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      Fact-Checking Trump’s Recent Immigration Claims

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      As President Biden grapples with an unwieldy crisis at the southern border, his likely 2024 rival has leveled many criticisms — including some baseless and misleading claims.Former President Donald J. Trump has drawn widespread censure after reprising a line that casts undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”The remark underscored Mr. Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration, which has been central to his platform since he made his first bid for president in 2015. If elected again, he has vowed to carry out mass deportations and enact other strict policies.He and his Republican rivals have pointed to the surge of migrants at the southern border to make their political case. Some Democrats, too, have been critical of the Biden administration’s approach toward immigration.But even with legitimate lines of attack, Mr. Trump has at times turned to baseless and misleading claims during rallies in recent months.Here’s a fact check.WHAT WAS SAID“I read an article recently in a paper … about a man who runs a mental institution in South America, and by the way they’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Africa, from Asia, all over, but this happened to be in South America. And he was sitting, the picture was — sitting, reading a newspaper, sort of leisurely, and they were asking him, what are you doing? He goes, I was very busy all my life. I was very proud. I worked 24 hours a day. I was so busy all the time. But now I’m in this mental institution — where he’s been for years — and I’m in the mental institution and I worked very hard on my patients but now we don’t have any patients. They’ve all been brought to the United States.”— during a rally in Nevada this monthThis lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that immigrants crossing the border are coming from “mental institutions” and jails. This particular story would seem to offer specific facts behind that assertion, but there is no evidence that such a report exists.The New York Times could not find any such news account from the start of Mr. Biden’s tenure in January 2021 to March, when Mr. Trump told the same story at a Texas rally.The Trump campaign did not respond when repeatedly asked about the source of this claim. But pressed this year by CNN for factual support for the tale, the campaign provided links that did not corroborate it.Likewise, there is no support for Mr. Trump’s broader claim that countries are “dumping” their prisoners and psychiatric patients in the United States.“We are unaware of any effort by any country or other jurisdiction to empty its mental-health institutions or its jails and prisons to send people with mental-health issues or criminals to the U.S.,” Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokeswoman for the nonpartisan research organization Migration Policy Institute, said in an email.The claim evokes elements of a mass exodus that occurred more than 40 years ago in Cuba, Ms. Mittelstadt noted: the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Some 125,000 people fled to the United States, including inmates from jails and patients from mental health institutions freed by the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.“But there has been no present-day effort by any country, to our knowledge, or any credible reporting by media or others that anything of the like is taking place,” Ms. Mittelstadt said.WHAT WAS SAID“They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions, and wait till you see what’s going to happen with all those people.”— during a rally in October in New HampshireThis lacks evidence. Setting aside the baseless suggestion that all undocumented immigrants entering the country are coming from jails and mental institutions, Mr. Trump’s estimate of 15 million is not supported by the data.Customs and Border Protection data shows that U.S. officials recorded nearly eight million encounters at its borders from February 2021, the first full month of Mr. Biden’s presidency, to October 2023.But even then, “encounter does not mean admittance,” Tom Wong, an associate professor of political science and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email. “In fact, most encounters lead to expulsions.”For example, C.B.P. data shows that about 2.5 million expulsions occurred under Title 42, a health rule that used the coronavirus as grounds for turning back immigrants illegally crossing the border, from February 2021 until the policy ended in May.Former President Donald J. Trump has at times turned to baseless and misleading claims about immigration in recent months.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe number of encounters also are based on events, not people, and therefore could include the same person more than once.The exact number of people who have entered the country without authorization is hard to pin down because there are also “gotaways” — people who crossed into the country illegally and evaded authorities.But the federal, observational estimates of such people also would not support Mr. Trump’s claim. The secretary of homeland security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, estimated at a recent hearing that there had been more than 600,000 gotaways in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September. That is also the estimate for fiscal year 2022, according to an inspector general report. And there were more than 391,300 in fiscal year 2021, which began in October 2020 under Mr. Trump and ended in September 2021 under Mr. Biden.In terms of migrants with criminal records, officials encountered nearly 45,000 at ports of entry since the start of fiscal year 2021. Between ports of entry in that period, officials encountered another 40,000 noncitizens with criminal records.While Mr. Trump in this instance claimed the country had allowed 15 million migrants to enter, he has at other times predicted that would be the total figure by the end of Mr. Biden’s term. That would be larger than the estimated total population of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States — about 10.5 million in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.WHAT WAS SAID“In the past three years, Biden has spent over $1 billion to put up illegal aliens in hotels, some of the most luxurious hotels in the country. Meanwhile, we have 33,000 homeless American veterans. Can you believe it?”