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      The DeSantis Campaign Is Revealing What Republican Voters Really Want

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      If Ron DeSantis surprises in Iowa and beyond, if he recovers from his long polling swoon and wins the Republican nomination, it will represent the triumph of a simple, intuitive, but possibly mistaken idea: That voters should be taken at their word about what they actually want from their leaders.It was always clear, going into 2024, that a large minority of the Republican primary electorate would vote for Donald Trump no matter what — including, in the event of his untimely passing, for the former president’s reanimated corpse or his A.I. simulation. A smaller bloc strongly preferred a pre-Trump and un-Trump-like Republican; this has become the Nikki Haley constituency.This left a crucial middle bloc, maybe 40 percent of the party in my own guesstimation, that was Trump-friendly but also seemingly persuadable and open to another choice. These were those Republicans who mostly hadn’t voted for Trump in the early primaries in 2016, who had regarded him as the lesser of two evils during his tilt with Hillary Clinton, but who had gradually become more authentically favorable toward him over the course of his presidency — because of the judges he appointed, because of the strength of the economy, because they reacted against the hysteria of his liberal opponents, or just because of the alchemy of partisan identification.I talked to a lot of these kind of Republicans between 2016 and 2020 — not a perfectly representative sample, probably weighted too heavily toward Uber drivers and Catholic lawyer dads, but still enough to recognize a set of familiar refrains. These voters liked Trump’s policies more than his personality. They didn’t like some of his tweets and insults, so they mostly just tuned them out. They thought that he had the measure of liberals in a way that prior Republicans had not, that his take-no-prisoners style was suited to the scale of liberal media bias and progressive cultural hegemony. But they acknowledged that he didn’t always seem entirely in charge of his own administration, fully competent in the day-to-day running of the government.So their official position was that they wanted a version of Trump with less drama, who wasn’t constantly undermined by his generals or his bureaucrats, who didn’t seem confused about the difference between tweeting about a problem and actually addressing it. They didn’t want to go back to the pre-Trump G.O.P., but they also didn’t just want to replay Trump’s first term — especially how it ended, with Trump at war with his own public health apparatus over Covid while a left-wing cultural revolution surged through American cities and schools and mass media.Ron DeSantis’s entire persona as governor of Florida seemed to meet this ostensible demand. He had a strong record of both political and legislative success, having moved Florida rightward at the ballot box and in public policy — a clear contrast with Trump, as a one-term president who presided over notable Republican political defeats. DeSantis was a cultural battler who seemed more adept than Trump at picking fights and more willing than many pre-Trump Republicans to risk the wrath of big donors and corporations. His Covid record was exactly in tune with the party’s mood; he exuded competence when a hurricane hit; he fought constantly with the media and still won over Florida’s swing voters. If Republicans wanted to keep key elements of Trumpism but joined to greater competence, if they wanted a president who would promise to build a wall and then actually complete it, DeSantis was clearly the best and only possibility.Those voters still have a chance, beginning in Iowa, to make the choice they claimed to want. But if current polls are correct and they mostly just return to Trump, what will it say about how political identification really works?One argument will be that DeSantis failed the voters who were open to supporting him, by failing to embody on the campaign trail the brand that he built up in Florida and that had built him solid national polling numbers before he jumped into the race.For instance, it’s clear that the ability to wrangle happily with the liberal media is a crucial part of the Trumpian persona, and having showed some of that ability in Florida, DeSantis unaccountably tried to run a presidential campaign exclusively via right-wing outlets and very-online formats like his disastrous Muskian debut. His lack of charisma relative to Trump was always going to be a problem, but he still made it worse by cocooning himself, initially at least, from the conflicts that should have been a selling point.Or again, any Trumpism-without-Trump would presumably need to copy some of Trump’s flair for ideological heterodoxy, his willingness to ignore the enforcers of True Conservatism and promise big — new infrastructure projects, universal health care, flying cars — whatever the indifferent follow-through. And again, while the DeSantis of Florida seemed to have some instinct for this approach — attacking woke ideology in schools while also raising teacher salaries, say — as a presidential candidate he’s been more conventional, running the kind of ideologically narrow campaign that already failed to deliver Ted Cruz the nomination in 2016.But allowing for these kind of specific critiques of how DeSantis has failed to occupy the space he seemed to have carved out, his struggles still seem more about the gap between what voters might seem to want on paper and how political attractions are actually forged.Here DeSantis might be compared to the foil in many romantic comedies — Ralph Bellamy in a Cary Grant vehicle, Bill