Trump, Donald J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Conundrum of Covering Trump Lands at Univision’s Doorstep

      by

      The howls of protest against Univision began as soon as its interview with Donald J. Trump aired. A month later, they still haven’t stopped.To critics of Univision, the Nov. 9 interview — with its gentle questioning and limited follow-ups from the interviewer, Enrique Acevedo — has confirmed their fears since the traditionally left-leaning network merged with the Mexican broadcaster Televisa early last year in a $4.8 billion deal. The network, they said, was taking a troubling turn to the right under its new owners, who have a reputation for cultivating relationships with leading politicians in Mexico, where Televisa has been a feared kingmaker for more than 50 years.Last-minute maneuvering at Univision raised further suspicions. Just hours before the interview aired, the network reversed its invitation to the Biden campaign to run ads during the hourlong special with Mr. Trump, citing what appeared to be a new company policy. Scarcely an hour later, Univision abruptly canceled an interview with the Biden campaign’s director of Hispanic media.But the reason for changes at the network can’t be explained by political considerations alone, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former Univision journalists and executives, including Mr. Acevedo and Daniel Coronell, the network’s president of news.Hispanic media is proving susceptible to the same upheaval straining other American newsrooms. Spanish-language television news audiences are in decline, compounding pressure from an uneven economy. And the dilemma over how to report on Mr. Trump — should he get exhaustive, minimal or even no coverage? — is vexing Univision just as it is its English-language counterparts.Univision executives have said they are making a pivot toward the center — a strategy that reflects the split political preferences of the Hispanic electorate and the need to broaden their audience.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Hunter Biden Charged With Evading Taxes on Millions From Foreign Firms

