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    Biden Steps Out in Tinsel Town and the Big Donors Show Up

    The president was back on the fund-raising trail in Los Angeles this weekend after a hiatus because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes.President Biden is facing multiple wars, economic anxieties, the indictment of his son and flagging poll numbers. But he was received in California this weekend like a superstar, headlining the hottest events in Los Angeles.In sprawling Southern California homes, celebrities flocked — and opened their wallets — to hear the president and the first lady, Jill Biden, make the case for why Mr. Biden should be re-elected. The campaign swing was the first since the end of the monthslong actors’ and writers’ strikes, during which the president stayed away from the fund-raising hub to show support for those on the picket lines.“It was like a desert out here in L.A.,” said James Costos, a former ambassador under the Obama administration, who hosted one of the events. “There was a lot of people who were idly sitting by, wanting to know what was going on, who hadn’t seen the president in a while.”The weekend’s activities — which included two larger fund-raisers and two “campaign meetings,” as described by the White House — came as recent polls indicated Mr. Biden could lose in an expected rematch with former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Biden has struggled to assuage anxieties around an improved economy, and his steadfast support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza has earned the ire of young, diverse voters who threaten not to support him in 2024.But in Hollywood, as they say, anything is possible.At a party held by Mr. Costos and his partner, Michael Smith, many of those in attendance were household names: Steven Spielberg, Shonda Rhimes and Rob Reiner were co-hosts; Barbra Streisand and Jon Hamm attended; and Lenny Kravitz was the musical performer. Tickets started at $1,000 and went up to $500,000, and the event was expected to raise more than $7 million, according to a person familiar with the president’s fund-raising.And while Mr. Biden was the star, Mr. Trump took center stage in his remarks. Mr. Biden cast his predecessor as a danger to democracy — taking care to mention him by name in saying “You’re the reason why Donald Trump is a former president,” which was met with cheers.“The other day, he said that he’d be a dictator only on the first day — thank God, only one day,” Mr. Biden quipped. He later added that Mr. Trump “embraces political violence instead of rejecting it. We can’t let this happen.”The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. But Mr. Trump on Saturday in New York City called the allegation that he would pose a threat to democracy part of Democrats’ “newest hoax,” and again flipped the attacks, saying “the threat is Crooked Joe Biden.”Democrats have long counted on the liberal Los Angeles area as a financial power source. In 2019, Mr. Biden raised more than $700,000 at the home of Mr. Costos and Mr. Smith for the primary campaign that he went on to win. The reliance on the region is a frequent subject of attack for Republican opponents, who decry Democrats nationwide as funded by Hollywood elites and California liberals.At a second fund-raiser, held Saturday at the home of the investors José Feliciano and Kwanza Jones, Mr. Biden tailored his remarks toward his administration’s successes for Black, Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. constituencies. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden said: “He talks about the blood of our country being poisoned. He’s talking about — you know what he’s talking about,” a slight addition to his comments from the night before.While in town, Mr. Biden also paid his respects at the shiva for Norman Lear, the acclaimed television writer who died on Tuesday.In attendance at both fund-raisers was Jeffrey Katzenberg, the longtime Hollywood executive who is a co-chair of the Biden Victory Fund. Mr. Katzenberg said the 36 hours of events represented a preview of fund-raising efforts in the region next year. On Sunday, he put the weekend’s fund-raising totals at “over $15 million.”“This is a group of people that are pretty well-read, and they understand that all of the signals today are headed in the right direction and the wind is beginning to come into the sails of the president’s campaign,” Mr. Katzenberg said in an interview. He explained away Mr. Biden’s troubling poll numbers as evidence that “sentiment has not caught up with the facts.”The soirees that reporters got a glimpse of had it all: At one, a couple hundred attendees gathered around heat lamps, conversing over live jazz in the background and eating organic hot dogs. On Saturday, dozens of stars lined the path into a multimillion-dollar home whose entryway displayed a larger-than-life Christmas tree, and Mr. Biden joked it “looked like walking into the White House.”The events also drew a wide array of politicians and others, who congregated to demonstrate their support for him — and their distaste for Mr. Biden’s likely opponent. Two of the state’s best-known elected officials, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Representative Nancy Pelosi, attended Friday’s event, and a third, Senator Alex Padilla, was present at the fund-raiser on Saturday.One surprising co-sponsor of Friday’s fund-raiser was Rick Caruso, a billionaire and recent Democratic convert who lost his bid for mayor of Los Angeles last year. (Mr. Biden endorsed his opponent, Karen Bass, who won the election. She also attended on Friday.)Mr. Caruso, who said he had a “very meaningful” private conversation with the president on Friday, said he planned to financially support moderate Democrats in California House races next year — and did not rule out another run for public office himself.“I don’t agree with everything that Joe Biden does,” Mr. Caruso acknowledged in an interview. But, he added, “what I do feel strongly about is that he has a deep care and concern for our country, and he’s got a commitment to the democracy that we all enjoy. And I don’t believe that Trump does.”But even while insulated in friendly territory, Mr. Biden couldn’t quite escape his woes. Pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, the occupation has got to go” could be heard from the spacious backyard in Western Los Angeles on Friday. More than 1,000 people gathered at a nearby park to criticize his approach in Israel and Gaza, the Los Angeles Times reported.Mr. Biden did not mention the conflict in either of his fund-raiser addresses. But Dr. Biden didn’t skip a beat when faint echoes of the protesters could be heard over her speech on Friday. At one point, she remarked, “I’m so grateful Joe is our president during these uncertain times,” prompting a standing ovation from the crowd. More

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    Casey DeSantis Invited Outsiders to Caucus in Iowa. The State Party Said No.

