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      Why Haley Is Rising Among the Rivals to Trump

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      She has gained with educated and relatively moderate Republicans and independents, but that is also a big liability in today’s G.O.P.Nikki Haley is No. 2 in polling in New Hampshire.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesIf you dozed off while following the Republican primary, I wouldn’t blame you. But it might be worth perking up for a moment.Over the last few months, Nikki Haley has gained enough in the polls that she might be on the verge of surpassing Ron DeSantis as Donald J. Trump’s principal rival in the race.With Ms. Haley still a full 50 percentage points behind Mr. Trump in national polls, her ascent doesn’t exactly endanger his path to the nomination. If anything, she is a classic factional candidate — someone who’s built a resilient base of support by catering to the wishes of a minority of the party. So if you were reading this only on the off chance that Mr. Trump might be in jeopardy, you can doze off again.But even if it’s still hard to imagine a Haley win, her rise may nonetheless make this race more interesting, especially in the early states, which will begin to vote in six weeks. Ms. Haley is now neck-and-neck with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, a state he is counting on to reverse a yearlong downward spiral in the polls. She’s well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two states where a moderate South Carolinian like her ought to fare relatively well.Ms. Haley finds herself in an intriguing position. Even without any additional gains over the next 40 days, a result in line with today’s Iowa polling could be enough for her to claim a moral victory heading into New Hampshire and potentially even clear the field of her major rivals. Mr. DeSantis would be hard pressed to continue in the race if he finished 27 points behind Mr. Trump, as the polls show today. And Chris Christie would face pressure to withdraw from the race or risk enabling Mr. Trump, just as he did at this same time and place in 2016. If the stars align, it’s not inconceivable that Ms. Haley could become highly competitive in New Hampshire, where today she and Mr. Christie already combine for around 30 percent of the vote.When primary season began, it seemed unlikely that Ms. Haley would have a chance to surpass Ron DeSantis.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesThe idea that Ms. Haley might win New Hampshire might seem far-fetched but, historically, much crazier things have happened. Late surges in Iowa and New Hampshire are so common that they’re closer to being the norm than the exception. Of course, there’s still a chance that such a surge could belong to Mr. DeSantis, who has earned important Iowa endorsements from the prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and Gov. Kim Reynolds. It’s also possible that nothing really changes in the next 40 days. But there’s no reason to be terribly surprised if Ms. Haley simply keeps gaining. She’ll have the resources to compete, especially having recently earned the support of the political network founded by the Koch brothers.For a precedent, John McCain is probably the best analogy. By the numbers, George W. Bush is a strong comparison to Mr. Trump. Both held 60 percent or more of the Republican vote nationwide and started with a seemingly comfortable lead of around 45-15 in New Hampshire. At first, Mr. McCain did not seem to be Mr. Bush’s strongest challenger. But in the end, he won New Hampshire, 49-30, cleared the field, and ultimately won seven states.Winning seven states would be very impressive for Ms. Haley, just as it was for Mr. McCain. It would also represent a fairly marked shift from today’s currently uncompetitive Republican race. (Mr. Trump would probably win all 50 states if we had a national primary today.) But to state the obvious: Winning seven states would leave her much further from winning the nomination than it probably sounds. And while caveats about Mr. Trump’s legal challenges are worth flagging here, it’s probably something pretty close to the best case for Ms. Haley.That’s because she has gained traction only by catering to the needs of a party wing, especially one that’s dissatisfied with the party’s front-runner — in other words, an archetypal factional candidate.These kind of candidates are a common feature of contested primaries, as even the most formidable front-runners struggle to appeal to every element of a diverse party. George W. Bush, for instance, was one of the strongest primary candidates on record, but as a Southern evangelical conservative he was always an imperfect fit for Northern moderates, leaving a natural opening in 2000 for a candidate who appealed to that faction: Mr. McCain.If you look back, you can probably think of a factional candidate in almost every presidential primary cycle. Bernie Sanders, John Kasich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, Howard Dean, Pat Buchanan and Jesse Jackson are only the beginning of a very long list of candidates who gained a foothold by offering an often-but-not-always disgruntled faction exactly what it wanted.If you haven’t noticed, all these factional candidates lost their races. That’s not a coincidence. It’s very challenging to make a powerful appeal to a