Pullman in “Sleepless in Seattle,” the boyfriend left behind in the city while the heroine reconnects with her small-town roots in various TV Christmas movies. He’s the guy who’s entirely suitable, perfectly sympathetic and yet incapable of inspiring passion or devotion.Or again, to borrow an insight from a friend, DeSantis is an avatar for the generation to which he (like me, just barely) belongs: He’s the type of Generation X-er who pretends to be alienated and rebellious but actually has a settled marriage, a padded résumé, a strong belief in systems and arguments and plans — and a constant middle-aged annoyance at the more vibes-based style of his boomer elders and millennial juniors.The Republican Party in the Trump era has boasted a lot of Gen X leaders, from Cruz and Marco Rubio to Paul Ryan and Haley. But numerically and spiritually, the country belongs to the boomers and millennials, to vibes instead of plans.This might be especially true for a Republican Party that’s becoming more working-class, with more disaffected and lower-information voters, fewer intensely focused consumers of the news, less interest than the Democratic electorate in policy plans and litmus tests. (Though even the Democratic electorate in 2020 opted against its most plans-based candidates in the end, which is why an analogy between DeSantis and Elizabeth Warren has floated around social media.)And it’s definitely true in the narrative context created by Trump’s legal battles, all the multiplying prosecutions, which were clearly the inflection point in DeSantis’s descent from plausible successor to likely also-ran.If a majority or plurality of Republican voters really just wanted a form of Trumpism free of Trump’s roiling personal drama, a version of his administration’s policies without the chaos and constant ammunition given to his enemies, the indictments were the ideal opportunity to break decisively for DeSantis — a figure who, whatever his other faults, seems very unlikely to stuff classified documents in his bathroom or pay hush money to a porn star.But it doesn’t feel at all surprising that, instead, voters seem ready to break decisively for Trump. The prosecutions created an irresistible drama, a theatrical landscape of persecution rather than a quotidian competition between policy positions, a gripping narrative to join rather than a mere list of promises to back. And irresistible theater, not a more effective but lower-drama alternative, appears to be the revealed preference of the Republican coalition, the thing its voters really want.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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      Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman

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      It’s the latest hot TV genre: a woman in a frigid outpost, bundled in puffy outerwear, trying to uncover truths buried in ice.In the new season of HBO’s “True Detective,” Jodie Foster is a cop trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in a remote Alaska town, described as “the end of the world.” On FX’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” Emma Corrin is an amateur sleuth trudging through snow trying to solve a murder in an isolated retreat in Iceland.And now I find myself in puffy outerwear, trudging through snow in glacial Iowa, trying to uncover truths buried in the ice.I don’t have as much of a mystery to unravel as the TV detectives. The only thing the horde of reporters here is trying to figure out is if Donald Trump will win the caucuses on Monday with a plurality or if he can pull off a majority. No one is expecting a Jimmy Carter/Barack Obama-style upset.A blizzard on Friday froze the action. Drivers skidded all over Des Moines, with cars abandoned on highways. Candidates canceled events and scrambled to do telephone town halls. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny donned fleece earmuffs for live reports. Journalists planning to arrive this weekend faced canceled flights. With Trump and the others scrapping in-person rallies, reporters were left jaw-jawing with one another in the lobbies of the Hotel Fort Des Moines and the downtown Marriott.On Friday evening, Trump posted a video, accusingly telling Iowa, “You have the worst weather, I guess, in recorded history.” Maybe he should have gotten here earlier instead of haranguing the judge in his New York fraud trial on Thursday.Candidates’ surrogates resorted to extreme measures. Kari Lake, stumping for Trump in a yellow sweater — a Hawkeye color for her alma mater — joked that they would use “the ancient strategy” of the telephone to reach voters.Campaign aides to Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley were desperately calculating if the weather could give them an advantage: Maybe some of Trump’s older voters in rural areas who have to drive a long way to caucus would not show up on Monday, which could be the coldest day in caucus history, with wind chills potentially hitting 40 below.But the Trump crew here — including Donald Trump Jr. and Jason Miller — roamed around looking sanguine. “We’re confident, not cocky,” Miller told me.Compared with the poor ground game Trump Sr. had in 2016, when he came in second to “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz, as he called him, MAGA world is a model of organization. And that should frighten Democrats.