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      Johnson Said in 2015 Trump Was Unfit and Could Be ‘Dangerous’ as President

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      Speaker Mike Johnson, then a Republican state lawmaker, posted on social media that Donald J. Trump lacked the character and morality to be president and could be vindictive.Years before he played a lead role in trying to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office after the 2020 election or defended him in two separate Senate impeachment trials, Speaker Mike Johnson bluntly asserted that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could be a danger as president.“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also questioned what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely disrespecting him? I am only halfway kidding about this. I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”The comments came at a time when many Republicans who would later become loyalists of Mr. Trump were disparaging him and declaring him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Only later did they fall in line and serve as the first-line defenders of his most extreme words and actions.But Mr. Johnson’s anti-Trump screed has, until now, flown under the radar, in a large part because Mr. Johnson himself did, too, before his unlikely election as speaker last month put him second in line to the presidency.These days, Mr. Johnson only praises Mr. Trump and defends him against what he dismisses as politically motivated indictments and criminal charges. Mr. Trump has lauded Mr. Johnson as someone who has acted as a loyal soldier since the beginning of his political rise.In a lengthy statement to The New York Times on Monday night, Mr. Johnson said his comments were made before he personally knew Mr. Trump, and attributed them to the fact that “his style was very different than mine.”He continued: “During his 2016 campaign, President Trump quickly won me and millions of my fellow Republicans over. When I got to know him personally shortly after we both arrived in Washington in 2017, I grew to appreciate the person that he is and the qualities about him that made him the extraordinary president that he was.”Mr. Johnson, who campaigned for Mr. Trump in 2020 and has endorsed his 2024 bid, added: “Since we met, we have always had a very good and friendly relationship. The president and I enjoy working together, and I look forward to doing so again when he returns to the White House.”A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the posts.In 2015, Mr. Johnson, who would announce his first run for Congress the next year, wrote that he was horrified as he watched Mr. Trump’s debate performance with his wife and children.“What bothered me most was watching the face of my exceptional 10 yr old son, Jack, at one point when he looked over at me with a sort of confused disappointment, as the leader of all polls boasted about calling a woman a ‘fat pig.’”In one of the most famous exchanges from that debate, Megyn Kelly, a moderator and then a Fox News host, asked Mr. Trump about his history of referring to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Mr. Trump responded. He added that the country’s problem was political correctness, something he didn’t have time for.Mr. Johnson was horrified.“Can you imagine the noble, selfless characters of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln or Reagan carrying on like Trump did last night?” wrote Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian. He noted that voters needed to demand a “much higher level of virtue and decency” than what he had just witnessed.During the Trump administration, Mr. Johnson enjoyed a friendly relationship with the president. In 2020, he accompanied him, along with other House Republicans, to the college football national championship game between Louisiana State University and Clemson.After the election that year, he played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results. On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called him to discuss legal challenges to the election results.In recent years, Mr. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, has used a podcast he hosted with his wife to defend Mr. Trump against four different indictments and the criminal charges against him.“I think every single one of these bogus prosecutions is overtly weaponized political prosecutions of Donald Trump,” Mr. Johnson said on one episode.On another, Mr. Johnson proclaimed, “No one did it better in the White House than President Trump.” In last month’s speaker’s race, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Johnson, noting that he was someone who had “supported me, in both mind and spirit, from the very beginning of our GREAT 2016 Victory.”Mr. Johnson is far from alone in having expressed deep concerns about Mr. Trump, only to go on to later embrace him and his agenda.In 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called Mr. Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” as well as a “kook,” “crazy” and a man who was “unfit for office.” He went on to serve as Mr. Trump’s most loyal defender in the Senate.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the second-to-last man left standing in the 2016 Republican primary race, called Mr. Trump a “pathological liar” who was “utterly amoral,” a “serial philanderer” and a “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” Mr. Cruz has explained his decision to become a loyal defender of Mr. Trump as something that was a “responsibility” to his constituents.Mick Mulvaney, the former Republican congressman who went on to serve as the president’s acting chief of staff, in 2016 called his future boss a “terrible human being” who had made “disgusting and indefensible” comments about women.Unlike the other lawmakers who fell in line, however, Mr. Johnson has pitched himself as someone of deep religious convictions, whose worldview is driven by his faith. More

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      The Squandered Potential of Tim Scott

