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    On Jan. 6 Anniversary, Trump Repeats Lie That 2020 Election Was Stolen

    Three years to the day that supporters of Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, Mr. Trump said yet again that the mob had been acting “peacefully and patriotically.” He called for the release of people imprisoned for their actions that day, and he criticized the congressional committee that investigated the attack as “fake.”Speaking to crowds of several hundred people at two events on Saturday in Iowa, Mr. Trump,who faces criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, made only passing references to the riot, focusing much of his speeches instead on criticizing President Biden’s policies.But at his second event, Mr. Trump — who has repeatedly referred to the people serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack as “hostages” — called on Mr. Biden to free them. More than 1,200 people have been arrested in connection with the attack, 170 have been convicted of crimes at trial and more than 700 have pleaded guilty.“Release the J6 hostages, Joe,” Mr. Trump said in Clinton, Iowa. “Release them, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe.”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 Doesn’t Actually Speak for the Silent Majority

    I can’t fit everything that I think into a single piece, especially when I’m writing on deadline. My column this week, for example, was on the effort to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Although the piece is not exactly brief, it’s by no means exhaustive of my thoughts on the matter.There was one point in particular that I couldn’t quite fit into the flow. It concerns an assumption that, in my view, undergirds much of the discourse around Trump and his voters.It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”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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    Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024

    In dueling sets of speeches, Donald Trump and President Biden are framing the election as a battle for the future of democracy — with Mr. Trump brazenly casting Mr. Biden as the true menace.Rarely in American politics has a leading presidential candidate made such grave accusations about a rival: warning that he is willing to violate the Constitution. Claiming that he is eager to persecute political rivals. Calling him a dire threat to democracy.Those arguments have come from President Biden’s speeches, including his forceful address on Friday, as he hammers away at his predecessor. But they are also now being brazenly wielded by Donald J. Trump, the only president to try to overthrow an American election.Three years after the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Trump and his campaign are engaged in an audacious attempt to paint Mr. Biden as the true menace to the nation’s foundational underpinnings. Mr. Trump’s strategy aims to upend a world in which he has publicly called for suspending the Constitution, vowed to turn political opponents into legal targets and suggested that the nation’s top military general should be executed.The result has been a salvo of recriminations from the top candidates in each party, including competing events to mark Saturday’s third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol.The eagerness from each man to paint the other as an imminent threat signals that their potential rematch this year will be framed as nothing short of a cataclysmic battle for the future of democracy — even as Mr. Trump tries to twist the very idea to suit his own ends.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him — not America, not you,” Mr. Biden said Friday, speaking near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. “Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power.”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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    Is Trump Hell?