    The Iowa Republican Party reminded supporters that only residents can vote in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15.Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, drew criticism on Saturday from the rival campaign of former President Donald J. Trump for seeking to recruit out-of-state supporters to participate in the nation’s first Republican nominating contest.The backlash came a day after Ms. DeSantis, during a Fox News appearance with her husband, urged supporters from elsewhere to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” said Ms. DeSantis, who has been a key player in her husband’s campaign and was specifically addressing mothers and grandmothers who support him.But the call to action is at odds with caucus rules, according to the Republican Party of Iowa, which hours later said that nonresidents were barred from caucusing.“Remember: you must be a legal resident of Iowa and the precinct you live in and bring photo ID with you to participate in the #iacaucus!” the party wrote on the social media platform X.Mr. Trump’s campaign on Saturday accused the DeSantis campaign of spreading misinformation about the caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15. It suggested that the move was part of a broader scheme to change the outcome in the state, where polls show that Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has a significant lead.“The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the caucus through fraud,” the campaign said in a statement.In an email on Saturday, Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, drew attention to comments made later on Friday by Ms. DeSantis on X, attempting to clarify her earlier remarks.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” Ms. DeSantis wrote.Mr. DeSantis also addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters on Friday in Iowa.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” he said. “They even let people go and speak on behalf of candidates, and they have all these precincts, so you may have people who really can speak strongly about our leadership that are going to come.”The Trump campaign continued to seize upon Ms. DeSantis’s remarks on Saturday, calling on Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and snubbed Mr. Trump, to clarify the caucus eligibility rules. It also demanded that Ms. Reynolds disavow the tactics promoted by Ms. DeSantis as “flagrantly wrong that could further disenfranchise caucusgoers.”A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Kellen Browning More

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    Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate

    Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are not doing much to reassure those worried about his autocratic instincts. If anything, they seem to be leaning into the predictions.When a historian wrote an essay the other day warning that the election of former President Donald J. Trump next year could lead to dictatorship, one of Mr. Trump’s allies quickly responded by calling for the historian to be sent to prison.It almost sounds like a parody: The response to concerns about dictatorship is to prosecute the author. But Mr. Trump and his allies are not going out of their way to reassure those worried about what a new term would bring by firmly rejecting the dictatorship charge. If anything, they seem to be leaning into it.If Mr. Trump is returned to office, people close to him have vowed to “come after” the news media, open criminal investigations into onetime aides who broke with the former president and purge the government of civil servants deemed disloyal. When critics said Mr. Trump’s language about ridding Washington of “vermin” echoed that of Adolf Hitler, the former president’s spokesman said the critics’ “sad, miserable existence will be crushed” under a new Trump administration.Mr. Trump himself did little to assuage Americans when his friend Sean Hannity tried to help him out on Fox News this past week. During a town hall-style meeting, Mr. Hannity tossed a seeming softball by asking Mr. Trump to reaffirm that of course he did not intend to abuse his power and use the government to punish enemies. Instead of simply agreeing, Mr. Trump said he would only be a dictator on “Day 1” of a new term.“Trump has made it crystal clear through all his actions and rhetoric that he admires leaders who have forms of authoritarian power, from Putin to Orban to Xi, and that he wants to exercise that kind of power at home,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” referring to Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Xi Jinping of China. “History shows that autocrats always tell you who they are and what they are going to do,” she added. “We just don’t listen until it is too late.”Despite his public sparring with China’s leaders, President Trump has praised President Xi Jinping for his strongman policies.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTalk about the possible authoritarian quality of a new Trump presidency has suffused the political conversation in the nation’s capital in recent days. A series of reports in The New York Times outlined various plans developed by Mr. Trump’s allies to assert vast power in a new term and detailed how he would be less constrained by constitutional guardrails. The Atlantic published a special issue with 24 contributors forecasting what a second Trump presidency would look like, many of them depicting an autocratic regime.Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming who was vice chairwoman of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, published a new book warning that Mr. Trump is a clear and present danger to American democracy. And of course, there was the essay by the historian, Robert Kagan, in The Washington Post that prompted Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio and a Trump ally, to press the Justice Department to investigate.To be sure, American presidents have stretched their power and been called dictators going back to the early days of the republic. John Adams, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, among others, were all accused of despotism. Richard M. Nixon was said to have consolidated power in the “imperial presidency.” George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both compared to Hitler.But there is something different about the debate now, more than overheated rhetoric or legitimate disagreements over the boundaries of executive power, something that suggests a fundamental moment of decision in the American experiment. Perhaps it is a manifestation of popular disenchantment with American institutions; only 10 percent of Americans think democracy is working very well, according to a poll in June by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.Perhaps it is a reflection of the extremism and demagoguery that has grown more prevalent in politics in many places around the world. And perhaps it stems from a former president seeking to reclaim his old office who evinces such perplexing affinity for and even envy of autocrats.Mr. Trump once expressed no regret that a quote he shared on social media came from Mussolini and adopted the language of Stalin in calling journalists the “enemies of the people.” He told his chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things” and later said he wished American generals were like Hitler’s generals.Last December, shortly after opening his comeback campaign, Mr. Trump called for “termination” of the Constitution to remove Mr. Biden immediately and reinstall himself in the White House without waiting for another election. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as whining by liberals who do not like him or his policies and are disingenuously trying to scare voters. They argue that President Biden is the real dictator because his Justice Department is prosecuting his likeliest challenger next year for various alleged crimes, although there is no evidence that Mr. Biden has been personally involved in those decisions and even some former Trump advisers call the indictments legitimate.“The dictator talk by Kagan and his fellow liberal writers is an attempt to scare Americans not just to distract them from the failures and weakness of the Biden administration but because of something they are even more afraid of: that a second Trump administration will be far more successful in implementing its agenda and undoing progressive policies and programs than the first,” Fred Fleitz, who served briefly in Mr. Trump’s White House, wrote on the American Greatness website on Friday.Mr. Kagan, a widely respected Brookings Institution scholar and author of numerous books of history, has a long record of support for a muscular foreign policy that hardly strikes many on the left as liberal. But he has been a strong and outspoken critic of Mr. Trump for years. In May 2016, when other Republicans were reconciling themselves to Mr. Trump’s first nomination for president, Mr. Kagan warned that “this is how fascism comes to America.”His essay on Nov. 30 sounded the alarm again. Mr. Trump may have been thwarted in his first term from enacting some of his more radical ideas by more conventional Republican advisers and military officers, Mr. Kagan argued, but he will not surround himself with such figures again and will encounter fewer of the checks and balances that constrained him last time. The former president’s defenders dismiss the fears about Mr. Trump’s autocratic instincts as complaints by liberals who are trying to scare voters.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAmong other things, Mr. Kagan cited Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn an election that he had lost, disregarding the will of the voters. And he noted Mr. Trump’s overt discussion of prosecuting opponents and sending the military into the streets to quell protests. “In just a few years, we have gone from being relatively secure in our democracy to being a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship,” Mr. Kagan wrote.Mr. Vance, a freshman senator who has courted Mr. Trump’s support and was listed by Axios this past week as a possible vice-presidential running mate next year, took umbrage on behalf of the former president. He dispatched a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland suggesting that Mr. Kagan be prosecuted for encouraging “open rebellion,” seizing on a point in Mr. Kagan’s essay noting that Democratic-run states might defy a President Trump.Mr. Vance wrote that “according to Robert Kagan, the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency is terrible enough to justify open rebellion against the United States, along with the political violence that would invariably follow.”Mr. Kagan’s piece did not actually advocate rebellion, but simply forecast the possibility that Democratic governors would stand against Mr. Trump “through a form of nullification” of federal authority. Indeed, he went on to suggest that Republican governors might do the same with Mr. Biden, which he was not advocating either.But Mr. Vance was trying to draw a parallel between Mr. Kagan’s essay and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. By the Justice Department’s logic in pursuing Mr. Trump, the senator wrote, the Kagan article could be interpreted as “an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.” To make his point clear, he insisted on answers by Jan. 6.Mr. Kagan, who followed his essay with another on Thursday about how to stop the slide to dictatorship that he sees, said the intervention by the senator validated his point. “It is revealing that their first instinct when attacked by a journalist is to suggest that they be locked up,” Mr. Kagan noted in an interview.Aides to Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance did not respond to requests for comment. David Shipley, the opinion editor of The Post, defended Mr. Kagan’s work. “We are proud to publish Robert Kagan’s thoughtful essays and we encourage audiences to read both his Nov. 30 and Dec. 7 pieces together — and draw their own conclusions,” he said. “These essays are part of a long Kagan tradition of starting important conversations.”It is a conversation that has months to go with an uncertain ending. In the meantime, no one expects Mr. Garland to take Mr. Vance seriously, including almost certainly Mr. Vance. His letter was a political statement. But it says something about the era that proposing the prosecution of a critic would be seen as a political winner. More

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    Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans

    Over the last few months, the incredulous question — How can Donald Trump possibly be leading the polls; there must be some mistake — has given way to the clear reality: Something in American life would need to change for Joe Biden to be favored for re-election in November 2024.The good news for Biden is that it’s easy to imagine developments that would help his re-election bid. Notwithstanding a fashionable liberal despair about how bad vibes are deceiving Americans about the state of the economy, there’s plenty of room for improvements — in inflation-adjusted wages, interest rates, the stock market — that could sweeten the country’s economic mood. (Just sustaining the economic trajectory of the last few months through next summer would almost certainly boost Biden’s approval ratings.)The looming Trump trials, meanwhile, promise to refocus the country’s persuadable voters on what they dislike about the former president; that, too, has to be worth something in the swing states where Biden is currently struggling.In both those cases, though, the president doesn’t have much control over events. No major economic package is likely to pass Congress, and whatever influence you think his White House did or didn’t exert over Trump’s indictments, Biden staffers won’t be supervising jury selection.There is an issue that’s hurting Biden, however, where the Republican Party is (officially, at least) quite open