      by

      The Justice Department charged President Biden’s son after a long-running and wide-ranging investigation with substantial political repercussions.A federal grand jury charged Hunter Biden on Thursday with a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses, the second indictment against him this year and a major new development in a case Republicans have made the cornerstone of a possible impeachment of President Biden.Mr. Biden, the president’s son, faces three counts each of evasion of a tax assessment, failure to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return, according to the 56-page indictment — a withering play-by-play of personal indulgence with potentially enormous political costs for his father.The charges, filed in California, came five months after he appeared to be on the verge of a plea deal that would have avoided jail time and potentially granted him broad immunity from future prosecution stemming from his business dealings. But the agreement collapsed, and in September, he was indicted in Delaware on three charges stemming from his illegal purchase of a handgun in 2018, a period when he used drugs heavily and was prohibited from owning a firearm.The tax charges have always been the more serious element of the inquiry by the special counsel, David C. Weiss, who began investigating the president’s son five years ago as the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Delaware. Mr. Weiss was retained when President Biden took office in 2021.Mr. Biden “engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” Mr. Weiss wrote.“Between 2016 and Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant spent this money on drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes,” he added.If convicted, he could face a maximum of 17 years in prison, Justice Department officials said.Read the Tax Indictment Against Hunter BidenThe president’s son was indicted on nine counts accusing him of evading federal taxes on millions of dollars he has made in his work with foreign companies.Read Document 56 pagesThe charges, while serious, were far less explosive than ones pushed by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans, who have been angry with the department for failing to find wider criminal wrongdoing by the president’s son and family.But the failure of Mr. Biden’s lawyers to reach a new settlement after talks with Mr. Weiss fell apart has now subjected Mr. Biden to the perils of two criminal proceedings in two jurisdictions, with unpredictable outcomes.Many of the facts laid out in Thursday’s indictment were already widely known, and the litany of Mr. Biden’s actions tracks closely with a narrative he drafted with prosecutors in the plea deal that collapsed over the summer under the withering scrutiny of a federal judge in Delaware.Prosecutors said that he “subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company,” Owasco PC, by withdrawing millions from the coffers that he used to subsidize “an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.” They also accused him of taking false business deductions.Mr. Weiss called out Mr. Biden for failing to pay child support and his reliance on associates, including the Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris, to pay his way. Prosecutors included a chart that tracked the cash he siphoned from Owasco’s coffers — $1.6 million in A.T.M. withdrawals, $683,212 for “payments — various women,” nearly $400,000 for clothing and accessories, and around $750,000 for restaurants, health and beauty products, groceries, and other retail purchases.Throughout the document, Mr. Weiss presented an unflattering split-screen of Mr. Biden, scooping up millions in income and gifts from friends while stubbornly refusing to pay his taxes. That pattern even persisted into 2020, after he had borrowed money to pay off his tax liabilities from the previous few years, prosecutors wrote.“Defendant spent $17,500 each month, totaling approximately $200,000 from January through Oct. 15, 2020, on a lavish house on a canal in Venice Beach, Calif.,” they wrote, adding that “the I.R.S. stood as the last creditor to be paid.”In a statement, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Biden’s lawyer, said Mr. Weiss had “bowed to Republican pressure” and accused him of reneging on their previous agreement. He said the special counsel had not responded to his request for a meeting a few days ago to discuss the details of the case.