    These are the men that try The Times’s soul.With the disreputable Donald Trump challenging the disfavored President Biden, the 2024 race has become the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s witticism about fox hunting: “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”Bleeding young and nonwhite voters, the president finally heeded Democrats urging him to “get out there,” as Nancy Pelosi put it, and throw some haymakers at Trump.Biden flew to Pennsylvania on Friday to visit Valley Forge and make a pugnacious speech invoking an earlier moment when we were fighting against despotism and clinging to a dream of a democracy.In a discontented winter during the American Revolution, George Washington tried to inspire his downtrodden troops at Valley Forge by having Thomas Paine’s “The American Crisis” read to them.“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote, adding, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”As the voting to determine the next president gets underway, it is clear that the tyrannical Trump won’t be easily conquered. And that is our hell.“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said in his speech, making a forceful case that America, which dumped the mad King George, should not embrace the mad King Donald.If we bow down to a wannabe dictator who loves dictators, who echoes the language of Nazi Germany, who egged on the mob on Jan. 6 and then rewrote the facts to “steal history” just as he tried to steal the election — what does that say about who we are, Biden wondered?Rejecting Trump’s campaign of grievance, vengeance, malignance and connivance, the president said, “We never bow. We never bend. We speak of possibilities — not carnage. We’re not weighed down by grievances. We don’t foster fear. We don’t walk around as victims.”On Thursday, the Biden-Harris campaign blasted out excerpts from a Margaret Sullivan column in The Guardian, upbraiding the media on its tendency to fall into “performative neutrality,” focusing too much on Biden’s presentation and poll numbers and not enough on stressing what a second Trump presidency would mean.Journalists should not fear looking as if they’re “in the tank” for Biden if they zero in on Trump’s seditious behavior, Sullivan said; the media should worry less about the horse race than about underscoring that many of Trump’s threats are authoritarian.She is right that the media must constantly remind itself not to use old tropes on a new trollop like Trump, particularly since the media is in a confluence of interest with Trump — as he himself has pointed out.Thanks to Trump, journalists can be festooned with gold — lucrative book contracts, TV deals and speaking gigs. The man who enriched himself with millions from foreign states and royalty seeking favors from the United States has the power to enrich us, too. He’s a once-in-a-lifetime story, the outlandish star of an even bigger reality show than his last.He put up a video on Truth Social on Friday touting the idea that God created him as a caretaker and “shepherd to mankind.” (It also chided Melania, showing her tripping and acting as if all she had to do was lunch with friends.) A narrator intones: “God said, ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state,’” topping off a hard week with Sunday church. “So God made Trump.” It was bound to happen: Trump playing divine victim, to pass himself off as Christlike or even hard-working. Both are equally untrue.At his Friday afternoon speech in Sioux Center, Iowa, Trump resorted to his bully-boy ways, mocking Biden’s stutter.I am not sure whether pounding away on the facts will work in a country with alternate realities. According to a new Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, 25 percent of Americans said it is “probably” or “definitely” true that the F.B.I. was behind Jan. 6. Among Republicans, The Post said, 34 percent said the F.B.I. “organized and encouraged the insurrection, compared with 30 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats.”If people don’t know by now that Trump tried to overthrow the government he was running on Jan. 6; if they don’t know that the MAGA fanatics breaking into the Capitol, beating up cops and threatening to harm Pelosi and hang Mike Pence were criminals, not “patriots” and “hostages,” as Trump risibly calls them; if they don’t know that Trump created the radical Supreme Court that is stripping women of their rights, then they don’t want to know, or they just don’t care.But the media must pound on. The duplicitous enablers at Fox News aside, journalists learned a lot in 2016 and have changed practices to better fence with Trump, fact-checking him more closely, engaging in defensive reporting, no longer covering every tweet like holy writ. Threats to democracy now count as a beat, just like schools and courts; The Times uses the rubric “Democracy Challenged.”When Dick Cheney was a deranged vice president, I was not permitted to call him a liar in my column. But now The Times lets columnists call Trump a liar. We have learned to separate the man from the office. Just because someone sits in the hallowed White House doesn’t mean he deserves the respect of the office. Not if he’s ginning up a fake war or if he’s flirting with treason and white supremacy.Still, the Biden-Harris campaign’s trumpeting of Sullivan’s column gives the impression that it expects the media to prop up Biden.Biden has to press his own case and not rely on the media or Trump’s fatuousness to win the election for him.People don’t want to vote against somebody; they want to vote for somebody.The president must continue to be aggressive in convincing people he’s the best alternative; that, at 81, he’s not too old for the job; that he has solutions to stop the chaos on the border and relentless death in Gaza.You do your job, Mr. President, and we’ll do ours.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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    This Election Year Is Unlike Any Other