“If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that our grass-roots guys had all been media trained,” Miller said. “Some of these people, because they watch everything the president does, they know any question. It doesn’t matter about whether it be the economy, Biden, witch hunt, Austin.” As in Lloyd. And “the president” Miller refers to is Trump.With a snow day here, I had time to contemplate the real mystery of Iowa: What has happened to America?In January 2008, the Democratic caucuses offered a thrilling contest. In overwhelmingly white Iowa, Barack Obama showed that Americans could propel a Black candidate into the Oval Office. Race was, remarkably, not a big factor in the contest.When I saw Obama at his first event in New Hampshire after his Iowa win, I was still stunned at the result. “Wow,” I said to him. “You really did it.”He looked solemn and a bit blank, recalling the scene in “The Candidate” when Robert Redford, the young, charismatic pol, pulls off an upset over his more seasoned, status quo opponent and murmurs, “What do we do now?”It felt then as if we were embracing modernity and inclusion, moving away from the image of John Wayne’s America.How could we have gone from such a hopeful moment to such a discordant one?Of course, every time there’s a movement, there’s a countermovement, where people feel that their place in the world is threatened and they want to turn back the clock. Trump has played on that resentment, trying to drag us into the past, curtailing women’s rights, inflaming voters to “take back America” and, as he said on Jan. 6, exhorting his base to “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”Trump is a master at exploiting voters’ fears. I’m puzzled about why his devoted fans don’t mind his mean streak. He can gleefully, cruelly, brazenly make fun of disabilities in a way that had never been done in politics — President Biden’s stutter, John McCain’s injuries from being tortured, a Times reporter’s disability — and loyal Trump fans laugh. He calls Haley “Birdbrain.” Trump is 77, yet he sees himself as a spring chicken. On Thursday, he put out a video on Truth Social mocking the “White House senior living” center, featuring pictures of the 81-year-old Biden looking helpless and out of it.Obama’s triumph in Iowa was about having faith in humanity. If Trump wins here, it will be about tearing down faith in humanity.That it’s happening in a blizzard is fitting. Trump’s whole life has been a snow job.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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      Nikki Haley Is Tougher Than the Rest

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      Politics is a tough business, so you’d think most politicians would be tough people. In fact, in my experience they’re often not. A lot of people go into politics because they want to be universally liked, and from Abraham Lincoln on down, many of them have detested personal confrontation. Several years ago it occurred to me that in every administration I had covered to that point — from Reagan through Obama — the White House staff seemed to fear the first lady more than they feared the commander in chief.This has obviously changed in recent times. Donald Trump was tough, mean and self-pitying (a nifty combination). President Biden is tougher than he looks. And the woman who is now Trump’s chief challenger, Nikki Haley, is one of the toughest politicians in America — by which I mean confrontational, willing to hammer her foes.When you read accounts of her days in South Carolina, her bellicosity fairly ripples off the pages. In a fantastic 2021 profile in Politico Magazine, Tim Alberta quotes a former South Carolina Republican Party chair: “Listen, man. She will cut you to pieces. Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she won’t give a second chance to anyone who she thinks did her wrong.”But the most telling quotation is the one Haley gave to Alberta herself: “I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust.”She grew up in the only Indian American family in a small working-class South Carolina town. The stories she tells about her girlhood are often about exclusion: being disqualified from a beauty pageant because it was set up to allow for only one Black and one white winner (though some locals dispute this); a fruit-stand vendor calling the cops because her father was a brown-skinned man wearing a turban. She once described her childhood as “survival mode.”Today, many people think of Haley as part of the older Republican establishment, a political descendant of the Bushes and Mitt Romney who suddenly finds herself trying to thrive in a party dominated by Trumpian populists. This is not quite right. Haley entered politics as a Tea Party maverick. As Hanna Rosin noted in The Atlantic in 2011, the Tea Party was female-led, and most of its supporters were right-wing women who, among other things, wanted to take on the Republican old boys network. Women like Haley and Sarah Palin presented themselves as whistle-blowers, taking down corruption.Haley ran her first campaign, for state legislature, against a 30-year Republican incumbent. What ensued was classic South Carolina politics. A mailer went out attacking her and referring to her by her birth name, Nimrata Randhawa. A whisper campaign suggested she was Buddhist or Hindu. (In fact, she is a Christian who attends a Methodist church). When she got to the legislature, she didn’t fit in with the old guard. “I’m telling you, nobody liked her. Nobody wanted to work with her. They hated her,” another state representative, who became a close friend, told Alberta.Alberta captured this period of her career this way: “She came to be loathed by many of her fellow Republicans for not being a team player, for going rogue on certain votes and procedures that made them look slimy or stupid to her benefit.”In 2010, she was given little shot at winning the governor’s race until Palin visited the state to enthusiastically endorse her. Once again the rough rules of South Carolina politics prevailed. Two men surfaced at the height of the campaign, including a lobbyist