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      The Supreme Court’s Big Trump Test Is Here

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      A generation after the Supreme Court stepped into a disputed presidential election, America is experiencing a creeping sense of déjà vu. Twenty-three years ago, a bare majority of the justices halted a recount in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush.The specter of Bush v. Gore, the case that stands as a marker of how not to resolve searing political disputes, looms large as the Supreme Court is being called upon to address controversies with profound implications for the fortunes of the Republican front-runner in 2024.The justices are feeling the heat nearly a year in advance of an election rather than in the fraught weeks following the vote. The questions today are more complex — there are at least three separate matters, not one — and all revolve around the Capitol insurrection that transpired across the street from the Supreme Court Building in 2021.On Friday, the court turned down Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for fast-track review of Donald Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for their conduct while in office. But that critical question will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court soon: The D.C. federal appeals court is hearing the case on Jan. 9 and will probably rule shortly thereafter.The court has agreed to hear a case asking whether Jan. 6 rioters can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, another key part of Mr. Smith’s Jan. 6 case against Mr. Trump. And most dramatically, the former president will surely ask the justices to reverse a ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court that, if affirmed, could pave the way for an untold number of states to erase his name from the ballot.For a tribunal that is supposed to sit far away from, not astride, politics, that’s a lot for the Supreme Court to handle. And this is happening at a rough moment for the court. In August 2000, on the eve of Bush v. Gore, 62 percent of Americans approved of how the Supreme Court was conducting itself. Now, recent polling shows that nearly that portion (58 percent) disapproves of the institution, a figure that scrapes historic lows for the court.Yet the multiplicity of cases affords the justices an opportunity to avoid pinning themselves in still further if they keep an eye on how potential decisions will — collectively — shape the political landscape. The point is not that getting the underlying legal questions “right” is irrelevant. But when the stakes are this high and the legal questions are novel, the justices have a duty to hand down decisions that resonate across the political spectrum — or at least that avoid inciting violence in the streets. That’s not subverting the rule of law; it’s preserving it.Extraordinary times call for a court that embraces the art of judicial statecraft.The trap the court finds itself in is largely a function of its own behavior, both on and off the bench. The 6-to-3 conservative supermajority has radically expanded gun rights, circumscribed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the environment, all but eviscerated race-based affirmative action, punched holes through the wall separating church from state and — most notoriously — eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. The past year has also seen increasing public scrutiny of the justices’ apparent ethical lapses, sunlight that pushed the justices to adopt their first code of ethics.A universe in which the court somehow splits the difference — for example, keeping Mr. Trump on the ballot while refusing to endorse (if not affirmatively repudiating) his conduct and spurning his kinglike claim to total immunity — could go a long way toward reducing the temperature of the coming election cycle. Such an outcome could also help restore at least some of the court’s credibility.We understand that trying too hard to project an image of nonpartisanship carries risks. Recent reporting on the twists and turns of how the conservative majority engineered the end of Roe v. Wade shows how curating rulings can make justices look too clever by half — if not outright deceptive. Delaying the grant of review in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, in which some of the conservative justices apparently knew they had the votes to overrule Roe, created a false impression that the court was struggling over the matter — when the reality was anything but. Indeed, the Dobbs experience and its aftermath might have led some justices to sour on the idea of judicial statecraft — especially if their internal deliberations end up getting leaked to the press. No jurist wants to be seen as a cunning manipulator of public opinion.And yet, some of the court’s most important rulings across its history have represented just the kind of high constitutional politics that we believe are called for now. The court’s recognition of its power to strike down acts of Congress in Marbury v. Madison came in a context in which the direct effect of the ruling was to restrain the court while slapping the Jefferson administration on the wrist.Its concerted effort to produce unanimous opinions in some of the landmark civil rights cases of the 1950s and 1960s reflected a view that speaking in one voice was more important than the legal nuances of what was said. (This, perhaps, is why no justice publicly dissented from Friday’s decision not to fast-track the immunity question.)The court’s landmark rejection of President Richard Nixon’s executive privilege claim in the Watergate tapes case, which helped to directly precipitate Nixon’s resignation, came in a unanimous opinion written by Nixon’s handpicked chief justice.This is also the best way to understand Chief Justice John Roberts’s much-maligned 2012 vote in the first serious challenge to the Affordable Care Act — upholding the individual mandate as a tax while rejecting it as a valid regulation of interstate commerce.What those (and other) rulings have in common was the sense, across the Supreme Court, that the country would be better off with a court that took appropriate measure of how its rulings would be received beyond the details of the legal analysis the justices provided.The court failed that test in Bush v. Gore — handing down a ruling widely perceived as Republican-appointed justices installing a Republican president via a strained (and oddly cabined) reading of the Equal Protection Clause and helping to precipitate the downturn in public opinion that figures so prominently in these cases.As the Jan. 6 cases put the justices right in the middle of the 2024 election, the question is whether they’ll understand the imperative of not letting history repeat.Ultimately, these contemporary disputes may not provide a perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to right that wrong. But if one thing’s for certain, it’s that neither the court nor the country can afford another election-altering ruling that takes such obvious partisan sides.Steven V. Mazie (@stevenmazie) is the author of “American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court” and is the Supreme Court correspondent for The Economist. Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck), a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, writes the One First weekly Supreme Court newsletter and is the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      The Unsettling Truth at the Heart of the Giuliani Case

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      No sooner did a jury deliver a nearly $150 million defamation judgment against the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani than he went out and again started smearing the two Georgia election workers at the center of the case. Within days, he filed for bankruptcy, shielding himself in the near term from having to surrender whatever assets he has to his creditors.His brazen thumbing of his nose at the jury and the legal system laid bare some unsettling truths about justice. Defamation law is one of the few tools that lawyers have to hold people accountable for using lies to destroy reputations and to deter wrongdoing. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, county clerks, election officials and other public servants targeted by politically motivated conspiracy theories like the Big Lie have used defamation lawsuits to try to clear their names and correct the public record.But in a hyperpartisan era when the incentives to tell lies about your political opponents can seemingly outweigh the risks, is defamation law still up to the task? And if admitted liars like Mr. Giuliani can avoid having to pay up, what does accountability even look like now?Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers who sued Mr. Giuliani for falsely claiming that they stole the 2020 election in Georgia for Joe Biden, will probably only ever see pennies on the dollar of the full amount that a Washington, D.C., jury awarded them.There are a few procedural hurdles to clear: The bankruptcy proceedings will hinge on whether a judge decides that Mr. Giuliani’s actions were “willful and malicious.” (If they were, he’ll still have to pay, even in bankruptcy.) Then there’s the question of whether he has the money to pay his debts. According to his bankruptcy petition, he has $1 million to $10 million in assets — nowhere close to what he’d need to clear the roughly $153 million he says he owes in total. (That number doesn’t include ongoing lawsuits against him that could also lead to financial settlements.) Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss could negotiate a settlement with him or choose to pursue a percentage of his assets and earnings for the rest of his working life.Recouping any money in a defamation judgment can take time. After juries in Connecticut and Texas found Infowars founder Alex Jones liable for more than $1.4 billion for spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school shooting, the families of victims who sued him and his businesses have spent the past year fighting him in bankruptcy. Only after a judge ruled that Mr. Jones’s conduct had met the “willful and malicious” standard did he finally propose a greatly reduced settlement of $5.5 million per year for five years and then a percentage of his business income for the next five. (The Sandy Hook families, who filed their suits nearly six years ago, have offered their own plan to liquidate all of Mr. Jones’s existing assets and to pursue his future earnings to collect on their jury verdict.)But victory for plaintiffs in cases like these is not limited to money. A trial gives victims of viral disinformation a chance to confront their tormentor in a court of law, where facts and procedures still matter, offering them a real sense of catharsis and vindication. Especially in cases that involve major news events, defamation suits can also help correct the public record. The trial in Freeman v. Giuliani not only proved that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had not done any of the criminal acts Mr. Giuliani alleged; it exhaustively debunked one of the biggest conspiracy theories to emerge from the 2020 presidential election.Tens of thousands of articles and TV segments amplified the trial’s findings to a massive audience. “This case was never about making Ruby and Shaye rich,” said Michael J. Gottlieb, the lead lawyer for the two women. “Of course, we wanted them to be compensated. But it was about accountability and establishing a public record of the truth about what happened at State Farm Arena in November 2020.”On a societal level, the real hope for these defamation cases is that over time, as more liars are brought low by their actions and held accountable in court, politicians and political operatives will pause before spreading disinformation and, slowly, this country will move toward a better, safer political discourse. For now, that seems overly optimistic. The twisted incentives created by extreme polarization and a fragmented media landscape might lead a young up-and-comer in conservative (or liberal, for that matter) politics to traffic in disinformation and conspiracy theories if that is the quickest way to fame, fortune and influence — consequences be damned.Our society counts on defamation judgments to draw a line between truth and falsity, and “we don’t imagine that there will routinely be recalcitrant defendants who will feel the incentive to lie to audiences that are eager to accept those lies is greater than the incentive to abide by the rule of law,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor and media expert. “Our libel system doesn’t really envision those dynamics.” Libel law itself may be outdated — too slow or too weak to reckon with the realities of modern politics.But there is reason to hope. As the Giuliani case shows, deterrence can take many forms. When Mr. Giuliani uttered more lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss shortly after the verdict, they filed a new lawsuit in the same court, seeking an injunction to prevent him from continuing to defame them. If successful, that case could be the strongest protection they have from getting drawn into the spotlight once more.Even without an injunction, now that a court has ruled that Mr. Giuliani defamed the two women with actual malice — meaning he knowingly or recklessly made the false statements in question — media outlets large and small may be hesitant to give him a platform. Even if the judgment doesn’t chasten Mr. Giuliani, it will almost surely make networks like Fox News and One America News think twice before they put him on the air.More than updating defamation law or passing new legislation, the way to send a signal to future Rudy Giulianis and Alex Joneses is by defending victims of widespread lies — and the larger truth — at scale. One of the legal organizations that represented Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, Protect Democracy, is attempting to do just that. The group is also representing them in a separate lawsuit against the right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit and is representing a Pennsylvania postal worker smeared by Project Veritas, a county recorder in Arizona attacked by the Republican candidate Kari Lake and a voter in Georgia accused of being a “ballot mule” by Dinesh D’Souza.These cases will test whether our legal system can evolve to meet the challenges posed by our viral era. But at the least, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have shown that you don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve justice.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      The Anti-Democratic Quest to Save Democracy from Trump

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      Let’s consider a counterfactual. In the autumn of 2016, with American liberalism reeling from the election of Donald Trump, a shattered Hillary Clinton embraces the effort to pin all the blame on Vladimir Putin.She barnstorms the country arguing that the election was fundamentally illegitimate because of foreign interference. She endorses every attempt to prove that Russian disinformation warped the result. She touts conspiracy theories that supposedly prove that voting machines in Wisconsin were successfully hacked. She argues that her opponent should not be allowed to take office, that he’s a possible Manchurian candidate, a Russian cat’s paw. And she urges Democrats in Congress and Vice President Joe Biden to refuse to certify the election — suggesting that it could somehow be rerun or even that patriotic legislators could use their constitutional authority to make her, the popular-vote winner, president instead.Her crusade summons up a mass movement — youthful, multiracial and left wing. On Jan. 6, 2017, a crowd descends on the National Mall to demand that “Trump the traitor” be denied the White House. Clinton stirs them up with an angry speech, and protesters attack and overwhelm the Capitol Police and surge into the Capitol, where one is shot by a police officer and the rest mill around for a while and finally disperse.The election is still certified, and Trump becomes president two weeks later. But he is ineffective and unpopular, and it looks as though Clinton, who is still denying his legitimacy, will be the Democratic nominee again. At which point right-wing legal advocacy groups announce an effort to have her removed from primary ballots, following the guidance of originalist scholars who argue that under the 14th Amendment, she has betrayed her senatorial oath by fomenting insurrection and is ineligible to hold political office.Is she?No doubt some readers, firm in the consistency required by the current effort to remove Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot, will bite the bullet and say that in this hypothetical scenario, yes, she is. Others will pick apart my attempted parallel — insisting, say, that it makes all the difference that Russia’s interference efforts were real, whereas the voter fraud claimed by Trump was not, or arguing that Trump’s conspiracy was more comprehensive than what I’ve just described.My view is that you can construct the analogy any way you like: Had Clinton explicitly tried to induce Congress to overturn the result of the 2016 race and had a left-wing protest on her behalf turned into a certification-disrupting riot, almost none of the people currently insisting that we need to take the challenge to Trump’s ballot access very seriously would be saying the same about a challenge to her eligibility. Instead, they would be accusing that challenge of being incipiently authoritarian, a right-wing attack on our sacred democracy.And they would have a point. Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot, indeed, a candidate currently leading in some polling averages (pending the economic boom of 2024 that we can all hope is coming), through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act. It is more antidemocratic than impeachment, because the impeachers and convicters, representatives and senators, are themselves democratically elected and subject to swift democratic punishment. It is more antidemocratic than putting an opposition politician on trial, because the voters who regard that trial as illegitimate are still allowed to vote for an indicted or convicted politician, as almost a million Americans did for Eugene V. Debs while he languished in prison in 1920.Sometimes the rules of a republic require doing antidemocratic things. But if the rule you claim to be invoking treats Jan. 6 as the same kind of event as the secession of the Confederacy, consider the possibility that you have taken the tropes of anti-Trump punditry too literally.The term “insurrection,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote on Wednesday, is “a defensible shorthand for Jan. 6.” But it’s not “the most precise” term, because while “Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office,” he “was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”This concession prompted howls of online derision from his left-wing critics, but Chait is obviously, crashingly correct. There are arguments about precedent and implementation that tell against the case for Trump’s ineligibility and prudential arguments about the wisdom of suppressing populist fervor by judicial fiat. But the most important point is that there are many things a politician can do to subvert a democratic outcome, all of them impeachable and some of them potentially illegal, that are simply not equivalent to military rebellion, even if a bunch of protesters and rioters get involved.To insist otherwise, in the supposed service of the Constitution, is to demonstrate yet again that too many would-be saviors of our Republic would cut a great road through reason and good sense if they could only be assured of finally getting rid of Donald Trump.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Trump Pushes Forward in 2024 Run Amid Indictments and Colorado Ruling