    At the outset of this election year, with Donald Trump leading the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, Americans should pause to consider what a second Trump term would mean for our country and the world and to weigh the serious responsibility this election places on their shoulders.By now, most American voters should have no illusions about who Mr. Trump is. During his many years as a real estate developer and a television personality, then as president and as a dominant figure in the Republican Party, Mr. Trump demonstrated a character and temperament that render him utterly unfit for high office.As president, he wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term.Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning.Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.If in 2016 various factions of the electorate were prepared to look beyond Mr. Trump’s bombast in the hope that he might deliver whatever it was they wanted without too much damage to the nation, today there is no mystery about what he will do should he win, about the sorts of people he will surround himself with and the personal and political goals he will pursue. There is no mystery, either, about the consequences for the world if America re-elects a leader who openly displays his contempt for its allies.Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House did lasting damage to the presidency and to the nation. He deepened existing divisions among Americans, leaving the country dangerously polarized; he so demeaned public discourse that many Americans have become inured to lies, insults and personal attacks at the highest levels of leadership. His contempt for the rule of law raised concerns about the long-term stability of American democracy, and his absence of a moral compass threatened to corrode the ideals of national service.The Republic weathered Mr. Trump’s presidency for a variety of reasons: his lack of prepared agenda, the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts of appointees who tried to temper his most dangerous or unreasonable demands. Most important, it survived because of the people and institutions in his administration and in the Republican Party who proved strong enough to stand up to his efforts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power.It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power.The project ties in with plans from Mr. Trump and his supporters to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers so they can be fired if they do not buy fully into the Trump agenda. He also plans to strip the Justice Department of its independence in order to use it to wreak vengeance on those who, in his view, failed to concoct a victory for him in the 2020 election or otherwise didn’t support his unconstitutional demands. There is more, including threats by Mr. Trump to find ways to use federal troops against those who might protest his policies and practices. These ambitions demonstrate that the years out of office and the mounting legal challenges he faces have only sharpened his worst instincts.Mr. Trump was impeached twice as president and since leaving office has been charged in four criminal cases — two related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one over hush money paid to a porn star and another for hoarding classified documents after he left office and impeding the government’s efforts to retrieve them. No other sitting or former president has ever been indicted on criminal charges. Not only has Mr. Trump shown no remorse for these actions, he has given no sign that he understands these indictments to be anything but a political crusade meant to undermine him. He continues to claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection has been misrepresented. “There was love and unity,” he said in an interview last August. And he has suggested that, if re-elected, he could use his presidential powers to pardon himself.Mr. Trump’s forays into foreign affairs remain dangerously misguided and incoherent. During his presidency, he displayed consistent admiration for autocratic leaders — including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — and contempt for our democratic allies. While in the White House, he repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance critical to the stability of Europe that he sees only as a drain on American resources; now his campaign website says, without elaborating, that he plans to “finish” the process of “fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”He has announced his intention to abandon Ukraine, leaving it and its neighbors vulnerable to further Russian aggression. Encouraged by an American president, leaders who rule with an iron fist in Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere would face far less moral or democratic pressure.Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties.He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way.Democracy in the United States is stronger with a formidable conservative political movement to keep diversity of thought alive on important questions, such as the nation’s approaches to immigration, education, national security and fiscal responsibility. There should be room for real disagreement on any of these topics and many more — and there is a long tradition of it across the American experiment. But that is not what the former president is seeking.Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.Source photograph by Kozlik_Mozlik, 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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    Fact-Checking Trump and Others’ Sparring Over Social Security and Medicare

