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      True-Crime Podcasts About Trump Are Everywhere

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      MSNBC, NPR, Vox Media and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution are all aiming to capitalize on interest in the criminal cases against President Donald J. Trump with the shows.True crime is among the most popular genres in podcasting. One of the biggest stories in the coming months is the wave of criminal charges facing former President Donald J. Trump.The result: a boomlet of podcasts dedicated to the criminal cases against him.MSNBC, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, NPR, Vox Media and The First TV, an upstart conservative media company, have all introduced or are about to start new shows examining Mr. Trump’s courtroom travails as he campaigns to win back the White House.On MSNBC’s “Prosecuting Donald Trump,” the legal commentators Andrew Weissmann and Mary McCord offer analysis gleaned from their years serving as prosecutors. A recent episode of “Breakdown,” from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, includes a newsy interview with Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. Recently on “Trump’s Trials,” the NPR host Scott Detrow discussed whether Mr. Trump could claim presidential immunity.The criminal charges against Mr. Trump — brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia, as well as in two federal indictments — involve allegations of election interference, his role in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, his handling of sensitive documents and payments to cover up a sex scandal. Mr. Trump denies any wrongdoing.Many of the hosts interviewed by The New York Times cited the newsworthiness of the story — a former president and a leading candidate for the office is facing a legal onslaught while battling for the White House — as the impetus to go wall to wall with dedicated podcasts.“He is the far and away front-runner to the nomination and has a real chance of being president again,” Mr. Detrow said. “That, to me, is an enormous legal story, an enormous political story.”But there is a significant potential economic upside as well: capturing a slice of the $2.4 billion that advertisers are expected to spend on podcasts in 2024, according to the data firm eMarketer. For years, news organizations have benefited financially from the public’s interest in Mr. Trump — colloquially known as the “Trump bump.”“The number of users is up, but the number of people vying for those users in terms of dollars is also way up,” said Chris Balfe, founder of The First TV.Mr. Trump’s legal challenges present an unusual twist on the true-crime genre, which often focuses on grisly murders or dramatic heists. “Serial,” a podcast from the creators of “This American Life,” was a pioneer of the category, which has also included entrants like “Exit Scam” (about a vanished cryptocurrency mogul) and “Last Seen,” a suspenseful yarn about the theft of 13 irreplaceable artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. (The New York Times Company now owns Serial Productions, maker of “Serial.”)The Trump cases, by contrast, involve complicated questions about the Constitution and democracy. Adding to the complexity: They span state and federal jurisdictions in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.Podcasts are an ideal format to explain the nuances to the public, because they give journalists the time and space to examine complicated issues at length, Mr. Balfe said. They also allow news organizations to create a listener destination for coverage quickly and relatively inexpensively, with two mics and a simple distribution feed for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, he said.“You don’t have to go lease a beautiful studio on Sixth Avenue and hire a crew and all this other stuff,” Mr. Balfe said. “A podcast is a low-floor, high-ceiling way to start a new product. And if it works, it can be very successful, very quickly.”Last year, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated the latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the criminal investigation. Since then, it has been all Trump, all the time, with 22 episodes on the topic since August.This year, the podcast garnered more than one million downloads, making it the newspaper’s most popular, finding audiences in Florida, California and New York, according to a spokeswoman for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The newspaper also has three full-time reporters covering Mr. Trump’s case in Fulton County, where he faces 13 felony charges, including racketeering.Tamar Hallerman, one of those reporters, co-anchors the podcast. She describes herself as a “recovering Washington correspondent.” (She was previously a reporter at Roll Call.)The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the largest newspaper in Georgia, dedicated its latest season of its true-crime podcast, “Breakdown,” to the Trump criminal investigation.Wulf Bradley for The New York Times“All of these legal cases that Trump is in the middle of are already creating a unique set of circumstances for a leading presidential candidate,” said Ms. Hallerman, who covered the 2016 presidential campaign. “This is absolutely not business as usual for the campaign press corps.”Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, has dedicated much of one of his three podcasts for Vox Media to the criminal investigations facing Mr. Trump. Mr. Bharara has covered Mr. Trump’s legal issues since 2018, saying, “There’s really been no shortage of legal-based news.”Yet “the dam broke” in April, he said, after Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, brought the first criminal charges against Mr. Trump.“Every month or two, there was another one,” Mr. Bharara said. “And it became clear that that was going to be a central focus.”Political coverage of Mr. Trump should focus on the criminal investigations into the former president, rather than traditional horse-race coverage, said Timothy Crouse, whose 1973 book, “The Boys on the Bus,” about the media’s coverage of the previous year’s presidential campaign, became a classic of the genre.Investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, not campaign reporters, did the most enduring political journalism of that era, Mr. Crouse said. At the time, many campaign reporters were skeptical of those stories. He added that sustained exploration of Mr. Trump’s criminal charges would probably follow the same pattern.“Fewer political reporters might be OK, but only if that decrease were to be balanced by an increase in investigative reporters,” Mr. Crouse said. More

