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      My Brother’s Thanksgiving Lament

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      Thanksgiving began as a time of prayer. We could use some prayers right now, in a country inflamed with hate and prejudice and generational mistrust. Americans are at each other’s throats, living in different realities, fraught by two brutal, calamitous wars. So, as this annus horribilis lurches to a close, with the hope that we can understand each other better, or at least eat pie together, here is the annual holiday column from a man I frequently disagree with, but always, love, my conservative brother, Kevin.****Less than a year before the country chooses a president, President Biden’s poll numbers are almost catastrophic. The overwhelming majority of voters say he is too old, and Donald Trump is beating him in five of six battleground states, according to one recent survey.While majorities of the country find both Trump and Biden unacceptable, Trump remains the Republican front-runner, bolstered by what his supporters see as overeager Democratic prosecutions. This scenario holds great peril for Republicans because Trump is the weakest candidate against Biden. He already lost to him in 2020 and the reflexive hatred he generates, especially among women, could boost Democratic turnout as only Trump could manage.Biden’s three years have been a disaster. An exorbitant round of unnecessary Covid spending sent inflation through the roof, leading to a destructive rise in interest rates and further squeezing consumers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      DeSantis Will Pick Up Endorsement by Bob Vander Plaats of Iowa

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      The endorsement by Bob Vander Plaats was long expected, but comes as Gov. Ron DeSantis has tried to build momentum heading into the Iowa caucuses in January.The influential Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats endorsed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday, the second major endorsement Mr. DeSantis has picked up this month in the state.Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s popular Republican governor, announced her support two weeks ago, giving Mr. DeSantis a key surrogate in a state that will hold the first vote of the Republican primary season with its caucuses on Jan. 15.“We need to find somebody who can win in 2024,” Mr. Vander Plaats said on Tuesday on “Special Report With Bret Baier” on Fox News. “What we saw in 2022, the supposedly red wave really only happened in Florida and in Iowa. Governor DeSantis took a reliable tossup state in Florida and made it complete red.”Mr. Vander Plaats has endorsed the last three Republicans who won contested Iowa caucuses — Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Ted Cruz in 2016 — though none of them went on to win the nomination. But it is far from clear that his support will be enough to bolster Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump by huge margins in polls in Iowa as well as nationally.As of Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis was more than 25 points behind Mr. Trump in the FiveThirtyEight average of Iowa surveys — an enormous gap to make up in less than two months’ time. And he is barely holding on to second place over Nikki Haley.Mr. Vander Plaats did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.Mr. Vander Plaats is well known for his influence among evangelicals, who are a powerful voting bloc in Iowa and have lifted socially conservative candidates there before.He is also a divisive figure. His organization once encouraged Republican candidates to sign a pledge that included a lament that “a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American president.”The Democratic National Committee highlighted a recent report about that pledge on Friday, as several Republican candidates prepared to appear at an event with Mr. Vander Plaats.On Tuesday, a D.N.C. spokeswoman, Sarafina Chitika, said: “Vander Plaats’ endorsement should come as no surprise — both he and DeSantis share the same desire to ban abortion and rip away freedoms from millions of women. They both promoted the insulting idea that slavery somehow benefited Black families.”At the recent event, a gala on Saturday for the anti-abortion group Pulse Life Advocates, Mr. Vander Plaats said that opposition to abortion was the single most important factor in his support for a candidate.“If they are not crystal clear where they are at on the sanctity of human life, you can’t trust them on anything else,” Mr. Vander Plaats said, adding: “The sanctity of life is not something to be nuanced. It’s not something to be poll-tested. It’s not a thing where the heartbeat bill was too harsh of a thing to be passed at the state level for the state of Florida.”That comment about the “heartbeat” bill, a common conservative name for six-week abortion bans, was a clear criticism of Mr. Trump, though Mr. Vander Plaats did not name him. Mr. Trump has called the six-week ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”Mr. Trump is, more than any other Republican, responsible for the Dobbs ruling that ended Roe v. Wade and allowed such laws to take effect, as he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who made the ruling.Mr. Trump has not courted Mr. Vander Plaats, and the former president’s supporters have been dismissive about his endorsement’s significance. A statement from the Trump campaign on Tuesday said, “While the DeSantis camp will try and spin that a Vander Plaats endorsement will revive their sputtering and shrinking campaign, cold hard data tells a much different story. These G.O.P. caucus attenders have mixed feelings about Vander Plaats, if they have any opinion at all, and no few if any are moving to vote for DeSantis because of his endorsement.”Shane Goldmacher More

