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      E. Jean Carroll Promises to Do ‘Something Good’ With Money Won From Trump

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      The writer was awarded $83.3 million for his defamation. Now, she will have to figure out how to use it.As soon as E. Jean Carroll heard the verdict on Friday — $83.3 million in defamation damages against Donald J. Trump — a world of possibility opened before her: How to use the money?The amount vastly eclipsed the $5 million awarded to her by a jury last spring in a different trial against Mr. Trump. It could take years before she sees the money, as Mr. Trump has said he will appeal, but she is already considering how she might use the money once she obtains it.“I’m not going to waste a cent of this,” she said. “We’re going to do something good with it.”Figuring that out will take some time, she added. But she will splurge on one luxury, she said — for her Great Pyrenees and her pit bull. “I’m going to be able to buy some premium dog food now,” she said.Ms. Carroll, appearing relaxed and happy in her lawyers’ offices on Saturday, spoke in her first interview since the Manhattan jury’s award in her favor a day earlier.Ms. Carroll, 80, sued Mr. Trump, 77, for defamation after he called her a liar in June 2019, when she first publicly accused him, in a magazine article, of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room decades earlier. Mr. Trump continued to attack Ms. Carroll, in posts on his Truth Social website that lasted right into the trial, as well as in news conferences and on the campaign trial.After the verdict on Friday, Mr. Trump, issued a new attack on social media: “Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon.” But he avoided criticizing Ms. Carroll, a silence that spoke volumes. Ms. Carroll said she was not ready to assume that the former president was finished with her.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?  More

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      Nikki Haley Was Target of ‘Swatting’ Incident in December, Authorities Say

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      A bogus account of a shooting at a South Carolina home owned by Nikki Haley sent the authorities scrambling in late December, but the Republican presidential candidate and a former governor of the state, was not there at the time, Reuters reported on Saturday.The news service published details about the Dec. 30 “swatting” incident at Ms. Haley’s home on Kiawah Island, S.C., one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response. Reuters obtained the information as part of a public records request, which included an email from Craig Harris, the town’s public safety director, discussing the incident with local officials.The email said that an unknown person had called 911 and “claimed to have shot his girlfriend and threatened to harm himself while at the residence of Nikki Haley.” The case remains under investigation, according to the email, which did not discuss a motive for the call.The details of the incident took nearly a month to emerge, a stark contrast to a series of high-profile “swatting” attempts that targeted politicians and government buildings in late December and early January.The Haley campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday. When reached by Reuters, the campaign declined to address the report.Ms. Haley, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in former President Donald J. Trump’s administration, is the last serious candidate battling him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. She lost to Mr. Trump in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday by 11 percentage points, and they have increasingly clashed over her decision to stay in the race.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?  More

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      Trump Campaigns in Nevada, Where He Has Virtually No Rival

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      Former President Donald J. Trump, long the dominant front-runner in the Republican nominating contest, has made it clear for months that he is itching to focus on a likely general election matchup between him and President Biden.On Saturday, he’ll campaign in Nevada, a critical battleground state. But first he’ll need at least a handful of his supporters to turn out for the nominating caucuses in the state on Feb. 8 — and his last remaining Republican rival for the nomination, Nikki Haley, is doing everything she can to remind him she’s still in the race even if they won’t meet head-to-head in Nevada.Off the trail on Friday, Ms. Haley assailed Mr. Trump as “unhinged” on Fox News as she continued to try and bait him into a one-on-one debate. Mr. Trump was in a New York City courtroom, but his campaign sent out email blasts pointing to articles that seemed to bolster the case that she should cede the race to him, and attacking her on immigration.“There’s one thing Americans know — Nikki will always put America last,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, wrote.There are two contests coming up in Nevada: the caucuses, and a presidential primary on Feb. 6. The presidential primary features Ms. Haley on the ballot, but won’t count toward the G.O.P. nomination, so she is skipping the state entirely. The caucuses feature Mr. Trump without a single major competitor — and that’s the contest that will determine who gets the state’s delegate prize.Critics have argued that the state party set up the caucuses to benefit Mr. Trump — which the party denies.“Nevada will certainly be a good messaging opportunity for Trump, because he’s going to win all the delegates here, and he will win unopposed,” said Jeremy Gelman, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. “He will be able to say he swept Nevada.”Still, the specter of Ms. Haley’s continued presence in the race is likely to hang over Mr. Trump’s speech on Saturday, his first campaign event since winning in New Hampshire, where he beat her by 11 percentage points.The former president and his team were hoping his showing there would persuade Ms. Haley to end her campaign. But she vowed to keep fighting, drawing Mr. Trump’s ire.“I don’t get too angry,” he said on Tuesday. In a signal of the likelihood that he would continue escalating his attacks against her, he added: “I get even.”On Saturday, she will be across the country, holding a rally in her home state of South Carolina, the site of her next electoral battle with Mr. Trump on Feb. 24. Back in Las Vegas, he’ll share a different split screen, this one with Vice President Kamala Harris.Ms. Harris will attend a get-out-the-vote event at a labor union headquarters meant to encourage turnout in Nevada’s Democratic primary. More