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      Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination this week having failed to make good on his early promise as a candidate who could broaden the party coalition in a general election. And while he could still have a long career ahead of him in Republican politics, his failure to connect with the primary electorate ought to trouble those pining for a more diverse and capacious G.O.P.Mr. Scott spent much of his campaign making hard-right appeals in a vain effort to wrest a portion of his party’s base from Donald Trump. For social conservatives, he offered a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks. For immigration and crime hard-liners, he supported ending birthright citizenship and committing troops to a war in Mexico against the drug cartels. In a recent appearance in Iowa, he even broadly alleged that Chinese college students studying in America could be “reporting back to the Chinese Communist Party.” And last month, he accused President Biden of having “blood on his hands” after Hamas attacked Israel, baselessly suggesting that by releasing Iranian oil revenue ⁠as part of a prisoner swap — for humanitarian uses, under American supervision — the president might have financed the massacre.None of this separated Mr. Scott, either in substance or in the polls, from the rest of the pack. But Mr. Scott did try make his candidacy distinctive in one important way: selling Republican voters, at every opportunity, a message of racial uplift that minimizes the extent to which racism still shapes American life.On paper, Mr. Scott was well positioned to deliver it.He could have been the first Black Republican nominee. Already, he is not only the South’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, but the first the region has ever popularly elected (he won a special election in 2014 after being appointed to his seat a year earlier by a rival 2024 candidate, Nikki Haley). And over the years, he has spoken often about his experiences as a Black man. He has described being pulled over on the road some 18 times in 20 years and being stopped by the Capitol Police on the way to work even as he wore a senator’s pin.Mr. Scott makes frequent reference, too, to voices on the left who have exposed their own racism by subjecting him to stereotypes and slurs and dismissing his agency. “When I fought back against their liberal agenda,” he said in the video announcing his presidential exploratory committee, “they called me a prop, a token, because I disrupt their narrative.”But Mr. Scott always sweetened these disclosures with a spoonful of sugar. “Is there racism in America?” he asked at a July campaign event. “Of course there is. Are the systems of our country racist? I don’t think so.” While racism lingers on, in other words, the strides we’ve made since slavery and the civil rights movement have been so great that we should deride those who argue it defines American identity or still structures our present.His own life story ⁠is, as far as he’s concerned, strong evidence in support of this idea. “Growing up in a single-parent household, I wondered if the American dream would work for a kid in the inner city,” he said at September’s Republican debate. “I’ve got good news for every single child, whether you’re in the inner cities of Chicago or the rural parts of Iowa. America and the dream — it is alive, it is well and it is healthy.”While most Republicans surely agreed that Mr. Scott’s background fatally undermined the critiques their opponents have been making of America and its history — “I am living proof that our founders were geniuses who should be celebrated, not canceled,” he told a crowd in Iowa early this year — they weren’t enthralled by his campaign, perhaps because Mr. Scott’s message of racial uplift doesn’t have more than a cerebral appeal to an overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. Thus far, the party’s voters have preferred to get their defenses of American history straight and neat from Mr. Trump and Ron DeSantis, without the detours into personal narrative that Mr. Scott offered up.Mr. Scott insists often that he doesn’t want people to think about his race at all. “People are fixated on my color,” he said to Politico in a 2018 profile. “I’m just not.” There’s a similar line in “America: A Redemption Story,” Mr. Scott’s 2022 entry in a now-venerable genre, the pre-campaign memoir. “Today we live in a world that thrives on creating narratives of division,” it reads. “But my childhood and my life have not been defined by my blackness.”The book itself suggested otherwise — that Mr. Scott was not only as fixated on his own color as the critics he scorned but also as determined to make use of it. The words “Black” or “African American” appear 75 times, or once every three-and-a-half pages — often within its capsule biographies of Black figures like Jackie Robinson and Madam C.J. Walker, whom Mr. Scott evidently sees as his historic peers. In truth and by design, the book is as much a kind of Black History Month reader as it is about Mr. Scott’s own life. And even that material begins with his grandfather teaching his mother how to pick cotton.Ben Carson’s more successful run for the Republican nomination in 2016 seemed to have some of what Mr. Scott’s campaign lacked — though almost forgotten today, Mr. Carson, unlike Mr. Scott, actually found his way to the top tier of contenders for a time. To be sure, the substance of Mr. Carson’s commentary on race did resemble Mr. Scott’s. In a representative interview with the conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, he both denied the persistence of deep racial inequality in American society — “Race doesn’t really keep you down in this country if you get a good education” — and argued that the racism worth worrying about was coming from his progressive critics. “It’s mostly with the progressive movement who will look at someone like me, and because of the color of my pigment, they decide that there’s a certain way that I’m supposed to think,” he said. “And if I don’t think that way, I’m an Uncle Tom and they heap all kinds of hatred on you. That, to me, is racism.”But unlike Mr. Scott, Mr. Carson rarely discussed race of his own volition, on or off the stump. “Asked about it,” Molly Ball observed in The Atlantic, “he tends to deflect, rejecting racial distinctions as divisive.” And to the extent that Mr. Carson’s campaign did attempt to harness race to