to working with the president, provided that he’s willing to break with his own party’s interest groups: the security of the southern border, where Border Patrol apprehensions remain stubbornly high even as the president’s approval ratings on immigration sit about 30 points underwater.There is a commonplace interpretation of the immigration debate that treats the unpopularity of an uncontrolled border primarily as an optics problem: People are happy enough to have immigrants in their own communities, but they see border disorder on their television screens and it makes them fearful about government incompetence. Sometimes this interpretation comes packaged with the suggestion that the people who worry most about immigration are rural voters who rarely see a migrant in real life, as opposed to liberal urbanites who both experience and appreciate diversity.The last year or so of blue-city immigration anxiety has revealed the limits of this interpretation: Place enough stress on New York or Chicago, and you will get demands for immigration control in even the most liberal parts of the country.But really, there’s never been good reason to think that immigration anxiety only manifests itself telescopically, among people whose main exposure to the trend is alarmist Fox News chyrons.Consider a new paper from Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena, respectively a Tufts University economics Ph.D and a Defense Department analyst, which uses Mexican-government ID data to track the flow of Mexican migrants into counties in the United States, and finds that exposure to immigrants increases conservatism among natives. As the migrant flow goes up, so does the vote for Republicans in House elections: “A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican Party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points.” And the inflow also shifts local policy rightward, reducing public spending and shifting money toward law enforcement as opposed to education.This suggests that a pro-immigration liberalism inevitably faces a balancing act: High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative, so a policy that’s too radically open is a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed.You can see this pattern in U.S. politics writ large. The foreign-born population in the United States climbed through the Obama presidency, to 44 million from 38 million, and as a share of the overall population it was nearing the highs of the late 19th and early 20th century — a fact that almost certainly helped Donald Trump ride anti-immigration sentiment to the Republican nomination and the presidency.Then under Trump there was some stabilization — the foreign-born population was about the same just before Covid-19 hit as it had been in 2016 — which probably help defuse the issue for Democrats, increase American sympathy for migrants, and make Biden’s victory possible. But since 2020 the numbers are rising sharply once again, and the estimated foreign-born share of the American population now exceeds the highs of the last great age of immigration. Which, again unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump.Border control in an age of easy global movement is not a simple policy problem, even for conservative governments. But policy does matter, and while the measures that the White House is reportedly floating as potential concessions to Republicans — raising the standard for asylum claims, fast-tracking deportation procedures — aren’t quite a pledge to finish the border wall (maybe that’s next summer’s pivot), they should have some effect on the flow of migrants north.Which makes them a distinctive sort of policy concession: A “sacrifice” that this White House has every political reason to offer, because Biden’s re-election becomes more likely if Republicans accept.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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    Fears of a NATO Withdrawal Rise as Trump Seeks a Return to Power

    For 74 years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has been America’s most important military alliance. Presidents of both parties have seen NATO as a force multiplier enhancing the influence of the United States by uniting countries on both sides of the Atlantic in a vow to defend one another.Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he sees NATO as a drain on American resources by freeloaders. He has held that view for at least a quarter of a century.In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Mr. Trump wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” As president, he repeatedly threatened a United States withdrawal from the alliance.Yet as he runs to regain the White House, Mr. Trump has said precious little about his intentions. His campaign website contains a single cryptic sentence: “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” He and his team refuse to elaborate.That vague line has generated enormous uncertainty and anxiety among European allies and American supporters of the country’s traditional foreign-policy role.European ambassadors and think tank officials have been making pilgrimages to associates of Mr. Trump to inquire about his intentions. At least one ambassador, Finland’s Mikko Hautala, has reached out directly to Mr. Trump and sought to persuade him of his country’s value to NATO as a new member, according to two people familiar with the conversations.In interviews over the past several months, more than a half-dozen current and former European diplomats — speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from Mr. Trump should he win — said alarm was rising on Embassy Row and among their home governments that Mr. Trump’s return could mean not just the abandonment of Ukraine, but a broader American retreat from the continent and a gutting of the Atlantic alliance.“There is great fear in Europe that a second Trump presidency would result in an actual pullout of the United States from NATO,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired four-star Navy admiral who was NATO’s supreme allied commander from 2009 to 2013. “That would be an enormous strategic and historic failure on the part of our nation.”Formed after World War II to keep the peace in Europe and act as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, NATO evolved into an instrument through which the U.S. works with allies on military issues around the world. Its original purpose — the heart of which is the collective-defense provision, known as Article V, that states that an armed attack on any member “shall be considered an attack against them all” — lives on, especially for newer members like Poland and the Baltic States that were once dominated by the Soviet Union and continue to fear Russia.Ukrainian soldiers test-fired the guns of tanks provided by NATO before moving to the frontline in Ukraine. NATO’s purpose as a bulwark against the Soviet Union lives on for newer members in Eastern Europe who continue to fear Russian aggression.