who had worked for one of her rivals, claiming to have had affairs with her, while lacking evidence. A fellow lawmaker called her a “raghead.”After his own political career imploded, Gov. Mark Sanford gave Haley a $400,000 donation at a crucial moment in the campaign. “And then she cut me off,” Sanford recalled to Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki: She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”As governor it was more of the same. She frequently went to war with lawmakers to get her agenda passed. “I have called out legislators from Year 1,” she once declared. “I go to their districts and call them out. I mean, it’s what I’m known for. I put their votes up on Facebook.” One of her great successes as governor was relentlessly lobbying corporations to build their plants in South Carolina. When she left office, the state had 400,000 more jobs than when she entered.She brought the same pummeling manner to her job as U.N. ambassador. All U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations defend Israel, but Haley made it the centerpiece of her job. She waded into a famously anti-Israel institution with fists raised. She was one of the people who made the Trump administration so supportive of the Jewish state. When close allies like Britain and France voted for a resolution condemning the U.S. decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she did not invite their representatives to a U.S. Mission reception, which is practically war in U.N. terms.Seen through one lens, she is a ruthlessly ambitious person who is happy to bruise people to succeed. Seen from another perspective, she is a brave renegade who fights the old guard to get things done. Seen through a third lens, she is a needlessly competitive personality who makes enemies in profusion. All three viewpoints seem to contain a piece of the truth.A few things need to be said to complicate this picture. First, though she knows how to play hardball, her heart has not been callused over. When nine parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston were gunned down by a white supremacist in 2015, she was vulnerable and grieving in public and private. She went to all of the funerals. Her friends worried she was losing a dangerous amount of weight. Mobilized by sadness and anger, she helped persuade more than two-thirds of both houses of the legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds, which was an astounding act of political craftsmanship and moral fortitude that even her detractors admire.Second, if she’s often tough as nails, she has generally been tough as tulips about Donald Trump. As The Times’ Sharon LaFraniere has reported, she was not one of the Trump officials who would stand up to try to prevent him from carrying out his more crackpot ideas. “Every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,” Trump told Vanity Fair in 2021, which is pretty accurate.I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man. I also wonder if her toughness was forged by being a woman in a conservative, male-dominated state. Maya Angelou offered some wisdom on female toughness in her 1993 book, “Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now.” She wrote, “The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough. She must have convinced herself, or be in the unending process of convincing herself, that she, her values and her choices are important. In a time and world where males hold sway and control, the pressure upon women to yield their rights of way is tremendous. And it is under those very circumstances that the woman’s toughness must be in evidence.”By this measure, Haley has succeeded amazingly well. But then Angelou added a wrinkle: A woman “will need to prize her tenderness and be able to display it at appropriate times in order to prevent toughness from gaining total authority and to avoid becoming a mirror image of those men who value power above life, and control over love.”There’s often been a wariness around Haley, people worrying she’s mostly about herself. Donald Trump, who really is all about himself, has somehow made himself into the much-beloved tribune of the working class in a way his opponents just haven’t.The Republican Party has come a long way in the last few decades. The party is no longer in the mood for compassionate conservatism or even Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. Republicans feel besieged and want a bruiser type who will defend them. In their different ways, Trump and Haley are both products of and architects of the current G.O.P. vibe. Neither Trump nor Haley sits around reading Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Neither Trump nor Haley has what you would call fully developed philosophies. Neither is conventionally partisan; both made their bones attacking the G.O.P. establishment, not working their way up within it.Mike Pence was too boring to match the party’s current mood. Tim Scott was too nice. Trump and the woman who is now his leading challenger are different versions of a bare-knuckled ethos, and if you look at their records, it’s pretty clear that Haley is actually more effectively tough than Trump. She’s confrontational in pursuit of policy, whereas he is confrontational in pursuit of ratings. She’s a doer; his attention span isn’t long enough to make him an effective executive. If Republicans want someone who will execute their agenda, they should go with her.Unfortunately, Haley’s support in the G.O.P. seems to have a low ceiling. This campaign is about toughness and finding someone who can defend a party that feels under siege, but it’s also about identity and class. Haley is surging, but she is surging mostly among college-educated voters. In general, Haley does better among more educated voters than less, slightly better among men than women, and she does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is as much a nationalist identity category as a religious one.Trump also has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.Source photograph by Christian Monterrosa, via Getty Images.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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      Ahead of Iowa Caucuses, Voters Fear the Prospect of Civil Unrest