its advantage, as it did in a pair of conservative talk radio ads it aired before South Carolina’s primary that year, it did so the old-fashioned way: appealing to the racial anxieties and outright racism of white right-of-center voters. One of the South Carolina ads “inveighed against affirmative action as ‘racial entitlement’ while the other depicted Black crime as a ‘crisis,’” Ms. Ball wrote. “Taken together, the ads were a striking attempt to provoke white voters’ racial attitudes by a candidate who has otherwise avoided the subject.”Mr. Carson’s own bootstraps story, meanwhile, mirrors Mr. Scott’s in certain respects — both men came to success from poverty and broken homes — but Mr. Carson’s personal narrative was also a tale of Christian redemption. As he tells it, he worked past the anger and violence of his youth through studying the Bible, which made him famous among the conservative evangelicals who would take an interest in his campaign long before he entered politics.Mr. Scott has nothing like that story in his own narrative — a comparatively simple rags-to-Republican tale about the virtues of hard work and rejecting racial victimhood that, while appealing in the abstract to essentially everyone on the right, wasn’t compelling enough to excite any important constituency in particular. So where Mr. Carson ran largely as a conventional evangelical Republican candidate — racial dog whistles and all — Mr. Scott actively tried and failed to make a race-based message connect.It is important to note that Mr. Scott — a descendant of slaves who is, by all accounts, still warmly received in the North Charleston community where he grew up — is no less fully and authentically Black for being a conservative or having used his identity to sell conservatism. Criticisms of Mr. Scott on this front are inane. The Black community is ideologically diverse — and, in fact, substantively more conservative than the Democratic margins among Black voters might suggest.The pool of Black voters who are skeptical or hostile to the progressive movements that Mr. Scott reviles or who believe, as he does, that unshackling capitalism further might liberate struggling Black communities, may be even larger — and it includes Democrats and independents. This is what might have made Mr. Scott such a formidable general election contender: Given the thin electoral margins in swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, even mild slippage rightward among Black voters could be potentially catastrophic for Democrats.But luckily for them, the G.O.P. is still Donald Trump’s party, and nothing Mr. Scott could have said or done would have changed that.Mr. Scott, in fact, has taken pains to frame himself as an occasionally critical but generally loyal friend of the former president, going as far as absolving him of responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. In his campaign memoir, Mr. Scott describes being invited to the White House for a conciliatory chat after publicly condemning Mr. Trump for what he said after the violence in Charlottesville. When Mr. Trump asked him what he could to do make amends to those he’d offended, Mr. Scott sensed an opportunity to plug Opportunity Zones — tax incentives for private investment in specific high poverty areas, a policy idea he’d nurtured for some time.“The next day, I was stunned to read about President Trump answering a question as he boarded Air Force One,” he writes. “When asked about how our meeting went, he started talking about the importance of rebuilding lower-income neighborhoods through Opportunity Zones.”Opportunity Zones eventually found their way into the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and are talked up today, by Mr. Scott, as an example of how rejecting the politics of racial outrage — and, implicitly, countenancing the racism of Republican politicians like Mr. Trump — might pave the way toward making material, market-driven gains for racial minorities. The fact that nearly half of the tax breaks offered under the program thus far had gone to just 1 percent of the designated zones by the end of 2020 — and to projects like a $600 million Ritz-Carlton development in Portland, Ore. — is of no consequence to him.This is Mr. Scott’s dream and, by his lights, America’s: the notion that we might continue making racial progress (even though there’s not much left to make) with the business-friendly policy tools already available to us, and without fundamentally reworking our politics or our economy. It is a thoroughly conservative vision that was offered by a capable conservative spokesman — one who won the respect of Republican voters but not nearly enough of their support.Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic and a columnist at The Guardian.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Bad Feelings About the Economy Sour Arizona Voters on Biden

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      The White House has hailed new investments and new jobs, yet many voters in a battleground state are chafing at inflation and housing costs.If President Biden hopes to replicate his narrow victory in Arizona, he will need disillusioned voters like Alex Jumah. An immigrant from Iraq, Mr. Jumah leans conservative, but he said he voted for Mr. Biden because he could not stomach former President Trump’s anti-Muslim views.That was 2020. Since then, Mr. Jumah, 41, said, his economic fortunes cratered after he contracted Covid, missed two months of work as a trucking dispatcher, was evicted from his home and was forced to move in with his mother. He said he could no longer afford an apartment in Tucson, where rents have risen sharply since the pandemic. He is now planning to vote for Mr. Trump.