Trump, Donald J

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      Biden Goes After Trump’s Felon Status at Connecticut Fund-Raiser

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      Democrats had been clamoring for the president to ratchet up his criticism of his predecessor.President Biden, prodded by Democrats to confront former President Donald J. Trump head-on about Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction in his New York hush-money case, heeded those calls on Monday night during a big-dollar fund-raiser in Connecticut for his re-election campaign and for the party.Mr. Biden railed against his rival at a reception in Greenwich, telling a group of supporters who included Connecticut’s governor and its two sitting U.S. senators that the campaign had entered “unchartered territory” when a jury on Thursday found Mr. Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts that he had been facing.He said Mr. Trump had cemented the distinction of being the first former president and convicted felon to seek the Oval Office.“But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice,” Mr. Biden said, according to a pool reporter covering the event.Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump “unhinged” and said he was undermining another democratic institution with his vitriol after the verdict.“It’s reckless and dangerous for anyone to say that’s rigged just because they don’t like the outcome,” he said.A spokesman for the Trump campaign, responding to a request for comment on Monday night, attacked Mr. Biden in a statement and said the president was trying to divert attention from the federal gun charge trial of his son, Hunter, that opened on Monday.Mr. Biden’s bluster at the reception, hosted by Richard Plepler, the former chief executive of HBO, was a notable shift in his approach to Mr. Trump’s conviction by a Manhattan jury.When asked on Friday by reporters at the White House about the verdict, Mr. Biden grinned and walked away silently after making remarks about the war in Gaza. His reluctance to weigh in on the issue tracked with his general strategy to avoid personally engaging Mr. Trump about his legal woes.Mr. Biden’s remarks at the fund-raiser echoed portions of a televised statement at the White House on Friday before he outlined his administration’s latest efforts to end the war between Israel and Hamas. Still, Democrats had called for him to be more aggressive.Mr. Trump’s offender status was not the only line of attack for Mr. Biden during the fund-raiser.Mr. Biden brought up the time when Mr. Trump suggested during a White House coronavirus briefing four years ago that bleach could be used to treat the disease, medical advice that was instantly debunked.“He must have injected it into his brain,” Mr. Biden said, according to a pool report. More

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      Trump’s Harder Line on Immigration Appears to Resonate With Many Americans

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      As the 2024 presidential election ramps up, here is what polls say about public views on the growing number of migrants.Former President Donald J. Trump has described his plans to remove large numbers of unauthorized immigrants from the country if elected to a second term by citing the mass deportations under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.In that initiative, federal agents and law enforcement officers used military techniques such as sweeps, raids and surveillance checkpoints — as well as a blunt form of racial profiling — to round up undocumented workers and load them onto buses and boats. As many as 1.3 million people were expelled, mostly Mexican and Mexican American workers, some of whom were U.S. citizens. Critical to the initiative — named Operation Wetback, for the racial slur — was intense anti-immigrant sentiment. Officials at the time used that sentiment to justify family separations and overcrowded and unsanitary detention conditions — practices that the Trump administration would deploy decades later in its own immigration enforcement.As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some Latino advocacy and immigrant-rights groups are sounding the alarm that Mr. Trump’s tactics could amount to a repetition of a sordid chapter of American history. But recent polling shows that Mr. Trump’s position on immigration appears to be resonating. About half of Americans have said they would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS in January. Authorities have reported record numbers of migrant apprehensions at the southern border for three straight years, including 2.4 million apprehensions in the fiscal year that ended in September 2023. Although the numbers have dropped sharply in recent months, immigration remains an albatross for President Biden: Even some Democratic mayors have complained that they need help from the federal government to contend with the migrant populations in their cities.Americans’ views on immigration are complex and constantly changing. Here is a snapshot of where public attitudes on immigration stand now.Public support for more immigration has ebbed after rising under Trump.Mr. Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration, both legal and illegal, helped push Americans of various political stripes to support more permissive policies.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows

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      Last Thursday, Sonia Sotomayor helped protect the country from Donald Trump, and she did it in an unexpected way — by defending the National Rifle Association.Let me explain.Attempts to target the free speech of political opponents are often the first sign of a decline into authoritarianism. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860, after an angry mob shut down an abolitionist event in Boston, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech.”“Liberty,” he went on, “is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”That’s exactly right, and that’s why Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A. against a hostile attack from a Democratic official in New York has ramifications well beyond New York politics and well beyond the battle over gun rights. By upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A., the Supreme Court reinforced the constitutional wall of protection against vengeful government leaders, including Trump.Here’s what happened. In 2017, Maria Vullo, who was then the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, began investigating the N.R.A. Carry Guard insurance program. As the court’s opinion explains, Carry Guard was an insurance affinity program in which the N.R.A. offered insurance that “covered personal-injury and criminal-defense costs related to licensed firearm use” and even “insured New York residents for intentional, reckless and criminally negligent acts with a firearm that injured or killed another person.”Under the affinity program, the N.R.A. would offer the insurance as a member benefit and various insurance companies, including Chubb Limited and Lloyd’s of London, would underwrite the insurance and the N.R.A. would take a cut of the premium payments.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Felon in the Oval Office Would Test the American System

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      The system of checks and balances established in the Constitution was meant to hold wayward presidents accountable, but some wonder how it will work if the next president is already a felon.The revolutionary hero Patrick Henry knew this day would come. He might not have anticipated all the particulars, such as the porn actress in the hotel room and the illicit payoff to keep her quiet. But he feared that eventually a criminal might occupy the presidency and use his powers to thwart anyone who sought to hold him accountable. “Away with your president,” he declared, “we shall have a king.”That was exactly what the founders sought to avoid, having thrown off the yoke of an all-powerful monarch. But as hard as they worked to establish checks and balances, the system they constructed to hold wayward presidents accountable ultimately has proved to be unsteady.Whatever rules Americans thought were in place are now being rewritten by Donald J. Trump, the once and perhaps future president who has already shattered many barriers and precedents. The notion that 34 felonies is not automatically disqualifying and a convicted criminal can be a viable candidate for commander in chief upends two and a half centuries of assumptions about American democracy.And it raises fundamental questions about the limits of power in a second term, should Mr. Trump be returned to office. If he wins, it means he will have survived two impeachments, four criminal indictments, civil judgments for sexual abuse and business fraud, and a felony conviction. Given that, it would be hard to imagine what institutional deterrents could discourage abuses or excesses.Moreover, the judiciary may not be the check on the executive branch that it has been in the past. If no other cases go to trial before the election, it could be another four years before the courts could even consider whether the newly elected president jeopardized national security or illegally sought to overturn the 2020 election, as he has been charged with doing. As it is, even before the election, the Supreme Court may grant Mr. Trump at least some measure of immunity.Mr. Trump would still have to operate within the constitutional system, analysts point out, but he has already shown a willingness to push its boundaries. When he was president, he claimed that the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want.” After leaving office, he advocated “termination” of the Constitution to allow him to return to power right away without another election and vowed to dedicate a second term to “retribution.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s Where Trump’s Other Cases Stand

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      After being convicted in a Manhattan courtroom, the former president still faces charges in three criminal prosecutions, all of which are tangled up in procedural delays.Former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan came to an end this week when a jury found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in an effort to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to upset his 2016 presidential campaign.But Mr. Trump is still facing federal charges, brought by a special counsel, in two cases: one in Florida, where he is accused of illegally holding on to classified documents after leaving office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them, and one in Washington, D.C., where he’s accused of plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He faces similar election-tampering charges in a third case brought by a local prosecutor in Georgia.The proceedings — all of which are bogged down in delays — can be confusing to keep track of. Here are updates on where each of them stands.Federal Documents CaseThe federal indictment against Mr. Trump in the documents case.Jon Elswick/Associated PressIn this case, Mr. Trump is accused of illegally holding on to a large amount of sensitive national security material after leaving office and then plotting to obstruct repeated efforts by the government to get it back. The charges were brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee the federal investigations into Mr. Trump.The case is tied up in efforts by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to have the charges against him dismissed before they go to trial. To that end, the lawyers have filed a barrage of motions attacking the indictment on a number of grounds. Those include claims that Mr. Smith was improperly appointed to his job and that he filed the charges as part of a politicized effort to harm Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rudy Giuliani Holds 80th Birthday Amid Many Woes