faction and somehow still become the favorite of the rest of the party. It’s not impossible to pull off, but it takes a special set of circumstances — like an unpopular front-runner, or a faction that’s so large and popular as to blur the distinction between a mere “faction” and the “mainstream,” like the conservative movement in the 1970s.But if factional candidates usually lose, under the right circumstances they can have a big advantage in gaining a toehold in the race. By definition, these candidates have a powerful appeal to a narrow but often still quite sizable base of support. Broadly appealing candidates, on the other hand, can struggle to become anyone’s favorite — especially if there’s already a strong, broadly appealing front-runner like a Mr. Trump or Mr. Bush.Just consider how often factional favorites outlast more conventional, mainstream candidates who, in many respects, seem to be stronger candidates. Was Jesse Jackson stronger than John Glenn in 1984? Was Rick Santorum vastly stronger than Tim Pawlenty in 2012? Probably not. In a hypothetical one-on-one matchup, Mr. Glenn and Mr. Pawlenty would have probably defeated the likes of Mr. Jackson and Mr. Santorum. But these losing mainstream candidates couldn’t find a distinct base in a race against a broadly appealing front-runner, whereas the factional candidates built resilient and insulated bases of support.The same can be said of Ms. Haley today. Is she a stronger candidate than Mr. DeSantis? It doesn’t seem so. A HarrisX/The Messenger poll shows Mr. DeSantis with a two-to-one lead over Ms. Haley if Mr. Trump dropped out of the race. But Ms. Haley appeals squarely to the relatively moderate, highly educated independents and Republicans who do not support Mr. Trump, giving her the inside path to a resilient base. It’s a base that, almost by definition, even Mr. Trump can’t touch.Mr. DeSantis, on the other hand, has done surprisingly little to appeal to the voters who dislike Mr. Trump. He’s running as an orthodox conservative — another Ted Cruz, except this time against a version of Mr. Trump with far stronger conservative credentials than the one who lost Iowa eight years ago. If Ms. Haley weren’t in the race, perhaps Mr. DeSantis would grudgingly win many of her supporters, but his transformation into a Cruz-like Republican is part of what created the space for a Ms. Haley in the first place.As with factional candidates before her, the same attributes that help Ms. Haley appeal to Mr. Trump’s detractors make her a poor fit for the rest of the party. Most Republicans agree with Mr. Trump on immigration, foreign policy, trade and other policies that distinguish Mr. Trump from his skeptics. This is a conservative, populist party. A moderate, establishment-backed candidate might have the path of least resistance to earning 25 percent of the vote in a race against a populist, conservative like Mr. Trump. But the path to 50 percent is far harder. More

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      The Insurrection Act Has to Go

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      There is a land mine embedded in the United States Code, one that Donald Trump, if re-elected president, could use to destroy our republic. But it’s not too late for Congress to defuse the mine now and protect America.I’m talking about the Insurrection Act, a federal law that permits the president to deploy military troops in American communities to effectively act as a domestic police force under his direct command. In theory, there is a need for a well-drafted law that permits the use of federal troops in extreme circumstances to maintain order and protect the rule of law. The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.These flaws are especially relevant because Trump and his allies are keenly aware of the act’s provisions and have long expressed interest in its use. Trump has publicly regretted not using more military force to suppress riots in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, there were suggestions that he utilize the act as part of his plot to steal the 2020 election, and now there are reports that Trump might invoke the act on the first day of his next term, to suppress demonstrations, to control the border or both.Moreover, these reports have to be read in the context of Trump’s latest public pronouncements. He has declared many of his domestic political opponents to be “vermin.” His campaign has promised that his critics’ “sad, miserable existence” will be “crushed.” And he has specifically told his followers, “I am your vengeance.”Some version of the Insurrection Act is probably necessary. After all, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War to Trump’s own insurrection on Jan. 6, we have seen direct, violent challenges to federal authority. But any such authorization should be carefully circumscribed and subject to oversight. The authority granted by the act, however, is remarkably broad, and oversight is virtually nonexistent.The Insurrection Act contains a number of provisions, and not all are equally bad. For example, the first provision, 10 U.S.C. Section 251, provides that the president may deploy troops “upon the request of [a state’s] legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened” in the event of an insurrection. There is no unilateral presidential authority under this provision; the president’s power