“At first I was really happy with Biden,” he said. “We got rid of Trump, rid of the racism. And then I regretted it. We need a strong president to keep this country first.”His anger helps explain why Mr. Biden appears to be struggling in Arizona and other closely divided 2024 battleground states, according to a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College.Surveys and interviews with Arizona voters find that they are sour on the economy, despite solid job growth in the state. The Biden administration also fails to get credit for a parade of new companies coming to Arizona that will produce lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles and computer chips — investments that the White House hails as emblems of its push for a next generation of American manufacturing.Breanne Laird, 32, a doctoral student at Arizona State University and a Republican, said she sat out the 2020 elections in part because she never thought Arizona would turn blue. But after two years without any pay increases and after losing $170,000 trying to fix and flip a house she bought in suburban Phoenix, she said she was determined to vote next year, for Mr. Trump.She bought the investment property near the peak of the market last year, and said she watched its value slip as mortgage rates rose toward 8 percent. She said she had to max out credit cards, and her credit score fell.Arizona’s housing market fell farther than most parts of the country after the 2008 financial crisis, and it took longer to recover. Few economists are predicting a similar crash now, but even so, Ms. Laird said she felt frustrated, and was itching to return Mr. Trump to power.“I’m even further behind,” she said. “I see the value in voting, and plan to vote as much as possible.”Voters waited in line to cast their ballots at dawn in Guadalupe, Ariz., in 2020.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesA majority of Arizona voters in the recent New York Times/Siena survey rated the country’s economy as poor. Just 3 percent of voters said it was excellent.Arizona experienced some of the worst inflation in the country, largely because housing costs shot upward as people thronged to the state during the pandemic. Average monthly rents in Phoenix rose to $1,919 in September from $1,373 in early 2020, a 40 percent increase according to Zillow. Average rents across the country rose about 30 percent over the same period.Home prices and rents have fallen from their peaks this year, but even so, economists say that the state is increasingly unaffordable for middle-class families, whose migration to Arizona has powered decades of growth in the state.Arizona’s economy sprinted out of the pandemic, but economists said the speed of new hiring and consumer spending in the state has now eased. The state unemployment rate of 4 percent is about equal to the national average, and the quarterly Arizona Economic Outlook, published by the University of Arizona, predicts that the state will keep growing next year, though at a slower pace.Arizona has added 280,000 jobs since Mr. Biden took office, according to the federal Labor Department, compared with 150,000 during Mr. Trump’s term. Phoenix just hosted the Super Bowl, usually a high-profile boost to the local mood and economy.Barely a week goes by without Arizona’s first-term Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, visiting a groundbreaking or job-training event to talk up the state’s economy or the infrastructure money arriving from Washington.Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs on stage during the 2023 Inauguration Ceremony at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMr. Biden was even farther behind Mr. Trump in another poll being released this week by the Phoenix-based firm Noble Predictive Insights. That survey of about 1,000 Arizona voters said Mr. Trump had an eight-point lead, a significant swing toward Republicans from this past winter, when Mr. Biden had a two-point edge.Mike Noble, the polling firm’s chief executive, said that Mr. Trump had built his lead in Arizona by consolidating support from Republicans and — for the moment — winning back independents. Respondents cited immigration and inflation as their top concerns.“Economists say, ‘Look at these indicators’ — People don’t care about that,” Mr. Noble said. “They care about their day-to-day lives.”Bill Ruiz, the business representative of Local 1912 of the Southwest Mountain States Carpenters Union, said the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill and CHIPS Act were bringing billions of dollars into Arizona, and helping to power an increase in union jobs and wages. Carpenters in his union were working 7 percent more hours than they were a year ago, and the union’s membership has doubled to 3,400 over the past five years.“We’re making bigger gains and bigger paychecks,” he said. “It blows me away people don’t see that.”Political strategists say Mr. Biden could still win in Arizona next year, if Democrats can reassemble the just-big-enough coalition of moderate Republicans and suburban women, Latinos and younger voters who rejected Mr. Trump by 10,000 votes in 2020. It was the first time in more than two decades that a Democrat had carried Arizona and its 11 electoral votes.The same pattern was seen in last year’s midterm elections, when Arizona voters elected Democrats running on abortion rights and democracy for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, defeating a slate of Trump-endorsed hard-right Republicans.Abortion is still a powerful motivator and a winning issue for Democrats, but many Arizona voters now say their dominant concerns are immigration, inflation and what they feel is a faltering economy.Grant Cooper, 53, who retired from a career in medical sales, is the kind of disaffected Republican voter that Democrats hope to peel away next year. He supports abortion rights and limited government, and while he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, he said he would not do so again.He said his personal finances and retirement investments were in decent shape, and he did not blame the president for the spike in gas prices in 2022. Still, he said he plans to vote for a third-party candidate next year, saying that both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were out-of-touch relics of a two-party system that was failing to address long-term challenges.“They squibble and squabble about the dumbest things, rather than looking at things that could improve our economy,” he said. “The Republicans are fighting the Democrats. The Democrats are fighting the Republicans. And what gets done? Nothing.”David Martinez, 43, is emblematic of the demographic shift that has made Arizona such a battleground. He and his family moved back to Phoenix after 15 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he still works remotely in the tech industry. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, and said he was worried about the threat Mr. Trump poses to free elections, democracy and America’s future in NATO.His working-class friends and extended family don’t share the same concerns. These days, the political conversations with them usually begin and end with the price of gas (now falling) and eggs (still high).“It falls on deaf ears,” Mr. Martinez said of his arguments about democracy. “They feel down about Biden and inflation and his age. They’re open to giving Trump a second term or skipping the election entirely.”Camille Baker More