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      The indicted and increasingly isolated former New York mayor celebrated his birthday over pasta and meatballs. Donald J. Trump sent a video.Consider this Midtown split screen.Donald J. Trump on Friday appeared in the lobby of the gilded Fifth Avenue tower that bears his name to crow about the affection and campaign cash that have poured in since his conviction on 34 felonies.A few blocks away, at an Italian restaurant on East 56th Street, his former lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was having a party for his 80th birthday. There was little to celebrate. Mr. Giuliani’s run-ins with the law have left his life and finances in tatters.As he left a previous party celebrating the same birthday, he was served notice of his indictment in an Arizona election-interference case. He has also been indicted in Georgia in connection to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Giuliani has filed for bankruptcy and owes two Georgia women a $148 million judgment from a defamation case. He is relying on a 9/11 charity as one of his last financial lifelines. Mr. Trump has done little to help with his legal bills.Earlier that very day, a board that oversees lawyer discipline in Washington recommended that Mr. Giuliani be disbarred.A little after 6 p.m., he stepped out of a Dodge Durango, helped along by a security detail, and into the restaurant, Amata, a white table-clothed, red-sauce joint owned by the brother-in-law of Anthony Carbonetti, the former mayor’s chief of staff at City Hall, who attended the party.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Trump’s Speech After His Guilty Verdict Was All Business, No Politics

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      In his post-verdict remarks, the former president sounded less like a political martyr than like a motorist trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket.The way to evaluate a political speech — I mean as a literary critic, not as a pundit or a partisan — is to examine how the rhetoric rises to the occasion. Does the moment demand gravity or transcendence? Humility or defiance? Do the speaker’s words answer the call of history?In the case of Donald J. Trump’s 33-minute address in the lobby of Trump Tower on Friday, the occasion was both bizarre and momentous. A former president on the brink of becoming, for the third time in a row, the nominee of his party, stood convicted of 34 felonies. That nothing remotely similar has ever happened before is sufficient to guarantee the speech a place in the annals of American political discourse.As text and performance, though, the thing was kind of a slog. Mr. Trump has never been an orderly orator or a methodical builder of arguments; he riffs and extemporizes, free-associates and repeats himself, straying from whatever script may be at hand. He did some of that on Friday, but his manner was subdued. The matter was also curiously flat: a rehash of the trial, with a few gestures toward the larger political stakes.The persona Mr. Trump presented on Friday was that of an aggrieved New York businessman — a Trump that seemed like a throwback to an earlier, pre-MAGA era. He didn’t sound like a candidate in campaign mode. The showboating populism that he brings to his rallies — the mix of piety and profanity that gets the crowds going — was hardly in evidence.It’s true that he began and ended with familiar tropes and themes, painting a grim picture of a declining, crime-ridden American overrun by foreigners (some speaking languages “that we haven’t even heard of”). He framed his legal troubles as an assault on the Constitution and used religious imagery to depict what had happened in the courtroom. Some witnesses were “literally crucified” by the judge, Juan Merchan, “who looks like an angel, but he’s really a devil.”As a longtime journalist (and lifelong pedant), I’m compelled to point out that nobody was literally crucified. And as a student of Renaissance love poetry, I’m tempted to linger over Mr. Trump’s oddly tender description of the “highly conflicted” judge: “He looks so nice and soft.” A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America’s streets, of Little League ball fields swamped by migrant encampments, of “record levels of terrorists” flooding the country.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Holy Cow, 34 for 45!

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      WASHINGTON — At Nativity grade school, we grew up steeped in the lore — and gore — of martyrs. For their brave deeds and words, these men and women were stoned, crucified, beheaded, stripped of all their skin, shot with arrows and cooked alive on a red-hot griddle.So I’m a little surprised my siblings would somehow put Donald Trump in those martyrs’ sainted company.My sister and brother, disturbed by Trump’s constant chaos and slashing insults, saw their hopes for Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley evaporate.I called my Republican sibs Friday to see if hearing the word “guilty” ring out 34 times in a New York courtroom had finally severed them from Trump; they are, after all, children of a police detective.My sister, Peggy, said she couldn’t sleep all night.“You decided you can’t vote for a felon?” I asked.“I wasn’t going to vote for Trump,” she said. “But now I am because I thought this whole thing was a sham.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More