— during a rally in November in New HampshireThis needs context. Mr. Trump’s figure of homeless veterans refers to a 2022 estimate by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That number includes about 19,500 veterans who were in shelters when the count was conducted. And both the 2022 estimate and a new tally for 2023 — which reported nearly 35,600 homeless veterans — are actually down slightly from when Mr. Trump was in office, continuing an overall downward trend since 2009.As for migrant housing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted in 2021 with a nonprofit group to house border arrivals at a handful of hotels in Texas and Arizona, as a 2022 homeland security inspector general report details. The contract totaled more than $130 million and ended in 2022. The Trump administration also turned to hotels in 2020 to hold migrant children and families before expelling them.The Biden administration has not directly spent $1 billion to place immigrants in hotels. But cities are indeed facing steep costs for sheltering and caring for border arrivals — including through hotels. The Trump campaign did not indicate where Mr. Trump had obtained the $1 billion figure, but it is possible he was referring to a federal initiative that provides funding to local governments and nongovernment groups to help offset those costs.The program was in fact first authorized through 2019 legislation signed by Mr. Trump. While it allows nonfederal entities to seek grants for housing migrants in hotels and motels, it is not exclusive to that. Congress provided the program $110 million in fiscal year 2021 and $150 million in fiscal year 2022.Lawmakers recently replaced the initiative with a new shelter and services program. For fiscal year 2023, officials earmarked $425 million for the old program and $363.8 million for the new one.All told, the federal government has allocated about $1 billion since fiscal year 2021, which includes the last few months under the Trump administration, toward local efforts to feed and shelter migrants around the country — not only hotel expenses.While FEMA discloses recipients of the funding, it does not say how much each grant is used specifically on hotel costs.WHAT WAS SAID“We cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring in at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border.”— during a rally in Iowa in OctoberThis lacks evidence. Mr. Trump offered no evidence that people affiliated with Hamas, the militant group that staged a brutal assault on Israel in early October, are “pouring” into the country at record levels. And experts say they are unaware of data that would support that contention.If the former president’s statement was meant to convey that terrorists more generally are “pouring in” at the border, he could be referring to the rising number of encounters at the southern border with people on a terrorism watch list. The list includes known and suspected terrorists as well as people affiliated with them.A total of 169 noncitizens on that list tried to illegally enter the United States at the southern border in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September, up from three in fiscal year 2020, according to C.B.P. statistics.Still, it is unclear what that says about the terrorism threat, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. There is no record of a terrorist attack being committed on American soil by an immigrant who crossed the southern border illegally. (In 2008, three brothers who had come to the United States illegally years earlier as children, from Yugoslavia, were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey.)Apprehended individuals on the list are supposed to remain in government custody as they await removal proceedings, Mr. Nowrasteh said.Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com. More

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      How Russian and Chinese Interference Could Affect the 2024 Election

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      The stakes for Russia in the presidential vote are large. Other adversaries also might try to deepen divisions among American voters.The U.S. government is preparing for its adversaries to intensify efforts to influence American voters next year. Russia has huge stakes in the presidential election. China seems poised to back a more aggressive campaign. Other countries, like Iran, might again try to sow division in the United States.As Washington looks ahead to the 2024 vote, U.S. intelligence agencies last week released a report on the 2022 midterm elections — a document that gives us some hints about what might be to come.Spy agencies concluded Russia favored Trump in 2016. What about in 2024?Russia appears to be paying close attention to the election, as its war in Ukraine is soon to enter a third year.Former President Donald J. Trump, the leading Republican candidate, has expressed skepticism about Ukraine funding. President Biden has argued that assisting Ukraine is in America’s interest.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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      When Will Trump Stand Trial? Supreme Court Order May Help Him Delay.