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesThe interviews with current and former diplomats revealed that European officials were mostly out of ideas for how to deal with Mr. Trump other than returning to a previous playbook of flattery and transactional tributes.Smaller countries that are more vulnerable to Russian attacks are expected to try to buy their way into Mr. Trump’s good graces by increasing their orders of American weapons or — as Poland did during his term — by performing grand acts of adulation, including offering to name a military base Fort Trump in return for his placing a permanent presence there.At this point in the campaign, Mr. Trump is focused on the criminal cases against him and on defeating his Republican primary rivals, and he rarely talks about the alliance, even in private.As he maintains a broad lead in his campaign to become the Republican nominee, the implications for America’s oldest and most critical military alliance are not clearly advertised plans from Mr. Trump, but a turmoil of widely held suspicions charged with unknowability.UkraineAmid those swirling doubts, one thing is likely: The first area where Mr. Trump’s potential return to the White House in 2025 could provoke a foreign policy crisis is for Ukraine and the alliance of Western democracies that have been supporting its defense against Russia’s invasion.Helping Ukraine stave off the attempted Russian conquest has become a defining NATO effort. Ukraine is not a NATO member but has remained an independent country because of NATO support.Camille Grand, who was NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense investment early in the war, said that how Mr. Trump handled Ukraine would be the first “big test case” that Europeans would use to assess how reliable an ally — or not — he might be in a second term.“Will he throw Zelensky under the bus in the first three months of his term?” Mr. Grand, now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, asked, referring to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.NATO’s collective response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has helped President Biden, center, rebuild traditional alliances after the turmoil of Mr. Trump’s presidency.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump has repeatedly declared that he would somehow settle the war “in 24 hours.” He has not said how, but he has coupled that claim with suggestions that he could have prevented the war by making a deal in which Ukraine simply ceded to Russia its eastern lands that President Vladimir Putin has illegally seized.Mr. Zelensky has said Ukraine would never agree to cede any of its lands to Russia as part of a peace deal. But Mr. Trump would have tremendous leverage over Ukraine’s government. The United States has supplied huge quantities of vital weapons, ammunition and intelligence to Ukraine. European countries have pledged the most economic assistance to Ukraine but could not make up the shortfall if America stopped sending military aid.Some of Mr. Trump’s congressional allies, who have followed his lead in preaching an “America First” mantra, already oppose sending further military assistance to Kyiv. And in a broader sign of waning support, Senate Republicans last week blocked an emergency spending bill to further fund the war in Ukraine after demanding unrelated immigration policy concessions from Democrats as a condition of passing it.But even if Congress appropriates further aid, Mr. Trump could withhold delivery of it — as he did in 2019 when trying to coerce Mr. Zelensky into announcing a criminal investigation into Mr. Biden, the abuse-of-power scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.Against that backdrop, Russia’s battlefield strategy for now appears to be biding its time; it is carrying out attacks when it sees opportunities and to tie up Ukrainian forces but is not making paradigm-shifting moves or negotiating, officials said. That stasis raises the possibility that Mr. Putin has calculated he could be in a much better position after the 2024 U.S. election.‘Everybody Owes Us Money’Mr. Trump likes to brag that he privately told leaders of NATO countries that if Russia attacked them and they had not paid the money they owed to NATO and to the United States, he would not defend them. He claimed at a rally in October that after he had declared that “everybody owes us money” and was “delinquent,” he made that threat at a meeting and so “hundreds of billions of dollars came flowing in.”That story is garbled at best.There was a spending-related dispute, but it was over Europeans’ meeting their spending commitments to their own militaries, not money they somehow owed to NATO or to the United States. They did increase military spending during the Trump administration — though by nowhere near the amounts Mr. Trump has claimed. And their spending rose significantly more in 2023, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.But Mr. Trump’s exuberance for retelling his story, coupled with his past displeasure with NATO, is giving fresh alarm to NATO supporters.Pressed by The New York Times to explain what he means by “fundamentally re-evaluating” NATO’s mission and purpose, Mr. Trump provided a rambling statement that contained no clear answer but expressed skepticism about alliances.“It is the obligation of every U.S. president to ensure that America’s alliances serve to protect the American people, and do not recklessly endanger American blood and treasure,” Mr. Trump’s statement read.Some Trump supporters who are pro-NATO have argued that Mr. Trump is bluffing. They said he was merely looking to put more pressure on the Europeans to spend more on their own defense.“He’s not going to do that,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a Trump supporter, said of the prospect of Mr. Trump’s withdrawing from NATO. “But what he will do is, he will make people pay more, and I think that will be welcome news to a lot of folks.”Robert O’Brien, who served as Mr. Trump’s final national security adviser, echoed that view.“President Trump withdrawing from NATO is an issue that some people in D.C. discuss, but I don’t believe it’s a real thing,” Mr. O’Brien said. “He understands the military value of the alliance to America, but he just feels — correctly, I might add — like we’re getting played by the Germans and other nations that refuse to pay their fair share for their own defense.”But John Bolton, a conservative hawk who served as national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, wrote in his memoir that Mr. Trump had to be repeatedly talked out of withdrawing from NATO. In an interview, Mr. Bolton said “there is no doubt in my mind” that in a second term, Mr. Trump would withdraw the United States from NATO.Germany has increased its defense spending but will still fall short of the 2 percent target European members of the alliance agreed to.