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      The Ogre Gorging on America

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      If you can imagine the lobby bar of the Manchester Marriott as an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, I can explain how it felt to cover the New Hampshire primary.I will need the help of the late Seamus Heaney, who described what it was like to be quaffing in Heorot Hall while Grendel lurked and swooped through the frost-stiffened north.In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” Heaney described Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.”The “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance,” he said, adding: “Grendel waged his lonely war, inflicting constant cruelties on the people, atrocious hurt,” pursuing “vicious raids and ravages.”The New Hampshire primary felt like a chapter of that Old English saga: Donald Trump, the ogre who keeps coming back to terrorize us, was stomping around that lovely little snow-covered state, devouring his foes.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?  More

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      A Radical Proposal for Nikki Haley: Try to Win More Votes

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      Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary but found a cause: getting under Donald Trump’s not exactly rhinoceros-thick skin. The story of the Republican primary campaign in the days since Trump’s victory has been one where the victor acts like a sore loser and the likely loser loosens up, goads her stronger rival and finds a pool of small-dollar donors to keep her in the race.Haley’s turn toward mockery and confrontation has created modest excitement in the disillusioned world of NeverTrump punditry. Maybe the remaining non-Trump Republican is giving up on being vice president or winning some future G.O.P. primary campaign. Maybe she’s ready to make Trump’s unfitness her exclusive theme. Maybe, as The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio speculates, by needling and attacking and bringing out Trump’s worst behavior, she can even bring about the long-awaited Republican crackup that would finally defeat Trump on the scale that he deserves.I don’t think this hope makes a lot of sense. The idea that there exists some form of elite Republican denunciation, combined with egregious Trumpian misbehavior, that could shatter the G.O.P. coalition and send him to a Barry Goldwater or George McGovern-style defeat, seemed plausible enough eight years ago. It’s what I expected and what Republicans deserved.But I should have heeded the wisdom of Bill Munny in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Because since then we’ve seen all kinds of terrible behavior, coupled with attempted repudiations from all sorts of Republicans, including Trump’s own aides and cabinet appointees. And yet the rule has held: Ask people if they like Trump and majorities do not, but put Trump up against the current Democratic Party, and he becomes a viable candidate for president.Maybe Haley is the right figure to change that. But she has nowhere near the pre-Trump fame of a Mitt Romney or the ideological credibility of a Liz Cheney. And based on what we saw from Chris Christie’s campaign, a pure repudiate-Trump candidacy is only likely to enhance Trump’s margins in the remaining primaries, emphasizing Haley’s hopelessness rather than her gumption.Moreover, wouldn’t there be something a little bit strange, after two consecutive primary campaigns in which Republicans desperately competed for a chance to face off with Trump one-on-one, for the winner of that prize to immediately give up on winning any more supporters? Haley’s consolidation of gentry Republicans succeeded in boxing out Ron DeSantis’s attempt to build a larger non-Trump coalition. Is she really not even going to attempt to build a larger coalition of her own?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?  More

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      After Carroll Verdict, Haley Says ‘America Can Do Better’ Than Trump or Biden