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      Trump Campaign Officials Try to Play Down Contentious 2025 Plans

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      But many aspects of those blueprints are based on Donald Trump’s own words, his campaign website and an adviser whom the campaign asked to speak.Two top officials on former President Donald J. Trump’s 2024 campaign on Monday sought to distance his campaign team from news reports about plans for what he would do if voters return him to the White House.Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, who are effectively Mr. Trump’s campaign managers, issued a joint statement after a spate of articles, many in The New York Times, about plans for 2025 developed by the campaign itself, and trumpeted on the trail by Mr. Trump, as well as efforts by outside groups led by former senior Trump administration officials who remain in direct contact with him.Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita focused their frustration on outside groups, which they did not name, that have devoted considerable resources to preparing lists of personnel and developing policies to serve the next right-wing administration.“The efforts by various nonprofit groups are certainly appreciated and can be enormously helpful. However, none of these groups or individuals speak for President Trump or his campaign,” they wrote, calling reports about their personnel and policy intentions “purely speculative and theoretical” and “merely suggestions.”Mr. Trump’s team has sought to portray him as the most substantive candidate on policy in the Republican Party. But according to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers have grown enraged at what they perceive alternately as credit-taking by the groups, and headlines that could be problematic for more moderate voters in a general election.The statement noticeably stopped short of disavowing the groups and seemed merely intended to discourage them from speaking to the press.One challenge for the Trump team is that the most incendiary rhetoric and proposals have come from Mr. Trump’s own mouth.For instance, an article in The Times in June explored Mr. Trump’s plans to use the Justice Department to take vengeance on political adversaries by ordering investigations and prosecutions of them, eradicating the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from White House political control.Mr. Trump himself said in June: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”The Times recently published an extensive article on Mr. Trump’s immigration plans for a second term. He has promised what he called “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and has used increasingly toxic language to describe immigrants, including saying that they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”The Times article detailed plans for an immigration crackdown in part based on a lengthy interview with Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump White House immigration policy. The Trump campaign, after being approached by Times reporters about Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, had asked Mr. Miller to speak with them.President Biden’s 2024 campaign pounced on the article concerning immigration — which described plans for mass detention camps, among other things — saying that Mr. Trump had “extreme, racist, cruel policies” that were “meant to stoke fear and divide us.”Other Times articles have focused on plans being fleshed out by close allies of Mr. Trump who occupied senior roles in his White House and are likely to return to power if he is elected.Those plans include efforts to increase White House control over the federal bureaucracy that are being developed, among others, by Russell T. Vought, who was Mr. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.But as The Times noted, Mr. Vought’s plans dovetailed with statements Mr. Trump himself made in a video his campaign published on its website, including vowing to bring independent regulatory agencies “under presidential authority.”The Times series has also examined plans by Trump allies to recruit more aggressive lawyers seen as likely to bless extreme policies. Mr. Trump fired the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security in 2019 after disputes over White House immigration policies and has blasted key lawyers from his administration who raised objections to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.The statement from Ms. Wiles and Mr. LaCivita on Monday said that, “all 2024 campaign policy announcements will be made by President Trump or members of his campaign team. Policy recommendations from external allies are just that — recommendations.” More

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      After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’