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      This week’s debate over his very eligibility for office served as a stark reminder that anyone else facing such a wide array of legal problems would have left the political stage long ago.In another era, a politician would have walked away.For decades, American elected officials facing criminal charges or grave violations of the public trust would yield their positions of power, if only reluctantly, citing a duty to save the country from embarrassment and ease the strain on its institutions.Then came Donald J. Trump. The former president isn’t just forging ahead despite four indictments and 91 felony charges, but actively orchestrating a head-on collision between the nation’s political and legal systems.The ramifications continued to accrue this week, when the fundamental question of the former president’s eligibility for office was all but forced upon a Supreme Court already mired in unprecedented questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.But the heated legal debate over whether Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection obscured the extraordinary reality that he is running for president at all — returning with fresh vengeance and a familiar playbook built around the notions that he can never lose, will never be convicted and will never really go away.That blueprint remains intact largely because his approach continues to yield political returns.Far from agonizing over the collateral damage from his never-surrender ethos, Mr. Trump seems incentivized by strife, tightly braiding his legal defense with his presidential campaign. He has tried to run out the clock on his criminal trials, a strategy that earned a new victory on Friday when the Supreme Court declined to decide a key point of contention in his federal 2020 election case immediately.While this year began with most Republicans telling pollsters that they preferred a different presidential nominee, the calendar will flip to 2024 with roughly two-thirds of the party aligned behind Mr. Trump. His legal problems, which in decades past would have bolstered rivals for a major party’s presidential nomination, have only caused Republican voters to unify around him more.“This has been the mystery of the Trump era — every time we think this is the final straw, it turns into a steel beam that merely solidifies his political infrastructure,” said Eliot Spitzer, a former Democratic governor of New York. Mr. Spitzer resigned as governor in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal, saying at the time that he owed as much to his family and the public.Lately, Mr. Trump has faced increased criticism that he is adopting fascist language and authoritarian tactics. Defending himself, he insisted repeatedly this week that he had never read “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto.Of course, if there were a guidebook on how to run traditional American political campaigns, he would not have read that, either.At the start of his 2016 bid, he disparaged decorated military veterans, and voters looked past it. When a hot-mic recording surfaced of Mr. Trump casually claiming that celebrity status made it easier to sexually assault women, he resisted calls from fellow Republicans to step aside, dismissed the remarks as “locker room talk” and, 32 days later, won the presidency.The cycle repeated itself for years, leading to a kind of truism inside Trump world that the swirl of chaos and coup de théâtre surrounding the former president was almost always surprising, but hardly ever shocking.The absurdity of it all, in other words, always seemed to make perfect sense.Mr. Trump and his allies have sought to turn his impeachments into a political strength. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesEven the riot by Mr. Trump’s supporters at the Capitol nearly three years ago adhered to that adage. Whether the attack was the ultimate coda to his presidency or the beginning of a darker phase in U.S. politics, the violence, in hindsight, was as horrifying as it was foreseeable.Mr. Trump, after all, had spent four years wielding the powerful White House bully pulpit to insist that any critical news coverage was a lie, that no elected official he opposed should be believed and that the courts could not be trusted.The story in Washington again unfolded in ways that were surprising — but hardly shocking. Days after Mr. Trump left office, polls showed that he maintained high levels of support inside his party. House Republicans who had voted to impeach him found themselves the targets of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders visited him at Mar-a-Lago — a steady stream of supplicants bowing before their exiled king.It soon became clear that the Republican Party’s best opportunity to cast Mr. Trump aside had passed when 43 of its senators voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial after the Capitol riot.In an interview last month, Mr. Trump all but bragged about continuing his latest presidential campaign despite his criminal charges.“Other people, if they ever got indicted, they’re out of politics,” he told Univision. “They go to the microphone. They say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life, you know, clearing my name. I’m going to spend the rest of my life with my family.’”“I’ve seen it hundreds of times,” Mr. Trump said, concluding that such decisions were always mistakes. “I can tell, you know, it’s backfired on them.”Mr. Trump’s legal problems, which in decades past would have bolstered rivals for a major party’s presidential nomination, have only caused Republican voters to unify around him more.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s commitment to the fight is rooted in a “preoccupation with not being seen as a loser,” said Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, who considered stepping down as governor in 2009 when an extramarital affair erupted in scandalous national headlines.He ultimately remained in office, recalling in an interview this week that he had wanted to take responsibility for his actions and had hoped his regret and humility would serve as an example to his four sons and lead to a reconciliation with his constituents.Mr. Sanford said he doubted Mr. Trump had ever considered not running again.