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesAs a legal matter, whether Mr. Trump could unilaterally withdraw the United States from NATO is likely to be contested.The Constitution requires Senate consent to ratify a treaty but omits procedures to annul one. This has led to debate about whether presidents can do so on their own or need lawmakers’ authorization. There are only a few court precedents regarding the issue, none definitive.Decisions to revoke treaties by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 and by President George W. Bush in 2001 led members of Congress to file lawsuits that were rejected by courts, partly on the grounds that the disputes were a “political question” for the elected branches to work out. While the legal precedents are not perfectly clear, both of those presidents effectively won: the treaties are widely understood to be void. Still, any attempt to withdraw from NATO would likely invite a broader challenge.In reaction to Mr. Trump’s threats, some lawmakers — led by Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, and Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida — put a provision in the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress is likely to vote on this month. It says the president shall not withdraw the United States from NATO without congressional approval. But whether the Constitution permits such a tying of a president’s hands is also contestable.And European diplomats say that even if Mr. Trump were to nominally keep the United States in NATO, they fear that he could so undermine trust in the United States’ reliability to live up to the collective-defense provision that its value as a deterrent to Russia would be lost.A Transactional AttitudeThe uncertainty stemming from Mr. Trump’s maximalist and yet vague rhetoric is bound up in his past displays of consistent skepticism about NATO and of unusual solicitude to Russia.As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump rattled NATO allies by saying that if Russia attacked the Baltic States, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether they had “fulfilled their obligations to us.” He also repeatedly praised Mr. Putin and said he would consider recognizing Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.As president in July 2018, Mr. Trump not only nearly withdrew from NATO at an alliance summit but denounced the European Union as a “foe” because of “what they do to us in trade.” He then attended a summit with Mr. Putin, after which he expressed skepticism about the idea that the United States should go to war to defend a tiny NATO ally, Montenegro.Mr. Trump held a summit in Helsinki with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in 2018 after repeatedly praising him and displaying an unusual solicitude toward Russia.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWith no prior experience in the military or government, Mr. Trump brought a transactional, mercantilist attitude to interactions with allies. He tended to base his views of foreign nations on his personal relationships with their leaders and on trade imbalances.Mr. Trump particularly disliked Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, and often complained that German automakers were flooding America with their products. His defenders say his anger was in some ways justified: Germany hadn’t been meeting its military spending commitments, and over his objections, Ms. Merkel pushed ahead with a natural-gas pipeline to Russia. Germany only suspended that project two days before Russia invaded Ukraine.Mr. Trump’s allies also point out that he approved sending antitank weapons to Ukraine, which President Obama had not done after Russia seized Crimea in 2014.Still, in 2020, Mr. Trump decided to withdraw a third of the 36,000 American troops stationed in Germany. Some were to come home, as he preferred, with others redeployed elsewhere in Europe. But the following year, as Russia built up troops on Ukraine’s border, Mr. Biden canceled the decision and added troops in Germany as a show of support for NATO.A Supportive MovementIf he returns to power, Mr. Trump will be backed by a conservative movement that has become more skeptical of allies and of U.S. involvement abroad.Anti-interventionist foreign policy institutes are more organized and better funded than they were during Mr. Trump’s time in office. Those groups include the Center for Renewing America, a Trump-aligned think tank that published a paper titled “Pivoting the U.S. Away From Europe to a Dormant NATO,” which provides a rationale for minimizing America’s role in NATO.On Nov. 1, the Heritage Foundation — a traditionally hawkish conservative think tank that has lately refashioned itself in a Trumpist mold, on matters including opposition to aid to Ukraine — hosted a delegation from the European Council on Foreign Relations.The Europeans exchanged views with ardent nationalists, including Michael Anton, a National Security Council official in the Trump administration; Dan Caldwell, who managed foreign policy at the Center for Renewing America; and national security aides to Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and other Trump-aligned senators.According to two people who attended, Mr. Anton told the Europeans he could imagine Mr. Trump setting an ultimatum: If NATO members did not sufficiently increase their military spending by a deadline, he would withdraw the United States from the alliance. As the meeting broke up, Eckart von Klaeden, a former German politician who is now a Mercedes-Benz Group executive, implored Mr. Anton to ask Mr. Trump to please talk to America’s European allies as he formulated his foreign policy.That seems like wishful thinking.In his statement to The Times, Mr. Trump invoked his slogan “America First” — a phrase once popularized by American isolationists opposed to getting involved in World War II.“My highest priority,” Mr. Trump said in the statement, “has always been, and will remain, to America first — the defense of our own country, our own borders, our own values, and our own people, including their jobs and well-being.”Steven Erlanger More

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    In Iowa, Nikki Haley Looks Beyond Her Rivals’ Attacks