is activated only by a state request.But the act gets worse, much worse. The next section takes the gloves off, giving the president the ability to call out the National Guard or the regular army “whenever the president considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Note the key language: “whenever the president considers.” That means deployment is up to him and to him alone.The section after that does much same thing, again granting the president the power to “take such measures he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.” This broad grant of power makes the Insurrection Act far more immediately dangerous than many other threatened Trump actions, such as prosecuting political opponents and transforming the federal work force. Judicial review can blunt many of Trump’s worst initiatives, but there’s no such obvious check on the use of his power under the act.You might wonder why the Insurrection Act hasn’t presented much of a problem before now. It’s been used rarely, and when it has been used, it’s been used for legitimate purposes. For example, it was used repeatedly to suppress racist violence in the South during the Reconstruction era and the civil rights movement. Most recently, George H.W. Bush invoked it in 1992 — at the request of the governor of California — to assist in quelling the extreme violence of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.That historical restraint has been dependent on a factor that is utterly absent from Trump: a basic commitment to the Constitution and democracy. Previous presidents, for all their many flaws, still largely upheld and respected the rule of law. Even in their most corrupt moments, there were lines they wouldn’t cross. Trump not only has no such lines but also has made his vengeful intentions abundantly clear.There is still time, however, to take this terrible tool out of Trump’s potential hands. The Insurrection Act has not always been so broad. In its earliest versions, the president’s power was much more carefully constrained. But Congress expanded the president’s power after the Civil War, in part to deal with racist insurgencies in the defeated Confederacy.It’s time to rein in the excesses of the act. In 2022, Elizabeth Goitein and Joseph Nunn from the Brennan Center for Justice submitted a comprehensive reform proposal to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The proposal would narrow and carefully define the circumstances in which the president can deploy troops, provide for a congressional review and approval process and enable judicial review of claims that the legal criteria for deployment were not met. It’s a proposal worth adopting.I’m not naïve. I recognize that it will be difficult if not impossible for any reform bill to pass Congress. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the Republican-led House of Representatives, was a central player in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Many of Trump’s congressional allies share his thirst for vengeance. But it’s past time to highlight this problem in the federal code. It’s past time to strip unilateral authority from the president.It’s not hard to imagine what could happen if we don’t. An angry, vindictive president could send regular army troops straight into American cities at the first hint of protest. This would place both the American polity and the American military under immense strain. While the former consequence may be more obvious, the latter is also important. Many soldiers would be deeply unhappy to be deployed against their countrymen and would be rightly concerned that a reckless deployment would be accompanied by reckless orders. Dominating the streets of New York is not the mission they signed up for.When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford. It’s time to take from presidents a power they never should have possessed. No man or woman should be able to unilaterally deploy the armed forces to control America’s streets.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’s Defense to Charge That He’s Anti-Democratic? Accuse Biden of It

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      Indicted over a plot to overturn an election and campaigning on promises to shatter democratic norms in a second term, Donald Trump wants voters to see Joe Biden as the bigger threat.Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been indicted by federal prosecutors for conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with a plot to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly claimed to supporters in Iowa on Saturday that it was President Biden who posed a severe threat to American democracy.While Mr. Trump shattered democratic norms throughout his presidency and has faced voter concerns that he would do so again in a second term, the former president in his speech repeatedly accused Mr. Biden of corrupting politics and waging a repressive “all-out war” on America.”Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy,” he said. “Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy.”Mr. Trump has made similar attacks on Mr. Biden a staple of his speeches in Iowa and elsewhere. He frequently accuses the president broadly of corruption and of weaponizing the Justice Department to influence the 2024 election.But in his second of two Iowa speeches on Saturday, held at a community college gym in Cedar Rapids, Mr. Trump sharpened that line of attack, suggesting a more concerted effort by his campaign to defend against accusations that Mr. Trump has an anti-democratic bent — by going on offense.Polls have shown that significant percentages of voters in both parties are concerned about threats to democracy. During the midterm elections, candidates who embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him were defeated, even in races in which voters did not rank “democracy” as a top concern.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has frequently attacked Mr. Trump along those lines. In recent weeks, Biden aides and allies have called attention to news reports about plans being made by Mr. Trump and his allies that would undermine central elements of American democracy, governing and the rule of law.Mr. Trump and his campaign have sought to dismiss such concerns as a concoction to scare voters. But on Saturday, they tried to turn the Biden campaign’s arguments back against the president.At the Cedar Rapids event, aides and volunteers left placards with bold black-and-white lettering reading “Biden attacks democracy” on the seats and bleachers. At the start of Mr. Trump’s speech, that message was broadcast on a screen above the stage.Mr. Trump has a history of accusing his opponents of behavior that he himself is guilty of, the political equivalent of a “No, you are” playground retort. In a 2016 debate, when Hillary Clinton accused Mr. Trump of being a Russian puppet, Mr. Trump fired back with “You’re the puppet,” a comment he never explained.Mr. Trump’s accusations against Mr. Biden, which he referenced repeatedly throughout his speech, veered toward the conspiratorial. He claimed the president and his allies were seeking to control Americans’ speech, their behavior on social media and their purchases of cars and dishwashers.Without evidence, he accused Mr. Biden of being behind a nationwide effort to get Mr. Trump removed from the ballot in several states. And, as he has before, he claimed, again without evidence, that Mr. Biden was the mastermind behind the four criminal cases against him.Here, too, Mr. Trump conjured a nefarious-sounding presidential conspiracy, one with dark ramifications for ordinary Americans, not just for the former president being prosecuted. Mr. Biden and his allies “think they can do whatever they want,” Mr. Trump said — “break any law, tell any lie, ruin any life, trash any norm, and get away with anything they want. Anything they want.”Democrats suggested that the former president was projecting again.“Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one where the government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement. “You don’t have to take our word for it — Trump has admitted it himself.”Even as he was insisting that Mr. Biden threatens democracy, Mr. Trump underscored his most antidemocratic campaign themes.Having said that he would use the Justice Department to “go after” the Biden family, on Saturday, he swore that he would “investigate every Marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal, racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law.”Mr. Trump has frequently decried the cases brought him against by Black prosecutors in New York and Atlanta as racist. (He does not apply that charge to the white special counsel in his two federal criminal cases, who he instead calls “deranged.”)Yet Mr. Trump himself has a history of racist statements.At an earlier event on Saturday, where he sought to undermine confidence in election integrity well before the 2024 election, he urged supporters in Ankeny, a predominantly white suburb of Des Moines, to take a closer look at election results next year in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, three cities with large Black populations in swing states that he lost in 2020.“You should go into some of these places, and we’ve got to watch those votes when they come in,” Mr. Trump said. “When they’re being, you know, shoved around in wheelbarrows and dumped on the floor and everyone’s saying, ‘What’s going on?’“We’re like a third-world nation,” he added.Mr. Trump’s speeches on Saturday reflected how sharply he is focused on the general election rather than the Republican primary contest, in which he holds a commanding lead.With just over six weeks until the Iowa caucus, Mr. Trump dismissed his Republican rivals, mocking them for polling well behind him and denouncing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as disloyal for deciding to run against him.He also attacked Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, for endorsing Mr. DeSantis and suggested her popularity had tumbled after she had spurned Mr. Trump.“You know, with your governor we had an issue,” Mr. Trump said, prompting a chorus of boos.Ann Hinga Klein More

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      Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim Alberta

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      In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security.” Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.”Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism | More

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      Appeals Court Says Jan. 6 Suits Against Trump Can Proceed for Now