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      Presidential elections traditionally speak to future aspirations, offering a vision of a better tomorrow, the hope and change of Barack Obama or the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush. Yet this year, even before a single vote has been cast, a far darker sentiment has taken hold.Across Iowa, as the first nominating contest approaches on Monday, voters plow through snowy streets to hear from candidates, mingle at campaign events and casually talk of the prospect of World War III, civil unrest and a nation coming apart at the seams.Four years ago, voters worried about a spiraling pandemic, economic uncertainty and national protests. Now, in the first presidential election since the siege on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, those anxieties have metastasized into a grimmer, more existential dread about the very foundations of the American experiment.“You get the feeling in Iowa right now that we’re sleepwalking into a nightmare and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Doug Gross, a Republican lawyer who has been involved in Iowa politics for nearly four decades, ran for governor in 2002 and plans to support Nikki Haley in the state’s caucuses on Monday. “In Iowa, life isn’t lived in extremes, except the weather, and yet they still feel this dramatic sense of inevitable doom.”Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner in the Republican primary race, bounces from courtroom to campaign trail, lacing his rhetoric with ominous threats of retribution and suggestions of dictatorial tendencies. President Biden condemns political violence and argues that if he loses, democracy itself could falter.Bill Bradley, 80, who served for 18 years as a New Jersey senator, remembered when he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, spending more than 75 days in Iowa during his bid. “We debated health care and taxes, which is reasonable,” he said, adding, “Civil war? No. World War III? No, no, no.”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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      DeSantis, Once a Darling of Conservative News Media, Now Rails Against It

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      As the Iowa caucuses draw near, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has increasingly focused on a peculiar target as he looks to win the Republican nomination: the conservative news media ecosystem that supports former President Donald J. Trump.Desperate to make his case that he is a better candidate than Mr. Trump — while trailing by wide margins in recent polls — Mr. DeSantis seems to have turned on many of the news outlets that once promoted his candidacy, for being unfair in their coverage.“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the websites, all this stuff,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters outside his campaign headquarters in Urbandale, Iowa. “They just don’t hold him accountable because they’re worried about losing viewers. And they don’t want to have the ratings go down.”He added: “That’s just the reality. That’s just the truth, and I’m not complaining about it. I’d rather that not be the case. But that’s just, I think, an objective reality.”It was the most animated version of a message that Mr. DeSantis, despite saying he is not complaining, has delivered repeatedly over the last several days. While the former governor’s own criticisms of Mr. Trump are relatively muted, he has urged conservative news media to be more critical.Calling on the conservative news media to hold Mr. Trump more to account allows Mr. DeSantis to appear to be doing so himself, if not directly. But he and his team have also taken to attacking Fox News, which was glowing in its coverage of Mr. DeSantis until it circled the wagons for Mr. Trump once the former president was first indicted in March 2023.When Mr. DeSantis was a House member, he became a star among conservatives through appearances on Fox News. He soon built a supportive network with other conservative news outlets.The New York Post, which, like Fox News, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, declared him “DeFuture” after his successful re-election effort in 2022, making him a target for some Trump allies who portrayed him as the conservative news media’s establishment pick. He had grown used to being defended by conservative news media in his culture war fights, and by an army of online allies who would defend him on social media.But that was then. Mr. DeSantis’s standing in the race for the Republican nomination eroded over many months. Fox News hosted Mr. Trump just this week for a live town hall from Iowa.Mr. DeSantis, who once constantly criticized the mainstream news media, has shifted gears and gives interviews to mainstream outlets like CNN and even left-leaning networks like MSNBC.He now finds himself floating attack lines against onetime allies as he fights for second place in the caucuses before bringing them on the trail. To that end, Mr. DeSantis used his line about Mr. Trump’s Praetorian Guard during an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” before deploying it again on Friday. More