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      Georgia Judge Weighs Revoking Bail for a Trump Co-Defendant, Harrison Floyd

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      Prosecutors say the defendant, Harrison Floyd, has been intimidating potential witnesses in the racketeering case with his social media posts.In a fiery courtroom presentation, the prosecutor overseeing the Georgia racketeering case against former President Donald J. Trump argued on Tuesday that one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants had intimidated potential witnesses on social media and should be sent to jail.But Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court chose not to revoke the bond of Harrison Floyd, the co-defendant. Instead, he signed off on modified terms prohibiting Mr. Floyd from posting further comments about witnesses in the case.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., took the unusual step of personally arguing on behalf of the prosecution, a few days after she filed a motion accusing Mr. Floyd of intimidating an elections worker and other witnesses for the state — including Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — through his posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers noted that Mr. Trump himself had issued provocative social media posts about the Georgia case, and that no action had been taken against him. That, they argued, made “the state’s decision to go after Harrison Floyd hard to justify.”They also argued that Mr. Floyd had not been trying to intimidate or threaten anyone with his posts. But they acknowledged by the end of Tuesday’s hearing that he had “walked up close to the line” of violating the terms of his bond.Mr. Floyd, once the head of a group called Black Voices for Trump, was paid by the 2020 Trump campaign. He is one of 19 people, including the former president, who were named as defendants in a 98-page racketeering indictment in August.The indictment charges them with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Four of the defendants have pleaded guilty and have promised to cooperate with prosecutors.In addition to a state racketeering charge, Mr. Floyd faces two other felony counts in the case, for his role in what the indictment describes as a scheme to intimidate Ruby Freeman, a Fulton County elections worker, and pressure her to falsely claim that she had committed electoral fraud.Ms. Freeman and her daughter were part of a team processing votes in Fulton County on election night in November 2020. Soon after, video images of the two women handling ballots were posted online, and Trump supporters falsely claimed that the video showed them entering bogus votes to skew the election in President Biden’s favor.Ms. Freeman became the target of so many threats that she was forced to leave her home.Her lawyer was a witness for the prosecution at Tuesday’s hearing, producing a report that he said showed a recent “spike” in online mentions of Ms. Freeman. That spike led her to adopt a fresh set of security measures, her lawyer said.Mr. Floyd’s lawyers, John Morrison and Chris Kachouroff, called the effort to revoke his bond “a retaliatory measure” — in part, they said, because Mr. Floyd recently turned down a plea agreement offered by the state. They argued that “tagging” people in posts did not constitute contact with witnesses, and was no different from yelling “a message to someone else sitting on the opposite side of a packed Mercedes-Benz stadium during the middle of an Atlanta Falcons football game.” Ms. Willis responded that “this notion that tagging someone doesn’t get a message to them is really lunacy,” She also called Mr. Floyd’s posts “disgusting,” adding that “what he really did is spit on the court.”And she was explicit about the stakes as she saw them: Election workers, she said, should not be intimidated for doing their jobs.Judge McAfee said that it appeared that Mr. Floyd had committed a “technical violation” of his bond by communicating with witnesses in the case, but seemed reluctant to take the step of jailing Mr. Floyd. “Not every violation compels revocation,” he said.Ms. Willis’s forceful stance on Mr. Floyd’s posts could have repercussions for Mr. Trump, who is enmeshed in battles over gag orders in other civil and criminal cases against him. Mr. Trump’s bond agreement in Georgia specifies that he “shall perform no act,” including social media posts, “to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a co-defendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice.”Mr. Floyd was the only one of the original 19 co-defendants in Georgia to spend days in jail in August while waiting to make bond. At Tuesday’s hearing, he cut a colorful figure at the defense table, wearing a green blazer adorned with polo horses. Before the hearing began, he appeared to be reading a book about the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.As the two sides worked out the new terms of the bond agreement, Ms. Willis made a reference to “Trump,” prompting Mr. Floyd to interject, “President Trump.”The judge told Mr. Floyd that it was not his place to talk. More