“If Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” he said.The indictment includes a more detailed description of Mr. Biden’s activities and tangled business deals than the government had previously made public. Taken in its totality, the filing paints a damning portrait of personal irresponsibility by a man who leveraged his last name to finance his vices while willfully ignoring his tax liabilities.The Hunter Biden case sits at the crowded intersection of America’s colliding political and legal systems. There is now a very real prospect that President Biden’s son will be defending himself in two federal criminal trials during a presidential election year — as former President Donald J. Trump, his father’s likely opponent, confronts the possibility of two federal criminal trials in his classified documents and election interference cases.The additional charges come on the cusp of a vote by the Republican-led House to formalize its impeachment inquiry into President Biden, which is largely based on unsubstantiated allegations that he benefited from his son’s lucrative consulting work for companies in Ukraine and China.Republican leaders in the House released draft text of a procedural impeachment resolution against President Biden on Thursday, just hours before word of the new charges started to percolate through official Washington. It is not clear what effect the indictment will have on their inquiry.The indictment contains no reference to President Biden. But prosecutors pointed out that Hunter Biden’s compensation from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, dropped from $1 million a year in 2016, when his father was still in office, to $500,000 in March 2017, two months after he left office.The decision to indict the president’s troubled son was an extraordinary step for Mr. Weiss, who was named a special counsel in August by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.The Justice Department has been investigating Mr. Biden since at least 2018. Despite examining an array of matters — including Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, ties to oligarchs and business deals in China — the investigation ultimately narrowed to questions about his taxes, like his failure to file his 2017 and 2018 returns on time, and the gun purchase.The special counsel, David C. Weiss, has been investigating an array of issues surrounding Hunter Biden.Will Oliver/EPA, via ShutterstockThe investigation appeared to have come to a conclusion in June when Mr. Weiss and Mr. Biden’s lawyers announced that Mr. Biden would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges.As part of the deal, prosecutors charged Mr. Biden with lying about whether he was using drugs but, under a so-called pretrial diversion agreement, agreed not to prosecute Mr. Biden on that. In return, Mr. Biden agreed to admit that he had used drugs at the time of the purchase and the deal remained contingent on him remaining drug free for the next two years.But the deal abruptly imploded.At a hearing in July, Judge Maryellen Noreika of the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., sharply questioned elements of the deal, telling the two sides repeatedly that she had no intention of being “a rubber stamp.”One objection centered on a provision that would have offered Mr. Biden broad insulation against further prosecution on matters under scrutiny during the federal inquiry. Mr. Weiss’s prosecutors and Mr. Biden’s lawyer at the time, Christopher J. Clark, disagreed on whether that shielded him from being prosecuted in connection with his foreign business dealings.The other objection had to do with the diversion program on the gun charge, under which the judge would play a role in determining whether Mr. Biden was meeting the terms of the deal.Judge Noreika said she was not trying to sink the agreement, but to strengthen it by ironing out ambiguities and inconsistencies. But by the end, the sides had splintered, prosecutors filed paperwork indicating they would proceed with a prosecution and the embattled Mr. Weiss requested to be named special counsel, which requires him to file a report at the conclusion of the investigation.Since taking control of the House in January, top Republicans have used their new investigative power to push the narrative that the president has been complicit in an effort engineered by Hunter Biden to enrich his family by profiting from their positions of power, especially through business and investment transactions abroad.The investigation has become a central focus of House Republicans, and of Mr. Trump, who has seized upon it as a counter to his own legal woes. Earlier this year, two former I.R.S. agents who worked on the investigation testified before a House committee that they had been discouraged from fully investigating interactions of Hunter Biden and his father, and that Mr. Weiss had complained that he did not have the authority to expand the investigation to other jurisdictions.Mr. Weiss denied those claims.On Thursday, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chairman of the House oversight committee, credited the “two brave I.R.S. whistle-blowers” for forcing Mr. Weiss to abandon plea negotiations and file charges.“The Department of Justice got caught in its attempt to give Hunter Biden an unprecedented sweetheart plea deal,” Mr. Comer said in a statement, adding that the men should be applauded “for their courage to expose the truth.”Luke Broadwater More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Chris Christie, Fresh Off Feisty Debate, Courts Voters in New Hampshire