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      DeSantis Adviser Continues Campaign’s Sharp Attack on Haley

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      A top adviser to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Friday accused Nikki Haley of “greed” as a candidate, saying that she’s trying to damage him to help former President Donald J. Trump in the Iowa caucuses.The comments from David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, came at an event hosted by Bloomberg News on Friday in downtown Des Moines, as the blizzard buffeting the city forced the campaign to cancel some events later in the day — though Mr. Polyansky said that Mr. DeSantis’s ground game was best equipped for the brutal weather barreling.He was joined by the campaign’s spokesman, Andrew Romeo, and its pollster, Ryan Tyson, but he did most of the talking. He said that Ms. Haley is running in Iowa to draw votes toward Mr. Trump and siphon them away from Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Polyansky also repeated Mr. DeSantis’s claim that Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, is running to be Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential pick, and criticized her for not ruling out joining a Trump ticket.Her donors’ dollars “are essentially in-kind contributions to Donald Trump,” he said. “Competition is trying to win. Competition isn’t trying to help one of your opponents,” he said.Later that day, the DeSantis campaign announced that Mr. DeSantis planned to fly straight from Iowa to South Carolina, Ms. Haley’s home state, after the caucuses, to hold a surprise event there on Jan. 16, his campaign said. He will then proceed to New Hampshire, which votes on Jan. 23, for a CNN town hall that evening. The news was first reported by The Associated Press. Although he is trailing in the polls there, Mr. DeSantis’s decision would seem to be a shot at Ms. Haley, as well as a signal to Mr. Trump that he intends to stay in the race. “We hope Donald Trump is ready for a long, scrappy campaign,” Andrew Romeo, the DeSantis campaign’s communications director, said in a statement.Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for Ms. Haley, said that Mr. DeSantis would “say anything to distract from his flailing campaign” after “burning through $150 million in Iowa and losing half his support in the polls.” She added, “Nikki is the only Trump alternative candidate with the resources and momentum to go the distance.”Mr. DeSantis has been bludgeoned by ads from both Mr. Trump’s world and Ms. Haley’s. But Mr. Trump’s team has also aired attack ads against Ms. Haley.Mr. DeSantis has been battling to hold onto second place in a state that he had once banked his candidacy on and in which aides had predicted privately last fall that he would win easily. Mr. Polyansky described the campaign as “joyful,” and said the candidate and the team are having “fun.”He declined to answer when the campaign last conducted a poll. Mr. Tyson, seated two seats away from him, also answered few questions.Mr. Polyansky insisted that the volunteer operation and the work by the DeSantis team — whose field operation has been conducted mostly by a super PAC, Never Back Down — would be critical if temperatures are below zero, as expected, on Monday. But he also said that he could not predict the turnout.“I don’t know how to measure it anymore, I don’t,” he said. The Trump team, he added, claims “they’ve got a great organization and maybe they do.”He added, “We’ll find out on Monday night.”Mr. Polyansky maintained that Mr. DeSantis planned to remain in the race through South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 24.He also said that Mr. DeSantis, who has been criticized even among conservatives for not taking a fight more directly to Mr. Trump, has been going straight at the front-runner for months. Yet Mr. Polyansky’s toughest attacks during the Bloomberg meeting focused on Ms. Haley.Mr. Tyson, a long-serving adviser to Mr. DeSantis, was asked Friday what happened to his camp after the Florida governor’s re-election victory last year, when he had seemed poised to potentially overtake Mr. Trump.“I don’t really have an answer for that,” Mr. Tyson said. When asked if he wished that Mr. DeSantis had waited until 2028 to run for president, he said that he stood by Mr. DeSantis.“I don’t have any second thoughts on that,” Mr. Tyson said.He added, “Doing this second-guessing thing, I just don’t feel is appropriate for me,” during what he described as an “unprecedented atmosphere.” And he said: “I don’t think that’s helpful.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Court Papers Offer Glimpse of Trump’s Defense in Classified Documents Case

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      The former president’s lawyers may question whether the documents he took from the White House were related to national defense and whether the country’s security was damaged.