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      House Speaker Mike Johnson Visits Trump at Mar-a-Lago

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      It was the speaker’s first trip to see the former president since he won his post, and it came as he faced anger from right-wing lawmakers for moving to fund the government.Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday night visited former President Donald J. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, according to a person familiar with the meeting, making his first pilgrimage to see the Republican presidential front-runner since his surprise elevation to the top post in the House last month.The visit to Mr. Trump’s Florida home came at a tricky moment for the inexperienced speaker, who is already facing criticism from hard-right allies livid at him for teaming with Democrats last week to pass legislation to avert a government shutdown. The person confirmed the private meeting on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.Mr. Trump’s influence over spending fights in Washington may be limited, but Mr. Johnson’s decision to meet with him within weeks of his election is a sign he knows he cannot afford to have Mr. Trump weighing in publicly against him and hardening right-wing opposition to his leadership.Mr. Johnson has taken other steps to ingratiate himself to the far right and cement his hold on the gavel. Late last week, he announced he was publicly releasing surveillance video of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a step far-right lawmakers and activists have been demanding as they seek to undercut the facts about how supporters of Mr. Trump violently stormed the complex seeking to overturn his electoral defeat.Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, Republican congressional leaders have had to cultivate some kind of working relationship with him. But Mr. Johnson, who defended the former president in two Senate impeachment trials and played a lead role in trying to help him invalidate the 2020 election results, is positioning himself as the first speaker to be in complete lock step with the former president.The meeting at Mar-a-Lago was reported earlier by Punchbowl News.Last week, Mr. Johnson officially endorsed Mr. Trump — a move former Speaker Kevin McCarthy resisted even while proclaiming that the former president would be the Republican nominee and would be re-elected.“I endorsed him wholeheartedly for re-election in 2020, and traveled with his team as a campaign surrogate to help ensure his victory,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement to The New York Times. “I have fully endorsed him once again.”The endorsement came in response to a report by The Times that in 2015, Mr. Johnson had posted on social media saying that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could be a danger as president.“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015. “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”Mr. Johnson, who until last month never held a top-tier position in leadership, was in Florida for a fund-raising trip. He made a stop at Mar-a-Lago for an event for Representative Gus Bilirakis, Republican of Florida, according to the person familiar with the meeting with Mr. Trump.A spokesman for Mr. Johnson did not provide additional information about the meeting. More

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      Ignore Trump? Democrats Now Want Him Plastered All Over the News.