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      The former president’s claim that he is immune from prosecution will now be taken up by a federal appeals court — and could end up back in front of the justices within weeks.The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday not to fast-track consideration of former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he is immune to prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election was unquestionably a victory for Mr. Trump and his lawyers.The choice by the justices not to take up the issue now — rendered without explanation — gave a boost to the former president’s legal strategy of delaying the proceedings as much as possible in the hopes of running out the clock before Election Day.It is not clear, however, that the decision holds any clues to what the Supreme Court might think of the substance of his immunity claim. And the degree to which it pushes off Mr. Trump’s trial will only be determined in coming weeks as the clash over whether he can be prosecuted plays out in the federal appeals court in Washington — and then perhaps makes its way right back to the justices.How the Supreme Court handles the case at that point could still have profound implications, both for whether the federal election interference indictment will stand and for whether Mr. Trump might succeed in pushing a trial past the election. At that point, if he wins the presidency, he could order the charges to be dropped.Here is a look at what’s ahead.What issue is Mr. Trump appealing?Mr. Trump is attempting to get the entire indictment against him tossed out with an argument that has never before been tested by the courts — largely because no one else has ever made it this way. He is claiming that he is absolutely immune to criminal prosecution on the charges of election interference because they stem from acts he took while he was in the White House.Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is handling the underlying case in Federal District Court in Washington, rejected that claim earlier this month in a decision that found there was nothing in the Constitution or American history supporting the idea that the holder of the nation’s highest position, once out of office, should not be subject to the federal criminal law like everybody else.Mr. Trump appealed the decision to the first court above Judge Chutkan’s: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.But fearing that a protracted appeal could delay the case from going to trial as scheduled in March, Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, made an unusual request to the Supreme Court: He asked the justices to step in front of the appeals court and consider the case first to speed up the process and preserve the current trial date.On Friday, in a one-sentence order, the Supreme Court turned down Mr. Smith’s request.Where will the case be heard now?The appeals court in Washington will hear the immunity matter. In fact, the court will do so on a schedule that is extremely accelerated by judicial standards.A three-judge panel of the court — made up of one judge named by President George H.W. Bush and two appointed by President Biden — has ordered all of the briefs in the case to be turned in by Jan. 2. It has set a hearing for oral arguments on Jan. 9.In a sign of how quickly the panel is moving, the judges told Mr. Trump’s lawyers to turn in their first round of court papers on Saturday, two days before Christmas. Mr. Smith’s team has been ordered to submit its own papers on the following Saturday, the day before New Year’s Eve.What happens after the appeals court rules?If the appeals court decides in Mr. Trump’s favor, Mr. Smith’s office would almost certainly challenge the loss in front of the Supreme Court, assuming the justices agreed to hear it.But the more likely scenario is that the three appellate judges rule against Mr. Trump, rejecting his claims of immunity.At that point, he could seek to have the entire circuit court hear the appeal — a move that, if nothing else, would eat up more time. If the full court declined to take the case or ruled against him, he would likely ask the Supreme Court to step in for the second time.What happens if it goes back to the Supreme Court?In theory, the Supreme Court could decline to take up the immunity matter if Mr. Trump loses and simply let the appeals court ruling stand. That option could be appealing to the justices if they want to avoid stepping directly into a highly charged political issue — just one of several they are likely to confront in coming months that could have a bearing on Mr. Trump’s chances of reclaiming the White House.Were that to happen, the case would go back to Judge Chutkan and she would set a new date for trial. Her handling of the case so far suggests that she would move the proceedings along at a rapid clip.If, however, the Supreme Court were to take the case, the justices would have to make another critical decision: how fast to hear it. It is possible they could consider the case quickly and return a ruling on the immunity issue by — or even well before — the end of their current term in June.But Mr. Smith has expressed concern in filings to the court that the justices might not be able to complete their work before the end of this term. If they do not, the case would drag into the next term, which does not get underway until October, too late to resolve before Election Day.What does all of this mean for the start of the trial?If the appeals court returns a quick decision against Mr. Trump and the Supreme Court lets that decision stand, the trial might be delayed, but perhaps only by a matter of weeks. Under this scenario, it is conceivable that the case could go in front of a jury by April or May, well before the heart of the campaign season.If the Supreme Court takes the case and hears it on a fast-tracked schedule, the trial could be delayed for somewhat longer — perhaps by a matter of months. That would mean a trial could be held over the summer, a fraught possibility given that the Republican nominating convention is in July and that Mr. Trump, assuming he is the party’s nominee, could be kept from doing much traditional campaigning for the duration of the trial.But if the Supreme Court takes the case and follows a leisurely pace in considering it, there might not be a trial at all before the general election in November. In that case, voters would not have the chance to hear the evidence in the case against Mr. Trump before making their choice — and a President Trump could choose to make sure they do not get the chance after the election either. More