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      The former president’s Veterans Day speech used language similar to the dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign rejected criticism that he was echoing the language of fascist dictators with his vow to root out his political opponents like “vermin,” then doubled down: It said on Monday that the “sad, miserable existence” of those who made such comparisons would be “crushed” with Mr. Trump back in the White House.“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”At a campaign event Saturday in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He then said his political opposition was the most pressing and pernicious threat facing America.“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within,” Mr. Trump said. “Our threat is from within.”The former president’s remarks drew criticism from some liberals and historians who pointed to echoes of dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini.An earlier version of Mr. Cheung’s statement, in which he said the “entire existence” of those critics would be crushed, was reported by The Washington Post on Sunday. Mr. Cheung said on Monday that he edited his initial statement “seconds” after sending it, and The Post amended its article to include both versions.Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for President Biden’s re-election campaign, said in a statement that Mr. Trump at his Veterans Day speech had “parroted the autocratic language” of “dictators many U.S. veterans gave their lives fighting, in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions.”Though violent language was a feature of Mr. Trump’s last two campaigns, his speeches have grown more extreme as he tries to win a second term.At recent rallies and events, Mr. Trump has compared immigrants coming over the border to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from the horror movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”He called on shoplifters to be shot in a speech in California, and over the weekend in New Hampshire, he again called for drug dealers to be subject to the death penalty. He has insinuated that a military general whom he appointed as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.Last month, Mr. Trump told a right-wing website that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase recalling white supremacist ideology and comments made by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf.” More

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      How Tim Scott’s Campaign Ended: Internal Mistrust, Flat Debates and More

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      Externally, Mr. Scott’s brand of relentless optimism never found traction. Internally, his campaign was plagued by missteps, and a huge sum expected from a key donor never materialized.It was late October and Tim Scott’s campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, was trying to rally the troops on an all-staff call, announcing that they would soon relocate to Iowa in a last-ditch move to salvage his floundering presidential bid. She broke the news from the back seat of an Uber, according to four people familiar with the call.As the car bumped through the streets of Chicago after a Scott speech had run long, Ms. DeCasper insisted, “We are not failing.”But by then, even many of those around Mr. Scott believed his candidacy had already run its course.His debate performances were flat. His television ads weren’t working. His operation was burning through far more cash than it was raising. And his super PAC had canceled its own television ads days before Ms. DeCasper’s staff call.There was one other detail that had been closely guarded: The man long expected to be the super PAC’s biggest donor, the billionaire Larry Ellison, wound up not giving anything to the group after Mr. Scott entered the race, according to four people aware of the group’s finances. From 2020 to 2022, Mr. Ellison donated $35 million to Scott-aligned groups, and a huge check had seemed a foregone conclusion when Mr. Ellison showed up at the Scott kickoff and got a shout-out from the stage.Before his run, Mr. Scott telegraphed to allies that he had expected a significant sum to flow into his super PAC, according to three of the people familiar with the discussions and planning, and the super PAC wrote a budget for roughly half the amount that Mr. Scott had predicted. But donations fell well short of even that smaller sum.By early November, Mr. Scott had sunk so low in polls that he barely qualified for the third presidential debate in Miami. Then, on a night last week when he knew he needed a performance that would reinvigorate his flagging candidacy, the biggest splash he made in Miami was the public debut of his girlfriend.Days later, he quit the race on Fox News in an announcement that surprised much of his staff.For a senator from South Carolina who had entered the race with high hopes as the Republican Party’s highest-ranking Black elected official, Mr. Scott, 58, was unable to convert his compelling life story — and more campaign cash at the outset than any other candidate — into concrete support.Externally, Mr. Scott’s brand of relentless optimism never found traction in a contest that has been dominated by the dark and fear-laden campaign of former President Donald J. Trump.“Sometimes the message and the tone don’t align with the moment,” said Rob Godfrey, a veteran South Carolina Republican political strategist who has followed Mr. Scott’s career for years. “It may be that the potential wasn’t realized in this campaign because there is such anger and polarization in the electorate.”Internally, the campaign was plagued by miscommunications, missed opportunities and mistrust. Allies questioned the candidate’s devotion to the race and his decision to lean on a senior team, led by Ms. DeCasper, with so little presidential experience. Mr. Scott himself raised concerns to one person close to him about how the nearly $22 million he brought into the race from his Senate re-election was being spent by others, which further narrowed his circle of trust.“It’s hard for any presidential candidate to surround themselves with people they don’t know and ask them to be loyal to the cause,” Ms. DeCasper, who has worked with Mr. Scott for more than a decade, said in an interview. “I was his longstanding protector and nobody could have done that besides me.”Ms. DeCasper said those who doubted Mr. Scott’s commitment to the cause were misinterpreting his core values.“He made a promise to his mother that he would take her to church every Sunday,” Ms. DeCasper said. It was a promise, she added, Mr. Scott rarely broke. “People without context would see it as a lack of commitment to a presidential campaign,” she said. “But in reality he was committing to being a good senator as well as a good Christian as well as a good son.”In some ways, the debates were the undoing of Mr. Scott. He had entered the first one, in August, primed for a moment as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had faded and he had ticked up in the polls in Iowa. But Mr. Scott was largely absent that evening and never fully recovered. Donors and voters instead gave a fresh look to his fellow South Carolinian, former Gov. Nikki Haley, who had first appointed Mr. Scott to the Senate a decade ago and who supplanted him as Mr. DeSantis’s chief rival for a Trump alternative.Mr. Scott struggled to stand out against Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy during the primary debates.