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      Prosecutors Ask Judge to Keep Trump From Making ‘Baseless Political Claims’ in Trial

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      The special counsel, Jack Smith, is seeking to shape the evidence the jury in the federal election interference case will hear.Federal prosecutors asked a judge on Wednesday to keep former President Donald J. Trump and his lawyers from claiming to the jury in his upcoming election interference trial that the case had been brought against him as a partisan attack by the Biden administration.The move by the prosecutors was designed to keep Mr. Trump from overtly politicizing his trial and from distracting the jury with unfounded political arguments that he has often made on both the campaign trail and in court papers related to the case.Ever since Mr. Trump was charged this summer with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, he and his lawyers have sought to frame the indictment as a retaliatory strike against him by President Biden. Mr. Trump has also placed such claims at the heart of his presidential campaign even though the charges were initially returned by a federal grand jury and are being overseen by an independent special counsel, Jack Smith.Molly Gaston, one of Mr. Smith’s senior assistants, asked Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is handling the election case in Federal District Court in Washington, to keep Mr. Trump’s political attacks as far away from the jury as possible.“The court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation,” Ms. Gaston wrote, “and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding.”The 20-page motion was filed two weeks after Judge Chutkan effectively froze the case in place as an appeals court considers Mr. Trump’s broad claims that he is immune from prosecution. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear the question of the immunity immediately, although the justices are likely to take up the issue after the appeals court completes its highly accelerated review.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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      Matt Damon, Fran Drescher and an Indian Soybean Farmer on 2024

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      What are your hopes for 2024? See how they compare with those of 11 people I put that question to. (Most of them replied by email. The people from Afghanistan and India spoke by phone.)Fran Drescher, an actress and the president of SAG-AFTRA, which staged a 118-day strike against movie and television producers this year:In 2024, I am looking forward to a sudden and essential collective human emotional growth spurt, whereby empathy becomes the main emotion that informs all behavior.Andrew Marsh, the chief executive of Plug Power, a fuel cell supplier:My hope is to see 2024 as the year we get serious about decarbonizing hard-to-abate heavy industrial manufacturing sectors. Building out a nascent U.S. hydrogen industry is essential to moving these industrial processes to carbon neutrality.Uri Levine, an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Waze:I want people to find a purpose in life. When you have a life purpose or figure out what your destiny is, your life becomes simpler, everything is clearer, and you’re happier, healthier and richer. You know what you have to do. The purpose becomes the north star to guide you. My purpose is to create value.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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      Plagiarism Allegations Against Claudine Gay

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      More from our inbox:The Bronx Defenders and the Fallout From WarUndoing Roe: ‘A Shameful Saga’Buying Cashmere Without an Environmental CostKen Cedeno/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “Why Claudine Gay Should Go,” by John McWhorter (column, nytimes.com, Dec. 21):Mr. McWhorter argues that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, should be held to the same academic standards as the institution’s undergraduates. If only that were true!When I was a graduate student there in the late 1990s, I was warned by a senior professor not to pursue a case of plagiarism because it might lead to a lawsuit. The university, he confided, had recently lost a costly court case brought by the parents of a student accused of plagiarism.Plagiarists are rarely brought to account, especially in academe, where it is often treated as a minor delict. How do I know? I’ve been plagiarized by at least two other academics, including a visiting professor at Harvard during my first year of graduate school. Neither she nor the other offender ever faced any consequences.Andrew I. PortDetroitThe writer is a professor of history at Wayne State University.To the EditorRe “Harvard Finds More ‘Duplicative Language’ of President” (news article, Dec. 22):I find it quite odd for The Times to consistently lead the