      by

      Mr. Christie rejoined the campaign trail, energized by a debate performance in which he seized the spotlight with attacks on Mr. Trump and his rivals.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey returned to New Hampshire on Thursday for a series of campaign appearances that quickly became more like a victory lap after his performance in the third Republican Party debate.In a series of stops at universities, Mr. Christie told war stories about his moments in the debate spotlight, offering a highlights reel of his zingers against his opponents. Mr. Christie, who has faced calls to exit the race from some donors and strategists, won praise for his performance on the stage, particularly his series of scathing attacks against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur.Speaking to students at Keene State College in the western part of the state, Mr. Christie recounted with visible glee a shouting match with Mr. DeSantis, who dodged a question on Mr. Trump’s fitness to be president. Mr. DeSantis, he implied, was eager to quickly move past the question. Mr. Christie said that he wouldn’t allow it.“All he’s looking to do is for the red light in front of us to come on, which means he could stop,” Mr. Christie said, adding, “When the light goes on, he stops and he lets out a sigh of relief, like, Oh my God, thank God it’s over. But it wasn’t, because there’s another living human being onstage. And I said, ‘He doesn’t answer the question.’”Mr. Christie cast the debate as a crucial moment in a race that is heading into the final stages before votes are cast in January. “I’m telling you right now, I’m gonna be the last person standing against Donald Trump,” he said. “There’s gonna be no place for him to hide. And then you’re gonna be more entertained than you’ve ever been in your entire life.”Mr. Christie is widely trailing his rivals, sitting at third place in polls in New Hampshire. He has staked his candidacy on a full-throated attack against Mr. Trump but has struggled to find an audience among Republican primary voters for that message. He seized the opportunity onstage Wednesday, painting Mr. Trump as one step away from being a felon and attacking the other Republican presidential candidates for their reluctance to criticize the former president.In an interview, Mr. Christie said he was personally offended by Mr. Ramaswamy’s attacks on Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, as being corrupt, unintelligent and inauthentic.“Who would think that somebody would be enough of a jackass to say that Nikki Haley was not as smart as his 3-year-old son,” Mr. Christie said in an interview. “When I heard that, I have to tell you the truth, I was just like, I’m not gonna let him get away with that.”Whether his energetic performance could give Mr. Christie an opportunity to make gains among voters who are most sympathetic to his anti-Trump crusade remains to be seen.Mr. Christie, gesturing below, has trailed his rivals for most of the campaign, and he has been the most vocal critic of former President Donald J. Trump among the Republican field.Sophie Park for The New York TimesAt Franklin Pierce University, Mr. Christie asked for the votes of faculty members and students in attendance — even high schoolers, some too young to cast a ballot in the primary in January.“I urge you to register and get involved. But I’ve got to give you a reason to get involved,” Mr. Christie said.Mr. Christie talked up his policy priorities, including increasing treatment options for people with mental health issues, addressing the opioid epidemic and cutting spending to reduce inflation.Yet, even among a group that tends to tilt Democratic, Mr. Christie faced heckles and criticism. In his appearances, Mr. Christie embraced conservative positions that have not typically energized college students. He did not endorse banning semiautomatic rifles or broadly forgiving student debt. He told a young audience at Keene State College that he is “an unabashed and complete parental rights advocate” when it comes to the issue of transgender youth.As he addressed a packed room in a student hall at Keene State College, protesters outside bearing signs supporting abortion, immigration and Palestine jeered him — dancing, playing music and occasionally banging on the glass windows behind him. One member of the audience tried to use the last question of the town hall to ask why Mr. Christie wears his pants so high.“You know, that’s an example of one of the reasons that political candidates are reluctant at times to come to college campuses,” Mr. Christie said, declining to answer the question.Still, he found some supporters among the packed rooms. Allison Keyson, 19, a student at Keene State College, said she was torn between supporting Mr. Christie and Ms. Haley.“His career is pretty inspiring to me. It’s kind of what I would like to do. I’m gonna get into law, and I would like to go into politics as well,” Ms. Keyson, a registered independent, said. “He is definitely an inspiring candidate.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Likening Nikki Haley to Clinton, Ads From Pro-DeSantis Super PAC Fall Short