    The top presidential candidates are vowing to protect the entitlement programs for current seniors, though some have floated changes for younger generations. But they’ve muddied each other’s current positions.Top contenders for the 2024 presidential election in recent weeks have accused each other of jeopardizing Social Security and Medicare, key entitlement programs for seniors.The future of the programs has been fodder for endless political debate — and distortions — because of the long-term financial challenges they face.Social Security’s main trust fund is currently projected to be depleted in 2033, meaning the program would then be able to pay only about three-quarters of total scheduled benefits. Medicare, for its part, is at risk of not having enough money to fully pay hospitals by 2031.President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are among the candidates zeroing in on those vulnerabilities, often by referring to one another’s previous positions.Here’s a fact-check.WHAT WAS SAID“Trump in 2020: We will be cutting Social Security and Medicare”— Biden campaign in a December social media post that includes a clip of Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. The Biden campaign has repeatedly claimed that cutting the programs is one of Mr. Trump’s policies. But while Mr. Trump has in the past suggested he might entertain trims to entitlements, he has repeatedly vowed during his campaign to protect the programs.In this case, the Biden campaign shared a short clip of Mr. Trump during a Fox News town hall in March 2020 and ignored his clarification at the time.The clip shows a Fox News host, Martha MacCallum, telling Mr. Trump, “If you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”“Oh, we’ll be cutting, but we’re also going to have growth like you’ve never had before,” Mr. Trump responded.The Trump administration immediately walked back his comments and said he was referring to cutting deficits. “I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past 3 years,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post a day later.During his time in office, Mr. Trump did propose some cuts to Medicare — though experts said the cost reductions would not have significantly affected benefits — and to Social Security’s programs for people with disabilities. They were not enacted by Congress.Like other candidates, including Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has shifted his positions over time. In a 2000 book, Mr. Trump suggested, for people under 40, raising the age for receiving full Social Security retirement benefits to 70. Before that, he said he was open to the idea of privatizing the program, even if he did not like the concept. He no longer advances those positions.Former President Donald J. Trump suggested that the government could avert Social Security changes by expanding drilling, but experts say that would not be enough revenue.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLast January, the former president said in a video that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” But he has not outlined a clear plan for keeping the programs solvent. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump suggested last month that the government could avert any Social Security changes by expanding drilling in the United States, but experts say that is not feasible.“Dedicating current oil and gas leasing revenues to Social Security would cover less than 4 percent of its shortfall, and it would be impossible to fix Social Security even if all federal land were opened to drilling operations,” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.WHAT WAS SAID“And unlike Ron DeSanctimonious, we will always protect Social Security and Medicare for our great seniors. He wanted to knock the hell out of Social Security and Medicare.”— Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in mid-DecemberThis is misleading. While in Congress, Mr. DeSantis supported budget frameworks that proposed raising the full Social Security retirement age to 70, but leaving the early retirement age the same. As a presidential candidate, he has said he would not cut Social Security for seniors but has at times expressed openness to changes for younger people without specifying what those are.Currently, workers are eligible for their full benefits at their full retirement age, which varies from 66 to 67 depending on year of birth. But recipients can qualify for reduced benefits as early as age 62.As a Florida congressman, Mr. DeSantis did vote for Republican budget proposals — which would not have changed the law on their own — that supported gradually raising the full retirement age for Social Security to 70. The proposals did not call for changing the early retirement age.Gov. Ron DeSantis has not made clear his plans for Medicare as he runs for president.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe proposals also called for changes to Medicare, including by eventually increasing its retirement age to 67 or 70, from 65, and transitioning the program to “premium support,” in which the government would provide payments for seniors to shop for various health care plans.Mr. DeSantis has not made clear his plans for Medicare as he runs for president, but he has often rejected the idea of changing Social Security. “We’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans, I think that that’s pretty clear,” he said in March.That said, he has signaled openness to adjusting the program for younger people. In a July interview on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis said, “Talking about making changes for people in their 30s or 40s, so that the program’s viable, you know, that’s a much different thing, and that’s something that I think there’s going to need to be discussions on.”The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.WHAT WAS SAID“Nikki Haley, she has claimed that the retirement age is way, way, way too low. That’s what she said. So you’ve got a lot of people that have worked hard their whole life. Life expectancy is declining in this country. It’s tragic, but it’s true. So to look at those demographic trends and say that you would jack it up so that people are not going to be able to have benefits. I mean, I don’t know why she’s saying that.”— Mr. DeSantis on CNN last monthThis needs context. Life expectancy in the United States dropped during the coronavirus pandemic, but it is inching back up. And Ms. Haley has only called for changes to Social Security for younger people — not unlike what Mr. DeSantis himself has entertained.“The way we deal with it is, we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in, but we go to people, like my kids in their 20s, when they’re coming into the system, and we say, ‘The rules have changed,’” Ms. Haley said in an August interview with Bloomberg. “We change retirement age to reflect life expectancy.”Ms. Haley did not specify what the new retirement age should be. “What we do know is 65 is way too low, and we need to increase that,” she said when pressed. “We need to do it according to life expectancy.”Nikki Haley has suggested changing the Social Security retirement age for younger generations.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMs. Haley also called for determining benefit adjustments based on inflation, rather than the current cost-of-living calculation, and limiting benefits for the wealthy.On Medicare, Ms. Haley has proposed expanding Medicare Advantage, under which private companies provide plans and are paid by the government to cover the beneficiary.Yet for 2023, the government was projected to spend $27 billion more for Medicare Advantage plans than if those enrollees were in traditional Medicare. Experts note that expanding Medicare Advantage while achieving overall savings would require structural changes that would be politically challenging to implement.“It would require a change in payment policy that would likely run into fierce opposition,” said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president at the health nonprofit KFF and executive director for its program on Medicare policy.Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com. More