coverage of Claudine Gay’s academic work with an overemphasis that “conservative” voices have driven the claims of plagiarism.The issue is not the political background of the whistle-blowers, but the actual charges. I (hardly a conservative if it matters) wrote articles, a master’s thesis, a Ph.D. dissertation and a book, and I can guarantee that in each case I knew my writing and what I got from other sources (primary and secondary).Nothing bothered my mentor and friend, the late historian Stan Kutler, more than plagiarists who claimed, after getting caught, that their stealing was an oversight, a little mistake, a slight error, a problem in checking content. No, they simply got caught.Dr. Gay would surely support a grad student’s expulsion for plagiarizing. Her turn.Joseph L. DavisMadison, Wis.To the Editor:The New York Times has devoted a startling amount of coverage to sorting out the question of Claudine Gay’s plagiarism. May I suggest that before devoting more, the newspaper’s reporters might want to examine publications by all the Harvard presidents who came before her? And perhaps some of those by its most famous professors, too.The computer technology that exists today may allow critics to scrutinize her writings far more than any past scholar’s work was scrutinized when such technological capabilities did not exist.Let’s see how much she is an outlier in her community — or not — before condemning her so roundly.Janna Malamud SmithMilton, Mass.The writer graduated from Harvard in 1973.The Bronx Defenders and the Fallout From WarSome lawyers in housing and family courts have said they want nothing to do with members of the Bronx Defenders.Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Feud Over War Imperils Future of Legal Group; Claims of Antisemitism at Bronx Defenders” (front page, Dec. 15):I am an attorney and a former priest at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in the South Bronx.The Bronx Defenders are among the best lawyers in the city. A lawyer’s duty is to represent a client “zealously,” and the Bronx Defenders represent their clients passionately. I always felt confident when they represented a parishioner or someone I knew from the community.Apparently they bring the same passion to advocating for Palestinians, seeing the hardships they face as similar to those of their South Bronx clients.I urgently hope that they can see that, throughout history, the Jewish people have suffered from prejudice that is also similar to the prejudice their clients have experienced, and, for the sake of their clients, save the Bronx Defenders.(Rev.) Martha OverallNew YorkTo the Editor:Your article about the Bronx Defenders epitomizes my deepest fears about the effects of the Israel-Hamas war on the United States.Longstanding progressive American allies in the campaigns for free speech, civil rights, marriage equality, reproductive freedom, L.G.B.T.Q. protections, educational and legal reform, health care for all, affordable housing, academic freedom, animal and environmental protection — and more — are fighting each other over support for Israel versus support for Palestine as if no compromise were possible and this one point of conflict outweighed years of cooperative work, personal friendships and even family ties.Marches, flag-waving and ill-informed slogan-shouting, especially on college campuses, will have little effect on the war, but they might alienate enough normally Democratic voters to let Donald Trump win a close election. That would harm the country beyond our wildest imagining far into the future.Judy OlinickMiddlebury, Vt.Undoing Roe: ‘A Shameful Saga’Erin Schaff/The New York Times; Illustration by Matt DorfmanTo the Editor:Re “Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe” (front page, Dec. 17):This brilliant account of the undoing of Roe v. Wade exposes a shameful saga of partisan judging by justices who were committed to ending a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion even as they misled the Senate about their respect for long-settled precedent.Appointed by then-President Donald Trump with the mandate of reversing Roe, the three newest justices joined the reactionary core of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to fashion a decision that will live in infamy, rivaled in disgrace only by the cases of Citizens United and Dred Scott.The story of how the conservative majority manipulated the calendaring and hearing of the case, and their activism in going beyond the limited relief initially sought by Mississippi, will further erode public confidence in the integrity of the court and undermine its legitimacy as a once revered institution.Gerald HarrisNew YorkThe writer is a retired New York City Criminal Court judge.Buying Cashmere Without an Environmental CostGoats grazing on the Mongolian Plateau in Central Asia.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Demand for Cashmere Is Harming the Environment,” by Ginger Allington (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 17):While, of course, we must do all we can to preserve the incredibly fragile world we walk on, we can own cashmere — buy it used!Dr. Allington’s vivid essay teaches us to eschew the fabric that comes from the destructive practices used in herding Mongolian goats. But, as she says, “consider vintage cashmere.” We can head to our nearest consignment shop or other retailer of preworn clothing and find cashmere treasures for our loved ones during these alarming times.Here’s to such warmth!Deborah FriedNew Haven, Conn.To the Editor:Thank you so much for Ginger Allington’s guest essay on cheap cashmere fibers. It is up to every one of us to make a difference by choosing sustainable options.I had the luxury of buying several real cashmere sweaters in the 1970s. I am still wearing them! And I have just inherited a batch from my mother’s closet that are all still perfectly wearable because of the quality. The cheap cashmere that is being produced is doubly egregious because it won’t last one season.At what cost fast fashion? Is it the chicken or the egg? Buyers should stop buying, or manufacturers should stop producing?Susan StockToronto More

