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      Barring Trump From the Ballot Would Be a Mistake

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      When Donald Trump appeals the Colorado decision disqualifying him from the ballot in that state’s Republican primary, the Supreme Court should overturn the ruling unanimously.Like many of my fellow liberals, I would love to live in a country where Americans had never elected Mr. Trump — let alone sided with him by the millions in his claims that he won an election he lost, and that he did nothing wrong afterward. But nobody lives in that America. For all the power the institution has arrogated, the Supreme Court cannot bring that fantasy into being. To bar Mr. Trump from the ballot now would be the wrong way to show him to the exits of the political system, after all these years of strife.Some aspects of American election law are perfectly clear — like the rule that prohibits candidates from becoming president before they turn 35 — but many others are invitations to judges to resolve uncertainty as they see fit, based in part on their own politics. Take Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which blocks insurrectionists from running for office, a provision originally aimed at former Confederates in the wake of the Civil War. There may well be some instances in which the very survival of a democratic regime is at stake if noxious candidates or parties are not banned, as in West Germany after World War II. But in this case, what Section 3 requires is far from straightforward. Keeping Mr. Trump off the ballot could put democracy at more risk rather than less.Part of the danger lies in the fact that what actually happened on Jan. 6 — and especially Mr. Trump’s exact role beyond months of election denial and entreaties to government officials to side with him — is still too broadly contested. The Colorado court deferred to a lower court on the facts, but it was a bench trial, meaning that no jury ever assessed what happened, and that many Americans still believe Mr. Trump did nothing wrong. A Supreme Court that affirms the Colorado ruling would have to succeed in constructing a consensual narrative where others — including armies of journalists, the Jan. 6 commission and recent indictments — have failed.The Supreme Court has been asked to weigh in on the fate of presidencies before, and its finer moments in this regard have been when it was a force for stability and reflected the will and interests of voters. Almost 50 years ago, the court faced a choice to end a presidency as it deliberated on Richard Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors. But by the time the Supreme Court acted in 1974, a special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, had already won indictments of Nixon’s henchmen and named the president himself before a grand jury as an unindicted co-conspirator. Public opinion was with Jaworski; the American people agreed that the tapes Nixon was trying to shield from prosecutors were material evidence, and elites in both political parties had reached the same conclusion. In deciding against Nixon, the Supreme Court was only reaffirming the political consensus.As the constitutional law professor Josh Chafetz has observed, even United States v. Nixon was suffused with a rhetoric of judicial aggrandizement. But if the Supreme Court were to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot, seconding the Colorado court on each legal nicety, when so many people still disagree on the facts, it would have disastrous consequences.For one thing, it would strengthen the hand of a Supreme Court that liberals have rightly complained grabs too much power too routinely. Joe Biden came into office calling for a re-examination of whether the Supreme Court needs reform, and there would be considerable irony if he were re-elected after that very body was seen by millions to pre-empt a democratic choice.Worse, it is not obvious how many would accept a Supreme Court decision that erased Mr. Trump’s name from every ballot in the land. Liberals with bad memories of Bush v. Gore, which threw an election to one candidate rather than counting votes, have often regretted accepting that ruling as supinely as they did. And rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place. The purpose of Section 3 was to stabilize the country after a civil war, not to cause another one.As it unfolds, the effort to disqualify Mr. Trump could make him more popular than ever. As harsh experience since 2016 has taught, legalistic maneuvers haven’t hurt him in the polls. And Democrats do nothing to increase their popularity by setting out to “save democracy” when it looks — if their legal basis for proceeding is too flimsy — as if they are afraid of practicing it. That the approval ratings of the Democratic standard-bearer, Mr. Biden, have cratered as prosecutions of Mr. Trump and now this Colorado ruling have accumulated indicates that trying again is a mistake, both of principle and of strategy.Perhaps the worst outcome of all would be for the Supreme Court to split on ideological lines, as it did in Bush v. Gore, hardly its finest hour. Justices have fretted about the damage to their “legitimacy” when their decisions look like political choices. They often are, as so many recent cases have revealed, but when the stakes are this high, the best political choice for the justices is to avoid final judgment on contested matters of fact and law and to let the people decide.In the Nixon era, the justices were shrewd enough to stand together in delivering their decision: It was handed down 8-0, with one recusal. In our moment, the Supreme Court must do the same.This will require considerable diplomacy from Chief Justice John Roberts, and it will define his stewardship as profoundly as cases such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which his effort to herd his colleagues into consensus failed. In this situation, unlike that one, it will require him to convince his liberal colleagues who might otherwise dissent. For their part, they ought to be able to anticipate the high and unpredictable costs of presuming that judges can save a nation on the brink of breakdown.The truth is that this country has to be allowed to save itself. The Supreme Court must act, but only to place the burden on Mr. Trump’s political opponents to make their case in the political arena. Not just to criticize him for his turpitude, but to argue that their own policies benefit the disaffected voters who side with a charlatan again and again.Samuel Moyn teaches law and history at Yale.