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      The court left open the possibility that the former president could still prevail in his effort to claim immunity from civil cases seeking to hold him accountable for the violence.A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that civil lawsuits seeking to hold former President Donald J. Trump accountable for the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, can move forward for now, rejecting a broad assertion of immunity that Mr. Trump’s legal team had invoked to try to get the cases dismissed.But the decision, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, left open the possibility that Mr. Trump could still prevail in his immunity claims after he makes further arguments as to why his fiery speech to supporters near the White House on Jan. 6 should be considered an official presidential act, rather than part of his re-election campaign.The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution gives presidents immunity from being sued over actions taken as part of their official duties, but not from suits based on private, unofficial acts. The civil cases brought against Mr. Trump have raised the question of which role he was playing at the rally he staged on Jan. 6, when he told supporters to “fight like hell” and urged them to march to the Capitol.Essentially, the appeals court ruled that at this stage of the case, that question has yet to be definitively answered. It said Mr. Trump must be given an opportunity to present factual evidence to rebut the plaintiffs’ claims that the rally was a campaign event — scrutinizing issues like whether campaign officials had organized it and campaign funds were used to pay for it.“Because our decision is not necessarily even the final word on the issue of presidential immunity, we of course express no view on the ultimate merits of the claims against President Trump,” Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote for the panel.He added: “In the proceedings ahead in the district court, President Trump will have the opportunity to show that his alleged actions in the run-up to and on Jan. 6 were taken in his official capacity as president rather than in his unofficial capacity as presidential candidate.”The panel’s decision to allow the three civil cases to proceed for now in Federal District Court in Washington adds to the array of legal woes that Mr. Trump is facing as he runs again for president.The ruling comes as the former president has mounted a parallel effort to get the criminal indictment he faces on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election dismissed based on a similar claim of immunity. The federal judge overseeing that case rejected those claims on Friday night.After the Capitol attack, a number of plaintiffs, including members of Congress and police officers who were caught up in or injured during the riot, filed lawsuits against Mr. Trump, blaming him for inciting the mob on Jan. 6 with the speech he gave that day.Mr. Trump sought to have the cases dismissed at the outset for several reasons, including a claim that his act of speaking to the public about a matter of public concern was an official action, so he was immune from being sued over it. The plaintiffs, by contrast, maintained that the rally and speech were campaign events.When considering a motion to dismiss, judges decide whether a lawsuit should be thrown out even if they assume that everything plaintiffs claim is true. In February 2022, the trial judge, Amit P. Mehta, rejected Mr. Trump’s arguments and allowed the case to proceed. Mr. Trump then appealed Judge Mehta’s ruling.The appeals court acknowledged that legal precedents have long protected a president from being sued for actions undertaken as part of his job. But it rejected Mr. Trump’s categorical view that any time a president is speaking about matters of public concern, it should be considered an official act.“When a first-term president opts to seek a second term, his campaign to win re-election is not an official presidential act,” Judge Srinivasan wrote. “The office of the presidency as an institution is agnostic about who will occupy it next. And campaigning to gain that office is not an official act of the office.”Kristy Parker, a lawyer for Protect Democracy, which is helping to represent two Capitol Police officers who sued Mr. Trump, praised the decision. “This decision is a significant step forward in establishing that no one is above the law, including a sitting president,” she said.Joe Sellers, who represented the congressional plaintiffs, said the ruling was “a crucial step closer to holding the former president accountable for the harm brought on members of Congress and on our democracy itself.