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThe fourth debate in December, with its higher polling requirement, had threatened to unceremoniously end the Scott campaign and so, after weekend events in Iowa were canceled because of what his campaign said was a case of the flu, Mr. Scott bowed on Sunday night to the reality that the race was over.His announcement on Fox News on Sunday blindsided most of Mr. Scott’s own aides and supporters, with among the few to know being Ms. DeCasper and Nathan Brand, his communications director.The shock factor was the latest and final sign of a campaign that some criticized as insular at the top. Fund-raising pleas had gone out less than an hour before he had announced his departure. And the suspension of his campaign was not posted on his own account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, for nearly three hours.Privately, allies and advisers to Mr. Scott had questioned his dedication to the contest, pointing to a campaign schedule that was less robust than his leading non-Trump rivals. According to a calendar tracked by The Des Moines Register, Vivek Ramaswamy held more than twice as many events as he did in Iowa this year, while Mr. DeSantis had 50 percent more events and even Ms. Haley, who has made Iowa far less central to her candidacy, nearly matched Mr. Scott’s total. (Unlike Ms. Haley and Mr. Ramaswamy, Mr. Scott has a full-time job as a senator.)Questions about Mr. Scott’s future had accelerated after his super PAC pulled its advertising plug, after running about $12 million of the $40 million in ads it had announced reserving over the summer. “We aren’t going to waste our money when the electorate isn’t focused or ready for a Trump alternative,” Rob Collins, the super PAC’s co-chairman, wrote in a blunt memo to donors.Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman who is supporting Ms. Haley, called the memo unhelpful. “That was the first thing that sucked the oxygen out,” Mr. Dawson said.But Mr. Scott himself soon echoed that message on CNBC, a relatively rare interview beyond the friendly confines of Fox News.“One of the things that we’ve realized throughout the last several days is breaking through in any of the media with any campaign material is just useless,” Mr. Scott said. “Why waste those resources when you can save them for the end of the campaign when you will have the opportunity to break through.”That opportunity never came.Despite a Black Republican surging to the top of the polls in each of the last two open Republican primaries (Ben Carson in 2016, and Herman Cain in 2012), Mr. Scott never had a breakout moment in 2023, even as polls show he remained well liked by voters.In the end, the party instead seemed satisfied to have Mr. Scott stay in the Senate. The lack of money from Mr. Ellison was symptomatic of a broader trend of donor reluctance.In the first half of 2021, when Mr. Scott delivered the Republican rebuttal to President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Scott had nearly 247,000 online donations. This year, when running for president, he had far fewer: under 109,000 online contributions, according to federal records data for WinRed, the company that processes nearly all online Republican campaign contributions.Though Mr. Scott has repeatedly downplayed any interest in the vice presidency, his lack of frontal criticisms of Mr. Trump — and Mr. Trump’s lack of attacks on him — has fueled repeated questions about them as potential running mates.But Mr. Scott, who has previously indicated that he will not seek another U.S. Senate term in 2028, did not foreclose a different political future on Sunday, saying he was listening to the voters in his interview with Trey Gowdy.“They’re telling me, ‘Not now, Tim,’” he said. “I don’t think they’re saying, Trey, ‘No,’ but I do think they’re saying, ‘Not now.’” More

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      in Elections

      Nikki Haley and Those High Heels

      by

      If Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have the best shot at taking on Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, there was an especially telling moment at Wednesday’s debate that shows why Ms. Haley might be better suited to endure and overcome Mr. Trump’s lines of attacks than Mr. DeSantis would be.It was when their rival, the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, used a question about Israel to jab at Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis for being foreign policy hawks and then try to belittle them for wearing heels — high heels in the case of Ms. Haley, and cowboy boots for Mr. DeSantis (there has been much speculation that he has lifts in those boots).“Do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?” Mr. Ramaswamy said, clearly pleased with his one-liner. “In which case we’ve got two of them onstage tonight.”It was a classic Trump play by the Trump-toady Ramaswamy — the way the former president tries to reduce women to gender and make them seem weak (Hillary Clinton, Carly Fiorina, Megyn Kelly and more) or tries to de-man a male rival (the penis comparisons with Marco Rubio, the wimp attacks on Jeb Bush and more).Mr. DeSantis said nothing. He was either trying to ignore it or rise above it (or perhaps forget it ever happened). If that’s the soft-shoe dance that Mr. DeSantis plans if and when Mr. Trump escalates attacks on him, history suggests that Mr. DeSantis will get stomped.Ms. Haley, by contrast, seemed almost delighted that Mr. Ramaswamy raised her stilettos: It gave her an opportunity to emphasize this most feminine of objects, while also turning the moment around on her male rival.“I’d first like to say, they’re five-inch heels,” she corrected. “And I don’t wear ’em unless you can run in ’em.”