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    Trump Targets Nikki Haley in Sharpest Attacks Yet

    Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday opened one of his most targeted lines of attack yet against Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who has emerged as one of his top competitors for the Republican nomination, accusing her of being “in the pocket” of “establishment donors.”At a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, Mr. Trump denounced Ms. Haley as the choice of corporate elites and the political establishment. Ms. Haley has received significant financial support from wealthy donors on Wall Street and in the tech world, including the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, who is a major Democratic donor.“Nikki Haley’s campaign is being funded by Biden donors,” Mr. Trump said to hundreds of attendees at an event space about 20 miles from the South Dakota border, referring to Ms. Haley as a “globalist.”“She likes the globe. I like America first,” Mr. Trump said, adding that the “establishment losers and sellouts lagging far behind us in the Republican primary can’t be trusted on taxes or trade or anything else. They’re globalists, and they always will be.”Mr. Trump also cited Ms. Haley’s recent missteps on the campaign trail, in particular her response last week to a question in New Hampshire about the causes of the Civil War. Ms. Haley did not mention slavery in her answer.“She does not have what it takes,” Mr. Trump said.A spokeswoman for the Haley campaign, Nachama Soloveichik, said, “If Trump feels so strongly about his false attacks, he should stop hiding and defend them on the debate stage in Des Moines.” She added that Mr. Trump “probably doesn’t remember that Nikki Haley passed one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration laws in the country in 2011, because he was still a New York City liberal.”Mr. Trump’s increased scrutiny of Ms. Haley reflects her improved standing in the race over the past few months. For most of last year, his fiercest criticism was reserved for Mr. DeSantis, but Ms. Haley has risen in polling throughout the fall and winter. Mr. Trump continues to lead both candidates by wide margins in state and national polls.Mr. Trump argued that his “Make America Great Again” movement had rescued the Republican Party from an elite political class intent on regaining influence by keeping him out of office.“There’s no chance we’re going to let them claw their way back to power,” Mr. Trump said. More

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    Supreme Court to Decide Whether Trump Is Eligible for Colorado Ballot

    The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last month that the former president could not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection.The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is eligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot, thrusting the justices into a pivotal role that could alter the course of this year’s presidential election.The sweep of the court’s ruling is likely to be broad. It will probably resolve not only whether Mr. Trump may appear on the Colorado primary ballot after the state’s top court declared that he had engaged in insurrection in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, but it will most likely also determine his eligibility to run in the general election and to hold office at all.Not since Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, has the Supreme Court taken such a central role in an election for the nation’s highest office.The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly. The Colorado Republican Party had urged the justices to rule by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.The number of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility across the country can only have added pressure on the court to hear the Colorado case, as they underscored the need for a nationwide resolution of the question.The case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the court’s docket or on the horizon. An appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, and the losing side is all but certain to appeal. And the court has already said that it will rule on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case in a decision expected by June.Mr. Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene after Colorado’s top court disqualified him from the ballot last month. That decision is on hold while the justices consider the matter.Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, pressed the Supreme Court to act fast.“Coloradans, and the American people, deserve clarity on whether someone who engaged in insurrection may run for the country’s highest office,” she said in a statement.Mr. Trump acknowledged the court’s decision to hear the case at a rally Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa, saying he hoped the justices would fairly interpret the law. “All I want is fair; I fought really hard to get three very, very good people in,” he said, referring to his appointees. He added, “And I just hope that they’re going to be fair because, you know, the other side plays the ref.”The case turns on the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.Though Section 3 addressed the aftermath of the Civil War, it was written in general terms and, most scholars say, continues to have force. More