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      Trudeau Goes to Mar-a-Lago to See Trump Amid Tariff Concerns

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      Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is the first G7 leader to visit President-elect Donald J. Trump in Florida since the election. He is under pressure to persuade Mr. Trump to back down from his tariff threat.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Friday night landed in Florida to see President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, two officials with direct knowledge of the visit said, after a threat by Mr. Trump to impose across-the-board tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico on Day 1.The visit makes Mr. Trudeau the first head of government from the Group of 7, a key forum of global coordination consisting of the world’s wealthiest democracies, to visit the president-elect.Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Trump were to dine together on Friday evening, one official said, along with a delegation of senior Trump allies poised for top trade and security positions in his new administration.Mr. Trudeau was accompanied on his visit by Dominic LeBlanc, Canada’s minister of public safety. The Canadian prime minister was expected to stay in the area overnight, but not at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment, and there was no information released about Mr. Trump’s schedule on Friday.Mr. Trudeau has been scrambling to formulate a plan to respond to the threat made this week by Mr. Trump to impose a 25 percent tariff unless Mexico and Canada take action to curb the arrival of undocumented migrants and drugs across their borders into the United States.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shouldn’t Trump Voters Be Viewed as Traitors?

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      The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether voters should be held accountable for their chosen candidate’s behavior.From my perspective, the attack on the Capitol spurred on by Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, the efforts to nullify the results of the 2020 election with false electors and unfounded court cases and the persistent effort to discredit those election results without evidence amounted to an attempt to overthrow a pillar of our democracy. More to the point, 18 U.S. Code Chapter 115 includes crimes against the nation described as treason, misprision of treason, rebellion or insurrection, seditious conspiracy and advocating the overthrow of government. I hold anyone voting for Trump at least morally guilty for the consequences of Jan. 6 and everything that follows the recent election. Would you agree that people who vote for Trump in light of these circumstances are themselves guilty of treasonous acts? — Name WithheldFrom the Ethicist:Something like three-quarters of Americans, surveys over the past year report, think democracy in America is threatened. To go by exit-poll data, those voters supported Trump in about the same proportions as those who thought democracy was secure. In a study published last year, researchers at U.C. Berkeley and M.I.T. provided evidence that democratic back-sliding around the world — with citizens voting for authoritarian leaders — is driven in part by voters who believe in democracy but doubt that the other side does. The researchers found that such voters, once shown the actual levels of support for democracy among their opponents, became less likely to vote for candidates who violated democratic norms. The general point is that not understanding the actual views of people of other parties — and assuming the worst of them — can be dangerous for democracy.Trump voters, for the most part, don’t think he committed treason. And your position can’t be that unknowingly voting for someone guilty of treason is itself treasonous. Perhaps you think that they should believe him to have been treasonous. Similar issues were aired when Henry Wallace, otherwise a highly dissimilar figure, ran for president in 1948. He had denounced the Marshall Plan, wanted the Soviet Union to play a role in the governance of Germany’s western industrial heartland and — detractors thought — was a Stalin apologist.Historians can debate whether he was a voice of conscience or a pawn of America’s adversaries. But suppose you were among those who viewed him as a traitor. To have extended the indictment to his supporters would have been to criminalize political disagreement. Besides, if voting for someone who has done bad things makes you guilty of them, most voters are in deep trouble. It’s easy to be inflamed by someone with a habit of making inflammatory statements. But there may be a cost when you deem those who vote for the other side as ‘‘the enemy from within.’’ That’s a term that Trump has freely employed, of course. You’ll want to ask yourself whether protecting democracy is best served by adopting this attitude.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Girds for a Test of Its Independence

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      President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to install loyalists have left officials fearful that he intends to carry out his threats of retribution but hopeful that rule-of-law norms can hold.It was an early case of Donald J. Trump seeking retribution through the Justice Department.In the first year of Mr. Trump’s first presidency, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appointed a top federal prosecutor to review whether the F.B.I. had failed to fully pursue investigations involving Hillary Clinton, including an inquiry into the Clinton Foundation’s ties to a Russian uranium mining operation.The appointment of the prosecutor, John W. Huber, the U.S. attorney in Utah, was championed by many on the right eager to turn the spotlight away from Mr. Trump’s ties to Moscow. But when Mr. Huber’s work ended years later with no charges or public report, Mr. Trump publicly called him a “garbage disposal unit for important documents.”As Mr. Trump begins filling out his administration and putting his stamp on Washington again, few issues loom larger than the resilience of the Justice Department’s tradition of independence and its commitment to the rule of law.Mr. Trump’s grievance-laden campaign rhetoric has left many current and former agency officials fearful that he will seek to turn it into a department of revenge aimed at foes inside and outside government.They said they worried that Mr. Trump’s past experiences with the Justice Department mean he is less likely this time to settle for an investigation like Mr. Huber’s — one that leads to little punishment or pain for anyone.In an interview, Mr. Huber characterized his work during Mr. Trump’s first term as a sign of the Justice Department’s ability to withstand any political pressure.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Inverted Morality of MAGA

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      I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to “extreme conservative.” As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Team’s Rejection of a Transition Deal Adds a Wrinkle to Its Transparency Pledges