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      The Supreme Court’s Big Trump Test Is Here

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      A generation after the Supreme Court stepped into a disputed presidential election, America is experiencing a creeping sense of déjà vu. Twenty-three years ago, a bare majority of the justices halted a recount in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush.The specter of Bush v. Gore, the case that stands as a marker of how not to resolve searing political disputes, looms large as the Supreme Court is being called upon to address controversies with profound implications for the fortunes of the Republican front-runner in 2024.The justices are feeling the heat nearly a year in advance of an election rather than in the fraught weeks following the vote. The questions today are more complex — there are at least three separate matters, not one — and all revolve around the Capitol insurrection that transpired across the street from the Supreme Court Building in 2021.On Friday, the court turned down Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for fast-track review of Donald Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for their conduct while in office. But that critical question will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court soon: The D.C. federal appeals court is hearing the case on Jan. 9 and will probably rule shortly thereafter.The court has agreed to hear a case asking whether Jan. 6 rioters can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, another key part of Mr. Smith’s Jan. 6 case against Mr. Trump. And most dramatically, the former president will surely ask the justices to reverse a ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court that, if affirmed, could pave the way for an untold number of states to erase his name from the ballot.For a tribunal that is supposed to sit far away from, not astride, politics, that’s a lot for the Supreme Court to handle. And this is happening at a rough moment for the court. In August 2000, on the eve of Bush v. Gore, 62 percent of Americans approved of how the Supreme Court was conducting itself. Now, recent polling shows that nearly that portion (58 percent) disapproves of the institution, a figure that scrapes historic lows for the court.Yet the multiplicity of cases affords the justices an opportunity to avoid pinning themselves in still further if they keep an eye on how potential decisions will — collectively — shape the political landscape. The point is not that getting the underlying legal questions “right” is irrelevant. But when the stakes are this high and the legal questions are novel, the justices have a duty to hand down decisions that resonate across the political spectrum — or at least that avoid inciting violence in the streets. That’s not subverting the rule of law; it’s preserving it.Extraordinary times call for a court that embraces the art of judicial statecraft.The trap the court finds itself in is largely a function of its own behavior, both on and off the bench. The 6-to-3 conservative supermajority has radically expanded gun rights, circumscribed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the environment, all but eviscerated race-based affirmative action, punched holes through the wall separating church from state and — most notoriously — eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. The past year has also seen increasing public scrutiny of the justices’ apparent ethical lapses, sunlight that pushed the justices to adopt their first code of ethics.A universe in which the court somehow splits the difference — for example, keeping Mr. Trump on the ballot while refusing to endorse (if not affirmatively repudiating) his conduct and spurning his kinglike claim to total immunity — could go a long way toward reducing the temperature of the coming election cycle. Such an outcome could also help restore at least some of the court’s credibility.We understand that trying too hard to project an image of nonpartisanship carries risks. Recent reporting on the twists and turns of how the conservative majority engineered the end of Roe v. Wade shows how curating rulings can make justices look too clever by half — if not outright deceptive. Delaying the grant of review in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, in which some of the conservative justices apparently knew they had the votes to overrule Roe, created a false impression that the court was struggling over the matter — when the reality was anything but. Indeed, the Dobbs experience and its aftermath might have led some justices to sour on the idea of judicial statecraft — especially if their internal deliberations end up getting leaked to the press. No jurist wants to be seen as a cunning manipulator of public opinion.And yet, some of the court’s most important rulings across its history have represented just the kind of high constitutional politics that we believe are called for now. The court’s recognition of its power to strike down acts of Congress in Marbury v. Madison came in a context in which the direct effect of the ruling was to restrain the court while slapping the Jefferson administration on the wrist.Its concerted effort to produce unanimous opinions in some of the landmark civil rights cases of the 1950s and 1960s reflected a view that speaking in one voice was more important than the legal nuances of what was said. (This, perhaps, is why no justice publicly dissented from Friday’s decision not to fast-track the immunity question.)The court’s landmark rejection of President Richard Nixon’s executive privilege claim in the Watergate tapes case, which helped to directly precipitate Nixon’s resignation, came in a unanimous opinion written by Nixon’s handpicked chief justice.This is also the best way to understand Chief Justice John Roberts’s much-maligned 2012 vote in the first serious challenge to the Affordable Care Act — upholding the individual mandate as a tax while rejecting it as a valid regulation of interstate commerce.What those (and other) rulings have in common was the sense, across the Supreme Court, that the country would be better off with a court that took appropriate measure of how its rulings would be received beyond the details of the legal analysis the justices provided.The court failed that test in Bush v. Gore — handing down a ruling widely perceived as Republican-appointed justices installing a Republican president via a strained (and oddly cabined) reading of the Equal Protection Clause and helping to precipitate the downturn in public opinion that figures so prominently in these cases.As the Jan. 6 cases put the justices right in the middle of the 2024 election, the question is whether they’ll understand the imperative of not letting history repeat.Ultimately, these contemporary disputes may not provide a perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to right that wrong. But if one thing’s for certain, it’s that neither the court nor the country can afford another election-altering ruling that takes such obvious partisan sides.Steven V. Mazie (@stevenmazie) is the author of “American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court” and is the Supreme Court correspondent for The Economist. Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck), a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, writes the One First weekly Supreme Court newsletter and is the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.”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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      The Unsettling Truth at the Heart of the Giuliani Case

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      No sooner did a jury deliver a nearly $150 million defamation judgment against the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani than he went out and again started smearing the two Georgia election workers at the center of the case. Within days, he filed for bankruptcy, shielding himself in the near term from having to surrender whatever assets he has to his creditors.His brazen thumbing of his nose at the jury and the legal system laid bare some unsettling truths about justice. Defamation law is one of the few tools that lawyers have to hold people accountable for using lies to destroy reputations and to deter wrongdoing. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, county clerks, election officials and other public servants targeted by politically motivated conspiracy theories like the Big Lie have used defamation lawsuits to try to clear their names and correct the public record.But in a hyperpartisan era when the incentives to tell lies about your political opponents can seemingly outweigh the risks, is defamation law still up to the task? And if admitted liars like Mr. Giuliani can avoid having to pay up, what does accountability even look like now?Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers who sued Mr. Giuliani for falsely claiming that they stole the 2020 election in Georgia for Joe Biden, will probably only ever see pennies on the dollar of the full amount that a Washington, D.C., jury awarded them.There are a few procedural hurdles to clear: The bankruptcy proceedings will hinge on whether a judge decides that Mr. Giuliani’s actions were “willful and malicious.” (If they were, he’ll still have to pay, even in bankruptcy.) Then there’s the question of whether he has the money to pay his debts. According to his bankruptcy petition, he has $1 million to $10 million in assets — nowhere close to what he’d need to clear the roughly $153 million he says he owes in total. (That number doesn’t include ongoing lawsuits against him that could also lead to financial settlements.) Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss could negotiate a settlement with him or choose to pursue a percentage of his assets and earnings for the rest of his working life.Recouping any money in a defamation judgment can take time. After juries in Connecticut and Texas found Infowars founder Alex Jones liable for more than $1.4 billion for spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school shooting, the families of victims who sued him and his businesses have spent the past year fighting him in bankruptcy. Only after a judge ruled that Mr. Jones’s conduct had met the “willful and malicious” standard did he finally propose a greatly reduced settlement of $5.5 million per year for five years and then a percentage of his business income for the next five. (The Sandy Hook families, who filed their suits nearly six years ago, have offered their own plan to liquidate all of Mr. Jones’s existing assets and to pursue his future earnings to collect on their jury verdict.)But victory for plaintiffs in cases like these is not limited to money. A trial gives victims of viral disinformation a chance to confront their tormentor in a court of law, where facts and procedures still matter, offering them a real sense of catharsis and vindication. Especially in cases that involve major news events, defamation suits can also help correct the public record. The trial in Freeman v. Giuliani not only proved that Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had not done any of the criminal acts Mr. Giuliani alleged; it exhaustively debunked one of the biggest conspiracy theories to emerge from the 2020 presidential election.Tens of thousands of articles and TV segments amplified the trial’s findings to a massive audience. “This case was never about making Ruby and Shaye rich,” said Michael J. Gottlieb, the lead lawyer for the two women. “Of course, we wanted them to be compensated. But it was about accountability and establishing a public record of the truth about what happened at State Farm Arena in November 2020.”On a societal level, the real hope for these defamation cases is that over time, as more liars are brought low by their actions and held accountable in court, politicians and political operatives will pause before spreading disinformation and, slowly, this country will move toward a better, safer political discourse. For now, that seems overly optimistic. The twisted incentives created by extreme polarization and a fragmented media landscape might lead a young up-and-comer in conservative (or liberal, for that matter) politics to traffic in disinformation and conspiracy theories if that is the quickest way to fame, fortune and influence — consequences be damned.Our society counts on defamation judgments to draw a line between truth and falsity, and “we don’t imagine that there will routinely be recalcitrant defendants who will feel the incentive to lie to audiences that are eager to accept those lies is greater than the incentive to abide by the rule of law,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor and media expert. “Our libel system doesn’t really envision those dynamics.” Libel law itself may be outdated — too slow or too weak to reckon with the realities of modern politics.But there is reason to hope. As the Giuliani case shows, deterrence can take many forms. When Mr. Giuliani uttered more lies about Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss shortly after the verdict, they filed a new lawsuit in the same court, seeking an injunction to prevent him from continuing to defame them. If