“For him to think about what’s best for the republic would mean having a frontal lobotomy,” Mr. Sanford said. “From the number of people he’s sued over the years to the number of subcontractors he’s ripped off to all of his bankruptcies, he has just bullied his way through life. He plays to an audience of one, and it’s not God — it’s Donald Trump.”Former Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, said he would advise Mr. Trump to end his presidential campaign if one of the former president’s federal cases resulted in a felony conviction.Mr. Lott, a former Senate majority leader, was forced out of his leadership position in 2002 after praising Strom Thurmond, a longtime senator and ardent segregationist who died the next year.“At some point, someone has to say to him that he has to do what’s in the best interest of the country and shut down his campaign,” Mr. Lott said of Mr. Trump. “But I don’t see any indication so far that he plans on going anywhere but back to the White House.” More

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      Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny

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      The former president’s remark about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country is one of several comments he’s made over the years regarding “good genes.”In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice. Toward the end, he wrapped up with standard lines from his stump speech and praise for the state’s pioneer lineage.Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” Mr. Trump told the audience. “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”Mr. Trump’s mention of the racehorse theory — the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring — reflected a focus on bloodlines and genetics that Mr. Trump has had for decades, and one that has received renewed attention and scrutiny in his third bid for president.In recent months, Mr. Trump has drawn widespread criticism for asserting that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that he said first in a right-wing media interview and has in the last week repeated on the campaign trail.As with the speech in 2020, Mr. Trump’s remarks have been criticized by historians, Jewish groups and liberals, who said his language recalled the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in America.In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Trump again defended his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood.” He dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not a student of Hitler” and that his statement used “blood” in crucially different ways, though he did not elaborate.But much as news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented Mr. Trump’s long interest in Adolf Hitler, they have also shown that Mr. Trump has frequently turned to the language of genetics as he discusses the superiority of himself and others.Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.He would connect those views to the racehorse theory in a CNN interview with Larry King in 2007.“You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better,” Mr. Trump told Mr. King. “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”Three years later, he would tell CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse” and likening his “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s “Frontline” in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that “there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.The former president has not just promoted his own “good genes,” but has repeatedly lauded those of British business leaders, Christian evangelical leaders, a top campaign adviser and the American industrialist Henry Ford.A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in a statement that Mr. Trump in his radio interview had “reiterated he is talking about criminals and terrorists who cross the border illegally.” Mr. Cheung added, “Only the media is obsessed with racial genetics and bloodlines, and given safe haven for disgusting and vile anti-Semitic rhetoric to be spewed through their outlets.”Mr. Trump’s political career and rise to the presidency are inextricably linked to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his tone has only grown more severe in his third run for office.In Friday’s radio interview, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to explain his use of the phrase, pressing him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”The former president said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.”Mr. Trump has long had a documented interest in Hitler. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.He once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “totally loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser.On another occasion, he told the same aide that “well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.The former president has denied making both comments. On Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase — “poisoning the blood” — differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.“They say that he said something about blood,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.” He did not explain the distinction.In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote that great civilizations declined “because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.” At one point, Hitler links “the poison which has invaded the national body” to an “influx of foreign blood.”Mr. Trump told Mr. Hewitt that he used “poisoning the blood” to refer to the immigrants coming from Asia, Africa and South America — though he did not mention Europeans — who he broadly claimed were coming from prisons and mental institutions. He added that he was “not talking about a specific group,” but rather immigrants from “all over the world” who “don’t speak our language.”Mr. Trump first directly addressed the comparisons between his remark and Hitler’s comments on Tuesday at a campaign event in Iowa, where he told hundreds of supporters that he had “never read ‘Mein Kampf.’”The next day, the Biden campaign posted a graphic to social media that directly compared Mr. Trump to Hitler, using images of them both and listing three quotes from each of them.Mr. Trump has also been accused by historians of echoing the language of fascist dictators, including Hitler. Last month, he described his political opponents as “vermin” that needed to be rooted out.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      ‘Donald Trump Is No Moderate’