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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      How DeSantis’s Ambitious, Costly Ground Game Has Sputtered

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      The Florida governor’s field operation, one of the most expensive in modern political history, has met challenges from the outset, interviews with a range of voters and political officials revealed.Ron DeSantis’s battle plan against Donald J. Trump was always ambitious.This spring, the main super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis laid out a costly organizing operation, including an enormous voter-outreach push with an army of trained, paid door-knockers, that would try to reach every potential DeSantis voter multiple times in early-nominating states.Seven months later, after tens of millions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of doors knocked, one of the most expensive ground games in modern political history shows little sign of creating the momentum it had hoped to achieve.Mr. DeSantis’s poll numbers have barely budged. His super PAC, Never Back Down, is unraveling. And Mr. Trump’s hold on Republican primary voters seems as unshakable as ever. With time running out before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, appears in danger of losing the extraordinary bet he made in outsourcing his field operation to a super PAC — a gamble that is testing both the limits of campaign finance law and the power of money to move voter sentiment.Never Back Down has spent at least $30 million on its push to reach voters in person through door-knocking and canvassing in early-primary states, according to a person with knowledge of its efforts — a figure that does not include additional tens of millions in television advertising. The organization has more than 100 full-time, paid canvassers in Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire, along with 37,000 volunteers.That ground game has increasingly centered on a do-or-die push in Iowa, where a long-shot victory could redeem the effort. Never Back Down has knocked on doors more than 801,000 times — including repeated visits — in Iowa, according to another person familiar with its work, a staggering number in a state of just 3.2 million people. The group has knocked on the doors of some potential DeSantis voters four times, with a fifth attempt planned before the caucuses, the person said.“I know they are doing the right things,” said Will Rogers, a Republican political organizer in Iowa who said Never Back Down had been to his door several times. But, he added, “it just doesn’t seem to be moving the needle at all.”Interviews with more than three dozen voters, local officials and political strategists across Iowa and beyond revealed that — even setting aside the internal disruptions at Never Back Down — the immense, coordinated effort to identify and mobilize voters for Mr. DeSantis has struggled from the outset.Mr. DeSantis’s decision to outsource his field operation to a super PAC was unusual, and tested the limits of campaign finance law.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesSome voters have been swayed by contact from the super PAC, but many remain unconvinced. Some said the door knockers were indifferent or rude, while others said the full-court press from Never Back Down felt inauthentic. And, in a particularly brutal twist, some of the door knockers openly told Iowans that they themselves were in fact Trump supporters.“From my point of view, it hasn’t been working,” said Cris Christenson, a businessman who lives in Johnston, a Des Moines suburb. Never Back Down has been all over his neighborhood, he said, and has knocked on his door three times.Mr. Christenson said he was “not anti-DeSantis,” describing him as “very bright.” But he is a firm supporter of Mr. Trump.“It really comes down to this — Trump is so wildly popular in the state that DeSantis doesn’t stand a chance,” he said.Spreading the wordJess Szymanski, a spokeswoman for Never Back Down, said the group had built “the largest, most advanced grass-roots and political operation in the history of presidential politics.”“With every voter we interact with on the ground, we constantly find strong support and new voters committing to caucus for Governor DeSantis,” she added. Door knocking is considered a particularly useful way not just to persuade and identify supporters, but above all to mobilize them to get to the caucuses or polls.The field operation is highly organized: Never Back Down has trained hundreds of people at an in-house boot camp in Des Moines that operatives call “Fort Benning.” There, recruits learn about the biography of Mr. DeSantis and his family, study his policies and record as Florida governor, and practice door-knocking techniques.Then, in groups — toting iPads with special software that contains details about likely voters — they spread out across Iowa and other early-nominating states.In Iowa, these paid door knockers have been joined by volunteer “precinct captains” — Never Back Down aims to have at least one captain in each of Iowa’s more than 1,600 caucus precincts by Jan. 15.Attendees at an Iowa Republican Party event in May were given information on Mr. DeSantis.