      by

      The claims by a super PAC that backs Gov. Ron DeSantis comparing Nikki Haley to Hillary Clinton are misleading.In Republican politics, being likened to a prominent Democrat like Hillary Clinton may well be among the highest of insults.Some G.O.P. presidential hopefuls and their allies are seizing on that comparison to denounce Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who has gained momentum in the primary race. During the Republican debate in Alabama on Wednesday, for example, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy criticized Ms. Haley for giving “foreign multinational speeches like Hillary Clinton.”In particular, though, supporters of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida have leveraged that line of attack, including in advertisements by a pro-DeSantis super PAC, Fight Right. But the ads trying to tie Ms. Haley to Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state, make claims that are misleading.Here’s a fact-check of some of those claims.WHAT WAS SAID“We know her as Crooked Hillary, but to Nikki Haley, she’s her role model, the reason she ran for office.”— Fight Right in an advertisementWe 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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump on Trial: The Looming Legal and Political Collision

      by

      The former president’s trial in one of his four criminal cases is scheduled for early March, putting his legal drama and the race for the White House on an unprecedented trajectory.In the next few months, as the weather warms in Washington, something remarkable could happen in the city’s federal courthouse: Donald J. Trump could become the first former president in U.S. history to sit through a trial as a criminal defendant.The trial, based on charges that Mr. Trump conspired to overturn the 2020 election, is scheduled to start in early March. And while the date could change, it is likely that a jury will sit in judgment of Mr. Trump before the 2024 election — perhaps even before the Republican Party meets in Milwaukee in July for its nominating convention.Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican nomination and is facing 91 felony charges in four separate cases. Putting him on trial either before the convention or during the general election would potentially lead to a series of events that have never been seen before in the annals of American law and politics.It would almost certainly fuse Mr. Trump’s role as a criminal defendant with his role as a presidential candidate. It would transform the steps of the federal courthouse into a site for daily impromptu campaign rallies. And it would place the legal case and the race for the White House on a direct collision course, each one increasingly capable of shaping the other.Throughout it all, Mr. Trump would almost certainly seek to turn the ordinarily sober courtroom proceedings into fodder he could use to influence public opinion and gain any advantage he can in a presidential race unlike any other.“There is no useful precedent for this — legally, politically — in any dimension that you want to analyze it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and F.B.I. official. “The turbulence is particularly dangerous because if Mr. Trump is convicted, he has set the stage for a large portion of the population to reject the jury’s verdict. As part of that, it is also his call to arms, and so there are other dangers that attend to his rhetoric.”The expectations of how a Trump trial would unfold before the election are based on interviews with people close to the former president. Already, Mr. Trump has sought to capitalize on the New York attorney general’s fraud case against him and his company. In that case, now underway in a Manhattan courtroom, Mr. Trump has shown up when he didn’t have to and has addressed reporters repeatedly. At the Washington trial, there will surely be enormous security, not only because of Mr. Trump’s status as a former president, but also because the event could become a flashpoint for conflict. There has been no violence during Mr. Trump’s various arraignments, when law enforcement officials had feared the worst.Still, there are some variables at play that could push the trial in Washington until after the election.Mr. Trump’s lawyers are planning to appeal a decision last week by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is presiding over the election case, to deny his sweeping claims that he enjoys absolute immunity from the indictment because it covers actions he took while he was president. That appeal, on a question that has never been fully tested, could end up in front of the Supreme Court, further delaying the case even if prosecutors ultimately win the argument on the merits.But despite such time-buying tactics, Mr. Trump’s legal team is cautiously preparing for a trial in the late spring or early summer. While the other three cases in which Mr. Trump is facing charges are much likelier to be pushed off until after Election Day, the former president’s team believes Judge Chutkan is intent on keeping the proceeding she is overseeing moving ahead.Mr. Trump has already turned his legal travails into a campaign message that doubles as a lucrative online fund-raising tool. But his attempts to reap political benefit from his prosecutions and to use his legal proceedings as a platform for his talking points about victimhood and grievance are likely to only intensify if he is actually on trial, in the nation’s capital, in the middle of the 2024 presidential cycle.Merchandise alluding to Mr. Trump’s criminal cases at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, in October.