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      Michigan Supreme Court Decides Trump Can Stay on Ballot

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      After Colorado’s top court ruled that the former president was disqualified for engaging in insurrection, justices in Michigan considered a similar challenge.The Michigan Supreme Court on Wednesday paved the way for Donald J. Trump to appear on the state’s primary ballot, a victory for the former president in a battleground state. The state’s top court upheld an appeals court decision that found that the former president could appear on the ballot despite questions about his eligibility to hold elected office because of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.The Michigan decision followed a bombshell ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court, which on Dec. 19 determined in a 4-3 opinion that Mr. Trump should be removed from the state’s 2024 Republican primary ballot for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.Mr. Trump applauded the Michigan ruling in a statement posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “We have to prevent the 2024 Election from being Rigged and Stolen like they stole 2020,” the statement said. Ron Fein, the legal director of Free Speech For People, a group seeking to have Mr. Trump disqualified from running in the 2024 election, said the Michigan Supreme Court ruled narrowly, sidestepping the core questions at the heart of the case. The decision, he said, leaves the door open to challenge whether Mr. Trump can appear on the general election ballot in Michigan. “The Michigan Supreme Court did not rule out that the question of Donald Trump’s disqualification for engaging in insurrection against the U.S. Constitution may be resolved at a later stage,” Mr. Fein said in a statement. Michigan’s primary will be held Feb. 27.The question of Mr. Trump’s eligibility is widely expected to be answered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Some form of challenge to Mr. Trump’s eligibility has been lodged in more than 30 states, but many of those have already been dismissed.The challengers’ arguments are based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies anyone from holding federal office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after having taken an oath to support it.A lower-court judge previously decided the ballot eligibility case in Mr. Trump’s favor. Judge James Robert Redford of the Court of Claims in Michigan ruled in November that disqualifying a candidate through the 14th Amendment was a political issue, not one for the courts. A lower court in Colorado had also ruled in Mr. Trump’s favor before the Supreme Court there took up the case.Judge Redford also ruled that Michigan’s top elections official does not have the authority alone to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot. Free Speech for People, a liberal-leaning group that filed the lawsuit, appealed the ruling, asking the state Supreme Court to hear the case on an accelerated timetable.Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state and a Democrat, echoed the request for a quick decision, citing approaching deadlines for printing paper primary ballots. She wrote that a ruling was needed by Dec. 29 “in order to ensure an orderly election process.”Jan. 13 is the deadline for primary ballots to be sent to military and overseas voters; absentee voter ballots must be printed by Jan. 18. The state’s presidential primary is set for Feb. 27.Mitch Smith More

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      Nikki Haley’s Bold Strategy to Beat Trump: Play It Safe

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      Ms. Haley still trails far behind the former president in polls. Yet she is not deviating from the cautious approach that has led her this far.At a packed community center in southwestern Iowa, Nikki Haley broke from her usual remarks this month to offer a warning to her top Republican presidential rivals, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, deploying a favorite line: “If they punch me, I punch back — and I punch back harder.”But in that Dec. 18 appearance and over the next few days, Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, did not exactly pummel her opponents as promised. Her jabs were instead surgical, dry and policy-driven.“He went into D.C. saying that he was going to stop the spending and instead, he voted to raise the debt limit,” Ms. Haley said of Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, in Treynor, near the Nebraska border. At that same stop, she also defended herself against his attack ads and criticized Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, over offshore drilling and fracking, and questioned his choice of a political surrogate in Iowa.She was even more careful about going after Mr. Trump, continuing to draw only indirect contrasts and noting pointedly that his allied super PAC had begun running anti-Haley ads.“He said two days ago I wasn’t surging,” she said, but now had “attack ads going up against me.”With under three weeks left until the Iowa caucuses, Ms. Haley is treading cautiously as she enters the crucial final stretch of her campaign to shake the Republican Party loose from the clutches of Mr. Trump. Even as the former president maintains a vast lead in polls, Ms. Haley has insistently played it safe, betting that an approach that has left her as the only non-Trump candidate with any sort of momentum can eventually prevail as primary season unfolds.On the trail, she rarely takes questions from reporters. She hardly deviates from her stump speech or generates headlines. And she keeps walking a fine line on her greatest obstacle to the Republican nomination — Mr. Trump.“Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough,” she told reporters this month in New Hampshire, where she picked up the endorsement of Chris Sununu, the state’s popular Republican governor. “Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough.”Ms. Haley’s consistent strategy has enabled her team to build a reputation as lean and stable where other campaigns have faltered: As Mr. DeSantis’s support has dipped and turmoil has overtaken his allied super PAC, even some of his advisers are privately signaling they believe hope is lost.“I keep coming back to the word ‘disciplined,’” said Jim Merrill, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire who served on Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 bids. “She has run an extraordinarily disciplined campaign.”This month, Ms. Haley secured the endorsement of Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, right. Sophie Park/Getty ImagesYet Mr. Trump remains the heavy favorite for the nomination despite facing dozens of criminal charges, as well as legal challenges that aim to kick him off the ballot in several states.Ms. Haley’s apparent reluctance to attack her rival even in the face of what would seem to be political setbacks for him has raised questions from voters and other Republican competitors — most notably, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — about whether she can win while passing up crucial opportunities to derail her most significant opponent.“A lot of the people in this field are running against Trump without doing very much to take him on,” said Adolphus Belk, a political analyst and professor of political science at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., Ms. Haley’s home state. “If you are running to be president of the United States, it seems like it would be an imperative to take on the person who has the biggest lead.”A recent poll from The New York Times and Siena College found Mr. Trump leading his Republican rivals by more than 50 percentage points nationally, a staggering margin.The poll offered a sliver of hope for Ms. Haley: Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s supporters said he should not be the Republican nominee if he were found guilty of a crime. But 62 percent of Republicans said that if the former president won the primary, he should remain the nominee — even if subsequently convicted.The challenge for Ms. Haley is peeling away more of his support from the Republican Party’s white, working-class base. The Times/Siena poll found that she garnered 28 percent support from white voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher, but just 3 percent from those without a degree.As she barnstorms through Iowa and New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has remained committed to a calibrated approach that aims to speak to all factions of the Republican Party.Her stump speech highlights her background as the daughter of immigrants and her upbringing in a small and rural South Carolina town, but in generic terms. She nods to her status as the only woman in the Republican primary field and the potentially historic nature of her bid, but only in subtle ways.Even as she has risen in the polls and consolidated significant anti-Trump support among donors and prominent Republicans, she has continued to cast herself as an underestimated underdog, with a message tightly focused on debt and spending, national security and the crisis at the border.And she has not strayed from her broad calls for a “consensus” on abortion, even though some conservatives say she is not going far enough in backing new restrictions. At the same time, Democrats are looking to hit her from the other direction: The Democratic National Committee last week put up billboards in Davenport, Iowa, where she was campaigning, accusing her of wanting “extreme abortion bans.”Still, Ms. Haley has evolved on some fronts. In recent weeks, she has more aggressively made the case that she is the most electable Republican candidate — an argument that polls show has some merit — and ramped up her critiques of what she describes as a dysfunctional Washington.This month, after Republicans blocked an emergency spending bill to fund support for Ukraine, demanding strict new border restrictions in return, she accused both President Biden and some Republicans of creating a false choice among those priorities, as well as aid to Israel, which the legislation also included.“And now what are you hearing coming out of D.C. — do we support Ukraine or do we support Israel?” she said at an event in Burlington, Iowa. “Do we support Israel or do we secure the border? Don’t let them lie to you like that.”Ms. Haley has kept her message tightly focused on debt and spending, national security and the crisis at the border.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesShe has ramped up her criticism of Mr. Trump on his tone, leadership style and what she describes as his lack of follow-through on policy, hitting him for increasing the national debt, proposing to raise the federal gasoline tax and “praising dictators.”But when confronted with tougher questions from voters over Mr. Trump’s potential danger to the nation’s democracy or why she indicated at the first debate that she would support him as the nominee even if he were convicted of criminal charges, she tends to fall back on a familiar response. She says she thinks that “he was the right president for the right time” but that “rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.”