successful, that case could be the strongest protection they have from getting drawn into the spotlight once more.Even without an injunction, now that a court has ruled that Mr. Giuliani defamed the two women with actual malice — meaning he knowingly or recklessly made the false statements in question — media outlets large and small may be hesitant to give him a platform. Even if the judgment doesn’t chasten Mr. Giuliani, it will almost surely make networks like Fox News and One America News think twice before they put him on the air.More than updating defamation law or passing new legislation, the way to send a signal to future Rudy Giulianis and Alex Joneses is by defending victims of widespread lies — and the larger truth — at scale. One of the legal organizations that represented Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, Protect Democracy, is attempting to do just that. The group is also representing them in a separate lawsuit against the right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit and is representing a Pennsylvania postal worker smeared by Project Veritas, a county recorder in Arizona attacked by the Republican candidate Kari Lake and a voter in Georgia accused of being a “ballot mule” by Dinesh D’Souza.These cases will test whether our legal system can evolve to meet the challenges posed by our viral era. But at the least, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss have shown that you don’t have to be rich or powerful to achieve justice.Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of “A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy.”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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      The Anti-Democratic Quest to Save Democracy from Trump

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      Let’s consider a counterfactual. In the autumn of 2016, with American liberalism reeling from the election of Donald Trump, a shattered Hillary Clinton embraces the effort to pin all the blame on Vladimir Putin.She barnstorms the country arguing that the election was fundamentally illegitimate because of foreign interference. She endorses every attempt to prove that Russian disinformation warped the result. She touts conspiracy theories that supposedly prove that voting machines in Wisconsin were successfully hacked. She argues that her opponent should not be allowed to take office, that he’s a possible Manchurian candidate, a Russian cat’s paw. And she urges Democrats in Congress and Vice President Joe Biden to refuse to certify the election — suggesting that it could somehow be rerun or even that patriotic legislators could use their constitutional authority to make her, the popular-vote winner, president instead.Her crusade summons up a mass movement — youthful, multiracial and left wing. On Jan. 6, 2017, a crowd descends on the National Mall to demand that “Trump the traitor” be denied the White House. Clinton stirs them up with an angry speech, and protesters attack and overwhelm the Capitol Police and surge into the Capitol, where one is shot by a police officer and the rest mill around for a while and finally disperse.The election is still certified, and Trump becomes president two weeks later. But he is ineffective and unpopular, and it looks as though Clinton, who is still denying his legitimacy, will be the Democratic nominee again. At which point right-wing legal advocacy groups announce an effort to have her removed from primary ballots, following the guidance of originalist scholars who argue that under the 14th Amendment, she has betrayed her senatorial oath by fomenting insurrection and is ineligible to hold political office.Is she?No doubt some readers, firm in the consistency required by the current effort to remove Trump from the 2024 presidential ballot, will bite the bullet and say that in this hypothetical scenario, yes, she is. Others will pick apart my attempted parallel — insisting, say, that it makes all the difference that Russia’s interference efforts were real, whereas the voter fraud claimed by Trump was not, or arguing that Trump’s conspiracy was more comprehensive than what I’ve just described.My view is that you can construct the analogy any way you like: Had Clinton explicitly tried to induce Congress to overturn the result of the 2016 race and had a left-wing protest on her behalf turned into a certification-disrupting riot, almost none of the people currently insisting that we need to take the challenge to Trump’s ballot access very seriously would be saying the same about a challenge to her eligibility. Instead, they would be accusing that challenge of being incipiently authoritarian, a right-wing attack on our sacred democracy.And they would have a point. Removing an opposition candidate from the ballot, indeed, a candidate currently leading in some polling averages (pending the economic boom of 2024 that we can all hope is coming), through the exercise of judicial power is a remarkably antidemocratic act. It is more antidemocratic than impeachment, because the impeachers and convicters, representatives and senators, are themselves democratically elected and subject to swift democratic punishment. It is more antidemocratic than putting an opposition politician on trial, because the voters who regard that trial as illegitimate are still allowed to vote for an indicted or convicted politician, as almost a million Americans did for Eugene V. Debs while he languished in prison in 1920.Sometimes the rules of a republic require doing antidemocratic things. But if the rule you claim to be invoking treats Jan. 6 as the same kind of event as the secession of the Confederacy, consider the possibility that you have taken the tropes of anti-Trump punditry too literally.The term “insurrection,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote on Wednesday, is “a defensible shorthand for Jan. 6.” But it’s not “the most precise” term, because while “Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office,” he “was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”This concession prompted howls of online derision from his left-wing critics, but Chait is obviously, crashingly correct. There are arguments about precedent and implementation that tell against the case for Trump’s ineligibility and prudential arguments about the wisdom of suppressing populist fervor by judicial fiat. But the most important point is that there are many things a politician can do to subvert a democratic outcome, all of them impeachable and some of them potentially illegal, that are simply not equivalent to military rebellion, even if a bunch of protesters and rioters get involved.To insist otherwise, in the supposed service of the Constitution, is to demonstrate yet again that too many would-be saviors of our Republic would cut a great road through reason and good sense if they could only be assured of finally getting rid of Donald Trump.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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      Trump Pushes Forward in 2024 Run Amid Indictments and Colorado Ruling