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThere is no evidence that President Biden has meddled in any of the Trump prosecutions. Still, people close to Mr. Trump are planning to exploit the situation by falsely claiming to voters that Mr. Biden is a “socialist” leader directly seeking to imprison his political rival. One of those people, who was not authorized to speak publicly, suggested that this message could resonate especially powerfully with Hispanic voters, some of whom have family members who have suffered under dictatorial regimes in Latin America.When he is in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom, Mr. Trump is likely to be fairly well-behaved, constrained by his lawyers and by the federal rules of criminal procedure. He is unlikely to say much at all under Judge Chutkan’s supervision. And his silence inside the courtroom may feel all the quieter given the noise he is likely to make outside it in front of the television cameras that will surely await him every day.Even now, Mr. Trump has been engaging in a fusillade of daily attacks not only against the election case in Washington but also against his three other criminal cases — as well as his civil fraud trial in Manhattan.He has tried to blur all four cases together in the public’s mind as one giant “witch hunt,” yoking them to previous investigations into him. He has assailed the judges, prosecutors and witnesses involved in the cases, leveraging moments when gag orders against him have been temporarily lifted. He has also mounted a sustained publicity blitz, comparing himself to Nelson Mandela while portraying the indictments against him as retaliatory strikes by his political opponents, including Mr. Biden.This sort of spin and vitriol is only likely to increase when crowds of reporters await Mr. Trump’s exit from Judge Chutkan’s court each day.Mr. Trump’s allies expect he will hold news conferences outside the courthouse, seeking to maximize media coverage and hoping to have cameras capture his daily motorcade departures, likely to the airport to fly back to New York so he can sleep in his own bed.The trial and the enormous publicity that surrounds it could also offer Mr. Trump an unmatched opportunity to communicate to the American public without anyone providing an effective rebuttal.The gag order in Washington does not preclude Mr. Trump from attacking the trial in general, and federal prosecutors are barred by their code of ethics from speaking about a case that is in process. That means the former president, who has no compunction about lying, is likely to be the only person directly involved in the proceeding talking about it daily on television and social media.“The reality of the ethical laws as they pertain to prosecutors is that Trump is going to continue to have a pathway to rail against the indictment and trial for all the reasons that he’s done in the past and will do in the future, essentially unfiltered and unlimited — the prosecutors won’t,” said Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the former Manhattan district attorney whose office spent years investigating Mr. Trump’s finances and business dealings.“There’s a significant imbalance in the ability of prosecutors to comment in real time about the evidence and the case.”A coalition of news organizations has asked Judge Chutkan to televise the proceedings and Mr. Trump has joined in the request. But that is unlikely to happen given that federal rules prohibit news cameras from broadcasting from the courtroom. Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have opposed the request, saying that the former president would turn the proceeding into a “media event” with a “carnival atmosphere.”Mr. Smith’s team is unlikely to react at all to Mr. Trump’s provocations — at least in public — instead focusing its energies on winning the case inside the courtroom, said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Duke University.“There have always been circuslike cases and this could be the most circuslike case of them all,” Mr. Buell said. “But the strategy of the prosecutors in these cases is to not get distracted.”Mr. Buell suggested that the special counsel’s office might request special protections for members of the jury who will be under scrutiny in a way rarely seen in other criminal matters. He said prosecutors might ask for the jurors to be anonymous or to have federal marshals drive them to and from the courthouse every day.The selection of the jurors will be of paramount importance, with Mr. Trump’s best hopes of avoiding a conviction likely resting on a hung jury, according to former prosecutors and defense lawyers. Given the demographics of Washington, D.C., the jury pool is likely to be racially diverse, but it is unclear how politically diverse it will be.Should he be convicted, it is unclear how quickly Mr. Trump would be sentenced. He will most likely file appeals. And the details of any sentence — when he would be punished and whether he would be sent to prison or ordered to serve home confinement — would all carry enormous significance and are likely to be litigated intensely.Even though Mr. Trump will try to shape public narratives about the trial, wall-to-wall coverage about it may not be entirely to his benefit.The trial is expected to feature a parade of witnesses, including many of his own lawyers and advisers who will testify under oath that he had been told in no uncertain terms that he lost the 2020 election. It is also likely to focus heavily on the role he played in stirring up the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.But even if Mr. Trump dominates the discussion about the trial on the airwaves, the slow and steady accumulation of evidence presented in the courtroom could serve as a counterbalance.“At trial, the prosecutors will present witnesses,” Mr. Vance said. “It becomes more balanced, and more powerful, when the trial is ongoing.” More

