end of your political career.Mr. Johnson and Mr. Pence, both mild-mannered, extremely conservative evangelical Christians who have put their faith at the center of their politics, occupy a similar space in their party. They have both gone through contortions to accommodate Mr. Trump and the forces he unleashed in their party, which in turn have ultimately come after them. Mr. Pence spent four years dutifully serving the former president and defending all of his words and actions. Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, played a lead role in trying to overturn the election results on Mr. Trump’s behalf.Vice President Mike Pence refused to accede to President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the certification of the electoral college votes on Jan. 6, 2021, even after a mob assaulted the Capitol. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWe 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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      Max Azzarello’s Path to Setting Himself on Fire Outside Trump Trial Began in Florida

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      Friends of Max Azzarello, who set himself on fire outside Donald J. Trump’s trial, said he was a caring person whose paranoia had led him down a dark path.The journey that ended with a man setting himself on fire on Friday outside the Manhattan courthouse where Donald J. Trump was being tried seemed to have begun in Florida, with a series of increasingly bizarre outbursts.Standing in the afternoon chill, the man, Max Azzarello, 37, of St. Augustine, Fla., threw pamphlets into the air before dousing himself with an accelerant and setting his body ablaze. The police hurried to extinguish the flames, but officials said his injuries were grave, and he was being treated at a hospital burn unit.The fire just a block or two from the courthouse appeared calculated to draw widespread attention, horrifying bystanders and temporarily overshadowing the momentous trial of a former president.But a closer look at the path the man had traveled to this moment of self-destruction revealed a recent spiral into volatility, one marked by a worldview that had become increasingly confusing and disjointed — and appeared to be unattached to any political party. His social media postings and arrest records suggest the immolation stemmed instead from a place of conspiracy theories and paranoia.Until last summer, Mr. Azzarello seemed to have lived a relatively quiet life. After high school, where he was a member of a bowling team, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009, with degrees in anthropology and public policy.As a student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., where he received a master’s degree in city and regional planning in 2012, he was known for leaving supportive Post-it notes for classmates in the hallways and for his karaoke performances of Frank Sinatra and Disney tunes, said a former classmate, Katie Brennan.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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      Day 4 of Trump’s Criminal Hush-Money Trial: Key Takeaways

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      The first week of the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump ended with a disturbing jolt: a 37-year-old man set himself on fire outside the courthouse, an event that overshadowed the legal proceedings inside.The news of the immolation rippled through the press corps just as the final members of Mr. Trump’s jury — including 12 seated jurors and six alternates — were being sworn in. Reporters rushed from the Lower Manhattan courtroom.But the trial’s pace, which has been faster than expected, did not slack. After lunch, Justice Juan M. Merchan conducted a hearing to determine which questions prosecutors might ask Mr. Trump if he were to testify in his own defense.Mr. Trump, 77, is charged with falsifying 34 business records in an attempt to cover up a payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress who has said they had a sexual encounter in 2006. Prosecutors have said he did so to better his chances of winning the election. He has denied the charges; the former president could face probation or prison if convicted.Opening statements in the case are expected Monday.Here are five takeaways from Mr. Trump’s fourth day, and the first week, on trial:We have our jury. And many are probably familiar with the Lexington Avenue subway.The process was grueling at times, but we have a panel of 12 Manhattanites who comprise the jury, and six alternates, who will hear the evidence and may be called upon to step in if jurors are excused or disqualified.It is a diverse bunch, both in their neighborhoods and professions: a Harlem educator, a Chelsea tech worker, a product manager from Upper Manhattan. The alternates who were added Friday included a fashion worker from Chinatown, an information technology specialist from Inwood and an unemployed woman from Murray Hill.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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      Takeaways From Day 3 of Trump’s Hush Money Criminal Trial