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the court’s decision was “limited, narrow and procedural,” adding that “the facts fully show that on Jan. 6 President Trump was acting on behalf of the American people, carrying out his duties as president of the United States.”The appellate panel that issued the decision included two appointees of Democratic presidents, Judge Srinivasan, who wrote the main 54-page opinion, and Judge Judith W. Rogers, who filed a narrower concurring opinion. She agreed with most of the main opinion, but thought a section that instructed Judge Mehta about how to evaluate whatever additional facts arise was unnecessary.The third member was Judge Gregory G. Katsas, who was appointed by Mr. Trump. He also filed a shorter concurring opinion, stressing that courts should try to sort through the ambiguity by looking at objective factors, like whether White House or campaign resources were used to organize and pay for the rally, rather than trying to parse Mr. Trump’s motives.The issue of presidential immunity is also an important aspect of Mr. Trump’s attempts to invalidate the election interference indictment filed against him in Washington by the special counsel, Jack Smith.The Justice Department has long maintained a policy that sitting presidents cannot be charged. But Mr. Trump’s motion to dismiss the criminal case on grounds that his actions were official ones was a remarkable attempt to extend the protections afforded to the presidency in his favor.Mr. Trump’s lawyers essentially claimed that all of the steps he took to subvert the election he lost to President Biden were not crimes, but rather examples of performing his presidential duties to ensure the integrity of a race he believed had been stolen from him.Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the criminal case, had little patience for such arguments in her ruling on Friday, saying that neither the Constitution nor American history supported the contention that a former president enjoyed total immunity from prosecution.If Mr. Trump’s lawyers challenge her decision, as expected, they will most likely have to make a detailed finding to the appeals court that his efforts to overturn the outcome in 2020 were not undertaken as part of his re-election campaign but rather in his official role as chief executive.Win or lose, the lawyers are hoping that a protracted appeal will require moving the election trial — now set to start in March — until after the 2024 election is decided. More

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      Georgia County Signs Up to Use Voter Database Backed by Election Deniers

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      The decision ignores warnings from voting rights groups and some election experts.A suburban county in Georgia agreed on Friday to use a new voter information database endorsed by the election denial movement, a move that defied warnings from voting rights groups, election security experts and state election officials.Columbia County, a heavily Republican county outside Augusta, is the first in the country known to have agreed to use the platform, called EagleAI. Its supporters claim the system will make it easier to purge the rolls of ineligible voters.Among the leading backers for this new system is Cleta Mitchell, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the leader of the Election Integrity Network, a national coalition of activists built around the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Mitchell and others have billed EagleAI as an alternative to the Election Registration Information Center, a widely used interstate system that made it easier for officials to track address changes and deaths as they maintain the voter rolls. That system, known as ERIC, has become the subject of conspiracy theories and misinformation that prompted nine states to withdraw with few backup plans.Ms. Mitchell declined to answer questions about the county’s decision.At an election board meeting Friday, around 40 people packed a room, with all speakers favoring the new system, according to Larry Wiggins, a Democratic member of the board who said he voted in favor.Mr. Wiggins said he was hopeful the tool would help the county handle an expected influx of voter eligibility challenges next year. A 2021 law made it easier for individuals to challenge large numbers of other voters’ registrations at once. Those challenges have often come from the same community of Republican activists now helping to push the EagleAI software.EagleAI was developed by a retired doctor in Columbia County, John Richards Jr., who did not response to a request for comment.Georgia state officials, who reviewed the EagleAI presentations, have found them riddled with errors and said the tools were unnecessary, according to documents provided by the groups American Oversight and Documented.In May, William S. Duffey Jr., the chairman of the State Election Board in Georgia, sent a letter to the county board of elections warning that EagleAI’s software might violate state privacy laws and state election statutes.The county responded in November that it would not allow access to private voter information and that the use of the tools would be limited.In a statement, the Georgia secretary of state’s office noted that the state still belonged to the Election Registration Information Center and that counties needed to follow state laws.Election experts have labeled the new system unnecessary and flawed.“EagleAI cannot be trusted to provide reliable information regarding who on the voter rolls is not eligible to remain there,” wrote seven voting rights and election organizations in a letter to Columbia County commissioners. It continued: “It will point you towards false positives and waste your staff’s time.”But Mr. Wiggins said the board wasn’t convinced. “We don’t put much faith in letters from outside groups,” Mr. Wiggins said. “We pay more attention to local individuals.” More

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      Paleoconservative or Moderate? Questions for Staffing the Next G.O.P. White House.