    • 50 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Why Fundamentalists Love Trump

      by

      I just finished reading Tim Alberta’s masterly new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It’s a powerful and emotionally resonant account of the transformation in evangelical politics that has brought us to the current moment: A godless man, Donald Trump, may now possess more devoted support from white evangelical Christians than any other president in the history of the United States. And most worrisome of all, that support is now disproportionately concentrated among the most churchgoing segment of the Republican electorate.One of the troubling aspects of the Trump era for me, as a churchgoing evangelical, has been watching the evolution of his support among white evangelicals. During the 2016 primaries, I took some solace in the fact that Trump’s support seemed to decline the more a voter went to church. According to the 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study, he received majority support from white evangelicals who seldom or never attended church, but he received barely over a third of the votes of white evangelicals who attended weekly.As we headed into the general election, a self-justifying narrative emerged. Countless churchgoing evangelicals told friends and neighbors that Trump had been their last choice among Republicans but that they had to vote for him against Hillary Clinton as the only pro-life option remaining.Soon enough, however, the churchgoing dynamic flipped. I noticed the change among people I knew before I saw it in the data. After Trump won, folks in the pews warmed up to him considerably, especially those who were most firmly ensconced in evangelical America. Most home-schooling families I knew became militantly pro-Trump. I watched many segments of Christian media become militantly pro-Trump. And I always noticed the same trend: the more fundamentalist the Christians, the more likely they were to be all in.Then the data started to confirm my observations. In 2018, Paul Djupe, a Denison University professor, and Ryan Burge, a statistician and associate professor at Eastern Illinois University, reported that Republican approval for Trump was positively correlated with church attendance: The more often people went to church, the more likely they were to strongly approve of Trump. By 2020, white evangelicals who attended church monthly or more were more likely to support Trump than evangelical voters who attended rarely or not at all.I’m certainly not arguing that all regular churchgoers are fundamentalists, but in my experience fundamentalists are virtually always regular churchgoers. To understand why they support Trump, it’s important to understand fundamentalism more broadly and to understand how Trump fits so neatly within the culture of fundamentalist Christianity.For some readers, that might be a head-spinning idea. How on earth could a secular, twice-divorced, philandering reality television star fit in neatly with fundamentalist Christians? It makes no sense until you understand that the true distinction between fundamentalism and mainstream beliefs isn’t what fundamentalists believe but how fundamentalists believe. As Richard Land, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “Fundamentalism is far more a psychology than a theology.” That’s why, for example, you can have competing Christian fundamentalisms, competing Muslim fundamentalisms and secular movements that possess fundamentalist characteristics.I grew up in a church that most would describe as fundamentalist, and I’ve encountered fundamentalism of every stripe my entire life. And while fundamentalist ideas can often be quite variable and complex, I’ve never encountered a fundamentalist culture that didn’t combine three key traits: certainty, ferocity and solidarity.Certainty is the key building block. The fundamentalist mind isn’t clouded by doubt. In fact, when people are fully captured by the fundamentalist mind-set, they often can’t even conceive of good-faith disagreement. To fundamentalists, their opponents aren’t just wrong but evil. Critics are derided as weak or cowards or grifters. Only a grave moral defect can explain the failure to agree.That certainty breeds ferocity. Indeed, ferocity — not piety — is a principal trait of every truly fundamentalist movement I’ve ever encountered. Ferocity is so valuable to fundamentalism that it can cover a multitude of conventional Christian sins. Defending Trump in 2016, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Dallas, an evangelical megachurch, explained, “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find. And I think that’s the feeling of a lot of evangelicals.”Alberta captures this rage well in his book. He tells a gut-wrenching anecdote about receiving a nasty note in 2019 at the funeral of his father, a pastor. After Alberta spoke at the service, he was handed the note from a member of the congregation condemning him as part of an “evil plot” to “undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States” and demanding that he seek absolution by investigating the “deep state.” This would be a strange message to direct at a journalist under any circumstance. But to do so at his father’s funeral is grotesque.Yet certainty and ferocity are nothing without solidarity. It’s the sense of shared purpose and community that makes any form of fundamentalism truly potent. There is an undeniable allure to the idea that you’re joining a community that has achieved an understanding of life’s mysteries or discovered a path to resolving injustice. As angry as fundamentalists may feel, at the same time, there is true joy among comrades in the foxhole — at least as long as they remain comrades.I’m reminded of an infamous quote by Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, regarding the necessity of loyalty. Explaining Trump’s hostility toward Ron DeSantis, Huckabee said, “I think there are two virtues — loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut.”Again, that’s not piety. It’s solidarity.When you recognize the psychology of fundamentalism, fundamentalist Christian enthusiasm for Trump makes considerably more sense. His fundamentalist supporters are certain that he is fulfilling a divine purpose. They are ferocious in their response to opponents, especially those Christians they believe to be weak or squishes. And they experience great joy in their motivated, activist solidarity.But the keys to fundamentalist success are also the source of its ultimate failure. Certainty, ferocity and solidarity can combine to create powerful social and political movements. They can have a steamrolling effect in institutions because their opponents — almost by definition — have less certainty, less ferocity and less solidarity.We’ve seen this phenomenon in both secular and religious spaces across the political spectrum. A small number of extremely confident and aggressive people can turn an organization upside down. Political activists who possess fundamentalist intensity can push through resistance — at least until their inherent intolerance creates sufficient backlash to trigger real opposition.That’s how fundamentalism fails. Certainty, which gives so much purpose, ultimately struggles in the face of complex realities. Ferocity, which allows fundamentalists to bully and intimidate opponents, also limits the ability to win converts. And solidarity, which creates community, can become stifling, as it encourages conformity and punishes those who raise good-faith questions.Why do so many fundamentalists love Trump? Because in his certainty, ferocity and demands of loyalty, he’s a far more culturally familiar figure than a person of restraint and rectitude such as the departing senator Mitt Romney, who has the piety of a true believer but does not possess the ferocity of the fundamentalist. Thus Romney was culturally out of step with the millions of Christians who wanted, in the words of Jeffress, “the meanest, toughest son of a gun” they could find.That’s why Trumpism, too, is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s engineered to destroy, not to build. The very characteristics that give it life also plant the seeds of its destruction. And so as we watch the continued marriage between Trumpism and fundamentalism dominate the right, the proper question isn’t whether fundamentalism will permanently remake American culture in its own image. Rather, it’s how much damage it will do before it collapses under the weight of its own rage and sin. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Seeks Freeze of Election Case as He Appeals Immunity Ruling

