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      Trump Focuses on Iowa as He Looks to Close Out the Republican Race

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      The former president has made Iowa his priority, hoping to thin the field and turn his attention to a campaign against President Biden.With just under two months until the Iowa caucuses, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday returned to the state and made explicit a campaign strategy that he had only hinted at for months.Speaking in a crowded high school gym, Mr. Trump made clear that he saw a decisive victory in the first Republican nominating contest as the swiftest path to end the Republican primary and focus on a general election race against President Biden.“You know, we have to send a great signal,” Mr. Trump said. Referring to his Republican rivals, he added, “And then maybe these people say, ‘OK, it’s over now.’”After his speech concluded, Mr. Trump also made a departure from his normal rally routine. The former president, who has largely eschewed the retail politicking characteristic of the state, stuck around for roughly 10 minutes to pose for pictures and shake voters’ hands.Mr. Trump’s speech, which covered issues including energy, foreign policy and criminal justice with an Iowa frame, suggested a subtle shift in his campaign’s approach to the Republican primary. For months Mr. Trump has appeared at small “commit to caucus” events, which his campaign hopes will ensure that his popularity in the state propels him to victory in January, pushing out most of the field.Still, Mr. Trump — who is the front-runner in the Republican primary in both polls and fund-raising — has maintained a fairly light campaign schedule in Iowa.His challengers, who lag far behind, have barnstormed the state, hoping that a strong showing could weaken Mr. Trump’s foothold and give them a path to the Republican nomination.On Saturday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has staked his campaign on the state, opened a new Iowa campaign headquarters outside Des Moines. He was joined by Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, who recently endorsed him.Ms. Reynolds, who previously pledged to stay neutral in the caucuses, praised Mr. DeSantis and said that Iowa caucusgoers “expect you to show up, they expect you to earn their votes,” in an apparent dig at Mr. Trump.But speaking in Fort Dodge, Mr. Trump projected confidence. He relied on a tactic that seemed to reflect his transactional approach to politics: recounting to Iowans what he did for them as president and asking them to return the favor.At one point, he took credit for keeping their caucuses the first presidential nominating contest, in contrast with Democrats, who shifted Iowa later in their nominating calendar.“Look, I kept you first in the nation,” he said. “I’m the one that — will you please give me a good show, at least, out of it? OK? Please.”Mr. Trump reaffirmed his commitment to ethanol, which is important to Iowa’s economy. And as he often does here, he repeatedly touted the $28 billion in aid his administration provided to farmers, money that he has said came from tariffs on China. Mr. Trump suggested that those funds alone should secure him a win in January.“My guys say: ‘Please, sir, don’t take it for granted that you’re going to win Iowa. It doesn’t sound good,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “I say to them, ‘Of course it does. I got them $28 billion. Who the hell else would you vote for?’”But even as he said Iowans’ support in the caucuses was crucial, Mr. Trump made clear that he was already looking ahead to a general election race against President Biden.Citing Mr. Biden’s meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, he accused the president of being corrupted by Chinese influence and too soft on the country.“We have a Manchurian candidate in the Oval Office,” Mr. Trump said, apparently referring to the 1962 film about a Communist sleeper agent in the U.S. government. The reference did not seem to resonate with the crowd.“You know, ‘The Manchurian Candidate’?” Mr. Trump continued. “Go check it out.”In another riff on his usual stump speech, Mr. Trump accused Democrats of conducting a witch hunt with their investigations of him, bringing up the so-called Steele dossier, which contained a salacious claim about his encounters with prostitutes in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton hotel.Mr. Trump lamented that he had to explain to his wife, Melania, accusations that he instructed the prostitutes to urinate on each other and the bed in the hotel, where President Barack Obama had once slept.“Actually, that one she didn’t believe, because she said: ‘He’s a germaphobe. He’s not into that, you know?’” Mr. Trump said. “‘He’s not into golden showers,’ as they say they call that.” He shook his head. “I don’t like that idea. No, I didn’t.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Pardon Recipients Seek to Sell Trump on His Own Sentencing Law

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      The Republican front-runner has a history of making racist statements, but some advisers think highlighting his signature law could help increase support among Black voters and potentially swing the election.In early July, former President Donald J. Trump received a somewhat unlikely visitor at his golf club and estate in Bedminster, N.J.: Michael Harris, the founder of Death Row Records, who had been imprisoned for drug trafficking and attempted murder, came to meet privately with the man who had pardoned him.Mr. Harris was connected to the former president by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump, who had helped push him as a pardon candidate, according to two people familiar with the process. The couple were staying at Mr. Trump’s club at Bedminster when the meeting took place, and Mr. Kushner joined, two people briefed on the matter said.But their lunch served another purpose for some people close to Mr. Trump: Mr. Harris is the type of high-profile Black celebrity that some Trump associates hope will next year highlight the former president’s signature criminal justice reform law, the First Step Act, which was one of Mr. Kushner’s key priorities during his time as an adviser in the White House.Although Mr. Harris is not a beneficiary of the sentencing law, having received his pardon on Mr. Trump’s last full day in office after serving decades in prison as part of a series of clemency grants, he has nonetheless become an evangelist for it.Mr. Trump, who has shown gains among Black voters in some recent polls, is hoping to win a slightly larger margin than he has in the past, with the potential to swing key states. He has been indicted four times, a fact that his advisers and allies insist — without offering any evidence — will somehow be helpful with Black voters because he asserts that he’s a victim of overzealous prosecution. (He has also repeatedly called the three Black prosecutors investigating him “racist.”)But some of his closest allies who have been trying to impress on him the value of boasting his own record on the issue insist that he has absorbed their message, though it is unclear whether that’s true or more of a projection of their own wishes.Mr. Harris declined to discuss what took place in their meeting, but he expressed gratitude toward the Trump administration in a statement and praised the sentencing law. “The passing of the First Step Act and similar initiatives surrounding” criminal justice reform “has provided much needed relief for so many deserving individuals and families,” he said.An aide to Mr. Kushner and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment.Not everyone around the former president believes that he should highlight the First Step Act, which Mr. Trump himself soured on soon after signing it. Mr. Trump, who is often influenced by what he thinks his core voters want, felt affirmed in that view after a number of hard-core Republicans began to criticize it in 2021 and 2022 amid a rise in crime. Some of his conservative associates, who see the bill as problematic with Republicans, said privately that they were unhappy that he had met with Mr. Harris.While the issue poses a potential challenge for Mr. Trump’s team, the discussions also underscore a broader challenge for President Biden’s team heading into 2024: how to pin down an opponent who has a four-year record as well as decades’ worth of statements on almost every issue that are contradictory.Michael Harris, the founder of Death Row Records, was pardoned on Mr. Trump’s last full day in office.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Trump has a long history of making racist statements, including attacking a judge’s Mexican heritage; calling for the death penalty for the teenagers who were arrested and later coerced into giving confessions in a case of brutal rape in Central Park in 1989; telling a group of congresswomen of color — almost all of whom were born in the United States — to go back to their countries; and, perhaps most famously, insisting that the first Black president might not have been born in the United States.He has also grown increasingly violent in his rhetoric about crime in America, saying that he admires the freedom that despots have to execute drug dealers and that shoplifters should be shot on the spot.At the same time, he has made clear that he viewed the law, which, among other things, sought to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes, as something that should have won him support from Black voters.“Did it for African Americans,” he wrote to this reporter for a book in 2022 when asked about his repeated expressions of regret about the law. “Nobody else could have gotten it done. Got zero credit.”But the Democratic coalition of Black, Latino and younger voters has frayed since Mr. Biden’s victory, with Mr. Trump picking up support from those groups. And one difficulty in holding Mr. Trump to account is that he often has a contradictory set of words and actions that different people can latch onto.And the bipartisan First Step Act, which Mr. Trump signed in December 2018, is one part of his record that some of his allies believe they can use in 2024 to downplay his strongman rhetoric and actions around race and violence.“Trump was both bloodthirsty in his rhetoric but signed the First Step Act, which was significant sentencing reform,” said Michael Waldman, the president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice, who also served in the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “Whether he truly believed in it or not, he did it.”While Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, attacked Mr. Trump over the law, calling it a “jailbreak” bill despite voting for an early version of it, his criticisms didn’t dent Mr. Trump’s support. And Republican criticisms of the law have become more muted as the party has coalesced around him.Both praising the legislation and making racist statements would be in keeping with Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, which was a mix of demagoguing immigrants and small-time criminals, using law-and-order rhetoric, and accusing Hillary Clinton of racism against Black men.It is also far from the only issue on which Mr. Trump has decades of action and statements he can point to that allow different people to read what they want into his behavior, and will happily play to whatever audience he’s in front of.Other than Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, no person is more responsible than Mr. Trump, who gave the Supreme Court its 6-3 conservative majority, for overturning the landmark decision that recognized abortion rights as constitutionally protected. Yet, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban signed by Mr. DeSantis a “terrible mistake,” and has refused to be specific about a national ban. That has alarmed Democrats, who worry he will try to appear moderate on the issue in a general election race against Mr. Biden.More recently, some of Mr. Biden’s allies watched angrily as the Spanish-language network Univision, which Mr. Trump has attacked in the past but now has new ownership, gave the former president a relatively soft interview, one that Mr. Kushner arranged, and minimized pushback from Mr. Biden’s team.It remains to be seen how willing Mr. Trump will be, if at all, to speak about the criminal justice law, or whether Mr. Harris might be asked to speak publicly.The same week that Mr. Harris met with Mr. Trump, the former president received a call from Alice Johnson, whose life sentence on charges related to cocaine possession and money laundering was commuted after a meeting between Mr. Trump and the celebrity Kim Kardashian. Ms. Johnson was the person who recommended to Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump that Mr. Harris be granted clemency.