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesNever Back Down is trying to reach Republicans in rural, heavily conservative areas like northwest Iowa, hoping that evangelical voters will embrace an alternative to the profane Mr. Trump.Quality control problemsSome of the challenges on the ground appear to stem from the operation’s size. The fact that it has been run by a super PAC rather than a campaign, and has relied largely on hired hands rather than volunteers, can make the outreach feel inauthentic, interviews with some caucusgoers showed.They described being put off or bemused by DeSantis campaigners who hailed from as far away as California. Douglas Jensen, a 38-year-old potential caucusgoer in rural northwestern Iowa who hasn’t decided which candidate to support, recalled being surprised to have a “very enthusiastic” man from Georgia pitch him on Mr. DeSantis at his house.Loren and Tina DeVries said they’d had door knockers from different campaigns stop by their house in Bettendorf. Some were locals — Ms. DeVries, 54, even knew the young woman who came to her door to stump for Vivek Ramaswamy personally.But the couple didn’t recognize the DeSantis door knockers, and recalled that they had been less than enthusiastic in their pitch.“The people that have come, I’m not sure if they’re there just to check a box or actually have a persuasive conversation,” Mr. DeVries, 53, said. “They’re not really doing a sell.”He still liked Mr. DeSantis, but Ms. DeVries remained undecided.Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis, put out sign-up sheets to endorse him at an Iowa Republican Party event in Cedar Rapids.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesDeSantis campaign materials at a restaurant in Tipton, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesNumerous other voters have also reported lackadaisical efforts, fruitless repeat knocking and bad attitudes from door knockers. Over the summer, a paid Never Back Down canvasser in South Carolina was dismissed after he was caught making lewd remarks about a homeowner, The Washington Post reported.The super PAC has dismissed employees and volunteers who failed to meet targets for door knocking and other measures of engagement, according to people who worked with the group.Fierce competition, and a looming favoriteOther campaigns are trying to capitalize. The political network founded by the Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity Action, which endorsed Nikki Haley last month, is aiming to knock on 100,000 doors in Iowa before the caucuses. The group is hoping that a more finely honed message, spread by the small group of well-trained volunteers and paid staff, will be enough to overcome the flood of outreach from Never Back Down.Tyler Raygor, A.F.P.’s state director, said the fact that Mr. DeSantis had been stagnant in state polls despite the huge canvassing effort cast doubt on how effective his messengers were.“It just begs the question of: ‘Who are you having out on the doors? How well are you training them?’” Mr. Raygor said.The Trump campaign has also put down roots in Iowa, though its efforts have focused more on training its 1,800 caucus captains and pushing them to persuade their friends and neighbors to caucus for Mr. Trump. Still, the campaign has reached several hundred thousand voters in Iowa through mail advertisements and door knocking, according to a person familiar with the efforts.Indeed, it seems possible that no amount of door knocking could surmount Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenge: He is not Donald Trump.Former President Donald J. Trump still leads in polls of Iowa caucusgoers by double digits. Jordan Gale for The New York TimesJeanette Hudson, 82, of Pella, Iowa, said she and her husband, both loyal Trump supporters, had been visited at home by a “pleasant young woman” who asked if they were going to caucus for Mr. DeSantis. Ms. Hudson said they were not.The woman smiled, thanked them and left.Persuading the unconvincedDavid Polyansky, the DeSantis deputy campaign manager, said door knocking was meant to drive turnout on caucus night, not to juice poll numbers.“It gives you the chance to not only identify who might be a DeSantis supporter, but also to bring them into the fold and make sure they are going to turn out on the 15th,” he said, arguing that it was too soon to judge the effectiveness of Never Back Down’s door-knocking operation.Mr. DeSantis’s allies say that many Iowans remain undecided, and that a major part of the ground game, in the weeks ahead, is to tip them to their side.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn New Hampshire, the way that Mr. DeSantis won the support of Hilary Kilcullen, 76, a physician assistant in Concord, is a model that Never Back Down hopes to emulate.Ms. Kilcullen, a Republican, said a young man had knocked on her door to tell her about Mr. DeSantis. The canvasser, who had flown up from Miami, told Ms. Kilcullen that she could rely on Mr. DeSantis in the event of a terrorist attack or other disaster.The conversation didn’t flip Ms. Kilcullen, who had grown tired of Mr. Trump, into a DeSantis supporter. But she valued the personal touch.“In this day and age, when everything has gone digital and virtual, I was impressed,” Ms. Kilcullen said. “If DeSantis could capture this passionate, young person’s attention, that means something.”Then, after hearing Mr. DeSantis speak in person this month at a town-hall event — and being impressed by his command of policy — she decided he had earned her vote.But others have yet to be convinced.One undecided caucusgoer in Iowa, Edith Hull, a 73-year-old retired farmer from Ottumwa, said she had a positive experience with a DeSantis door knocker recently.“He was a real nice young man,” she said. “And he didn’t pressure me or anything.” When he left, he gave her a large placard to hang on her doorknob, and reminded her to caucus.Asked if she felt any differently about Mr. DeSantis afterward, she said, “About the same.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      New Trump Cases Shadowed by Rocky Relationship With Supreme Court