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      More from our inbox:Poll on Biden’s Handling of the War in GazaWealthy Donors Seeking InfluenceHelping Lower-Income People Pay BillsMatt ChaseTo the Editor:Re “The Secret of Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism,” by Matthew Schmitz (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 18):According to Mr. Schmitz, the key to understanding Donald Trump’s electoral appeal is not his authoritarianism but his moderation. There may have been some truth to this eight years ago, when Mr. Trump’s policy views were often poorly defined. However, it is clearly no longer true in 2023.On a wide range of issues, including immigration, climate change, health care and gun control, Mr. Trump has endorsed policies supported by the right wing of the Republican Party. And when it comes to abortion, whatever his recent public statements, while he was in office, he consistently appointed anti-abortion judges committed to overturning Roe v. Wade.As a result, Mr. Trump now appeals most strongly to the far right wing of the Republican Party. Donald Trump is no moderate.Alan AbramowitzAtlantaThe writer is professor emeritus of political science at Emory University.To the Editor:Matthew Schmitz’s longwinded guest essay still misses the point: The bottom line of Donald Trump’s appeal to his supporters is the permission to indulge their darkest impulses and harshest judgments of “the other” — everyone in the world outside of MAGA Nation.Rich LaytonPortland, Ore.To the Editor:Matthew Schmitz could not be more wrong. There is no universe in which Donald Trump is a moderate. Moderates do not gut the system that they have sworn to uphold. Moderates do not consider calling in the military against American citizens, as Mr. Trump did during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Moderates do not start riots when they lose elections.Trump voters are either fellow grifters or people who do not understand how government works and are taken in by his shtick: the incurious and the easily fooled. It’s as simple — and as dangerous — as that. We have work to do to make sure he will not regain office.Christine PotterValley Cottage, N.Y.To the Editor:I was shocked to read a piece that wasn’t the usual drone of let’s count all the ways that Donald Trump is a disaster for the country. I’m so grateful that you are actually inviting a broader variety of opinions. It is just as valuable to understand why Mr. Trump is loved as why he is hated.I read the article twice, and it was compelling at times. I’m still not a fan of Mr. Trump, but am grateful that finally your paper is respecting its readership to handle different perspectives.T. PalserCalgary, AlbertaTo the Editor:Matthew Schmitz seems to think that he needs to explain to us that people are willing to overlook the clearly authoritarian tendencies of a candidate if they like some of his policies. Thanks, Mr. Schmitz, but we’re already well aware of this. Italians liked Mussolini because he “made the trains run on time.”This is exactly our point. This is how dictatorships happen.Robert Stillman CohenNew YorkTo the Editor:When you have to argue that the secret to someone’s appeal isn’t authoritarianism, the secret to their appeal is authoritarianism.David D. TurnerClifton, N.J.Poll on Biden’s Handling of the War in GazaPresident Biden addressing the nation from the Oval Office after visiting Israel in October, following the breakout of its war against Hamas.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Most Disapprove of Biden on Gaza, Survey Indicates” (front page, Dec. 19):You report that the people surveyed trusted Donald Trump to manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over President Biden by a margin of 46 percent to 38 percent. This is puzzling, since during his tenure as president, Mr. Trump was an extreme Israeli partisan. Indeed, everything he did with reference to the Middle East heavily favored Israel to the detriment of the Palestinians.Some of the actions that he undertook that were adverse to the Palestinians included: the appointment of an extreme Orthodox Jewish bankruptcy lawyer, who was an Israeli partisan, as ambassador to Israel; moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, contrary to both decades of American policy and Palestinian opposition; terminating American contributions to the U.N. fund for Palestinians; supporting the Israeli settler movement; and negotiating the Abraham Accords without any consideration of Palestinian interests.Mr. Trump is one of the people least likely to fairly manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Richard J. WeisbergNorwalk, Conn.To the Editor:The Biden administration is beginning to understand that while most Jewish Americans believe in Israel’s right to exist, this does not mean that American Jews overwhelmingly support the Israeli government’s relentless killing of innocent Palestinian civilians — at this point, more than 10,000 of them children.Increasingly, as the traumatized Israeli pursuit of Hamas costs more death and destruction, cracks are appearing in Jewish community support for the Biden administration’s military and political backing of the current Israeli government. President Biden is well advised to pay close attention to these cracks.As the article points out, nearly three-quarters of Jews historically vote Democratic. Unless Mr. Biden takes a harder line against the continued killings and steps up more boldly for a cease-fire, Democrats could lose Jewish votes.John CregerBerkeley, Calif.Wealthy Donors Seeking InfluenceHarvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on Tuesday.Adam Glanzman for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “College Turmoil Reveals a New Politics of Power” (news article, Dec. 15):Having spent a lifetime working for and with nonprofits, I am disgusted by wealthy donors who expect money to buy a voice in university affairs. Donations are gifts, not transactions, and I have always objected to 1) listing names of donors, whether on buildings or in concert programs, and 2) tax deductions for charitable donations.Yes, we will lose some ego-driven donors along the way, but we will eventually prevail by keeping it clean.Michael Rooke-LeySan FranciscoThe writer is a former law professor.Helping Lower-Income People Pay BillsJessica Jones and her three daughters moved in with Ms. Jones’s mother two years ago after her landlord did not renew the lease on a subsidized apartment. She said the displacement has wreaked family havoc.Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Soaring Rents Are Burdening Lower Incomes” (front page, Dec. 12):Congress should exempt the first $40,000 of income from the Social Security tax, which would immediately give lower-income families some relief.The lost income to the government should not be seen as lost but as support to allow people to stay in their existing apartments.This would also be the time to apply the Social Security tax to higher incomes that are currently exempt above $160,200. And to cap or reduce the excessive interest rate — which currently averages 24 percent — that many people pay on their credit card bills.Studies show that lower-income households use credit cards to buy necessities like food and to pay utility bills. Those interest rates often translate into money that ultimately ends up in the pockets of high-income people who are invested in the market.Let’s all give a little, so people can live with dignity.Ann L. SullivanPortsmouth, R.I. More

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      Principles at Stake in Push to Disqualify Trump: Will of Voters and Rule of Law

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      If the Colorado Supreme Court is right that the former president is constitutionally ineligible to run for president, fundamental values are in severe tension.The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald J. Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again pits one fundamental value against another: giving voters in a democracy the right to pick their leaders versus ensuring that no one is above the law.Mr. Trump’s status as the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, despite his role in the events that culminated in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has created severe tensions between those two principles. If the court’s legal reasoning is correct, obeying the rule of law produces an antidemocratic result.That constitutional and political dilemma is likely to land before the U.S. Supreme Court. And while Mr. Trump’s name would stay on the primary ballot as the justices weighed the matter, their decision would have consequences far beyond his opportunity to win Colorado’s 10 Electoral College votes.For one, similar legal challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility are pending in at least 16 additional states. Moreover, the precedent the case will set could open or shut the door to the risk that partisans will routinely turn to state courts to try to keep major federal candidates off the ballot.Supreme Court justices have life tenure in the hope that their work will be independent of political influence, and, under the principle of the rule of law, it would be illegitimate for them to torque their interpretation of the Constitution with an eye toward political consequences. Under the rule of law, the Constitution and federal statutes apply equally to everybody, and no one’s power, wealth, political influence or other special status puts him or her above the law.But under the principle of democracy, the government’s legitimacy stems from the fact that voters decided whom to put in charge. The prospect of unelected judges denying voters the opportunity to make their own decision about Mr. Trump’s political future has given pause even to some of his critics who fervently hope Americans will reject him at the ballot box.Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that even if one thinks that Mr. Trump’s actions rendered him unfit for office in line with the 14th Amendment, there are other — and less alarmingly novel — systems that could have addressed that problem before it reached the courts. These would have freed the Republican Party to have a starkly different primary contest, he said.“The problem is that we’re just not set up for this — we’ve run through the safety nets,” Mr. Vladeck said. “We’ve been spared from this problem in the few prior episodes where it could have arisen by different sets of constraints. And so now we’re in this position because those backstops have failed.”Had nine more Republican senators voted to convict Mr. Trump at his Jan. 6 impeachment trial, he would be ineligible to hold future office anyway, said Mr. Vladeck, who wrote a column about the complications of the Colorado court’s ruling titled “The Law and High Politics of Disqualifying President Trump.” And if more Republican voters were repelled by Mr. Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term, his political career would be over as a practical matter.The legal dispute turns on a clause of the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution after the Civil War. Its third section says that people who betrayed their government oaths by engaging in an insurrection are ineligible to hold office. Citing Mr. Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6. riot, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that he was an oath-breaking insurrectionist whose name could not lawfully appear on the ballot.Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the former president was disqualified from holding office again.Stephen Speranza for The New York Times“If the language is clear and unambiguous, then we enforce it as written,” a four-justice majority wrote.But even if a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court privately agree that the disqualification clause, by its plain text, seems clearly to bar Mr. Trump from returning to government power, it will not be surprising if they hesitate at the prospect of issuing a ruling affirming the Colorado court’s decision.If the justices want to overturn the Colorado ruling, they will have numerous potential offramps. Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have technical arguments, like whether the clause in question has legal force by itself or whether Congress would first need to enact a statute for it take effect. His lawyers will also have substantive arguments, like denying that the mob violence of Jan. 6 rose to the level of an “insurrection” in the constitutional sense.The dilemma invites comparisons to the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election, which overruled Florida’s Supreme Court and ensured that George W. Bush would maintain his narrow lead over Al Gore in that state to win its Electoral College votes and become the next president.A similarity is the risk of the appearance of partisanship. In the Bush v. Gore case, the five most conservative justices ensured that the Republican candidate would prevail. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is controlled by a supermajority of six Republican appointees, so a decision to overturn the Colorado ruling and help Mr. Trump could also carry partisan overtones.A difference is the implications for democracy. The Florida Supreme Court in 2000 was not itself deciding the fate of the candidates but trying to allow the completion of a recount that would have clarified the will of voters. If the Supreme Court now overturns the Colorado ruling, it will be leaning in the direction of letting voters decide about Mr. Trump; upholding the state court’s ruling would be the opposite.There has always been inherent tension in the American governing system because the Constitution sets certain limits on democracy. For one, most decisions are made by elected representatives, not directly by plebiscites and referendums.The current dilemma invites comparisons to the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 election.Mark Wilson/Newsmakers, via Getty ImagesThe structures of the Senate and the Electoral College system undercut the democratic principle that everyone has an equal say by giving disproportionate power to voters in sparsely populated states — including sometimes enabling the loser of the national popular vote, like Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016, to nevertheless become president.Not everyone who lives in the United States is allowed to vote for government leaders. Noncitizen permanent residents, people under 18 and convicted felons in some states may not participate in elections — all of which conflicts with the principle that the legitimacy of the government stems from the consent of the governed about who will be in charge.Other requirements restrict who is eligible to hold office. The 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being elected president a third time, even if voters want to keep that person in place. It was added after President Franklin D. Roosevelt violated the constitutional norm of retiring after two terms, which President George Washington had established.The Constitution sets age limits: One must be at least 25 years old to be a member of the House, 30 to be a senator and 35 to be president, even if voters would prefer someone who happens to be younger. And the Constitution dictates that to be eligible to be president, a person must be a natural-born citizen. The antidemocratic nature of that rule drew some attention when the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a naturalized citizen who was born in Austria, was elected governor of California. He could never run for president, no matter how popular he was with voters.The issue of citizenship at birth has also been the subject of political attention. When Senator John McCain ran as the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, there were questions at the fringes about whether he was eligible because he had been born in the Panama Canal Zone, although to American parents.Mr. Trump’s rise to national political prominence was fueled by his lie that President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, might have been born in Kenya. And in the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Trump attacked a rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, over his birth in Canada, similarly seeking to raise doubts about his eligibility for the presidency.But, despite Mr. Trump’s own history of questioning the eligibility of his political adversaries for president, his legal disqualification would risk undermining democratic legitimacy in a society where extreme polarization and partisanship are already raw.The moment calls to mind an ambiguous legal phrase that is often invoked as a rallying cry for courageously following the law but, as Mr. Vladeck pointed out, also carries a grim warning: “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” More

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      Maine’s Secretary of State to Decide Whether Trump Can Stay on Ballot

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      Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, has said she would decide next week whether Maine will join Colorado in disqualifying former President Donald J. Trump from its primary ballot. Maine’s secretary of state is poised to issue a decision next week that could bolster a citizen-led movement to keep former President Donald J. Trump off primary ballots around the country — or contradict a landmark court decision in Colorado this week. In a hearing last week at Maine’s State House in Augusta, Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state, weighed three separate complaints challenging Mr. Trump’s eligibility to appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot. Two are based on the same section of the Constitution that the Colorado Supreme Court cited in its 4-to-3 decision on Tuesday that found Mr. Trump cannot hold office again because his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol amounted to engaging in an insurrection.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. Most are unfolding in the courts, but in Maine — because of a quirk in its Constitution — the secretary of state weighs in first, with voters filing petitions, not lawsuits. Her decision can then be appealed to the state’s Superior Court.The Colorado ruling was the first in history to disqualify a presidential candidate from a ballot under the 14th Amendment, which was drafted after the Civil War. One section of the amendment bars those who have taken an oath “to support” the Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same,” or had “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Mr. Trump’s campaign has said it will appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court; should the high court take the case, the other challenges around the country are likely to be put on hold. After the Colorado ruling, Ms. Bellows, an elected Democrat, invited lawyers on both sides in Maine to file supplemental briefs and said that her decision was likely to come next week.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