“My whole conversation was just encouragement” about the criminal justice reform bill, said Ms. Johnson, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2020 and was pardoned by Mr. Trump a short time later. She said no one had asked her to call him or engage in politics for him next year. But, she added, “he actually is proud of that piece of legislation.” More

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      The Axe Is Sharp

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      David Axelrod is not a prick.Truly.I’ve known him since 2007 and if I had to pick a noun to describe him, it would be mensch.So when President Biden privately employs that epithet for Axelrod, according to Politico’s Jonathan Martin, it’s bad for a few reasons.The ordinarily gracious president is punching down at the strategist who helped elevate him onto the ticket with Barack Obama in 2008 and who thinks he was “a great vice president” and has done a lot of wonderful things as president.When some in the Obama camp chattered in 2011 about switching Biden out for Hillary Clinton, Axelrod said, he protested: “That would be an incredible act of disloyalty to a guy who has done a great job for us.”Surely, Mr. Biden does not want to lower himself to the vulgarity of the growling, brawling, thieving Republicans in the Hieronymus Bosch hellscape of our Congress.(As Seth Meyers noted, George Santos — who spent campaign money on Hermès, Ferragamo, Botox, Sephora and OnlyFans — had “the shopping list of a 98-year-old oil tycoon’s 20-year-old wife.”)Axelrod drew Biden’s ire because he urged the president to consider stopping at one term, throwing open the race to younger Democrats while there’s still time, and leaving as a hero. He said that, despite Biden’s insult, he got a slew of messages agreeing with him.“I don’t care about them thinking I’m a prick — that’s fine,” the strategist told me. “I hope they don’t think the polls are wrong because they’re not.”According to a New York Times/Siena College poll, Donald Trump is ahead in five battleground states and, as some other surveys have found, is even making inroads among Black voters and young voters. There’s a generational fracture in the Democratic Party over the Israeli-Hamas horror and Biden’s age. Third-party spoilers are circling.The president turns 81 on Monday; the Oval hollows out its occupants quickly, and Biden is dealing with two world-shattering wars, chaos at the border, a riven party and a roiling country.“I think he has a 50-50 shot here, but no better than that, maybe a little worse,” Axelrod said. “He thinks he can cheat nature here and it’s really risky. They’ve got a real problem if they’re counting on Trump to win it for them. I remember Hillary doing that, too.”The president’s flash of anger indicates that he may be in denial, surrounded by enablers who are sugarcoating a grim political forecast.Like other pols, Biden has a healthy ego and like all presidents, he’s truculent about not getting the credit he thinks he deserves for his accomplishments. And it must be infuriating that most of the age qualms are about him, when Trump is only a few years younger.No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever, referring to Democrats with the fascist-favored term “vermin” and plotting a second-term revengefest. Trump’s campaign slogan should be, “There will be blood.”For Biden, this is about his identity. It’s what he has fought all his life for, even battling his way through “friendly fire,” as Hunter Biden told me, in the Obama White House, when some Obama aides undermined him. It must have been awful when Obama took his vice president to lunch and nudged him aside for Hillary to run in 2016. Biden craves the affirmation of being re-elected. He doesn’t want to look like a guy who’s been driven from office.But he should not indulge the Irish chip on his shoulder. He needs to gather the sharpest minds in his party and hear what they have to say, not engage in petty feuds.If Trump manages to escape conviction in Jack Smith’s Washington case, which may be the only criminal trial that ends before the election, that’s going to turbocharge his campaign. Of course, if he’s convicted, that could turbocharge his campaign even more.It’s a perfect playing field for the maleficent Trump: He learned in the 2016 race that physical and rhetorical violence could rev up his base. He told me at the time it helped get him to No. 1 and he said he found violence at his rallies exciting.He has no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries at the hands of one of his acolytes is subhuman, any more than he understood how repellent it was in 2015 when he mocked a disabled Times reporter. He gets barbaric laughs somehow, and that’s all he cares about. In an interview with Jonathan Karl, Trump gloated about how his audience on Jan. 6 was “the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of by far.”Never mind that it was one of the most dangerous, shameful days in our history. To Trump, it was glorious.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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      Can Nikki Haley Beat Trump?