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      This week’s debate over his very eligibility for office served as a stark reminder that anyone else facing such a wide array of legal problems would have left the political stage long ago.In another era, a politician would have walked away.For decades, American elected officials facing criminal charges or grave violations of the public trust would yield their positions of power, if only reluctantly, citing a duty to save the country from embarrassment and ease the strain on its institutions.Then came Donald J. Trump. The former president isn’t just forging ahead despite four indictments and 91 felony charges, but actively orchestrating a head-on collision between the nation’s political and legal systems.The ramifications continued to accrue this week, when the fundamental question of the former president’s eligibility for office was all but forced upon a Supreme Court already mired in unprecedented questions surrounding Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.But the heated legal debate over whether Mr. Trump engaged in an insurrection obscured the extraordinary reality that he is running for president at all — returning with fresh vengeance and a familiar playbook built around the notions that he can never lose, will never be convicted and will never really go away.That blueprint remains intact largely because his approach continues to yield political returns.Far from agonizing over the collateral damage from his never-surrender ethos, Mr. Trump seems incentivized by strife, tightly braiding his legal defense with his presidential campaign. He has tried to run out the clock on his criminal trials, a strategy that earned a new victory on Friday when the Supreme Court declined to decide a key point of contention in his federal 2020 election case immediately.While this year began with most Republicans telling pollsters that they preferred a different presidential nominee, the calendar will flip to 2024 with roughly two-thirds of the party aligned behind Mr. Trump. His legal problems, which in decades past would have bolstered rivals for a major party’s presidential nomination, have only caused Republican voters to unify around him more.“This has been the mystery of the Trump era — every time we think this is the final straw, it turns into a steel beam that merely solidifies his political infrastructure,” said Eliot Spitzer, a former Democratic governor of New York. Mr. Spitzer resigned as governor in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal, saying at the time that he owed as much to his family and the public.Lately, Mr. Trump has faced increased criticism that he is adopting fascist language and authoritarian tactics. Defending himself, he insisted repeatedly this week that he had never read “Mein Kampf,” Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto.Of course, if there were a guidebook on how to run traditional American political campaigns, he would not have read that, either.At the start of his 2016 bid, he disparaged decorated military veterans, and voters looked past it. When a hot-mic recording surfaced of Mr. Trump casually claiming that celebrity status made it easier to sexually assault women, he resisted calls from fellow Republicans to step aside, dismissed the remarks as “locker room talk” and, 32 days later, won the presidency.The cycle repeated itself for years, leading to a kind of truism inside Trump world that the swirl of chaos and coup de théâtre surrounding the former president was almost always surprising, but hardly ever shocking.The absurdity of it all, in other words, always seemed to make perfect sense.Mr. Trump and his allies have sought to turn his impeachments into a political strength. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesEven the riot by Mr. Trump’s supporters at the Capitol nearly three years ago adhered to that adage. Whether the attack was the ultimate coda to his presidency or the beginning of a darker phase in U.S. politics, the violence, in hindsight, was as horrifying as it was foreseeable.Mr. Trump, after all, had spent four years wielding the powerful White House bully pulpit to insist that any critical news coverage was a lie, that no elected official he opposed should be believed and that the courts could not be trusted.The story in Washington again unfolded in ways that were surprising — but hardly shocking. Days after Mr. Trump left office, polls showed that he maintained high levels of support inside his party. House Republicans who had voted to impeach him found themselves the targets of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders visited him at Mar-a-Lago — a steady stream of supplicants bowing before their exiled king.It soon became clear that the Republican Party’s best opportunity to cast Mr. Trump aside had passed when 43 of its senators voted to acquit him in his impeachment trial after the Capitol riot.In an interview last month, Mr. Trump all but bragged about continuing his latest presidential campaign despite his criminal charges.“Other people, if they ever got indicted, they’re out of politics,” he told Univision. “They go to the microphone. They say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life, you know, clearing my name. I’m going to spend the rest of my life with my family.’”“I’ve seen it hundreds of times,” Mr. Trump said, concluding that such decisions were always mistakes. “I can tell, you know, it’s backfired on them.”Mr. Trump’s legal problems, which in decades past would have bolstered rivals for a major party’s presidential nomination, have only caused Republican voters to unify around him more.Max Whittaker for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s commitment to the fight is rooted in a “preoccupation with not being seen as a loser,” said Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, who considered stepping down as governor in 2009 when an extramarital affair erupted in scandalous national headlines.He ultimately remained in office, recalling in an interview this week that he had wanted to take responsibility for his actions and had hoped his regret and humility would serve as an example to his four sons and lead to a reconciliation with his constituents.Mr. Sanford said he doubted Mr. Trump had ever considered not running again.