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      Chinese Influence Campaign Pushes Disunity Before U.S. Election, Study Says

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      A long-running network of accounts, known as Spamouflage, is using A.I.-generated images to amplify negative narratives involving the presidential race.A Chinese influence campaign that has tried for years to boost Beijing’s interests is now using artificial intelligence and a network of social media accounts to amplify American discontent and division ahead of the U.S. presidential election, according to a new report.The campaign, known as Spamouflage, hopes to breed disenchantment among voters by maligning the United States as rife with urban decay, homelessness, fentanyl abuse, gun violence and crumbling infrastructure, according to the report, which was published on Thursday by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization in London.An added aim, the report said, is to convince international audiences that the United States is in a state of chaos.Artificially generated images, some of them also edited with tools like Photoshop, have pushed the idea that the November vote will damage and potentially destroy the country.One post on X that said “American partisan divisions” had an image showing President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump aggressively crossing fiery spears under this text: “INFIGHTING INTENSIFIES.” Other images featured the two men facing off, cracks in the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and terminology like “CIVIL WAR,” “INTERNAL STRIFE” and “THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.”The campaign’s artificially generated images, some of them also edited with tools like Photoshop, have pushed the idea that the November vote will damage and potentially destroy America.via XWe 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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      Haley Trails Trump by 36 Points in South Carolina, New Poll Shows

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      A Winthrop University poll released Wednesday shows Nikki Haley losing badly in South Carolina, her home state, with a little more than a week before the state’s Republican primary.Nearly two-thirds of likely Republican primary voters, 65 percent, said they supported former President Donald J. Trump, and only 29 percent said they supported Ms. Haley. Those numbers are very close to the average results of recent polls of South Carolina.After receiving 19 percent of the caucus vote in Iowa and 43 percent of the primary vote in New Hampshire, Ms. Haley has rested her argument for her campaign’s viability on the premise that she may not be beating Mr. Trump yet, but she is gaining ground. In an interview with NBC last month, she said of her performance in South Carolina, “I don’t think that necessarily has to be a win, but it certainly has to be better than what I did in New Hampshire, and it certainly has to be close.”The poll’s fine print was also bad for Ms. Haley: Only 49 percent of registered voters, including Republicans and Democrats, said they had a favorable opinion of her, down from 59 percent in the last Winthrop poll in November. The drop was sharpest among Republicans, 56 percent of whom had a favorable opinion of her, down from 71 percent in November.Mr. Trump’s approval rating among all registered voters was about the same as Ms. Haley’s, 48 percent. But he benefits from a huge 81 percent favorability rating among Republicans, and unlike Ms. Haley, he is getting more popular over time. In November, 45 percent overall and 77 percent of Republicans viewed him favorably.The poll was conducted from Feb. 2 to 10 among 1,717 adults registered to vote in South Carolina, 749 of whom said they were likely or certain to vote in the Republican primary. The margin of sampling error for the full poll is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points, and the margin of sampling error for likely primary voters is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.The timing of the poll means it predated Mr. Trump’s speech over the weekend, in which he suggested that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members whom he considered financially delinquent and insinuated that Ms. Haley’s husband, a major in the National Guard who is deployed to Djibouti, had left the country to escape her.Ms. Haley is trying to recover from an embarrassing result last week in the Nevada primary, where Mr. Trump was not on the ballot but she nevertheless got fewer votes than a “None of These Candidates” option did. She has hammered Mr. Trump for those comments.“The most harm he’s ever come across is whether a golf ball hits him on a golf cart, and you’re going to go and mock our men and women in the military?” she said on Monday. More

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      Trump Steps Up, Helping Biden Just When the President Needs Him