“The thing is, normal people aren’t obsessed with Trump like you guys are,” she told Jonathan Karl of ABC News this month, taking a swipe at the news media when asked for her thoughts on how Mr. Trump is campaigning on the idea of “retribution” against his political enemies.Such attempts to avoid alienating Trump supporters have helped generate interest, if not always commitment.Before her event in Treynor, Iowa, Keith Denton, 77, a retired farmer and longtime Republican, said he stood with Mr. Trump “100 percent,” and had come to watch Ms. Haley only because his wife was debating whether to support her. But after Ms. Haley wrapped up, he tracked down a reporter to acknowledge that he was now seriously considering her.“I have to eat my words,” he said, adding that Ms. Haley had said “some things that changed my mind.” For one, he said, “I thought she was more of a warmonger, but now I can see she is against war.”But at an Osceola distilling company the next day, Jim Kimball, 84, a retired doctor, veteran and anti-Trump Republican, elicited nervous laughter from the audience when he asked Ms. Haley a couple of bold questions regarding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021: “Did Mr. Trump trample or defend the Constitution? And is he running for president or emperor?”As usual, Ms. Haley weighed her words. She said that the courts would “decide whether President Trump did something wrong” and that he had a right to defend himself against the legal charges he faces, but she expressed disappointment that when he had the chance to stop the Capitol attack, he did not.“My goal is not to worry about him being president forever — that is why I’m going to win,” she finished to loud applause.But afterward, Mr. Kimball said that he wished she would have said that Mr. Trump is unfit to be president and that he was still deliberating whether to caucus for her or for Mr. Christie.“I wish she had the courage of Liz Cheney,” he said, referring to the congresswoman pushed out of Republican leadership in Congress and then her Wyoming seat by pro-Trump forces in the party. “But she doesn’t want to end up like Liz Cheney, so you get the answer you get.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      TikTok’s Influence on Young Voters Is No Simple Matter

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      We’re in a season of hand-wringing and scapegoating over social media, especially TikTok, with many Americans and politicians missing that two things can be true at once: Social media can have an outsized and sometimes pernicious influence on society, and lawmakers can unfairly use it as an excuse to deflect legitimate criticisms.Young people are overwhelmingly unhappy about U.S. policy on the war in Gaza? Must be because they get their “perspective on the world on TikTok” — at least according to Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who holds a strong pro-Israel stance. This attitude is shared across the aisle. “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said. Another Republican senator, Josh Hawley, called TikTok a “purveyor of virulent antisemitic lies.”Consumers are unhappy with the economy? Surely, that’s TikTok again, with some experts arguing that dismal consumer sentiment is a mere “vibecession” — feelings fueled by negativity on social media rather than by the actual effects of inflation, housing costs and more. Some blame online phenomena such as the viral TikTok “Silent Depression” videos that compare the economy today to that of the 1930s — falsely asserting things were easier then.It’s no secret that social media can spread misleading and even harmful content, given that its business model depends on increasing engagement, thus often amplifying inflammatory content (which is highly engaging!) with little to no guardrails for veracity. And, yes, TikTok, whose parent company is headquartered in Beijing and which is increasingly dominating global information flows, should generate additional concern. As far back as 2012, research published in Nature by Facebook scientists showed how companies can easily and stealthily alter real-life behavior, such as election turnout.But that doesn’t make social media automatically and solely culpable for whenever people hold opinions inconvenient to those in power. While comparisons with the horrors of the Great Depression can fall far off the mark, young people do face huge economic challenges now, and that’s their truth even if their grasp of what happened a century ago is off. Housing prices and mortgage rates are high and rents less affordable, resurgent inflation has outpaced wages until recently, groceries have become much more expensive and career paths are much less certain.Similarly, given credible estimates of heavy casualties inflicted among Gazans — about 40 percent of whom are children — by Israel’s monthslong bombing campaign, maybe a more engaged younger population is justifiably critical of President Biden’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government? Even the Israeli military’s own estimates say thousands civilians have been killed, and there is a lot of harrowing video out of Gaza showing entire families wiped out. At the same time, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least 69 journalists and media workers have been among those killed in the war; Israel blocks access to foreign journalists outside of a few embedded ones under its control. (Egypt does as well.) In such moments, social media can act as a bypass around censorship and silence.There’s no question that there’s antisemitic content and lies on TikTok, and on other platforms. I’ve seen many outrageous clips about Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7 that falsely and callously deny the horrific murders and atrocities. And I do wish we knew more about exactly what people were seeing on TikTok: Without meaningful transparency, it’s hard to know the scale and scope