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      Nikki Haley criticized Donald J. Trump on Friday, saying, “America can do better than Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” after a Manhattan jury had ordered the former president to pay $83.3 million for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll.It was the latest iteration of Ms. Haley’s new attack line against Mr. Trump, portraying another Trump presidency as just as bad for the country as another four years of President Biden. Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, began making similar statements after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida dropped out of the race on Sunday, leaving her as the last serious threat to Mr. Trump’s candidacy.“Donald Trump wants to be the presumptive Republican nominee and we’re talking about $83 million in damages,” Ms. Haley wrote on social media, adding that Mr. Trump’s legal troubles continued to be a distraction. “We’re not talking about fixing the border. We’re not talking about tackling inflation.”Ms. Haley is preparing for what may be the final stand of her presidential campaign, facing off against Mr. Trump next month in a critical primary in her home state of South Carolina. Ms. Haley has largely avoided commenting on Mr. Trump’s legal cases, but the former president leads her by wide margins in polls, and she appears to be turning up the heat in an effort to catch him.Mr. Trump lashed out on social media soon after the verdict, attacking the civil trial as a “Biden Directed Witch Hunt” despite the fact that Ms. Carroll sued Mr. Trump in 2019, before he had left office and while Mr. Biden was just one of many Democratic presidential candidates.The verdict was an extraordinary moment for a front-runner in a presidential nominating contest. A jury penalized Mr. Trump $83.3 million for defamation just three days after he had won a second nominating contest — in New Hampshire, by 11 percentage points. Mr. Trump also faces 91 felony counts in four separate criminal cases.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?  More

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      Bidencare Is a Really Big Deal

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      In 2010, at the signing of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, Joe Biden, the vice president at the time, was caught on a hot mic telling President Barack Obama that the bill was a “big deal.” OK, there was actually another word in the middle. Anyway, Biden was right.And in one of his major unsung accomplishments — it’s amazing how many Americans believe that an unusually productive president hasn’t done much — President Biden has made Obamacare an even bigger deal, in a way that is improving life for millions of Americans.As you may have noticed — as many Americans finally seem to be noticing — Biden has been racking up some pretty good numbers lately. Economic growth is still chugging along, defying widespread predictions of a recession, while unemployment remains near a 50-year low. Inflation, especially using the measure preferred by the Federal Reserve, has fallen close to the Fed’s target. The stock market keeps hitting new highs.Oh, and murders have plummeted, with overall violent crime possibly hitting another 50-year low.Biden deserves some political reward for this good news, given that Donald Trump and many in his party predicted economic and social disaster if he were elected, and that Republicans, in general, are still talking as if America were suffering from high inflation and runaway crime. (Trump, of course, has been dismissing the good jobs numbers as fake. Wait until he hears about falling crime.)It’s less clear how much of the good news on these fronts can be attributed to Biden’s policies. Presidents definitely don’t control the stock market. They have less influence in general on the economy than many believe; I would give Biden some credit for the economy’s strength, which was in part driven by his spending policies, but the rapid disinflation of 2023 mainly reflects a nation working its way out of lingering disruptions from the Covid pandemic. The same is probably true for the plunge in violent crime.One area where presidents do make a big difference, however, is health care. Obamacare — which arguably should really be called Pelosicare, since Nancy Pelosi (who is not, whatever Trump may think, the same person as Nikki Haley) played a key role in getting it through Congress — led to big gains in health insurance coverage when it went into full effect in 2014.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?  More

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      Nikki Haley Looks to Home Turf to Challenge Trump

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      Nikki Haley, facing growing doubts and pressure to drop out, has winnowed the race to a one-on-one contest and is looking to make her case in South Carolina.A combative Nikki Haley brought her presidential campaign back to South Carolina on Wednesday after a disappointing defeat the night before in New Hampshire, and told a boisterous crowd in a cavernous ballroom in North Charleston that she would fight Donald J. Trump for the Republican nomination.“The political elites in this state and around the country say we just need to let Donald Trump have this,” she told her supporters, who were jeering at the idea. “Listen. We’ve only had two states that have voted. We’ve got 48 more.”Nowhere is more immediately important than South Carolina, where she served two terms as governor before being tapped to serve as Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But just because it’s her home state does not mean it is friendly territory. As Ms. Haley looked to reinvigorate her campaign here on the ground, Republicans, as varied as local party officials and the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, stepped up the pressure on her to drop out. As she made her case for pressing on, the former president significantly consolidated his support.While she spoke, the Trump campaign blasted out a fresh list of endorsements in South Carolina that now includes the state’s two senators, most of its House members, its governor and lieutenant governor, and much of its State House — more than 150 names in all.“Welcome home to Trump Country, Nikki,” Austin McCubbin, Mr. Trump’s South Carolina director, taunted.Some of Ms. Haley’s closest allies and confidants on Wednesday continued to insist that Ms. Haley had met her own expectations: She had winnowed the field and was now in the two-person contest she wanted, with time enough until the primary on Feb. 24 to spread her message to a broader electorate and draw contrasts between herself and 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?  More