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      Though he appointed three justices, his administration had the worst track record before the justices since at least the 1930s.“I’m not happy with the Supreme Court,” President Donald J. Trump said on Jan. 6, 2021. “They love to rule against me.”His assessment of the court, in a speech delivered outside the White House urging his supporters to march on the Capitol, had a substantial element of truth in it.Other parts of the speech were laced with fury and lies, and the Colorado Supreme Court cited some of those passages on Tuesday as evidence that Mr. Trump has engaged in insurrection and was ineligible to hold office again.But Mr. Trump’s reflections on the U.S. Supreme Court in the speech, freighted with grievance and accusations of disloyalty, captured not only his perspective but also an inescapable reality. A fundamentally conservative court, with a six-justice majority of Republican appointees that includes three named by Mr. Trump himself, has not been particularly receptive to his arguments.Indeed, the Trump administration had the worst Supreme Court record of any since at least the Roosevelt administration, according to data developed by Lee Epstein and Rebecca L. Brown, law professors at the University of Southern California, for an article in Presidential Studies Quarterly.“Whether Trump’s poor performance speaks to the court’s view of him and his administration or to the justices’ increasing willingness to check executive authority, we can’t say,” the two professors wrote in an email. “Either way, though, the data suggest a bumpy road for Trump in cases implicating presidential power.”Now another series of Trump cases are at the court or on its threshold: one on whether he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution, another on the viability of a central charge in the federal election-interference case and the third, from Colorado, on whether he was barred from another term under the 14th Amendment.The cases pose distinct legal questions, but earlier decisions suggest they could divide the court’s conservative wing along a surprising fault line: Mr. Trump’s appointees have been less likely to vote for him in some politically charged cases than Justice Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by the first President Bush, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who was appointed by the second one.In his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees: Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, suggesting that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.“I picked three people,” he said. “I fought like hell for them.”In a speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump spoke ruefully about his three appointees and suggested that they had betrayed him to establish their independence.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Trump said his nominees had abandoned him, blaming his losses on the justices’ eagerness to participate in Washington social life and to assert their independence from the charge that “they’re my puppets.”He added: “And now the only way they can get out of that because they hate that it’s not good in the social circuit. And the only way they get out is to rule against Trump. So let’s rule against Trump. And they do that.”Mr. Trump has criticized Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on similar grounds. When the chief justice cast the decisive vote to save the Affordable Care Act in 2012, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that “I guess @JusticeRoberts wanted to be a part of Georgetown society more than anyone knew,” citing a fake handle. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump called the chief justice “an absolute disaster.”When he spoke on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump was probably thinking of the stinging loss the Supreme Court had just handed him weeks before, rejecting a lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states.Before the ruling, Mr. Trump said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court, after rushing Justice Barrett onto the court in October 2020 in part in the hope that she would vote in Mr. Trump’s favor in election disputes.“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Mr. Trump said of the election a few days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death that September. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”After the ruling, Mr. Trump weighed in on Twitter. “The Supreme Court really let us down,” he said. “No Wisdom, No Courage!”The ruling in the Texas case was not quite unanimous. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, issued a brief statement on a technical point.Those same two justices were the only dissenters in a pair of cases in 2020 on access to Mr. Trump’s tax and business records, which had been sought by a New York prosecutor and a House committee.The general trend continued after Mr. Trump left office. In 2022, the court refused to block the release of White House records concerning the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, effectively rejecting Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege. The court’s order let stand an appeals court ruling that Mr. Trump’s desire to maintain the confidentiality of internal White House communications was outweighed by the need for a full accounting of the attack and the disruption of the certification of the 2020 electoral count.