of such content on the platform.But I’m quite skeptical that young people would be more upbeat about the economy and the war in Gaza if not for viral videos.Why don’t we know more about TikTok’s true influence, or that of YouTube or Facebook? Because that requires the kind of independent research that’s both expensive and possible only with the cooperation of the platforms themselves, which hold so much key data we don’t see about the spread and impact of such content. It’s as if tobacco companies privately compiled the nation’s lung cancer rates or car companies hoarded the air quality statistics.For example, there is a strong case that social media has been harmful to the well-being of teenagers, especially girls. The percentage of 12- to 17-year-old girls who had a major depressive episode had been flat until about 2011, when smartphones and social media became more common, and then more than doubled in the next decade. Pediatric mental health hospitalizations among girls are also sharply up since 2009. Global reading, math and science test scores, too, took a nosedive right around then.The multiplicity of such findings is strongly suggestive. But is it a historic shift that would happen anyway even without smartphones and social media? Or is social media the key cause? Despite some valiant researchers trying to untangle this, the claim remains contested partly because we lack enough of the right kind of research with access to data.And lack of more precise knowledge certainly impedes action. As things stand, big tech companies can object to calls for regulation by saying we don’t really know if social media is truly harmful in the ways claimed — a convenient shrug, since they helped ensure this outcome.Meanwhile, politicians alternate between using the tools to their benefit or rushing to blame them, but without passing meaningful legislation.Back in 2008 and 2012, Facebook and big data were credited with helping Barack Obama win his presidential races. After his 2012 re-election, I wrote an article calling for regulations requiring transparency and understanding and worried whether “these new methods are more effective in manipulating people.” I concluded with “you should be worried even if your candidate is — for the moment — better at these methods.” The Democrats, though, weren’t having any of that, then. The data director of Obama for America responded that concerns such as mine were “a bunch of malarkey.” No substantive regulations were passed.The attitude changed after 2016, when it felt as if many people wanted to talk only about social media. But social media has never been some magic wand that operates in a vacuum; its power is amplified when it strikes a chord with people’s own experiences and existing ideologies. Donald Trump’s narrow victory may have been surprising, but it wasn’t solely because of social media hoodwinking people.There were many existing political dynamics that social media played on and sometimes manipulated and exacerbated, including about race and immigration (which were openly talked about) and some others that had generated much grass-roots discontent but were long met with bipartisan incuriosity from the establishment, such as the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, America’s role in the world (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and how international trade had reshaped the economy.As we head into the 2024 elections, in some ways, little seems to have changed since Obama’s victory in 2008 — the first election dubbed the “Facebook Election.” We’re still discussing viral misinformation, fake news, election meddling, but there’s still no meaningful legislation that responds to the challenges brought about by the internet and social media and that seeks to bring transparency, oversight or accountability. Just add realistic A.I.-generated content, a new development, and the rise of TikTok, we’re good to go for 2024 — if Trump wins the Republican nomination as seems likely, only one candidate’s name needs updating from 2016.Do we need proper oversight and regulation of social media? You bet. Do we need to find more effective ways of countering harmful lies and hate speech? Of course. But I can only conclude that despite the heated bipartisan rhetoric of blame, scapegoating social media is more convenient to politicians than turning their shared anger into sensible legislation.Worrying about the influence of social media isn’t a mere moral panic or “kids these days” tsk-tsking. But until politicians and institutions dig into the influence of social media and try to figure out ways to regulate it, and also try addressing broader sources of discontent, blaming TikTok amounts to just noise.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. 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      in Elections

      Michigan Republican Regrets Participation as Fake Trump Elector

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      The Trump supporter is the only one of the 16 fake Michigan electors who has agreed to cooperate with the authorities and had charges against him dropped.One of the Republicans in Michigan who acted as a fake elector for Donald J. Trump expressed deep regret about his participation, according to a recording of his interview with the state attorney general’s office that was obtained by The New York Times.The elector, James Renner, is thus far the only Trump elector who has reached an agreement with the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, which brought criminal charges in July against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors. In October, Ms. Nessel’s office dropped all charges against Mr. Renner after he agreed to cooperate.Mr. Renner, 77, was a late substitution to the roster of electors in December 2020 after two others dropped out. He told the attorney general’s office that he later realized, after reviewing testimony from the House investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that he and other electors had acted improperly.