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      The Heritage Foundation asks applicants for a future Republican administration a series of questions about their ideology, showing the extent to which “America First” has shaped the modern G.O.P.An influential conservative group is using a questionnaire to test the ideology of potential recruits for the next Republican presidential administration — and the questions reveal the extent to which former President Donald J. Trump has transformed the conservative movement in his image.The questionnaire by the group, the Heritage Foundation, includes questions that suggest it is screening for applicants who want to embrace tariffs, reduce America’s military footprint overseas and remove executive branch officials who obstruct the president’s agenda. The job-application questionnaire was first reported by Axios.Candidates are asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement that “the president should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.”Mr. Trump and his allies have promised to “demolish the deep state” and increase presidential power over every part of the federal government that currently operates with any degree of independence from White House political control.A Questionnaire for Applicants to the Next Conservative White HouseThe Heritage Foundation, which has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era, has a list of questions for job applicants that shows how Donald Trump has transformed the party.Read DocumentHeritage, the most powerful think tank on the right, has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era and is leading a $22 million presidential transition operation called Project 2025 to develop policies and personnel for the next conservative government.As a nonprofit group, Heritage cannot endorse political candidates, but its vast personnel recruitment project — a collaboration by more than 80 conservative groups — is being driven by former senior Trump administration officials who remain close to the former president. Heritage’s work will most likely end up in the hands of whomever the Republican Party nominates as its presidential candidate next year.Much of the Heritage questionnaire is unremarkable. It quizzes candidates on their political philosophy and on private school vouchers and other standard-issue Republican policies. But in subtle ways, the questionnaire shows the extent to which Mr. Trump’s “America First” ideology has infused the Republican Party. Those changes are most pronounced in the wording of the questions that relate to foreign policy and trade.(The questionnaire inquires about the applicant’s political philosophy, providing a number of possible selections such as Traditional Conservative, Libertarian, Paleoconservative and Moderate.)Heritage used to promote American leadership around the world and a hawkish foreign policy in line with the views espoused by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.But under the leadership of its president, Kevin Roberts, Heritage has in recent years argued that American tax dollars could more usefully be spent at home than in supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion. And in another departure from the pre-Trump Republican orthodoxy, Heritage has expressed openness to cutting the military budget.In that vein, the Heritage questionnaire asks potential recruits whether they agree or disagree that “the U.S. should scale back its strong military presence overseas.”Once a promoter of free trade — and still internally divided on the subject — Heritage now asks recruits for the next Republican administration whether they agree that “the U.S. should impose tariffs with the goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if these tariffs result in higher consumer prices.”Heritage’s shift toward an “America First” ideology has opened up rifts within the conservative movement and has caused tensions inside the organization. Several foreign policy analysts left Heritage disillusioned by the changes afoot there.In a statement to The New York Times, Heritage’s president, Mr. Roberts, said that “the radical left has lapped the political right when it comes to preparing men and women to serve in presidential administrations.”“Project 2025,” he added, “is committed to recruiting and training a deep bench of patriotic Americans who are ready to serve their country on day one of the next administration.” More

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      Trump Lawyer Tells Judge a Georgia Trial Would Be ‘Election Interference’