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent. His participation in the case, despite his wife Virginia Thomas’s own efforts to overturn the election, drew harsh criticism.Mr. Trump’s rocky record at the court offers only hints about how the justices will approach the cases already before them and on the horizon. His claim of absolute immunity appears vulnerable, based on other decisions from the court on the scope of presidential power.The case examining one of the federal statutes relied on by the special counsel in the federal election-interference case, which makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding, does not directly involve Mr. Trump, though the court’s ruling could undermine two of the charges against him.Mr. Trump’s rocky record at the court offers only hints about how the justices will approach the cases already before them and on the horizon.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe justices have been skeptical of broad interpretations of federal criminal laws, and the arguments in the case will doubtless involve close parsing of the statute’s text.The case that is hardest to assess is the one from Colorado, involving as it does a host of novel questions about the meaning of an almost entirely untested clause of the 14th Amendment, one that could bar Mr. Trump from the presidency. The case is not yet at the Supreme Court, but it is almost certain to arrive in the coming days.Guy-Uriel E. Charles, a law professor at Harvard, said the justices would have to act.“The Supreme Court is a contested entity, but it is the only institution that can weigh in and try to address this problem, which needs a national resolution,” he said. “There has been some loss of faith in the court, but even people who are deeply antagonistic to it believe it needs to step in.” More

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      DeSantis Says Trump’s Indictments ‘Sucked Out All the Oxygen’ From Primary

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      Ron DeSantis seemed to acknowledge that the former president’s legal woes were making it harder for his rivals to break through in the Republican primary.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that the indictments of former President Donald J. Trump had “distorted” the Republican presidential primary, tacitly admitting that the former president’s legal problems have helped him.“If I could have one thing change, I wish Trump hadn’t been indicted on any of this stuff,” Mr. DeSantis told David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network in an interview that aired on Thursday. He added that the indictments had “just crowded out, I think, so much other stuff and it’s sucked out all the oxygen.”With just weeks until Iowans cast the first votes in the race, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has struggled to gain ground on Mr. Trump and has had to focus more on battling former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina for second place.When Mr. DeSantis entered the race in May, he was widely regarded as the most viable challenger to Mr. Trump. That reputation frayed as his campaign struggled to articulate an effective message, organize in key early primary states and guard against internal turmoil. Last week, the top strategist for Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Jeff Roe, stepped down from his post.Mr. DeSantis did not elaborate on his comments during a campaign appearance at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Coralville, Iowa, on Thursday morning, and he barely mentioned Mr. Trump. He did not take questions from reporters after the event.But Mr. DeSantis has previously expressed frustration over how much attention Mr. Trump’s various legal troubles have attracted. “That is not what we want from this election,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters during a campaign stop outside Des Moines on Wednesday. “What we want is a referendum on the failures of the Biden administration.”Mr. Trump’s allies and supporters have maintained that the charges against him have only fueled his rise and fortified his strength as a candidate.In August, days before Mr. Trump was charged in Georgia over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, he boasted to a crowd of supporters in Alabama that he needed “one more indictment” to solidify his win in the race.Now facing four indictments and 91 felony counts, Mr. Trump has maintained a significant lead. A new poll from The New York Times and Siena College found that even as a growing number of Republican voters believe he has committed serious federal crimes, they still support his return to office.And Mr. Trump’s legal problems continue to grow. On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that he was ineligible to hold office again because of his actions related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The decision could strike him from the state’s primary ballot, but Mr. Trump’s campaign has pledged to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.In the CBN interview, Mr. DeSantis also singled out the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who has brought one of the cases against Mr. Trump, and accused him of “distorting justice” and abusing his power.He also railed against Democratic prosecutors more broadly — and, as governor, he has taken a particularly hard line against them. He has removed two Democratic prosecutors from their posts over the last two years, citing their stances on abortion and lenience on violent crime.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      How Could the Supreme Court Respond to Colorado?