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      Donald J. Trump’s stunning statement supporting a Russian attack against “delinquent” NATO allies takes attention away from unwelcome questions about the president’s age and provides the Biden camp a useful contrast.If anyone gets a thank-you note from President Biden for helping get him out of a jam in recent days, it should probably be former President Donald J. Trump.Just when Mr. Biden was swamped by unwelcome questions about his age, his predecessor and challenger stepped in, rescuing him with an ill-timed diatribe vowing to “encourage” Russia to attack NATO allies that do not spend enough on their militaries.The stunner from Mr. Trump over the weekend not only drew attention away from the president’s memory problems, as detailed in a special counsel report, but also provided a convenient way for Mr. Biden’s defenders to reframe the issue: Yes, they could now say, the incumbent may be an old man who sometimes forgets things, but his challenger is both aging and dangerously reckless.It was not the first time, nor likely will it be the last, that Mr. Trump has stepped up when an adversary was in trouble to provide an escape route with an ill-considered howler of his own. Mr. Trump’s lifelong appetite for attention has often collided with his evident best interest. For Mr. Biden, that may be the key to this year’s campaign, banking on his opponent’s inability to stay silent at critical moments and hoping that he keeps reminding voters why they rejected him in 2020.“There’s a saying that the enemy of your enemy is your friend,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who lost the party nomination that year to Mr. Trump. “Since Trump is his own worst enemy, he’s arguably Biden’s best friend.”That does not mean that age is no longer a political liability for Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest president in American history and would be 86 at the end of a second term. While Mr. Trump is close behind him at 77, the special counsel’s characterization of the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” proved searing and damaging.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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      Trump Faces Supreme Court Deadline on Claim of Absolute Immunity

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      A federal appeals court gave the former president until Monday to ask the justices to pause its ruling while he pursues an appeal.Former President Donald J. Trump is expected to file a last-ditch effort on Monday in the Supreme Court to press his claim of total immunity from criminal prosecution.When a federal appeals court last week rejected the claim, it temporarily paused its ruling, saying it would return the case to the trial court on Monday, allowing Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to restart proceedings in the case that had been frozen during the appeal. But the appeals court added that it would extend the pause until the Supreme Court rules — if Mr. Trump asks the justices to intervene by filing an application for a stay with them by Monday.That makes it virtually certain that Mr. Trump will file such an application in the coming hours, meaning that the Supreme Court will soon be poised to determine whether and how fast his federal trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election will proceed.It has several options. It could deny a stay, which would restart the trial. It could grant a brief stay and then deny a petition seeking review, which would effectively reject Mr. Trump’s immunity argument and let the appeals court’s ruling stand.It could hear his appeal on a fast track, as it is doing in a separate case on Mr. Trump’s eligibility to hold office. Or it could hear the case on the usual schedule, which would most likely delay any trial past the election.Timing, in other words, is everything. Unless the justices move quickly, the trial could be pushed into the heart of the 2024 campaign, or even past the election.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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      Trump’s Carter Problems vs. Biden’s Reagan Possibilities

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      The low approval rating and various political headwinds for President Biden have invited comparisons with another first-term Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, and the challenges he faced running for re-election in 1980. Many Republicans are thinking about his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, bullish that Donald Trump also has what it takes to oust a flagging incumbent.It is true that the 2024 race is shaping up to be a 1980 replay of sorts, but with an important twist. The more significant comparisons could be between Mr. Trump and Mr. Carter and their difficulty in winning over voters and, even more, between Mr. Biden and Mr. Reagan and their attempts to address doubts about their age — which are flaring again for Mr. Biden.To be sure, Carter-Biden comparisons are real: Mr. Biden’s third-year job approval average was the lowest for a sitting president since Mr. Carter’s, and Americans were dissatisfied with the economy and with the direction of the country under both men.But what became increasingly clear throughout 1980 was that there was a ceiling on voter support for Mr. Carter. The electorate had already decided it didn’t want to give him a second term. Mr. Carter’s job approval at the end of March was close to his final 41 percent share of the vote in November.In this year’s race, it is Mr. Trump who closely resembles Mr. Carter in the most important ways, including his ceiling of political support.For one, the most galvanizing and divisive figures in 1980 and today were Mr. Carter and Mr. Trump. As with Mr. Carter, most voters have firm opinions about Mr. Trump. His ability to inspire his base is matched only by his ability to alienate the rest of the electorate — as evidenced by the Republican Party taking beatings in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections.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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      Trump Says He Gave NATO Allies Warning: Pay In or He’d Urge Russian Aggression