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      It’s time to admit that I underestimated Nikki Haley.When she began her presidential campaign, she seemed caught betwixt and between: too much of a throwback to pre-Trump conservatism to challenge Ron DeSantis for the leadership of a Trumpified party, but also too entangled with Trump after her service in his administration to offer the fresh start that anti-Trump Republicans would be seeking.If you wanted someone to attack Trump head-on with relish, Chris Christie was probably your guy. If you wanted someone with pre-Trump Republican politics but without much Trump-era baggage, Tim Scott seemed like the fresher face.But now Scott is gone, Christie has a modest New Hampshire constituency and not much else, and Haley is having her moment. She’s in second place in New Hampshire, tied with DeSantis in the most recent Des Moines Register-led poll in Iowa, and leading Joe Biden by more than either DeSantis or Trump in national polls. Big donors are fluttering her way, and there’s an emerging media narrative about how she’s proving the DeSantis campaign theory wrong and showing that you can thrive as a Republican without surrendering to Trumpism.To be clear, I do not think Haley has proved the DeSantis theory wrong. She is not polling anywhere close to the highs DeSantis hit during his stint as the Trump-slayer, and if you use the Register-led poll to game out a future winnowing, you see that her own voters would mostly go to DeSantis if she were to drop out — but if DeSantis drops out, a lot of his voters would go to Trump.As long as that’s the case, Haley might be able to consolidate 30 or 35 percent of the party, but the path to actually winning would be closed. Which could make her ascent at DeSantis’s expense another study in the political futility of anti-Trump conservatism, its inability to wrestle successfully with the populism that might make Trump the nominee and the president again.But credit where it’s due: Haley has knocked out Scott, passed Christie and challenged DeSantis by succeeding at a core aspect of presidential politics — presenting yourself as an appealing and charismatic leader who can pick public fights and come out the winner (at least when Vivek Ramaswamy is your foil).So in the spirit of not underestimating her, let’s try to imagine a scenario where Haley actually wins the nomination.First, assume that ideological analysis of party politics is overrated, and that a candidate’s contingent success can yield irresistible momentum, stampeding voters in a way that polls alone cannot anticipate.For Haley, the stampede scenario requires winning outright in New Hampshire. The difficulty is that even on the upswing, she still trails Trump 46-19 in the current RealClearPolitics Average. But assume that Christie drops out and his support swings her way, assume that the current polling underestimates how many independents vote in the G.O.P. primary, assume a slight sag for Trump and a little last-moment Nikkimentum, and you can imagine your way to a screaming upset — Haley 42, Trump 40.Then assume that defeat forces Trump to actually debate in the long February lull (broken only by the Nevada caucus) between New Hampshire and the primary in Haley’s own South Carolina. Assume that the front-runner comes across as some combination of rusty and insane, Haley handles him coolly and then wins her home state primary. Assume that polls still show her beating Biden, Fox News has rallied to her fully, endorsements flood in — and finally, finally, enough voters who like Trump because he’s a winner swing her way to clear a path to the nomination.You’ll notice, though, that this story skips over Iowa. That’s because I’m not sure what Haley needs there. Victory seems implausible, but does she want to surge so impressively that it knocks DeSantis out of the race? Or, as the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio has suggested, does the fact that DeSantis’s voters mostly have Trump as a second choice mean that Haley actually needs DeSantis to stay in the race through the early states, so that Trump can’t consolidate his own potential support? In which case maybe Haley needs an Iowa result where both she and DeSantis overperform their current polling, setting her up for New Hampshire but also giving the Florida governor a reason to hang around.This dilemma connects to my earlier argument that beating Trump requires a joining of the Haley and DeSantis factions, an alliance of the kind contemplated by Trump’s opponents in 2016 but never operationalized. But I doubt Haley is interested in such an alliance at the moment; after all, people are talking about her path to victory — and here I am, doing it myself!Fundamentally, though, I still believe that Haley’s destiny is anticipated by the biting, “congrats, Nikki,” quote from a DeSantis ally in New York Magazine: “You won the Never Trump primary. Your prize is nothing.”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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      Colorado Judge Keeps Trump on Ballot in 14th Amendment Case