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      David Firestone and Donald Trump engaged in insurrection and that disqualifies him from appearing on the 2024 ballot in Colorado, the state’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.In this audio conversation with the Opinion editor David Firestone, the editorial board writer Jesse Wegman says he believes that the United States Supreme Court will eventually take this case. But Wegman is less certain than he once was that “the court is just going to strike this down.”Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Scott Morgan/ReutersThe 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, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin with help from Phoebe Lett. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Marge Mary Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. More

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      Democrats Keep Hoping It’s Curtains for Trump. He’s Still Center Stage.

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      As Donald Trump faces a new threat to his political future, this time over the question of ballot eligibility, Democrats again find themselves looking toward American institutions to stop him.For as long as Donald J. Trump has dominated Republican politics, many Democrats have pined for a magical cure-all to rid them of his presence.There was the Mueller investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and its ties to Russia, which began four months into his presidency. Then came the first impeachment. Then, after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and his supporters stormed the Capitol, the second impeachment.Each time, Democrats entertained visions of Mr. Trump meeting his political downfall. Each time, they were disappointed.This year, liberal hopes have sprung anew, with federal and state prosecutors bringing 91 felony charges against Mr. Trump in four criminal cases.Then, on Tuesday, came what appeared to be an out-of-the-blue act of deliverance from Denver. Colorado’s top court ruled that Mr. Trump should be disqualified from holding office on the grounds that he incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, a decision that is likely to end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.Once again, Democrats find themselves looking toward American institutions to stop Mr. Trump, whom they view as a mortal threat to democracy. For many, it may be more pleasant to think about a judicial endgame that stops Mr. Trump than envisioning the slog of next year’s likely rematch against President Biden.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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      The 2024 Election: How Iowa Learned to Love Trump

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | AmazonElisa Gutierrez and Stefani Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIowa was supposed to be fertile ground for Donald Trump’s primary challengers. Its population is disproportionately evangelical, and voters were expected to coalesce around a more faith-driven alternative. But that’s not what’s happened.This past summer, Trump was polling at around 42 percent in the state, a lead that has only continued to grow. Increasingly, it looks like Iowa is on track to coronate the former president.So when we visited the state fair in August, it was less to follow around a bunch of the candidates while they were milking a cow or flipping a pork chop, but rather to ask Iowa’s voters: What’s different this time?About ‘The Run-Up’“The Run-Up” is your guide to understanding the 2024 election. Through on-the-ground reporting and conversations with colleagues from The New York Times, newsmakers and voters across the country, our host, Astead W. Herndon, takes us beyond the horse race to explore how we got to this unprecedented moment in American politics. New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Trump Pushes Pro-Police Agenda, With a Big Exception: His Criminal Cases

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      Long a loud supporter of the police, Donald Trump is floating new protections for them. At the same time, he is raging against law enforcement officials who have brought felony charges against him.Former President Donald J. Trump has long spoken admiringly of police officers who use aggressive force on the job. For years, he has pointed to his unwavering support for local law enforcement, presenting himself as a “law and order” candidate who would help the police tackle violent crime.But now, as Mr. Trump campaigns again for the White House, he has added a new promise to his speeches on the trail: to “indemnify” police officers and protect them from the financial consequences of lawsuits accusing them of misconduct.“We are going to indemnify them, so they don’t lose their wife, their family, their pension and their job,” he said during a speech this month in New York.Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s proposal — which he first raised in an interview in October and has floated five times this month — would have little effect and would largely enforce the status quo. Police officers in most jurisdictions are already protected from being held financially responsible for potential wrongdoing. They also benefit from a legal doctrine that can shield officers accused of misconduct from lawsuits seeking damages.Since entering politics, Mr. Trump has often pledged his allegiance to the police as a way to attack Democrats, accusing them of being more concerned about progressive ideas than public safety. For decades, he has batted down calls for police reform, arguing that such changes hinder officers from using aggressive crime-fighting tactics.His promise to indemnify officers also reveals a contradiction at the heart of his current campaign. Even as he proclaims his steadfast support for rank-and-file officers, he has been raging against federal and state law enforcement officials who have led the four criminal cases against him, resulting in 91 felony charges.Two Capitol Police officers who were injured during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, have sued him, accusing him of inciting violence, and Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled this week that there was enough evidence that he engaged in insurrection to disqualify him from holding office again.Those realities have not stopped Mr. Trump from courting the police, meeting with law enforcement groups on the trail and posing with officers who are part of his motorcade. He and his aides often post photos and videos of the interactions on social media.Supporters of Mr. Trump at an event in Edinburg, Texas, last month honoring service members who were working on the border over the Thanksgiving holiday.