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      The former president has been relatively quiet, out of the headlines and off mainstream social media. Democrats are hoping that more attention on him can help turn around President Biden’s fortunes.When Donald J. Trump left the White House, Democrats didn’t want to hear another word from him. President Biden dismissed him as “the former guy.” A party-wide consensus held that he was best left ignored.Three years later, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign and Democratic officials across the party’s spectrum have landed on a new solution to his political slump:More Trump.Criticizing the news media for giving Mr. Trump a platform is out. Quietly pining for major networks to again broadcast live coverage of Trump campaign rallies is in.Behind the improbable longing for the former president to gobble up political oxygen again is Democrats’ yearslong dependence on the Trump outrage machine. Since his ascent, Mr. Trump has been a one-man Democratic turnout operation, uniting an otherwise fractured opposition and fueling victories in three straight election cycles.Now, Democrats worry that the fever of Trump fatigue has passed, and that some voters are softening toward a man they once loathed. Many others may simply be paying little attention, as Mr. Trump’s share of the daily national conversation has diminished, despite the occasional interruption of campaign-trail pronouncements like his recent vow to “root out” political opponents like “vermin.”Mr. Trump, who has never been called a shrinking violet, has nevertheless skipped the three Republican presidential debates and stayed away from the major social media platforms. He is expected to spend large parts of next year in criminal trials that, except for one in Georgia, will not be televised.Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina, said she didn’t hear much about Mr. Trump these days from the rural Black and Hispanic voters her organization focuses on.“I think it’s like a relationship,” she said. “There were a lot of bad things that happened, but the longer distance you get away from the bad things, you’re like, maybe the bad things weren’t that bad.”Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina that focuses on rural Black and Hispanic voters, said that these days, she didn’t hear as much from them about Mr. Trump. Travis Dove for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s campaign, which has been slow to ramp up its operations, is betting that once voters view the election as a choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who remains highly polarizing, they will set aside their reservations about the president and fall in line behind him.But while Mr. Trump is likely to rise in the public consciousness as November 2024 approaches, it is far from certain that he will sabotage himself politically. And it remains unclear whether his criminal trials will make him more toxic among moderate and swing voters, or whether weeks of courtroom appearances will keep his presence more muted than normal.Other Biden efforts are meeting limited success. His campaign has little to show for a $40 million advertising push promoting his economic record. And approval of the president, according to polls released this month by The New York Times and Siena College, has fallen sharply among Black and Hispanic voters — demographics that strategists say are more likely to disregard Mr. Trump when he is not front and center in the news.“Not having the day-to-day chaos of Donald Trump in people’s faces certainly has an impact on how people are measuring the urgency of the danger of another Trump administration,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an African American political organizing group. “It is important to remind people of what a total and absolute disaster Trump was.”Mr. Biden and Democrats, of course, cannot control decisions that news organizations make or the topics that absorb voters in person and on social media. But the Biden campaign, which is aiming to make the 2024 election a referendum on whether Mr. Trump should return to the White House, can try to push the national discussion in his direction with its messaging.One big challenge, however, is that many Americans who tuned out the former president when he left office show little interest in hearing more about him.Several voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020 and are now leaning toward Mr. Trump said they had not followed the ins and outs of the former president’s post-White House activities and tended to discount and brush aside his past scandals.“I know a lot of people get mad about what he said years ago about ‘grab them by whatever,’” said Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. “That was kind of aggravating. But, you know, that was years ago. And that’s how guys talk in a locker room. I don’t think he really would do that. I think he was just saying that.”Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesArthur Taylor, a business owner from Mesa, Ariz., described himself as a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden and now says he will back Mr. Trump in 2024. He said that the business climate was better when Mr. Trump was president and that the 91 criminal charges against him might not be so bad.“There’s so many things that President Trump does that’s just not ethical,” Mr. Taylor said. But he added that with the former president, “there’s a level of honesty and almost transparency, even in a way that we might cringe at it.”Those sorts of sentiments have left the Biden campaign this past week to engage in its own media criticism, publicly urging news shows on network television to follow New York Times articles about Mr. Trump’s plans for immigration and deportation policies if he wins the election.“The more the American people are confronted with who Donald Trump is — a dangerous, extreme and erratic man who only cares about using the power of the government to help himself and his friends — the more they reject him,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “We will continue to highlight for voters what’s at stake if Trump and his cronies are allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.”Mr. Biden and most of his Democratic allies have adopted a collective vow of silence on what portends to be the biggest Trump-related story line over the next year — the four criminal trials he faces in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.In August, 38 House Democrats wrote to the federal courts administrator asking that Mr. Trump’s federal trials be broadcast live on television. Mr. Trump himself last week asked that cameras be allowed in the courtroom for his trial in Washington — a request that federal prosecutors swiftly opposed.“You see one of the court-artist sketches, and you look at that and you’re like, I’m not really sure which trial he’s on,” Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in an interview. “Is anyone paying attention to them?”Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic strategist, said Mr. Biden’s decision to stay quiet had allowed Mr. Trump to frame the cases against him as “a one-sided conversation.”“We have not engaged on perhaps Donald Trump’s No. 1 Achilles’ heel, which is the 91 indictments,” she said. “We’ll see what happens when we do.”Aside from the trials, Democrats are longing for the days when cable networks carried Mr. Trump’s rallies live. To watch a Trump rally live now, viewers need to find an online stream or a fringy far-right cable station like Newsmax.On this, Mr. Trump and Democrats tend to be in agreement.“The more people see and hear from Donald Trump and what he has planned for the country if he regains power, the better off Democrats will be up and down the ballot,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “Trump’s voracious need for attention works to Democrats’ advantage.”Google search interest in Mr. Trump remains well below the level it was at when he was in office and running for re-election four years ago. The television ratings for Mr. Trump’s CNN town-hall event in May were strong, but well below what similar events in 2016 and 2020 drew.Jessica Floyd, the executive director of the Hub Project, a progressive group, urged mainstream cable TV networks to “remind people exactly how bad these rallies are and how corrosive they are for our democracy.”She added, “They should also show President Biden selling an absolutely historic level of investment in our economy.”Jon Soltz, a co-founder and chairman of VoteVets, a liberal veterans group, cautioned Democrats to be patient.“There’s a huge amount of the population right now that doesn’t realize that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president,” he said. “When that happens, you will see a different response.”Camille Baker More