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      Arguments in court on Friday offered clues to Donald J. Trump’s legal strategy in fighting state charges of conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election.A lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued in an Atlanta courtroom on Friday that putting his client on trial in the final stages of the 2024 presidential contest would be “the most effective election interference in the history of the United States.”Steven H. Sadow, Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer in Georgia, also asserted that if his client were to win the election, Georgia could not try him in the case until after he left the White House again. He cited the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law “supreme” over contrary state laws.Whether a president would in fact be shielded from prosecution while in office is not a settled legal matter.Mr. Sadow’s comments, which were challenged by prosecutors, came during a hearing in the election interference case against Mr. Trump and 14 co-defendants that was brought in August by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga.Ms. Willis wants the defendants to go on trial in August, but the presiding judge, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, did not set a date on Friday. Mr. Trump is seeking to delay the trial, while another defendant, John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Mr. Trump after he lost the 2020 presidential election, is seeking to speed it up.Judge McAfee scheduled the hearing to address motions not just from Mr. Trump, but also from a number of his co-defendants. He did not make any rulings from the bench, and gave few clues as to what he thought of the various arguments.All 15 defendants in the case face conspiracy charges related to attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results and subvert the will of voters. Four other defendants have pleaded guilty in the case and have agreed to cooperate with the government.The arguments from Mr. Sadow, a veteran Atlanta defense lawyer, were the main event at the hourslong hearing on Friday, offering some of the first hints about Mr. Trump’s legal strategy in the case.“Can you imagine the notion of the Republican nominee for president not being able to campaign for the presidency because he is in some form or fashion in a courtroom defending himself?” Mr. Sadow asked during the proceeding.That led Judge McAfee to ask what the prosecution thought of the idea “that having this trial on Election Day would constitute election interference?”Nathan Wade, the lead prosecutor in the case, rejected it.“This is moving forward with the business of Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t think that it in any way impedes defendant Trump’s ability to campaign.”Mr. Sadow also argued that to have a fair trial on state charges in Georgia, Mr. Trump needed access to lists of the government’s evidence in a related federal case against him.Last month, Mr. Sadow sent an email to members of the former president’s legal team who are handling the federal election interference case. In the email, Mr. Sadow said he wanted an inventory of “relevant material” that is “common to both of our cases” — specifically, F.B.I. reports and federal grand jury transcripts.The F.B.I. reports and federal grand jury transcripts stem from the separate federal investigation into election interference following the 2020 election.It is not unusual for a lawyer to ask for broader access to evidence, but Mr. Sadow’s motion is complicated by the fact that it seeks material from a different jurisdiction. The motion is being interpreted by many legal analysts as an effort by Mr. Trump to delay the Georgia proceedings.In response to Mr. Sadow’s email, the lawyers in the federal case pointed to a protective order that “appears to restrict our ability to share information with others.” Mr. Sadow then filed a motion seeking Judge McAfee’s assistance.The federal case is being brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. It relates to Mr. Trump’s broader efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election despite losing to Joseph R. Biden Jr.On Friday, Mr. Sadow told Judge McAfee that there was “remarkable overlap” between the Georgia case and Mr. Trump’s election interference case in Washington. He said that if he were unable to get his hands on the federal discovery, “the remedy is dismissal of the case.”One possibility, Mr. Sadow said, would be for the Georgia court to wait until the Washington case was “completely over,” at which point, presumably, the information would be free for him to request. Or, he said, he could prepare a subpoena.A solution to the conundrum, he said, “is going to take some time.”For the bulk of the hearing, defense lawyers, including Mr. Sadow, argued motions challenging many of the charges in the 98-page indictment. A lawyer for Robert Cheeley, a defendant and pro-Trump lawyer, argued that the indictment was an assault on the First Amendment rights of the defendants to engage in political speech.The lawyer, Chris Anulewicz, said that defendants’ statements challenging the 2020 election result had been rebutted “by a ton of counter-speech” in the public sphere and in the courts, a sufficient remedy in itself.Will Wooten, a deputy district attorney for Fulton County, said that some of the crimes listed in the indictment pertained to expression and speech, but that others did not.For example, he said, conspiracy to commit racketeering — the central crime that all the defendants are charged with — was not about speech, but rather “a crime involving a corrupt agreement.” More