    In her first campaign stop since Wednesday’s heated Republican debate, Ms. Haley suggested that fierce criticism from her opponents continued to not be worth her time.In her first campaign stop since Wednesday’s contentious Republican debate, Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and former governor of South Carolina, largely ignored the many attacks that her fellow candidates, aware of her rise in the polls, had lobbed at her. What she did discuss suggested she continued to feel that the criticism wasn’t, as she said on Wednesday night, “worth my time.”Speaking to about 100 people in a convention center conference room in Sioux City, Iowa, on Friday, Ms. Haley stuck to the topics that have become the cornerstones of her campaign — her foreign policy experience and her willingness to tell “hard truths.” She railed against China, pledged to be a fiscally responsible president and even answered a question about fears that Venezuela could invade its South American neighbor, Guyana.Despite her growing rivalry with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to become the chief alternative to former President Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, Ms. Haley did not mention Mr. DeSantis by name, nor did she mention the debate — where she was in the line of fire for much of the evening — until the final minutes of the event.Responding to a voter’s question about her standing in the race, Ms. Haley said she did not think she needed to win the Iowa caucus to be successful.“The momentum is on our side,” she said. “The way I look at it is, we just need to have a good showing in Iowa. I don’t think that means we have to win, necessarily, but I think that we have to have a good showing.”Ms. Haley also appeared to indicate that she would not accept an offer to be Mr. Trump’s running mate, if he were to win the nomination and ask her. “I’ve never played for second,” she said.Ms. Haley’s campaign has gained prominence in recent weeks. Many national polls now put her in a heated race for second place with Mr. DeSantis, and she is running at a similar level in Iowa, at roughly 17.5 percent. (Mr. Trump is well ahead of them both, at more than 45 percent.)Late last month, Americans for Prosperity Action, the conservative political network founded by the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, endorsed Ms. Haley, which gave her campaign access to the network’s financial might and to a pool of staff members to knock on doors and make phone calls.During the Republican debate in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Wednesday, Ms. Haley’s increasing prominence made her the target of frequent attacks from Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr. Ramaswamy in particular assailed her, calling her a “fascist,” asserting that she was in the pocket of business interests and at one point holding up a notepad on which he had written, “Nikki = Corrupt.”“I love all the attention, fellas,” Ms. Haley quipped at one point, even as she appeared, at least at moments, to fade into the debate’s background. Some analysts suggested afterward that Ms. Haley had not mounted a strong enough defense of herself.Unlike former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who rehashed his debate zingers during his campaign stops in New Hampshire on Thursday, Ms. Haley appeared to have moved on. She said the debates had served to winnow the field, and she predicted that another candidate — evidently Mr. DeSantis, though she did not name him — would drop out of the race after the Iowa caucuses.“We’ve got three major people that are going to go into Iowa, and I think after Iowa, one’s going to drop,” Ms. Haley said. “And then I think you’re going to have a play with me and Trump in New Hampshire, and then we’re going to go to my home state in South Carolina, and then we’re going to take it.”Many in attendance in Sioux City appeared to agree with Ms. Haley’s decision to largely ignore the attacks from her opponents, saying they had admired her debate performance on Wednesday.“She did so well at the debate,” said Adrienne Dunn, a 48-year-old Sioux City resident who is leaning toward voting for Ms. Haley but has not made a final decision. “She was prepared. She had good answers.” More

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    In Las Vegas, Biden Speaks the Name He Often Doesn’t

    The president openly attacked his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump, deploying direct criticism he has frequently avoided, at an event announcing billions for high-speed rail service.Just a few months ago, President Biden rarely said the name of his likely opponent in the 2024 presidential election — former President Donald J. Trump — instead invoking other Republicans as proxies during public events or, on occasion, referring simply to “the former guy.”But speaking in Las Vegas on Friday, Mr. Biden didn’t hold back.“Trump just talks to talk,” he said at the Carpenters International Training Center in Las Vegas, a union hub favored by Democrats. “We walk the walk.”And then his words turned even sharper: “He likes to say America is a failing nation. Frankly, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”Mr. Biden was in Las Vegas to announce $8.2 billion in funding for passenger rail projects, and he used the opportunity to criticize his predecessor’s approach to infrastructure, saying that “the last administration tried to cancel” a rail project in California and that his latest investments “stand in stark contrast.”“He always talked about ‘infrastructure week,’ four years of ‘infrastructure week,’ but it failed — he failed,” Mr. Biden said, referring to Mr. Trump. “On my watch, instead of infrastructure week, America’s having ‘infrastructure decade.’”The shift comes as officials for the Biden campaign have taken an interest in trying to use Mr. Trump, and his actions and words both during and after his presidency, as a foil to bolster Mr. Biden’s re-election effort. That strategy is one that some other elected Democrats across the country have been less keen on, arguing that Mr. Biden needs to do more to promote his own accomplishments while in office.A poll released last month by The New York Times and Siena College found that Mr. Trump was leading Mr. Biden in Nevada by 10 points, the largest margin across six critical battleground states surveyed.Mr. Trump, who in most national polls leads the field of Republican primary candidates by more than 40 percentage points, will hold a rally in Reno later this month.Mr. Biden’s visit to Las Vegas came on the heels of two tragedies in the state: the killing of two state troopers in a hit-and-run last week, and a shooting on Wednesday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that killed three faculty members. Mr. Biden met with the university’s president and some of its students and other community members before delivering his remarks on the infrastructure funding, according to the White House.For a few minutes during his speech, he paused to address gun violence, renewing his calls for Congress to “step up” and pass legislation that would include restrictions on assault rifles and universal background checks.“Folks, we got to get smart,” he said. “There have been over 600 mass shootings in America this year alone, plus daily acts of gun violence that don’t even make the national news.” He added, “This is not normal.”But the event’s primary focus was to promote his administration’s agenda, and in doing so, indirectly make his pitch for another four years in office to a friendly audience.Mr. Biden, who earned the nickname Amtrak Joe after commuting by train between Delaware and Washington, D.C., for decades, particularly praised an allocation for a 218-mile high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.He also talked up the latest employment figures released Friday by the Labor Department — which reported that employers had added 199,000 jobs in November — briefly acknowledging that “we know the prices are still too high for too many things.”Mr. Biden appeared alongside several members of Nevada’s congressional delegation, including Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat who is facing a competitive re-election next year after defeating an incumbent herself in 2018.Nevada is one of several key states where Democrats will need to succeed next year to retain control of the White House and the Senate. While Nevada has voted for Democrats in the last several presidential elections — including Mr. Biden in 2020 — other races have been more inconsistent.Senator Catherine Cortez Masto won re-election in the 2022 midterms in a narrow victory, helping the Democrats maintain control of the Senate. But that same year, voters ousted the state’s Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, in favor of his Republican challenger, Joseph Lombardo. More