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      The president-elect’s team said it would disclose its donors’ names and not take donations from foreigners, but it isn’t legally bound to adhere to those promises.The refusal by President-elect Donald J. Trump’s team to sign a transition agreement with the General Services Administration means that, despite the team’s pledges to abide by several transparency customs of presidential handovers, it isn’t legally bound to follow through on its promises.Presidential transitions abide by a series of laws and norms that enable the outgoing administration to brief incoming officials with nonpublic information and to fund transition operations. Mr. Trump’s transition team, after forgoing the $7.2 million in government funds that the G.S.A. would have provided if they had reached an agreement, has promised to be transparent by disclosing the names of its donors and said it would not accept donations from foreigners. In an agreement with the White House, the transition team also released an ethics pledge, but the pledge may not be compliant with transition rules.Mr. Trump’s transition team released a statement this week saying the decision to opt for private funding alone saves taxpayer dollars.But the Trump team did not indicate when donors’ names would be made public, or if the amounts of their donations would also be released. If Mr. Trump’s team accepted the help of the G.S.A., donors would need to be disclosed within 30 days of the inauguration, which is set for Jan. 20. Past presidential transitions have also limited individual donations to $5,000, a cap that Mr. Trump’s team has not committed to. The G.S.A. would also have provided secure lines of communication and office space to conduct internal meetings.After initially missing an Oct. 1 deadline, Mr. Trump’s team this week signed an agreement with the White House that will begin formal briefings led by departing administration members. But Mr. Trump has continued to refuse to sign an agreement with the Justice Department that would allow the F.B.I. to run security checks for transition staff. Without clearances, Biden administration officials cannot share classified information with many transition team members.This week, Mr. Trump’s team published an ethics plan for its transition staff. Though President Biden’s staff accepted the plan in its agreement with Mr. Trump, the plan may run afoul of the Presidential Transition Act, which mandates that such plans detail how a president-elect himself will address his own conflicts of interest. Mr. Trump’s plan does not appear to do that.Representatives for the Trump transition team and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.“This engagement allows our intended cabinet nominees to begin critical preparations, including the deployment of landing teams to every department and agency, and complete the orderly transition of power,” Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s incoming chief of staff, said in the statement on Tuesday about the agreement with the White House.During his 2016 presidential transition, Mr. Trump signed the agreement with the G.S.A. By his inauguration, the transition had about 120 employees and disclosed $6.5 million in funds raised, as well as $2.4 million in reimbursements from the federal government.Ken Bensinger More

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      Mark Zuckerberg se reúne con Trump en Mar-a-Lago

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      El presidente electo lleva tiempo criticando las plataformas de redes sociales de Meta, afirmando que lo restringen a él y a otros puntos de vista conservadores.Mark Zuckerberg se reunió el miércoles con el presidente electo Donald Trump en un raro encuentro cara a cara, el último intento del director ejecutivo de Meta de establecer una relación positiva con Trump.La reunión, confirmada por tres personas con conocimiento del asunto, fue iniciada por Zuckerberg, quien ha mantenido una tensa relación con Trump durante la última década. Trump, quien sostiene desde hace tiempo que Meta lo ha restringido injustamente a él y a otros conservadores en sus aplicaciones de redes sociales, ha lanzado ataques contra Zuckerberg en esas plataformas y durante sus discursos electorales.Zuckerberg voló a West Palm Beach, Florida, el martes por la noche antes de reunirse con Trump en su hotel y club, Mar-a-Lago, el miércoles, según las personas que hablaron bajo condición de anonimato porque no estaban autorizadas a hablar de la reunión. En buena parte, los dos hombres intercambiaron cumplidos, y Zuckerberg felicitó a Trump por ganar la presidencia.Tras la reunión celebrada a primera hora de la tarde, Trump y Zuckerberg tenían previsto cenar en el hotel de Trump esa misma noche, dijeron las personas.“Es un momento importante para el futuro de la innovación estadounidense”, dijo un representante de Meta en un comunicado. “Mark agradeció la invitación a cenar con el presidente Trump y la oportunidad de reunirse con miembros de su equipo para hablar sobre el gobierno entrante”.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      San Jose State’s Opponent Boycotts Game Over Transgender Player. Again.

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      The women’s volleyball team at the center of a national debate over gender and sports advanced to the conference championship after Boise State refused to play.The San Jose State University Spartans women’s volleyball team, which is at the center of a national debate over the inclusion of transgender women in women’s sports, advanced to its conference championship on Saturday without having played a single game in the tournament.After a first-round bye, the team was preparing to play a semifinal match in the Mountain West Conference tournament scheduled for Friday, but the opposing team — Boise State University — refused for the third time to play the Spartans because of their transgender player.After Boise State beat Utah State University on Friday to qualify for the semifinal in Las Vegas, the players celebrated by cheering and hugging. They talked quietly in a huddle, then cheered again.Hours later Boise State released a statement that read: “The decision to not continue to play in the 2024 Mountain West Volleyball Championship tournament was not an easy one. Our team overcame forfeitures to earn a spot in the tournament field and fought for the win over Utah State in the first round on Wednesday. They should not have to forgo this opportunity while waiting for a more thoughtful and better system that serves all athletes.”It was the seventh time this year that a Mountain West team has backed out of a match against San Jose State out of protest over the transgender player, who declined an interview request through a university spokeswoman. Boise State, one of five teams to forfeit games against the Spartans this season, also forfeited two regular season games against them.Boise State’s decision to forfeit and lose a chance at the final has called even more attention to one of the most complex and polarizing issues of American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More