“The second thing that I will say is, I wear heels. They’re not for a fashion statement. They’re for ammunition.”It wasn’t the most artful line. (Who was she outrunning? How could heels be ammunition? Was she not worried she’d conjure a bad “Single White Female” comparison, which of course she did?) But what the exchange revealed was that, amid this sea of macho men and during this era of macho politics, there is a path for women that involves simultaneously rising above and leaning into a gendered insult; while the men, on the other hand, too often succumb to the temptation of going lower.Ms. Haley seemed to know she’d gain more by shutting down a male jerk with humor than by letting the moment go. A bit later, too, when Mr. Ramaswamy brought up Ms. Haley’s daughter’s use of TikTok, an unusually personal attack on a family member, Ms. Haley spoke for many when she said, “You’re just scum.”Now imagine Ms. Haley on the debate stage with Mr. Trump. Maybe Mr. Trump has imagined it. Maybe that’s why he’s afraid to debate her.Whether you love or hate these playground-style duels, these moments can be more consequential than many of us assume. Most Americans are not reading deeply into the platforms of each candidate; they get glimpses of them in public performances like this, and often form opinions around them. So when a moment like this goes viral, often it matters even more. “People get to see whether you could stand your ground or hold your own,” said Tristan Bridges, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies gender politics. “And they’re just intensely gendered, every time, no matter who’s running.”Masculinity contests have long been a part of politics; for years, war heroes and combat veterans won office or their party’s presidential nominations, as other men sought to project traditionally masculine characteristics like toughness, resolve, seriousness, strength. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton ran for president staking out some hawkish positions on Iraq and foreign policy; her image of toughness helped her at first, given the ongoing threats from the war on terror. But she became caught up in questions about her likability, with none other than Barack Obama delivering if not a Ramaswamy comment, then still a pretty gendered one in a hushed aside at a critical debate: “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”No woman runs for office these days without having some way of responding to such digs, and Ms. Haley has practiced. As far back as 2012, she’s been recycling a version of her heels-as-ammunition line. As governor of South Carolina: “I’ve got a completely male Senate. Do I want to use these for kicking? Sometimes, I do.” During an address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “If I see something wrong, we’re going to kick them every single time.” In her official campaign announcement: “You should know this about me: I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”The reason for this stiletto contortion is actually quite clever: Ms. Haley, like the women candidates before her, must balance the qualities we expect of women (warmth, femininity) with what we expect of leaders (authority, strength). By taking the most feminine of objects — a heel — and turning it into a weapon is essentially her way of saying “I wear heels, but I’m tough.” It’s not clear how effective this strategy will be with large numbers of voters, but at least it doesn’t contribute to making American politics a locker room.Which is more than we can say for Mr. Trump, of course, who took masculinity chest-beating to new heights with his attacks on “Little Marco” and “Low Energy Jeb” in 2015 and 2016, and any number of sexist attacks on Mrs. Clinton as weak and tired. Or even on occasion Joe Biden, who once said he would have “beat the hell out of” Trump had the two been in high school together.Mr. DeSantis, for his part, seems stuck — there’s no way to judo out of a subject that his critics seem to be dissecting with the fury of a coded Taylor Swift lyric. No, really: There are diagrams of how his boots bend; their arch; the shape they make inside his pants; how they affect his gait. Politico Magazine even interviewed shoemakers about the boots — including one who makes bespoke cowboy boots with heel lifts for Texas politicians, and who concluded there was “no doubt” Mr. DeSantis is wearing lifts. (The shoemaker said the effect of a heel lift is similar to “five-inch stilettos.” A DeSantis spokesperson replied that the governor does not pad his boots and called the magazine’s story a “hit piece.”)It is certainly no surprise that Mr. Trump appears positively giddy over the whole boot matter, posting an image of Mr. DeSantis from a TV appearance on his Truth Social platform with the caption, “Tell me he’s not wearing hidden heels,” followed by a statement from a spokesman, Steven Cheung, suggesting Mr. DeSantis might consider something “sassier like platform shoes more appropriate for a contestant on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’ ”Mr. DeSantis, in response, did what any grown man running for president would apparently do: He went for Mr. Trump’s genitalia. “If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate” — he didn’t — “I’ll wear a boot on my head,” Mr. DeSantis challenged. His campaign quickly began selling golf balls with the slogan: “Ron DeSantis Has a Pair. He Shows Up.”If this all feels a little tired, as it may to at least a lot of women in this country, perhaps Ms. Haley offers Republicans another path.I hope she sticks with the heels, to be honest. They are imbued with meaning: a way to remind voters that, like Ginger Rogers, she’s essentially had to dance backward in them — calling attention to the double standard for women — and to give her a comeback against a gendered attack.A final observation. I spent some time examining Ms. Haley’s debate stilettos last week, and by my feminine assessment they look more like four inches than five. Which is utterly inconsequential, except that it tells us something about Ms. Haley: She’s willing to play the size game, too.Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion who writes on gender, politics and culture. She teaches journalism at New York University and is co-host of the podcast, In Retrospect.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More