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      The Trump Threat Is Growing. Lawyers Must Rise to Meet This Moment.

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      American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them. But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.Recent reporting about plans for a second Trump presidency are frightening. He would stock his administration with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping — if not circumventing altogether — existing laws and long-established legal norms. This would include appointing to high public office political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on First Amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.We have seen him try this before, though fortunately he was thwarted — he would say “betrayed”— by executive branch lawyers and by judges who refused to go along with his more draconian and often unlawful policies and his effort to remain in office after being cast out by voters. But should Mr. Trump return to the White House, he will arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again.The Federalist Society, long the standard-bearer for the conservative legal movement, has failed to respond in this period of crisis.That is why we need an organization of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States. This new organization must step up, speak out and defend these ideals.Leaders of the legal profession should be asking themselves, “What role did we play in creating this ongoing legal emergency?” But so far, there has been no such post-mortem reflection, and none appears on the horizon. Many lawyers who served in the last administration — and many on the outside who occupy positions of influence within the conservative legal community — have instead stood largely silent, assenting to the recent assaults on America’s fragile democracy.We were members of the Federalist Society or followed the organization early in our careers. Created in response to left-liberal domination of the courts, it served a principled role, connecting young lawyers with one another and with career opportunities, promoting constitutional scholarship and ultimately providing candidates for the federal bench and Supreme Court.But the Federalist Society has conspicuously declined to speak out against the constitutional and other legal excesses of Mr. Trump and his administration. Most notably, it has failed to reckon with his effort to overturn the last presidential election and his continued denial that he lost that election. When White House lawyers are inventing cockamamie theories to stop the peaceful transition of power and copping pleas to avoid jail time, it’s clear we in the legal profession have come to a crisis point.We are thankful that there were lawyers in the Trump administration who opted to resign or be fired rather than advance his flagrantly unconstitutional schemes. They should be lauded.But these exceptions were notably few and far between. More alarming is the growing crowd of grifters, frauds and con men willing to subvert the Constitution and long-established constitutional principles for the whims of political expediency. The actions of these conservative Republican lawyers are increasingly becoming the new normal. For a group of lawyers sworn to uphold the Constitution, this is an indictment of the nation’s legal profession. Any legal movement that could foment such a constitutional abdication and attract a sufficient number of lawyers willing to advocate its unlawful causes is ripe for a major reckoning.We must rebuild a conservative legal movement that supports and defends American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law and that incentivizes and promotes those lawyers who are prepared to do the same. To that end, we have formed a nonprofit organization, the Society for the Rule of Law Institute, to bring sanity back to conservative lawyering and jurisprudence.There is a need and demand for this new legal movement that the legal profession can readily meet. Pro-democracy, pro-rule-of-law lawyers who populate our law school campuses, law firms and the courts decry what is happening in our profession. They deserve an outlet to productively channel these sentiments.Originally formed in 2018 as Checks & Balances during what we took to be the height of Mr. Trump’s threat to the rule of law, the organization spoke out against his transgressions. Since then, the legal landscape has deteriorated to a degree we failed to imagine, with Mr. Trump and his allies explicitly threatening to upend fundamental tenets of the American constitutional system if returned to power.We believe it is necessary to build a legal movement with the capability to recruit and engage dues-paying members, file legal briefs, provide mentorship and career opportunities, convene supporters and speak out as vocally and forthrightly as is necessary to meet the urgency that this moment requires.First and foremost, this movement will work to inspire young legal talent and connect them with professional opportunities that will enable them to fulfill their vast potential without having to compromise their convictions.Second, the movement will focus on building a large body of scholarship to counteract the new orthodoxy of anti-constitutional and anti-democratic law being churned out by the fever swamps. The Constitution cannot defend itself; lawyers and legal scholars must. Conservative scholars like the former federal appellate judges Michael McConnell and Thomas Griffith and the law professor Keith Whittington, who joins Yale from Princeton next year, are models for a new and more responsible conservative legal movement.Third and most important, we will marshal principled voices to speak out against the endless stream of falsehoods and authoritarian legal theories that are being propagated almost daily. To do otherwise would be to cede the field to lawyers of bad faith. We have seen in recent years what the unchecked spread of wildly untrue and anti-democratic lies gets us. We lawyers have a gift for advocacy and persuasion; we must use it.While those in the pro-democracy legal community — many of them progressives — might disagree with our overall legal philosophy, we welcome them with open arms. We are at a point when commitment to fundamental classical liberal tenets of our republican form of government is far more important than partisan politics and political party — and even philosophical questions about the law. Our country comes first, and our country is in a constitutional emergency, if not a constitutional crisis. We all must act accordingly, especially us lawyers.The writers are lawyers. George Conway was in private practice. J. Michael Luttig was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Barbara Comstock represented Virginia’s 10th District in Congress from 2015 to 2019. They serve on the board of the newly formed Society for the Rule of Law Institute, formerly called Checks & Balances.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, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Los planes de Trump para 2025