“I can’t overemphasize how once I read the information in the J6 transcripts how upset I was that the legitimate process had not been followed,” he said in the interview. “I felt that I had been walked into a situation that I shouldn’t have ever been involved in.”Mr. Renner’s lawyer, Matthew G. Borgula, had no comment.Charges have now been brought against fake electors in three states — Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — and investigations are underway in other states, including Arizona and New Mexico. In Georgia, prosecutors in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, have looked far beyond the electors themselves and charged Mr. Trump, the former president, and many of his key allies over their efforts to keep him in power despite his loss in 2020. Mr. Trump also faces charges over election interference from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland.In Michigan, Ms. Nessel, a Democrat, has only charged the electors, but has said her investigation is still open. During their interview of Mr. Renner, her investigators asked about a number of other people involved, including Shawn Flynn, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign on the ground in Michigan, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. (Mr. Giuliani is among those charged in Georgia; both he and Mr. Trump have pleaded not guilty.)It is not clear if they, or Mr. Trump himself, have legal exposure in Michigan. The Detroit News recently reported that Mr. Trump was taped in December 2020 pressuring two members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the election results, providing direct evidence of his role in trying to overturn the Michigan vote.Mr. Renner is a former state trooper and a retired businessman who volunteered as a local party activist in Clinton County, which is near Lansing, the state capital. He had never served as an elector before and typically supported Republican campaigns by passing out signs and distributing fliers. He said he was contacted by the head of the county Republican Party a day or so before the electors had planned to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, was asked to fill in for someone who was dropping out and agreed to do so.Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan brought criminal charges against all 16 of the state’s fake Trump electors in July.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesSince Michigan had already been certified for Joseph R. Biden, Jr., who won the state by more than 150,000 votes, the Trump electors were barred from convening in the Capitol building, which was largely closed at the time because of the pandemic. They ended up meeting in the basement of the state Republican headquarters.During a pretrial hearing earlier this month for several of the electors, Laura Cox, the former chairwoman of the state Republican Party, testified that she and other local party officials had drafted language for the electors to sign that made clear they were only acting on a contingency basis, in the event that the Trump campaign’s election litigation succeeded. But Ms. Cox was sidelined by Covid on the day of the meeting, and she said the Trump campaign went against her instructions by not including such language.At the same pretrial hearing, Terri Lynn Land, a former Michigan secretary of state who was originally designated as a 2020 Republican elector, said she declined to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, because Mr. Trump had not been certified by state officials. Tony Zammit, a former spokesman for the state party who attended part of the meeting, testified that in his view, the “vast majority” of the electors were not culpable but “going along with what the lawyers were telling them.”Mr. Renner said in his interview with investigators that when he showed up, “I knew nothing about the electoral process.” Three of the electors took the lead at the signing session, he said: Meshawn Maddock, a former co-chair of the state Republican Party; Kathleen Berden, a Republican national committeewoman; and Marya Rodriguez, the only lawyer among the electors. (They have all pleaded not guilty.)In the interview, Mr. Renner said that “I was accepting the individuals that were in authority” knew “what they were talking about.”But he said that he later began studying the House transcripts and official procedure for the electors after he and the other fake Trump electors were sued in civil court this January. And he was alarmed by what he found, he said.“It was only then that I realized that, hold it, there is an official state authorized process for this,” he said. Before that, he said, “I had never been an elector, I had never discussed it with anybody. I was used to a much more informal process at the county level. And so that’s when I became suspicious of what had gone on.”He said he later realized that “what happened was not legitimate.”In Georgia, more than half of the fake Trump electors agreed to cooperate with prosecutors before charges were brought in the case there. In Michigan, all eight charges against Mr. Renner, including forgery and conspiracy counts, were dropped as part of his agreement with Ms. Nessel’s office.Her ongoing investigation means that the legal aftermath of the last presidential election in Michigan will not be over before voting begins in the next one. Pretrial hearings in the electors case are scheduled to last into February; the state’s presidential primary takes place on Feb. 27.“I am very upset, I don’t show it, but I am,” Mr. Renner told investigators, adding that to say he felt “betrayed is an understatement. That’s all I can say.” More