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      For Anti-Trump Republicans, It All Comes Down to New Hampshire

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      The old guard of the Republican Party has rallied around Nikki Haley ahead of New Hampshire’s primary, in a long-shot bid to stop the former president’s march to the nomination.The first-in-the-nation primary could be the last stand for the anti-Trump Republican.Since 2016, a shrinking band of Republican strategists, retired lawmakers and donors has tried to oust Donald J. Trump from his commanding position in the party. And again and again, through one Capitol riot, two impeachments, three presidential elections and four criminal indictments, they have failed to gain traction with its voters.Now, after years of legal, cultural and political crises that upended American norms and expectations, what could be the final battle of the anti-Trump Republicans won’t be waged in Congress or the courts, but in the packed ski lodges and snowy town halls of a state of 1.4 million residents.Ahead of New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday, the old guard of the G.O.P. has rallied around Nikki Haley, viewing her bid as its last, best chance to finally pry the former president from atop its party. Anything but a very close finish for her in the state, where moderate, independent voters make up 40 percent of the electorate, would send Mr. Trump on an all-but-unstoppable march to the nomination. The Trump opposition is outnumbered and underemployed. The former president’s polarizing style and hard-nosed tactics have pushed many Republicans who oppose him into early retirement and humiliating defeats, or out of the party completely. Yet, their long-running war against him has helped to frame the nominating contest around a central, and deeply tribal, litmus test: loyalty to 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?  More

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      Biden Campaign Sharpens Its Post-Roe Message: Abortion Is About Freedom

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      In events next week, the president and vice president will argue that abortion access is crucial to personal freedoms, and warn of what is at stake if Donald J. Trump is re-elected.President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will headline events next week centered around protecting abortion rights, throwing more heft behind an issue that has galvanized voters in the 18 months since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.On Monday, Ms. Harris will visit Wisconsin to begin a national tour focused on preserving access to reproductive health care as Republicans call for more restrictions. Then on Tuesday, she will join Mr. Biden at a rally for abortion rights in Virginia, where Democrats recently took control of the state legislature and have proposed to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution.Ms. Harris offered a preview of the administration’s election-year messaging to Americans when she visited “The View,” the most popular daytime talk show in the country.“We are not asking anyone to abandon their personal beliefs,” she said during an appearance on Wednesday, adding that “the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies.”The idea that preserving access to abortion is tantamount to preserving personal freedoms has been embraced by Biden administration officials, lawmakers and activists who hope it will energize a flagging base and draw independent voters into the fold. They also want to contrast the administration’s policies with the political peril that the Republican Party faces by embracing hard-line measures.“I start from the place that most Americans believe that women should have the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, including abortion, without government interference,” Senator Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, who traveled to the Iowa caucuses as a surrogate for Mr. Biden, said in an interview. (About 69 percent of voters think abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, according to a Gallup poll last year.)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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      Can the MAGA Shrew Be Tamed?

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      Maureen Dowd has a cold.Hmmm.Not quite the same ring as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Gay Talese’s legendary 1966 Esquire profile of the crooner.Nonetheless, I did catch a cold in arctic Des Moines. So on caucus night, I stayed in my hotel room watching TV and munching on Cheez-Its, flipping between wins and losses in Hollywood and Iowa.There wasn’t any custom Louis Vuitton on display in the frozen tundra of Iowa, but there were some parallels — beyond the abysmal turnout for both shows.The Emmys did a tribute to “The Sopranos” and James Gandolfini. Donald Trump, who loves to style himself as a tough mob don, facing down a RICO charge, recently bragged about a character reference he’d gotten from Sammy (the Bull) Gravano, once a hit man for John Gotti.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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      Donald Trump Isn’t Funny Anymore

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      In 1986, when I was a college student, I bristled every time I saw yet another fawning profile of a certain arrogant young real estate developer. The person of whom I speak is, of course, Donald Trump. As polarizing as he is now, Mr. Trump was then enjoying a press honeymoon — even Mike Wallace, the resident bulldog at CBS’s “60 Minutes,” went easy on him, breathlessly declaring in a 1985 profile, “He talks of millions the way most of us talk of nickels and dimes.” This repellent man needed to be knocked down a peg and I thought I knew of one effective way to do it: with jokes.So when I came across a fledgling satirical magazine, Spy, that articulated precisely what I was thinking, I was smitten. In its inaugural issue, Spy named Mr. Trump one of the “10 Most Embarrassing New Yorkers,” noting his tackiness, his shady tactics as a landlord and his “hustler-on-his-best-behavior manner.” Yes! My people!I was so smitten, in fact, that I cold-called the magazine’s office, offering myself up for a summer internship. I joined the staff full-time in 1989 and we continued to chronicle Mr. Trump’s offenses against taste and decency. We came up with a slew of epithets for him, including the one that stuck, “short-fingered vulgarian.” Then, as now, Mr. Trump was thin-skinned, and obsessed with his press coverage. He sent angry, threatening letters to Spy, which only heightened our joy.So you might think I’d revel in our current golden age of Trump mockery. When “Saturday Night Live” returns this week, we’re likely to see him incarnated by the comedian James Austin Johnson, who uncannily recreates Mr. Trump’s fragmentary locutions and deteriorating speaking voice as it whipsaws from a bellow to a gargle to a whisper.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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      Trump Confuses Haley and Pelosi, Accusing Rival of Jan. 6 Lapse