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      Además: Argentina eligió presidente, Acapulco a un mes del huracán Otis y más para estar al día.Donald Trump quiere regresar a la Casa Blanca en enero de 2025.A un año de las elecciones, aún es pronto para saber si la tendencia va a mantenerse, pero un sondeo reciente indica que el expresidente lidera las preferencias en la mayoría de los estados indecisos. Parece que las acusaciones formales en su contra por 91 delitos penales no le han restado apoyo.(Tanto Trump como el presidente Joe Biden son impopulares, según la encuesta Times/Siena. Pero los votantes que están frustrados con la situación actual de EE. UU. no expresan simpatía por Biden).¿Qué planea Trump para un segundo mandato?El expresidente Donald Trump en un discurso el domingo en Edinburg, TexasMichael Gonzalez/Getty ImagesA partir de sus discursos de campaña, así como de las publicaciones de sus páginas de internet, los reporteros de política del Times ofrecen un resumen de sus principales proyectos. A continuación, presentamos una lista de algunas de las medidas que pretende implementar en caso de ganar las elecciones:Modificar al poder ejecutivo para concentrar más poder. Esto involucraría que algunos organismos independientes, como la Comisión Federal de Comunicaciones y la Comisión Federal de Comercio, estén bajo el control presidencial. También ha indicado que planea transformar la burocracia federal.Atacar a los cárteles mexicanos de la droga con el uso de la fuerza militar.Modificar el poder judicial para actuar contra sus oponentes políticos. Según ha afirmado, eso implicaría nombrar un fiscal especial para “ir tras” Biden y su familia.En su primer mandato, las ambiciones de Trump se toparon con asesores jurídicos que impidieron algunas de sus propuestas. Ahora planea nombrar abogados que allanen el camino para llevar a cabo una agenda más radical.Al igual que en su primera campaña, Trump sigue empleando una retórica extrema contra los inmigrantes. Promete realizar “la mayor operación de deportación nacional en la historia de Estados Unidos”. Además, sus planes en materia migratoria incluyen redadas, campamentos y la reactivación del Título 42.Mientras tanto, los asesores de Biden desestiman la tendencia y aseguran que el actual mandatario está en una buena posición para competir en las elecciones.Si alguien te reenvió este correo, puedes hacer clic aquí para recibirlo tres veces por semana.Algo para el Día de Acción de GraciasLo digo todos los años: la fiesta de Acción de Gracias o Thanksgiving es una de mis festividades favoritas del calendario.Es una ocasión secular que reúne a familias o amigos para celebrar la gratitud y compartir una comida. Brinda una buena oportunidad para reflexionar sobre las bondades del año y ser agradecidos, algo que tiene impactos positivos en la salud. Y, de paso, cocinar puede resultar terapéutico.Si estás buscando ideas para el menú de estos días, aquí hay una receta de empanadas de calabaza que me recuerda a Reynosa, el lugar donde crecí. Te invito a participar en los comentarios con tus propias tradiciones de Acción de Gracias.Muchas familias mexicoestadounidenses cocinan a fuego lento calabaza fresca en piloncillo y otras especias; esta receta es más conveniente porque usa calabaza en lata.Bobbi Lin para The New York Times. Estilismo de comida: Maggie Ruggiero.Hoy quiero darte las gracias por ser parte de esta comunidad de lectores. Hace cuatro años que escribo este boletín y me siento muy afortunada de gozar del privilegio de contar con tu atención y poder acompañar tu semana.— More