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      A district court judge ruled that former President Donald J. Trump “engaged in insurrection” but said the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to him.A Colorado judge ruled on Friday that former President Donald J. Trump could remain on the primary ballot in the state, rejecting the argument that the 14th Amendment prevents him from holding office again — but doing so on relatively narrow grounds that lawyers for the voters seeking to disqualify him said they would appeal.With his actions before and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled, Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection against the Constitution, an offense that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which was ratified in 1868 to keep former Confederates out of the government — deems disqualifying for people who previously took an oath to support the Constitution.But Judge Wallace, a state district court judge in Denver, concluded that Section 3 did not include the presidential oath in that category.The clause does not explicitly name the presidency, so that question hinged on whether the president was included in the category “officer of the United States.”Because of “the absence of the president from the list of positions to which the amendment applies combined with the fact that Section 3 specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Judge Wallace wrote, “it appears to the court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the presidential oath.”“Part of the court’s decision,” she continued, “is its reluctance to embrace an interpretation which would disqualify a presidential candidate without a clear, unmistakable indication that such is the intent of Section 3.”She added in a footnote that it was “not for this court to decide” whether the omission of the presidency was intentional or an oversight.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement: “We applaud today’s ruling in Colorado, which is another nail in the coffin of the un-American ballot challenges.” He added, “These cases represent the most cynical and blatant political attempts to interfere with the upcoming presidential election by desperate Democrats who know Crooked Joe Biden is a failed president on the fast track to defeat.”Mario Nicolais, one of the lawyers representing the six Colorado voters who filed the lawsuit in September, said he was encouraged by the narrow grounds on which they had lost — not on the substance of Mr. Trump’s actions, but on the scope of the amendment’s applicability. The voters will appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court within three days, but the United States Supreme Court will most likely have the final say.“The court found that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection after a careful and thorough review of the evidence,” Mr. Nicolais said. “We are very pleased with the opinion and look forward to addressing the sole legal issue on appeal, namely whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to insurrectionist presidents. We believe that it does.”Judge Wallace is the first judge to rule on the merits of whether Section 3 applies to Mr. Trump. Similar lawsuits in Minnesota and New Hampshire have been dismissed on procedural grounds, and a judge in Michigan recently ruled that the questions were political ones that courts did not have the authority to decide. The plaintiffs in Michigan have appealed that ruling.Judge Wallace’s assessment of Mr. Trump’s behavior before and on Jan. 6 was damning, and, notably, she rejected his lawyers’ argument that the First Amendment protected him. His words and actions, she wrote, met the criteria set by the Supreme Court in Brandenburg v. Ohio for distinguishing incitement from protected speech.“Trump acted with the specific intent to incite political violence and direct it at the Capitol with the purpose of disrupting the electoral certification,” she wrote. “Trump cultivated a culture that embraced political violence through his consistent endorsement of the same.”Referring to his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, in which he told his supporters that they needed to “fight like hell” and that they were justified in behaving by “very different rules,” Judge Wallace said, “Such incendiary rhetoric, issued by a speaker who routinely embraced political violence and had inflamed the anger of his supporters leading up to the certification, was likely to incite imminent lawlessness and disorder.”Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, said she would obey whatever ruling was in place on Jan. 5, 2024, the state’s deadline for certifying candidates to the primary ballot. Ms. Griswold, a Democrat, is responsible for that certification, and the effect of Judge Wallace’s ruling was to order her to include Mr. Trump.But, while emphasizing that she was not saying whether the judge was right or wrong about the scope of Section 3, she said she found the notion that the presidency was excluded “deeply problematic.”“The idea that the presidency itself is a get-out-of-jail-free card for insurrection and rebellion, I think, is striking,” she said in an interview Friday night. Referring to Judge Wallace’s conclusion that Mr. Trump had engaged in insurrection, she added: “I think that court determination in itself is incredibly powerful for the country.”The decision followed a weeklong trial in which lawyers for the plaintiffs called eight witnesses to build their case for Mr. Trump’s disqualification, relying in particular on the testimony of two professors.Peter Simi, an expert on political extremism, testified that far-right groups routinely relied on implicit, plausibly deniable calls for violence, and that Mr. Trump had communicated with them in that way — an argument presented to rebut the defense that he never explicitly told anyone to storm the Capitol. And Gerard Magliocca, an expert on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, testified that at the time it was ratified, “engaging in insurrection” had been understood to include verbal incitement of force to prevent the execution of the law.Mr. Trump’s lawyers called one expert, Robert Delahunty, a law professor who testified that Section 3 was vague and that it should be up to Congress to define it. Their other witnesses included a former Defense Department official who said Mr. Trump had pre-emptively authorized the use of National Guard troops to prevent violence on Jan. 6 — followed by people who were at Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse that day, who testified that they had not heard his words as a call to violence and that the crowd had been peaceful before part of it turned violent. More