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday appeared to confuse Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi during a speech in New Hampshire, accusing Ms. Haley of failing to provide adequate security during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol and connecting her to the House committee that investigated it.Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations, has never served in Congress and was working in the private sector during the Capitol riot.On Friday night, Mr. Trump was in the middle of mocking Ms. Haley for the size of the crowds at her events, and criticizing the news media, when he pivoted to how he gave a speech in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the Capitol attack.“You know, when she comes here she gets like nine people, and the press never reports the crowds,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Haley, whose crowds have lately been, at the very least, in double digits.Then, he changed subjects. “You know, by the way, they never report the crowd on Jan. 6,” he said. “You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley.”Mr. Trump then repeated his frequent claim that the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack — including Mr. Trump’s actions that day — “destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence.”Then, he claimed that Ms. Haley was in charge of security that day, and that she and others had turned down his offer to send troops to the Capitol.“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” he said. (She was not.) “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”Mr. Trump, 77, often attacks President Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Mr. Biden is mentally unfit for office. “He can’t put two sentences together,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.”A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump has frequently tried to lay blame for the Jan. 6 riot with Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats. There is no evidence, however, that Mr. Trump ever offered to have troops deployed to the Capitol, or that Ms. Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, rejected him.At 3:52 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Haley reposted photos of besieged officials inside the Capitol, writing on Twitter, “An embarrassment in the eyes of the world and total sadness for our country. Wake up America.” More

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      Maine Secretary of State to Appeal Ruling on Her Decision to Exclude Trump From Ballot

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      Shenna Bellows said she intended to appeal the ruling by a state Superior Court judge that placed on hold her decision to exclude Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot.Maine’s top election official said on Friday she intended to appeal the ruling by a state Superior Court judge this week that placed on hold her decision to exclude former President Donald J. Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot.In a statement, the official, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, said she welcomed the guidance of the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to hear arguments on a similar case on Feb. 8. But in the meantime, she said, she will seek the input of Maine’s highest court.“I know both the constitutional and state authority questions are of grave concern to many,” Ms. Bellows wrote in a short statement on Friday. “This appeal ensures that Maine’s highest court has the opportunity to weigh in now, before ballots are counted, promoting trust in our free, safe and secure elections.”In a ruling late Friday, the chief justice of Maine’s highest court, Valerie Stanfill, described the lower court’s order as “generally not appealable.” She ordered Ms. Bellows to provide an explanation by Tuesday on why an appeal should be not dismissed.Ms. Bellows, a Democrat elected by the State Legislature, ruled on Dec. 28 that Mr. Trump did not qualify for the state ballot in Maine because he engaged in insurrection by encouraging the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The 14th Amendment disqualifies government officials who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office.Her decision made Maine the second state to bar him from the ballot, after a Colorado court reached the same conclusion. Similar ballot challenges have been filed in at least 35 states; many remain unresolved though the primary season is already underway.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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      Disdaining Haley, Trump Says She ‘Probably’ Won’t Be His Running Mate

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      Former President Donald J. Trump intensified his attacks against Nikki Haley on Friday, saying that she was not of presidential caliber and that, as a result, he was unlikely to choose her as his running mate.“She is not presidential timber,” Mr. Trump said at a campaign event in Concord, N.H. “Now, when I say that, that probably means that she’s not going to be chosen as the vice president.”Mr. Trump, known for off-the-cuff pronouncements that veer from his prepared remarks, continued by making it clear that his dismissal of Ms. Haley was not a fluke: “When you say certain things, it sort of takes them out of play, right?”Mr. Trump is well known for excoriating someone in one breath, and then reversing himself when it becomes politically or otherwise advantageous to do so. But his stance toward Ms. Haley, whom he appointed as his ambassador to the United Nations, has hardened as the New Hampshire primary approaches.Though Mr. Trump holds a wide lead over Ms. Haley in polls, she has narrowed the gap here in recent months. The Trump campaign is eyeing a decisive win in New Hampshire that could severely curtail her chances at winning the Republican nomination.On Friday, he again accused her of being supported primarily by Democrats, saying that “leftists” were spending millions on advertisements so they could “flood your airwaves with Nikki propaganda.”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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      Trump Falsely Claims Democrats Can Vote in New Hampshire’s GOP Primary

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      WHAT WAS SAID“Nikki Haley is counting on Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary.”— Former President Donald J. Trump during a New Hampshire rally WednesdayThis is false.Mr. Trump has falsely and repeatedly suggested in recent days that one of his Republican rivals, Nikki Haley, is counting on Democrats to win the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire next week. In fact, registered Democrats cannot vote in the state’s Republican primary — though voters who are not affiliated with a party can.During a rally on Wednesday in Portsmouth, N.H., Mr. Trump asked of the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who has endorsed Ms. Haley: “But why does he allow Democrats to vote in the Republican primary?”A day earlier, in Atkinson, N.H., Mr. Trump made similar claims. “As you know, Nikki Haley in particular is counting on the Democrats and liberals to infiltrate your Republican primary. You know that, that’s what’s happening. You have a group of people coming in that are not Republicans.”In New Hampshire, undeclared voters — often called simply independents — can choose to vote in either the Democratic or the Republican presidential primary, though not in both, as the New Hampshire secretary of state’s website explains. The voters become registered members of the party they select, though they can return to being an undeclared voter after the primary, if they want.But in order for registered Democrats to vote in the state’s Republican primary, they needed to have changed their party affiliation months ago: The deadline was Oct. 6.It is worth noting that these rules were in place in 2016, when Mr. Trump won New Hampshire’s primary during his first bid for president.Ms. Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, has been courting the state’s independent voters. On Friday, she pushed back on Mr. Trump’s claims and other attacks, accusing her former boss of pushing “too many lies.” More