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      The third day of Donald J. Trump’s trial started with drama and ended with a jury.After two jurors were dismissed on Thursday morning, a flurry of afternoon activity produced a full panel of 12 jurors who will decide the former president’s fate. Several alternates remain to be seated on Friday, with opening statements expected on Monday.Their work will be a unique challenge: the first prosecution of a former American president. Mr. Trump, 77, is charged with falsifying 34 business records in an attempt to cover up a payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who has said she had a brief sexual encounter with him in 2006. He has denied the charges; he could face probation or prison time if convicted.Here are five takeaways from Mr. Trump’s third day on trial:Things slowed down fast.Court officials had earlier thought jury selection might take as long as two weeks. But hopes were high on Thursday that the 12 members might be seated by close of business after seven members were picked Tuesday. Justice Juan M. Merchan had suggested that, if the fast pace continued, the prosecution and defense would offer introductory remarks on Monday morning.Then Thursday began as a slog, with both sides angling to gain any advantage, or — conversely — to get rid of any problems. For the prosecutors, that meant challenging a previously seated juror who they had discovered had credibility issues. Justice Merchan spent a long sidebar discussing the issue with lawyers from both sides and the juror. In the end, the juror was excused.By lunchtime, the jury was shrinking, not growing.Who Are Key Players in the Trump Manhattan Criminal Trial?The first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.They sped up fast, too.Justice Merchan was quick to get back on track. After 18 potential jurors were seated in the jury box, he kept them moving as they navigated a lengthy questionnaire with Mr. Trump looking on.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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      Judge in Documents Case Rejects Dismissal Motions by Trump Co-Defendants

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      Judge Aileen M. Cannon denied requests by Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira to have the charges against them dropped.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case on Thursday denied initial attempts by Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants to have the charges against them dismissed.The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was the first time she had rejected dismissal motions by the two men, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, both of whom work for Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, say that Mr. Nauta, one of Mr. Trump’s closest personal aides, and Mr. De Oliveira, the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, conspired with the former president to hide from the government boxes of classified materials that Mr. Trump had removed from the White House, and then took part in a related plot to destroy security camera footage of the boxes being moved. The men have also been charged with lying to investigators working on the case.At a hearing last week in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., lawyers for the two men tried to convince Judge Cannon that their clients had no idea that the boxes they had moved on Mr. Trump’s behalf contained classified materials. The lawyers also said they needed more details about the evidence against the men than what was contained in the 53-page superseding indictment.Mr. Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., raised an additional claim: that the obstruction statute his client was charged with violating was unconstitutionally vague.On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard somewhat similar arguments about that law, which has been used not only against hundreds of pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but also against Mr. Trump himself in both the classified documents case and the federal case in which he stands accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.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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      The Question of Transgender Care

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      Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today. She has entered one of the most toxic debates in our culture: how the medical community should respond to the growing numbers of young people who seek gender transition through medical treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone therapies. This month, after more than three years of research, Cass, a pediatrician, produced a report, commissioned by the National Health Service in England, that is remarkable for its empathy for people on all sides of this issue, for its humility in the face of complex social trends we don’t understand and for its intellectual integrity as we try to figure out which treatments actually work to serve those patients who are in distress. With incredible courage, she shows that careful scholarship can cut through debates that have been marked by vituperation and intimidation and possibly reset them on more rational grounds.Cass, a past president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, is clear about the mission of her report: “This review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves or rolling back on people’s rights to health care. It is about what the health care approach should be, and how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the N.H.S. in relation to their gender identity.”This issue begins with a mystery. For reasons that are not clear, the number of adolescents who have sought to medically change their sex has been skyrocketing in recent years, though the overall number remains very small. For reasons that are also not clear, adolescents who were assigned female at birth are driving this trend, whereas before the late 2000s, it was mostly adolescents who were assigned male at birth who sought these treatments.Doctors and researchers have proposed various theories to try to explain these trends. One is that greater social acceptance of trans people has enabled people to seek these therapies. Another is that teenagers are being influenced by the popularity of searching and experimenting around identity. A third is that the rise of teen mental health issues may be contributing to gender dysphoria. In her report, Cass is skeptical of broad generalizations in the absence of clear evidence; these are individual children and adolescents who take their own routes to who they are.Some activists and medical practitioners on the left have come to see the surge in requests for medical transitioning as a piece of the new civil rights issue of our time — offering recognition to people of all gender identities. Transition through medical interventions was embraced by providers in the United States and Europe after a pair of small Dutch studies showed that such treatment improved patients’ well-being. But a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.Unfortunately, some researchers who questioned the Dutch approach were viciously attacked. This year, Sallie Baxendale, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London, published a review of studies looking at the impact of puberty blockers on brain development and concluded that “critical questions” about the therapy remain unanswered. She was immediately attacked. She recently told The Guardian, “I’ve been accused of being an anti-trans activist, and that now comes up on Google and is never going to go away.”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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      What We Know About the 12 Jurors in Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial

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      Twelve Manhattanites have been chosen to serve on the jury for the first criminal trial of a U.S. president.The judge ordered that the jurors’ identities be kept confidential during the trial and that reporters withhold some information that could identify them.According to their statements in court during three days of jury selection, here is what we know about the jurors:Juror 1, who will be the foreman, works in sales and lives in West Harlem. He said that he enjoys outdoor activities. He said he gets his news from The New York Times and watches Fox News and MSNBC. He said he had heard about some of former President Donald J. Trump’s other criminal cases, but he did not have an opinion about him.Juror 2 works in finance and lives in Hell’s Kitchen. He said he likes hiking, music, concerts and enjoying New York City. He said he follows Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who is expected to be a key witness, on social media. But he also said he follows figures like former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. He said he believed Mr. Trump had done some good for the country, adding “it goes both ways.”Juror 3 works in the legal field and lives in Chelsea. He said he does not follow the news closely but, when he does, he reads The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and finds articles using Google. He added that he was not very familiar with Mr. Trump’s other criminal cases.Juror 4 is an engineer from the Upper West Side. Asked how he was during jury selection, he responded, “I am freezing.” When a lawyer asked if he had strong feelings about Mr. Trump, he responded “No, not really.”Who Are Key Players in the Trump Manhattan Criminal Trial?The first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.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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      Judge in Trump Trial Asks Media Not to Report Some Juror Information

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      The judge in former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial ordered reporters to not disclose employment information about potential jurors after he excused a woman who said she was worried about her identity becoming known.The woman, who had been seated on the jury on Tuesday, told the judge that her friends and colleagues had warned her that she had been identified as a juror in the high-profile case. Although the judge has kept prospective jurors’ names private, some have disclosed their employers and other identifying information in court.She also said that she did not believe she could be impartial.The judge, Juan M. Merchan, promptly dismissed her.Moments later, Justice Merchan ordered the press to not report the answer to two queries on a lengthy questionnaire for prospective jurors: “Who is your current employer?” and “Who was your prior employer?”The judge conceded that the information about employers was necessary for lawyers to know. But he directed that those two answers be redacted from the transcript.Justice Merchan also said that he was concerned about news outlets publishing physical descriptions of prospective or seated jurors, asking reporters to “simply apply common sense.”“It serves no purpose,” Justice Merchan said about publishing physical descriptions, adding that he was directing the press to “refrain from writing about anything you observe with your eyes.”With the loss of the female juror on Thursday morning, six seated jurors remain.In early March, Justice Merchan issued an order prohibiting publicly disclosing the names of jurors, while allowing legal teams and the defendant to know their identities.But before the trial, Mr. Trump’s lawyers requested that potential jurors not be told that the jury would be anonymous unless he or she expressed concerns. Justice Merchan told the parties that he’d “make every effort to not unnecessarily alert the jurors” to this secrecy, merely telling jurors that they would be identified in court by a number.On Thursday, Justice Merchan seemed frustrated by news reports that included identifying characteristics of potential jurors that had been aired in open court. He said: “There’s a reason why this is an anonymous jury, and we’ve taken the measures we have taken.”“It kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there,” he said.He added that “the press can write about anything the attorney and the courts discuss and anything you observe us do.”But he also said he had the legal authority to prevent reporters from relaying employer information on prospective jurors. He added that “if you can’t stick to that, we’re going to have to see if there is anything else we can do to keep the jurors safe.” More