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      Judge Rejects Trump Motion to Strike Jan. 6 Mentions From Federal Election Case

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      The ruling was a step toward allowing prosecutors to introduce evidence at trial that members of the mob that stormed the Capitol believed they were acting at Donald Trump’s instruction.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s trial on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election rejected on Friday a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to remove language from his indictment describing the role he played in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The ruling by the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, was an initial step toward allowing prosecutors in the case to introduce evidence at trial that members of the mob that stormed the Capitol that day believed they were acting at Mr. Trump’s instruction.Last month, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Chutkan to strike any mention of the riot at the Capitol from the 45-page indictment filed against him this summer in Federal District Court in Washington. The lawyers argued that since none of the four charges in the case explicitly accused Mr. Trump of inciting the violence that day, any reference to the mob attack would be prejudicial and irrelevant.Prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, shot back that even if they had not filed formal incitement charges, the riot would be instrumental in their efforts to prove one of their central allegations: that Mr. Trump had plotted to obstruct the certification of the election that was taking place at a proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6.In court papers to Judge Chutkan, prosecutors called the Jan. 6 attack “the culmination” of Mr. Trump’s “criminal conspiracies” to overturn the election. They also suggested that they were poised to introduce video evidence of the riot and call witnesses at trial who could testify that they attacked police and stormed the Capitol after hearing Mr. Trump exhort them to “fight” in a speech he gave before the violence broke out.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have suggested that they will try in a future motion to keep Mr. Smith’s team from introducing evidence like that at the trial. If the lawyers end up taking that route, Judge Chutkan will have to make another ruling about whether the evidence is relevant and not prejudicial.Her decision to keep the references to the riot in the indictment came on the same day that a group of news organizations reiterated a request to televise the trial.Lawyers for the news organizations said Mr. Trump had sought to challenge the “very legitimacy” of the case, and they argued that a live broadcast was needed so people could view the trial firsthand.“Of all trials conducted throughout American history, this one needs the public trust that only a televised proceeding can foster,” lawyers for the organizations wrote.The nine-page brief by the media outlets — The New York Times, among them — was the last round of court papers expected to be filed to Judge Chutkan before she rules on whether to allow cameras at the trial, which is scheduled to begin in March.Lawyers for Mr. Trump, in a combative and misleading filing last week, compared the election interference case to “a trial in an authoritarian regime.” They told Judge Chutkan that it should be televised so that the public did not have to “rely on biased, secondhand accounts coming from the Biden administration and its media allies.”Within days, prosecutors in the office of the special counsel fired back that broadcasting the proceeding would not only violate longstanding federal rules of criminal procedure, but would also allow Mr. Trump, a former reality television star, to turn the trial into “a media event” with a “carnival atmosphere.”Lawyers for the media coalition said in their filing on Friday that it was “naïve to think that Trump’s trial will be anything other than a ‘media event.’”But the lawyers said that if the proceeding were broadcast live — in a “dignified, carefully managed” manner — it would permit the public to “see this trial firsthand” after Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked the government’s case as an act of pure political persecution.“The media coalition believes that the more people who see the trial in real time, the stronger the case for public acceptance of the result,” the lawyers wrote.The judge who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s trial in Fulton County, Ga., on local charges of tampering with that state’s election has already televised several key hearings and has vowed to broadcast the trial itself, which could take place as early as next summer. (Prosecutors in Georgia filed a motion seeking an Aug. 5 start date on Friday, though the presiding judge will ultimately set the trial date.)But the federal courts have stricter rules about cameras in the courtroom, and Judge Chutkan would have to set them aside to allow her trial to be broadcast live. More

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      Nikki Haley Says She Doesn’t Agree With Trump ‘Vermin’ Comments