      by

      In an effort to delay the former president’s federal trial on charges of trying to overturn the election, his lawyers asked for a pause while they challenge the ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a federal judge on Wednesday to put the proceedings on hold in the case charging him with seeking to overturn the 2020 election as they appeal her recent ruling that he is not immune from prosecution.The request to freeze the case as the appeal goes forward was part of a long-planned strategy to delay any trial on the election interference charges from starting on schedule, in March.Mr. Trump’s legal team is hoping that a protracted appeal of the immunity issue, potentially to the Supreme Court, could result in the trial being pushed off until after the 2024 election is decided. Barring that, his lawyers hope to postpone the trial at least until after the Republican Party holds its nominating convention in Milwaukee in July.The way in which appealing the judge’s ruling has become entangled with Mr. Trump’s political calendar is typical of the way he has handled all four of the criminal cases he is facing as he mounts his third bid for the White House. He and his aides have made no secret that they believe his best shot at disposing of the four indictments against him is to be re-elected.While Mr. Trump has sought to slow down all of his cases, he has pursued the strategy most vigorously in the election case in Federal District Court in Washington, if only because it is likely to be the first to go before a jury.In an 11-page filing, Todd Blanche, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, told Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, that such a pause was “mandatory and automatic” now that Mr. Trump had served formal notice that he intends to challenge her ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.Mr. Blanche argued that Judge Chutkan no longer had control of the case and that jurisdiction over it had shifted to the appeals court. The expansive stay he requested would in essence stop the case in its tracks, pausing all of the deadlines that Judge Chutkan had already set for matters like pretrial motions, disclosures about defense trial strategies and jury selection.The appeal and the attempt to pause the case were triggered by a decision by Judge Chutkan late last week rejecting Mr. Trump’s sweeping claims that he could not be prosecuted on the election interference charges because they were based on actions he took while he was in the White House.In a ruling laying out a limited vision of presidential power, Judge Chutkan said that there was nothing in the law, the Constitution or American history suggesting the holder of the nation’s highest office was not bound by the federal penal code.“Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” she wrote.Most motions to dismiss an indictment cannot be challenged until after a defendant is convicted. But Mr. Trump was permitted to appeal Judge Chutkan’s decision on immunity because it hinged on the fundamental question of whether the charges should have been brought in the first place.“The Constitution protects presidents in their work to make sure laws are followed, especially as it relates to elections,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement. “As made clear in our appeal today, President Trump has absolute immunity from prosecution and litigation for carrying out his sworn and solemn duties as president.”Mr. Trump’s attempts to delay the election case will now depend on how quickly the appeals court decides to hear his challenge. The court’s next steps will be to lay out a schedule for written briefs to be filed and set a time for oral arguments.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, have made it clear in court papers that they were expecting Mr. Trump to mount an appeal on the immunity issue even before Judge Chutkan ruled against him. To keep things moving forward, they could ask the appeals court to decide the case on an expedited basis — but even that could take several weeks.If Mr. Trump loses his first bid to challenge the immunity ruling before a three-judge panel of the appeals court, he could try again in front of the entire court. His lawyers plan to continue their appeals all the way to the Supreme Court if they can, hoping that even if they lose, their efforts will eat up time.If Mr. Trump succeeds in pushing the trial until after the election and wins the race, he could have his attorney general simply toss the charges. But even if he manages only to delay the trial until the summer, it would still put Judge Chutkan in a tough position.She would then have to decide whether to hold the proceeding during the heart of the campaign season. Such a move would no doubt prompt furious outbursts from Mr. Trump, who would be obligated to be in the courtroom every day, not campaigning.Or she could defer to the political calendar and decide it was too fraught to put a presidential candidate on trial with the election looming. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      CNN Will Host Two GOP Debates in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2024

      by

      The announcement of the debates, planned for the days before each state’s nominating contest, comes as the Republican National Committee considers loosening its rules for the onstage clashes.CNN will hold two Republican presidential debates in Iowa and New Hampshire next month in the days leading up to those states’ nominating contests, the network said on Thursday.The announcement, made a day after the fourth debate this year, comes as the Republican National Committee weighs whether to loosen its rules and allow candidates to take part in debates that it does not sponsor. A spokesman for the committee, Keith Schipper, said on social media that it had not approved the CNN debates.The committee approved four debates this year, steadily raising the minimum thresholds for participation and pushing out lower-polling candidates.The current Republican front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, did not attend any of the debates. An adviser to his campaign said he did not plan to participate in the CNN debates.The Republican Party had suggested it might hold forums in January in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but multiple people involved in the process said those debates might no longer be sponsored by the party.Almost immediately on Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has staked his campaign’s success on a strong showing in Iowa, said he would participate in the debate there.That gathering will be held on Jan. 10 at Drake University in Des Moines, five days before the Iowa caucuses. The network will allow candidates to participate only if they have received at least 10 percent in three separate national or Iowa polls, with at least one poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers.The second debate is scheduled for Jan. 21 at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., two days before the New Hampshire primary election. The top three finishers in Iowa will be invited to participate. Otherwise, the criteria are similar to the Iowa debate. More