“For him to think about what’s best for the republic would mean having a frontal lobotomy,” Mr. Sanford said. “From the number of people he’s sued over the years to the number of subcontractors he’s ripped off to all of his bankruptcies, he has just bullied his way through life. He plays to an audience of one, and it’s not God — it’s Donald Trump.”Former Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, said he would advise Mr. Trump to end his presidential campaign if one of the former president’s federal cases resulted in a felony conviction.Mr. Lott, a former Senate majority leader, was forced out of his leadership position in 2002 after praising Strom Thurmond, a longtime senator and ardent segregationist who died the next year.“At some point, someone has to say to him that he has to do what’s in the best interest of the country and shut down his campaign,” Mr. Lott said of Mr. Trump. “But I don’t see any indication so far that he plans on going anywhere but back to the White House.” More

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      Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny

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      The former president’s remark about undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country is one of several comments he’s made over the years regarding “good genes.”In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice. Toward the end, he wrapped up with standard lines from his stump speech and praise for the state’s pioneer lineage.Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” Mr. Trump told the audience. “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”Mr. Trump’s mention of the racehorse theory — the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring — reflected a focus on bloodlines and genetics that Mr. Trump has had for decades, and one that has received renewed attention and scrutiny in his third bid for president.In recent months, Mr. Trump has drawn widespread criticism for asserting that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that he said first in a right-wing media interview and has in the last week repeated on the campaign trail.As with the speech in 2020, Mr. Trump’s remarks have been criticized by historians, Jewish groups and liberals, who said his language recalled the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in America.In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Trump again defended his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood.” He dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not a student of Hitler” and that his statement used “blood” in crucially different ways, though he did not elaborate.But much as news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented Mr. Trump’s long interest in Adolf Hitler, they have also shown that Mr. Trump has frequently turned to the language of genetics as he discusses the superiority of himself and others.Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.He would connect those views to the racehorse theory in a CNN interview with Larry King in 2007.“You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better,” Mr. Trump told Mr. King. “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”Three years later, he would tell CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse” and likening his “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s “Frontline” in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that “there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.The former president has not just promoted his own “good genes,” but has repeatedly lauded those of British business leaders, Christian evangelical leaders, a top campaign adviser and the American industrialist Henry Ford.A Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said in a statement that Mr. Trump in his radio interview had “reiterated he is talking about criminals and terrorists who cross the border illegally.” Mr. Cheung added, “Only the media is obsessed with racial genetics and bloodlines, and given safe haven for disgusting and vile anti-Semitic rhetoric to be spewed through their outlets.”Mr. Trump’s political career and rise to the presidency are inextricably linked to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his tone has only grown more severe in his third run for office.In Friday’s radio interview, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to explain his use of the phrase, pressing him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”The former president said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.”Mr. Trump has long had a documented interest in Hitler. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.He once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “totally loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser.On another occasion, he told the same aide that “well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.The former president has denied making both comments. On Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase — “poisoning the blood” — differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.“They say that he said something about blood,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.” He did not explain the distinction.In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote that great civilizations declined “because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood.” At one point, Hitler links “the poison which has invaded the national body” to an “influx of foreign blood.”Mr. Trump told Mr. Hewitt that he used “poisoning the blood” to refer to the immigrants coming from Asia, Africa and South America — though he did not mention Europeans — who he broadly claimed were coming from prisons and mental institutions. He added that he was “not talking about a specific group,” but rather immigrants from “all over the world” who “don’t speak our language.”Mr. Trump first directly addressed the comparisons between his remark and Hitler’s comments on Tuesday at a campaign event in Iowa, where he told hundreds of supporters that he had “never read ‘Mein Kampf.’”The next day, the Biden campaign posted a graphic to social media that directly compared Mr. Trump to Hitler, using images of them both and listing three quotes from each of them.Mr. Trump has also been accused by historians of echoing the language of fascist dictators, including Hitler. Last month, he described his political opponents as “vermin” that needed to be rooted out.Sheelagh McNeill More