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      Trump Health Report Claims ‘Weight Reduction’ but Skimps on Specifics

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      The former president’s doctors have often offered hyperbolic or unverifiable claims in reports about his health.Former President Donald J. Trump posted a fawning but vague health report from his doctor on Monday that declares that Mr. Trump’s health is “excellent” and that he has recently lost weight through an “improved diet” and “daily physical activity.”Mr. Trump’s physician, Dr. Bruce Aronwald, wrote the single-page report over two months after Mr. Trump, 77, underwent a “comprehensive” health examination in September, the document says.In August, Mr. Trump reported to the Fulton County Jail, during an intake process for one of four criminal cases he is facing, that he weighed 215 pounds. That was nearly 30 pounds less than the White House doctor reported in 2020.But the report on Monday did not include even basic details such as Mr. Trump’s weight, his blood pressure, his cholesterol levels, any prescriptions or even how much weight he had lost. Dr. Aronwald instead wrote that Mr. Trump’s “physical exams were well within the normal range and his cognitive exams were exceptional.”The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions about specific details regarding Mr. Trump’s health.The timing of the report appeared to be taking a jab at President Biden on his 81st birthday. While Mr. Trump has repeatedly mocked Mr. Biden’s age, he has had his own verbal stumbles on the campaign trail.Mr. Trump’s doctors — an eclectic group of personal and White House physicians — have previously released memos and reports that have offered few details about his health and included hyperbolic claims and descriptions of his condition as “excellent.”Dr. Harold Bornstein, Mr. Trump’s longtime personal physician, declared in late 2015 that Mr. Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” He then later told The New York Times that Mr. Trump was taking medication for various ailments, including a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth. Dr. Bornstein later said that Mr. Trump sent his bodyguard among others to seize his medical records from Dr. Bornstein’s office after the physician fell from Mr. Trump’s orbit.Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, a White House physician for Mr. Trump, asserted in 2018 that with a better diet, Mr. Trump could have lived to be 200 years old. Another White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, repeatedly misled the public about the severity of Mr. Trump’s illness after he contracted Covid in 2020.Mr. Biden, as president, has undergone annual physical exams and releases significantly more detailed health reports. His latest report, in February, was five pages long, noting specific ailments, like arthritis, and the regimen of tests taken — to detect neurological disorders, for example.But tests and reports have done little to reassure voters that Mr. Biden has not slowed in his senior years, and any slip of the tongue or stumble on a stairway draws further public attention. During remarks at the White House on Monday, he confused Taylor Swift with Britney Spears.Concerns about age and health have been a sore subject for both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who would each be well past 80 by the end of a term in 2029. They have repeatedly dismissed such concerns, and each asserts that he is more than capable of serving another four years in the Oval Office.In one notable episode, Mr. Trump repeatedly bragged in television appearances about acing a cognitive test that looks for signs of conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, wielding it as proof that he was sharper than Mr. Biden — who at the time was his opponent in the 2020 election.Mr. Trump was particularly boastful of completing a memory test that involved reciting the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” in the correct order.Recent polls have found that roughly two of every three voters say Mr. Biden is too old to serve another four-year term. About half say the same about Mr. Trump. More