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    Appeals Court Upholds Trump Gag Order in Election Case, but Narrows Terms

    The decision largely left in place an order limiting what the former president can say about his upcoming federal trial but allowed him more leeway to criticize Jack Smith, the special counsel.A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the gag order imposed two months ago on former President Donald J. Trump in the criminal case accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, but narrowed its terms to allow him to keep attacking one of his main targets: Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing his federal prosecutions.The fight over the gag order has pitted the First Amendment rights of a presidential candidate against fears that his vitriolic language could spur his supporters to violence against participants in the case. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed that a gag order was justified, its adjustments gave Mr. Trump broader latitude to lash out at some of the people he has been targeting for months.In its ruling, a three-judge panel sought to strike a cautious balance between what it called “two foundational constitutional values”: the integrity of the judicial system and Mr. Trump’s right to speak his mind.To that end, the panel kept in place the gag order’s original measures restricting Mr. Trump from attacking any members of Mr. Smith’s staff or the court staff involved in the case. It also preserved provisions that allowed Mr. Trump to portray the prosecution as a political vendetta and to directly criticize the Biden administration and the Justice Department.And in one respect, the court expanded the restrictions, adding a measure barring Mr. Trump from commenting on the relatives of lawyers or court staff members involved in the case if the remarks were intended to interfere with how the trial participants were doing their jobs.“We do not allow such an order lightly,” Judge Patricia A. Millett wrote for the panel. “Mr. Trump is a former president and current candidate for the presidency, and there is a strong public interest in what he has to say. But Mr. Trump is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants. That is what the rule of law means.”But the court cut back on the gag order in two important ways. In addition to freeing Mr. Trump to go after Mr. Smith, the public face of the prosecution, it relaxed a flat restriction against targeting witnesses — allowing Mr. Trump to criticize them if his remarks were not connected to their roles in the case.After the trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, first imposed the gag order on Mr. Trump in Federal District Court in Washington in October, Mr. Trump appealed seeking to get it overturned entirely as unconstitutional. As it hinted it might do at oral arguments last month, the appellate panel instead kept a version in place, but modified some of its terms.The modifications to the order mean that Mr. Trump can now return to using some of his favorite social media epithets and refer to Mr. Smith, as he has numerous times, as a “thug” or as “deranged.” The alterations also mean that Mr. Trump can lash out in a limited way against those of his political adversaries who also may be witnesses in the election interference trial, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Attorney General William P. Barr.Asked for comment, the Trump campaign issued a statement saying the appeals court had struck down “a huge part of Judge Chutkan’s extraordinarily overbroad gag order.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers have promised to challenge the gag order all the way to the Supreme Court.The appeals court’s ruling rejected many of Mr. Trump’s legal team’s arguments for lifting the gag order entirely, including that his remarks are all constitutionally protected as political speech, that he could not be held responsible for his listeners’ responses to his speech, and that the court could not proactively gag him before any harm was shown to have occurred.“Many of former President Trump’s public statements attacking witnesses, trial participants, and court staff pose a danger to the integrity of these criminal proceedings,” Judge Millett wrote. “That danger is magnified by the predictable torrent of threats of retribution and violence that the district court found follows when Mr. Trump speaks out forcefully against individuals in connection with this case and the 2020 election aftermath on which the indictment focuses.”But the original order, she said, “sweeps in more protected speech than is necessary,” so the First Amendment required a narrower tailoring of the restriction.Judge Millett and her two colleagues on the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — Judges Cornelia Pillard and Brad Garcia — were appointed by Democratic presidents. Judge Chutkan was also put on the bench by a Democrat.While gag orders are not uncommon in criminal prosecutions, the order imposed in the election interference case has resulted in a momentous clash. Mr. Smith’s prosecutors have sought to protect themselves and their witnesses from Mr. Trump’s “near-daily” social media barrages, while the former president has argued that the government has tried to censor his “core political speech” as he mounts another bid for the White House.Mr. Trump has often blurred the lines between his criminal cases and his presidential campaign, using court appearances to deliver political talking points and employing public remarks to assail his prosecutions as a form of persecution.Complicating matters, several of his political adversaries, including Mr. Pence, are likely to be witnesses against him when the election subversion case goes to trial as early as March.The decision by the appeals court means that the two gag orders placed on Mr. Trump — one in the federal election case and the other in his civil fraud case in Manhattan — have now been reinstated after judges had temporarily paused them.Late last month, a state appeals court in New York put back in place a gag order barring Mr. Trump from attacking the court staff in his civil trial. More