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesDuring a speech on Sunday in Nevada, he proudly told the crowd that he “shook so many hands of policemen” before arriving. Later, when he promised to indemnify officers, he called them out: “All those policemen that were shaking my hand back there, you better be listening.”Mr. Trump frequently criticizes Democrats as too critical of law enforcement. He conjures up images of big cities as lawless and unsafe, laying the blame on liberal politicians whose calls for police reform, he says, have deterred officers from carrying out their duties. The police, he has argued in recent speeches, are being “destroyed by the radical left.”“They’re afraid to do anything,” Mr. Trump said recently. “They’re forced to avoid any conflict, they’re forced to let a lot of bad people do what they want to do, because they’re under a threat of losing their pension, losing their house, losing their families.”But legal scholars who have studied the issue say that police officers are already largely shielded from personal financial consequences when it comes to lawsuits brought against them.“The idea that officers need indemnification is frankly absurd,” said Alexander A. Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “Because they already have it.”Indemnification, in a legal context, refers to a process by which one party agrees to cover the liability of another party, essentially agreeing to pay for any wrongdoing by the second party.In the case of policing, many state and local governments have laws in which they agree to indemnify police officers for lawsuits. In other cases, police unions obtain indemnification agreements as part of their bargaining.Joanna Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study in 2014 looking at lawsuits against the police in 81 jurisdictions over six years. She found that 99.98 percent of the money paid to plaintiffs in these cases came from local governments or their insurance companies — not from the officers themselves.“Officers virtually never pay anything in settlements or judgments entered against them,” Ms. Schwartz said in an interview.Mr. Trump, as is often the case, has been vague about the specifics of his plan, making it difficult to know whether such a move would be feasible, though experts say that enacting it might require legislation from Congress rather than an executive order.In Nevada on Sunday, Mr. Trump said the government would pay the police “for their costs, for their lawyers.” Earlier this year, he said he would protect states and cities from being sued, a remark that suggested a broad expansion of existing legal protections for police officers accused of violating constitutional rights.Under a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, someone who accuses the police of using excessive force or discriminating against them must not only show that misconduct occurred, but also generally be able to cite a closely similar previous case in which officers were held responsible.Critics say that qualified immunity offers blanket protections that prevent officers from being held accountable. Policing groups say these protections are necessary to keep officers from being so worried about personal liability that they fail to do their jobs.Mr. Trump has long expressed staunch support for qualified immunity for police officers, particularly during his 2020 re-election bid, when the nation was racked with protests after the murder of George Floyd. Several major police unions endorsed him during that campaign.A rally for Mr. Trump in Latrobe, Pa., during his re-election bid in 2020, when protests over George Floyd’s murder made policing a front-and-center political issue. Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn 1989, well before he entered the political arena, Mr. Trump bought advertising in New York claiming that concern over civil liberties had hampered the police and led to a rise in crime.In a newspaper ad, he wrote of being young and watching “two young bullies” harass a waitress in a diner. “Two cops rushed in, lifted up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again,” he wrote. In 2017, when Mr. Trump was president, he urged the police not to be “too nice,” telling them not to protect the heads of people suspected of being gang members when putting them into squad cars. Law enforcement authorities across the country criticized those remarks.In 2020, as protests rocked Minneapolis, Mr. Trump called the demonstrators “thugs” on social media and wrote, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The post was criticized for encouraging violence against protesters. Mr. Trump later said he meant to convey that looting generally led to violence, an interpretation that ignored the phrase’s racist history.As the protests spread across the country, he threatened to send the military to cities and states if he believed their leaders were failing to maintain order.This year, at a gathering of Republicans in California, Mr. Trump said he thought shoplifters should be shot on their way out of stores. “If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said, to which the crowd responded with uproarious applause.Then, after calling for the extrajudicial shootings of petty criminals, Mr. Trump returned to a familiar message.“You know, our law enforcement is great,” he said. “But they’re not allowed to do anything.”Kitty Bennett More