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      Her reaction, which came six days after the former president first made the remarks, came in response to a question from one of her supporters while campaigning in Iowa.Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is rising in the polls in the Republican presidential race, criticized former President Donald J. Trump for vowing to root out his political opponents like “vermin.”“I don’t agree with that statement,” Ms. Haley said at a town-hall event in Newton, Iowa. “Any more than I agree when he said Hezbollah was smart, or any more than I agree when he hit Netanyahu when his country was on its knees after all that brutality.”Ms. Haley’s response, which came six days after Mr. Trump made the remarks at a Veterans Day address in Claremont, N.H., was prompted by a question from Daniel Beintema, 63, a supporter of Ms. Haley who was concerned about the spread of “hate and division” and how little attention Mr. Trump’s comments received from Republican officials.Mr. Trump’s rhetoric — particularly the use of the word “vermin” — was condemned by President Biden’s campaign and other Democrats, as well as by historians, for its echoes with the dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini.“When somebody that’s a leader in the Republican Party uses words of divisiveness and hatred, calling people vermin — and just because they oppose what you’re doing or where they come from, who they are,” Mr. Beintema said in an interview after the event. “And the Republican Party backed away from that, like, ‘Well, I’m not going to make a comment on that.’ I think that’s important.”The town-hall exchange reflected the careful criticism of Mr. Trump that has seeped into Ms. Haley’s stump speeches on the campaign trail. She has focused on the former president’s mercurial and scandal-prone nature, something she says would be a liability both for Republicans at the polls and in the Oval Office.“You look at the elections from last week or two weeks ago, we lost again. That’s chaos,” Ms. Haley said speaking to voters on Friday. She added: “We can’t have the world on fire and be dealing with chaos. We just can’t. We won’t survive it.”The critical comments also come as Ms. Haley is surging in the polls in Iowa and other early voting states. Voters who plan to caucus for her in Iowa have said it is because of her foreign policy experience, her strong performance in the debates and her commitment to speaking what she calls “hard truths.”“She is willing to not avoid tough subjects that are going to potentially offend people who would show up for her,” said Mark Timmerman, 62, a resident of Clive, Iowa, who traveled to see Ms. Haley in Ankeny on Friday. “She will tell the truth.” More

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      Los planes de Trump y sus aliados para ejercer el poder en 2025

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      Utilizar el Departamento de Justicia para vengarse de sus adversarios y aumentar la represión a los inmigrantes serían algunas de las prioridades de Trump si regresa a la Casa Blanca.En el primer mitin de su campaña presidencial de 2024, el expresidente Donald Trump declaró: “Yo soy su castigo”. Más tarde, prometió utilizar el Departamento de Justicia para perseguir a sus adversarios políticos, empezando por el presidente Joe Biden y su familia.Detrás de estas amenazas públicas hay una serie de planes de Trump y sus aliados que pondrían en jaque elementos fundamentales de la gobernanza, la democracia, la política exterior y el Estado de derecho de Estados Unidos si regresa a la Casa Blanca.Algunos de estos temas se remontan al último periodo del mandato de Trump. Para entonces, sus asesores clave habían aprendido a ejercer el poder con mayor eficacia y Trump había despedido a funcionarios que se resistían a algunos de sus impulsos y los había sustituido por partidarios leales. Entonces, perdió las elecciones de 2020 y tuvo que abandonar el poder.Desde que dejó el cargo, los asesores y aliados de Trump en una red de grupos bien financiados han perfeccionado políticas, creado listas de posibles funcionarios y comenzado a dar forma a un nuevo andamiaje jurídico, con lo que han sentado las bases para una segunda presidencia de Trump que esperan que comience el 20 de enero de 2025.En una declaración poco clara, dos de los funcionarios más importantes de la campaña de Trump buscaron distanciar a su equipo de campaña de algunos de los planes que desarrollan los aliados externos del expresidente, grupos liderados por antiguos altos mandos de su gobierno que siguen en contacto directo con él. La declaración calificó los informes de noticias sobre el personal y las intenciones políticas de la campaña como “puramente especulativos y teóricos”.Los planes descritos aquí se derivan de lo que Trump ha pregonado en la campaña, lo que ha aparecido en su sitio web de campaña y de entrevistas con asesores de Trump, incluido uno que habló con The New York Times a petición de la campaña.Trump quiere usar al Departamento de Justicia para vengarse de sus adversarios políticosSi vuelve a ganar la presidencia, Trump ha declarado que usaría el Departamento de Justicia para iniciar investigaciones en contra de sus adversarios y acusarlos de cometer delitos, incluso dijo en junio que nombraría a “un fiscal especial de verdad para ir tras” Biden y su familia. Más tarde declaró en una entrevista con Univisión que, si alguien lo desafiaba por motivos políticos, podría hacer que esa persona fuera acusada formalmente.Los aliados de Trump también han estado desarrollando un proyecto intelectual para desechar la norma posterior al Watergate sobre la independencia investigadora del Departamento de Justicia respecto a la dirección política de la Casa