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that, while president, he told the leaders of NATO countries that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that had not paid the money they owed to the military alliance.Mr. Trump did not make clear whether he ever intended to follow through on such a threat or what that would mean for the alliance, but his comment at a campaign event in South Carolina — a variation of one he has made before to highlight his negotiation skills — is likely to cause concern among NATO member states, which are already very nervous about the prospect of a Trump return.Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would encourage Russian aggression against allies of the United States — for any reason — comes as Republicans in Congress have pushed back against more aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia, and as European officials have expressed concerns over possible Russian aggression on NATO’s Eastern side.Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, dismissed those warnings as “threat mongering” in an interview with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, that aired on Thursday. “We have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else,” Mr. Putin said.But he has also called on the United States to “make an agreement” to end the war in Ukraine by ceding Ukrainian territory to Russia, comments that were seen by some as an appeal to American conservatives to block further involvement in the war.Some European officials and foreign policy experts have said they are concerned that Russia could invade a NATO nation after its war with Ukraine concludes, fears that they say are heightened by the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to the presidency.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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      Trump Insinuates Haley’s Husband Deployed to Africa to Escape Her

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      Former President Donald J. Trump continued his aggressive attacks on Nikki Haley Saturday, insinuating at a rally in South Carolina that her husband, a National Guardsmen, left for a deployment in order to escape her.“What happened to her husband? Where is he?” Mr. Trump said to a crowd in Conway, S.C. “He’s gone.”He then paused, before adding suggestively: “He knew. He knew.”Mr. Trump’s comments, made in Ms. Haley’s home state two weeks before its Republican primary, are a stark turn in an escalating barrage of attacks on her as he looks to knock her out of contention in the Republican primary. Though he has for weeks criticized Ms. Haley’s political views and made vague swipes claiming she lacks a presidential temperament, he has refrained from making specific personal smears.Later in his speech in South Carolina, Mr. Trump — who for months has referred to Ms. Haley as “birdbrain” without offering an explanation — called her “brain dead” while criticizing her position in national polls.Ms. Haley’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but she posted a comment on X that referred to the absence of her husband, Michael, from the campaign trail.“Michael is deployed serving our country, something you know nothing about. Someone who continually disrespects the sacrifices of military families has no business being commander in chief,” she wrote.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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      Older Americans React to Special Counsel Report on Biden

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      President Biden’s age has once again become a talking point in national politics. Many older Americans agree that it’s an issue; others feel it’s insulting. Bill Murphy, an 80-year-old retired veterinarian in suburban Phoenix, sometimes blanks on names he could once summon with ease, so he has empathy for 81-year-old President Biden. But he winced when he watched Mr. Biden defend his mental sharpness at a news conference, only to mix up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico. Mr. Murphy, a Republican, believes Mr. Biden is not up to another term.Mary Meyer, an 83-year-old avid hiker and traveler who lives in the high desert north of Phoenix, took issue with a special counsel’s report that characterized him as elderly and forgetful — a similar assumption that strangers at the supermarket sometimes make about her capabilities. “I look at him as a peer,” said Ms. Meyer, who plans to vote for Mr. Biden. “I know what he’s capable of. I know it’s not as bad as everybody thinks.”To voters in their 70s and 80s, the renewed questions swirling around Mr. Biden’s age and fitness resonated in deeply personal ways. The special counsel report cleared him of criminal charges in his handling of classified documents but described him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”Some of Mr. Biden’s generational peers and supporters insisted the characterization was nothing more than a calculated political ploy to undercut his campaign, and play on perceived weakness. Many noted their own vibrant and busy lives, filled with mental and physical activity.The criticism of Mr. Biden as forgetful and incapable of serving echoed slights and discrimination they had felt. Others thought of their own struggles as they hit their 80s, and questioned any 80-year-old’s ability to lead the nation.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