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump on Friday told the federal judge overseeing his prosecution on charges of mishandling classified documents that they intended to ask the government for new information, including assessments of any damage to national security.The lawyers also told the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, that they planned to ask prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, for additional information about how the documents at issue were related to national defense — a requirement of the Espionage Act, one of the statutes that Mr. Trump has been accused of violating. In addition, they said they wanted “tracking information” concerning the classified records.Mr. Trump’s legal team is poised to make the requests on Tuesday, when it files motions asking for additional discovery evidence. This is a standard part of the pretrial process in which the defense seeks to get as much information about the case out of the government as it can. Discovery motions often indicate how lawyers intend to attack charges before a trial begins or how they plan to defend against them once the case goes in front of a jury.The papers filed on Friday suggest Mr. Trump may be planning to attack the multiple Espionage Act counts he is facing by, among other things, questioning whether the documents he took from the White House were actually related to national defense. They also suggest he may seek to downplay how damaging their removal from the White House was to the country’s security.The papers themselves were not discovery motions, but rather a more simple request to use more pages than normal when the motions are due next week. But they did mention the broad categories of information that Mr. Trump’s legal team will seek.Mr. Smith’s team filed its own set of court papers on Friday, telling Judge Cannon that they intended to call several F.B.I. agents to testify at trial concerning data extracted from cellphones and other devices seized from Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the case. They are Walt Nauta, a personal aide who served the former president at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, and Carlos De Oliveira, Mar-a-Lago’s property manager.Some of the data, the papers said, will be used to track for the jury the movements of Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira during key moments of the investigation. Both men have been charged along with Mr. Trump in a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to retrieve the classified materials.Mr. Smith also told Judge Cannon about some expert witnesses who will testify about classified material, but that section of the filing was submitted under seal.Until the two sets of papers were filed on Friday, the classified documents case has been relatively quiet in recent weeks and attention has been focused on the other case Mr. Smith has brought against Mr. Trump — one accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. Last week, Mr. Trump asked a federal appeals court in Washington to toss out the election interference charges, arguing that he was immune to them because they arose from actions he took while in office.The documents case has largely been bogged down in arguments involving a host of classified materials discovered or generated during the investigation that Mr. Smith’s prosecutors believe Mr. Trump should not have access to as part of the discovery process. Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded with a highly unusual request to see a motion that prosecutors filed under seal to Judge Cannon explaining their reasons for keeping that material from Mr. Trump.The case is headed toward an inflection point on March 1, when Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss when the trial will begin. It is currently set to start on May 20, but late last year Judge Cannon expressed concern that the proceeding might “collide” with the election interference trial, which is set to begin in early March in Washington but could well be delayed.Finding time for all four of Mr. Trump’s criminal trials — there are two more, in New York City and Atlanta — has been a logistical headache. The proceedings need to be scheduled not only in relation to each other, but also against the backdrop of an increasingly busy presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is the current front-runner to become the Republican nominee.Mr. Trump has consistently sought to delay the trials, hoping he can postpone them until after the election is decided. If he can pull that off and win the race, he could seek to have the federal charges against him dropped and could try to complicate the efforts of local prosecutors to bring him to trial while he is in office. More

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      This Year’s Iowa Caucuses are Ice-Cold

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      And it’s not just the sub-zero temperatures.It’s the Friday before Caucus Day, and in any other year, Iowa would be humming: candidates racing across the state, answering questions in living rooms, coffee shops and high school gyms. Last-minute get-out-the-vote speeches. Volunteers knocking on doors and handing out leaflets on street corners and in shopping malls.Not this year. Iowa was shut down today, under the threat of a worst-in-a-decade forecast of blinding blizzards and bitter cold. The high temperatures of zero predicted earlier this week now seem positively toasty, compared with what is promised for the days and nights ahead.Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, soldiered out for one event Friday morning before throwing in the shovel, so to speak. Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, scratched her in-person schedule, moving the campaign from living rooms to Zoom. Donald Trump is due here on Saturday; stay tuned.“This is about the worst weather I remember for the Iowa caucuses,” said Gordon Fischer, a former Democratic Party state leader, who has lived in Iowa for 40 years.It was a suitably desultory ending for what has turned into a desultory caucus. Even before the blizzard landed on top of Iowa, the campaign was lower in energy or suspense than any I can recall over some 30 years of covering caucuses.In a state where caucus observers were already scrapping for something to speculate about — and where hundreds of out-of-town political reporters are trapped in local hotels with no candidate events to cover — the misery of the weather has added a welcome bit of uncertainty.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