Blanca.Anticipándose a eso, Trump ya había violado las normas en su campaña de 2016, cuando prometió “encarcelar” a su oponente, Hillary Clinton, por usar un servidor de correo electrónico privado. Durante su presidencia, dijo en varias ocasiones a sus asesores que quería que el Departamento de Justicia presentara cargos contra sus enemigos políticos, incluidos funcionarios a quienes había despedido como James Comey, exdirector del FBI. El Departamento de Justicia abrió varias investigaciones de este tipo, pero no presentó cargos, lo cual enfureció a Trump y provocó una ruptura en 2020 con Bill Barr, su fiscal general.Se propone llevar a cabo una represión extrema de la migraciónTrump planea un ataque a la migración a una escala nunca antes vista en la historia moderna de Estados Unidos. A millones de migrantes que entraron ilegalmente en Estados Unidos se les prohibiría estar en el país o se les deportaría años o incluso décadas después de haberse establecido aquí.Reforzados por agentes reasignados de otros organismos federales de procuración de justicia, la policía estatal y la Guardia Nacional, los funcionarios del Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas llevarían a cabo redadas masivas destinadas a deportar a millones de personas cada año. Se emplearían fondos militares con el propósito de construir campamentos para albergar a los detenidos. Se invocaría una ley de emergencia de salud pública para suspender las solicitudes de asilo de las personas que llegan a la frontera. Y el gobierno trataría de poner fin a la ciudadanía por derecho de nacimiento para los bebés nacidos en suelo estadounidense de padres sin estatus legal.Trump tiene planes para usar la fuerza militar estadounidense más cerca de casaMientras estaba en el cargo, Trump pensó en usar el Ejército para atacar a los cárteles de drogas en México, una idea que violaría el derecho internacional a menos que México consintiera. Desde entonces, esa idea ha recibido un respaldo republicano más amplio y Trump pretende hacerla realidad si vuelve al Despacho Oval.Aunque la Ley Posse Comitatus prohíbe en general el uso de soldados federales con fines policiales, otra ley, la Ley de Insurrección, establece una excepción. Trump quería invocar la Ley de Insurrección a fin de utilizar al Ejército para reprimir a los manifestantes después de la muerte de George Floyd a manos de la policía en 2020, pero no lo logró y la idea sigue siendo importante entre sus asistentes. Entre otras cosas, su principal asesor de migración ha dicho que invocarían la Ley de Insurrección en la frontera sur para usar soldados con la finalidad de interceptar y detener a los migrantes que ingresan a Estados Unidos de manera ilegal.Trump y sus aliados quieren un mayor control sobre la burocracia federal y la fuerza laboralTrump y sus partidarios quieren aumentar el poder que tiene el presidente sobre las agencias federales, lo cual implicaría concentrar en la Casa Blanca un mayor control sobre toda la maquinaria del gobierno.Para ello han adoptado una versión maximalista de la llamada teoría del ejecutivo unitario, según la cual el presidente tiene autoridad directa sobre toda la burocracia federal y es inconstitucional que el Congreso cree reductos de autoridad independiente en la toma de decisiones.Como parte de ese plan, Trump también pretende revivir una iniciativa del final de su presidencia para alterar las normas de servicio civil que protegen a los profesionales de carrera del gobierno, lo que le permitiría despedir a decenas de miles de trabajadores federales y remplazarlos por partidarios. Después de que el Congreso fracasó en su intento de promulgar una ley para impedir que ese cambio sucediera, el gobierno de Biden decidió redactar un reglamento para blindar a los empleados federales contra Trump. Sin embargo, dado que se trata solo de una acción ejecutiva, el próximo presidente republicano podría dejarla sin efecto de la misma manera.Los aliados de Trump quieren abogados que no lo limitenLos abogados con designación política frustraron en ocasiones los deseos de Trump al plantear objeciones legales a sus ideas y a las de sus principales asesores. Esta dinámica ha provocado una división silenciosa en la derecha, ya que los partidarios leales a Trump han llegado a ver con desdén al típico abogado de la Sociedad Federalista, en esencia, un conservador republicano de la corriente dominante.En un posible nuevo mandato, los aliados de Trump están planeando instalar de forma sistemática guardianes legales más agresivos y alineados ideológicamente, que serán más propensos a aprobar acciones contenciosas. En un sondeo de The New York Times sobre candidatos presidenciales para 2024, Trump y su equipo de campaña se negaron a responder a una serie de preguntas detalladas sobre qué límites, de haberlos, reconocería a sus poderes en una serie de asuntos bélicos, de confidencialidad y de aplicación de la ley, muchos de ellos planteados en su primer mandato.Jonathan Swan es periodista de política especializado en campañas y el Congreso estadounidense. Como reportero de Axios, ganó un Emmy por su entrevista de 2020 al entonces presidente Donald Trump, así como el Premio Aldo Beckman de la Asociación de Corresponsales de la Casa Blanca por “excelencia en general en la cobertura de la Casa Blanca” en 2022. Más de Jonathan SwanMaggie Haberman es corresponsal política sénior y autora de Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Formó parte del equipo que ganó un premio Pulitzer en 2018 por informar sobre los asesores del presidente Trump y sus conexiones con Rusia. Más de Maggie HabermanCharlie Savage escribe sobre seguridad nacional y política legal. Es periodista desde hace más de dos décadas. Más de Charlie Savage More