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      I Was Attacked by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I Believe It Was a Strategy To Change What You See Online.

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      Timo LenzenWhen I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.These attacks on internet safety and security come at a moment when the stakes for democracy could not be higher. More than 40 major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including in the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana and Mexico. These democracies will most likely face the same risks of government-backed disinformation campaigns and online incitement of violence that have plagued social media for years. We should be worried about what happens next.My story starts with that fact check. In the spring of 2020, after years of internal debate, my team decided that Twitter should apply a label to a tweet of then-President Trump’s that asserted that voting by mail is fraud-prone, and that the coming election would be “rigged.” “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” the label read.On May 27, the morning after the label went up, the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway publicly identified me as the head of Twitter’s site integrity team. The next day, The New York Post put several of my tweets making fun of Mr. Trump and other Republicans on its cover. I had posted them years earlier, when I was a student and had a tiny social media following of mostly my friends and family. Now, they were front-page news. Later that day, Mr. Trump tweeted that I was a “hater.”Legions of Twitter users, most of whom days prior had no idea who I was or what my job entailed, began a campaign of online harassment that lasted months, calling for me to be fired, jailed or killed. The volume of Twitter notifications crashed my phone. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years expressed their concern. On Instagram, old vacation photos and pictures of my dog were flooded with threatening comments and insults. (A few commenters, wildly misreading the moment, used the opportunity to try to flirt with me.)I was embarrassed and scared. Up to that moment, no one outside of a few fairly niche circles had any idea who I was. Academics studying social media call this “context collapse”: things we post on social media with one audience in mind might end up circulating to a very different audience, with unexpected and destructive results. In practice, it feels like your entire world has collapsed.The timing of the campaign targeting me and my alleged bias suggested the attacks were part of a well-planned strategy. Academic studies have repeatedly pushed back on claims that Silicon Valley platforms are biased against conservatives. But the success of a strategy aimed at forcing social media companies to reconsider their choices may not require demonstrating actual wrongdoing. As the former Republican Party chair Rich Bond once described, maybe you just need to “work the refs”: repeatedly pressure companies into thinking twice before taking actions that could provoke a negative reaction. What happened to me was part of a calculated effort to make Twitter reluctant to moderate Mr. Trump in the future and to dissuade other companies from taking similar steps.It worked. As violence unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Jack Dorsey, then the C.E.O. of Twitter, overruled Trust and Safety’s recommendation that Mr. Trump’s account should be banned because of several tweets, including one that attacked Vice President Mike Pence. He was given a 12-hour timeout instead (before being banned on Jan. 8). Within the boundaries of the rules, staff members were encouraged to find solutions to help the company avoid the type of blowback that results in angry press cycles, hearings and employee harassment. The practical result was that Twitter gave offenders greater latitude: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was permitted to violate Twitter’s rules at least five times before one of her accounts was banned in 2022. Other prominent right-leaning figures, such as the culture war account Libs of TikTok, enjoyed similar deference.Similar tactics are being deployed around the world to influence platforms’ trust and safety efforts. In India, the police visited two of our offices in 2021 when we fact-checked posts from a politician from the ruling party, and the police showed up at an employee’s home after the government asked us to block accounts involved in a series of protests. The harassment again paid off: Twitter executives decided any potentially sensitive actions in India would require top-level approval, a unique level of escalation of otherwise routine decisions.And when we wanted to disclose a propaganda campaign operated by a branch of the Indian military, our legal team warned us that our India-based employees could be charged with sedition — and face the death penalty if convicted. So Twitter only disclosed the campaign over a year later, without fingering the Indian government as the perpetrator.In 2021, ahead of Russian legislative elections, officials of a state security service went to the home of a top Google executive in Moscow to demand the removal of an app that was used to protest Vladimir Putin. Officers threatened her with imprisonment if the company failed to comply within 24 hours. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their respective stores, restoring it after elections had concluded.In each of these cases, the targeted staffers lacked the ability to do what was being asked of them by the government officials in charge, as the underlying decisions were made thousands of miles away in California. But because local employees had the misfortune of residing within the jurisdiction of the authorities, they were nevertheless the targets of coercive campaigns, pitting companies’ sense of duty to their employees against whatever values, principles or policies might cause them to resist local demands. Inspired, India and a number of other countries started passing “hostage-taking” laws to ensure social-media companies employ locally based staff.In the United States, we’ve seen these forms of coercion carried out not by judges and police officers, but by grass-roots organizations, mobs on social media, cable news talking heads and — in Twitter’s case — by the company’s new owner.One of the most recent forces in this campaign is the “Twitter Files,” a large assortment of company documents — many of them sent or received by me during my nearly eight years at Twitter — turned over at Mr. Musk’s direction to a handful of selected writers. The files were hyped by Mr. Musk as a groundbreaking form of transparency, purportedly exposing for the first time the way Twitter’s coastal liberal bias stifles conservative content.What they delivered was something else entirely. As tech journalist Mike Masnick put it, after all the fanfare surrounding the initial release of the Twitter Files, in the end “there was absolutely nothing of interest” in the documents, and what little there was had significant factual errors. Even Mr. Musk eventually lost patience with the effort. But, in the process, the effort marked a disturbing new escalation in the harassment of employees of tech firms.Unlike the documents that would normally emanate from large companies, the earliest releases of the Twitter Files failed to redact the names of even rank-and-file employees. One Twitter employee based in the Philippines was doxxed and severely harassed. Others have become the subjects of conspiracies. Decisions made by teams of dozens in accordance with Twitter’s written policies were presented as having been made by the capricious whims of individuals, each pictured and called out by name. I was, by far, the most frequent target.The first installment of the Twitter Files came a month after I left the company, and just days after I published a guest essay in The Times and spoke about my experience working for Mr. Musk. I couldn’t help but feel that the company’s actions were, on some level, retaliatory. The next week, Mr. Musk went further by taking a paragraph of my Ph.D. dissertation out of context to baselessly claim that I condoned pedophilia — a conspiracy trope commonly used by far-right extremists and QAnon adherents to smear L.G.B.T.Q. people.The response was even more extreme than I experienced after Mr. Trump’s tweet about me. “You need to swing from an old oak tree for the treason you have committed. Live in fear every day,” said one of thousands of threatening tweets and emails. That post, and hundreds of others like it, were violations of the very policies I’d worked to develop and enforce. Under new management, Twitter turned a blind eye, and the posts remain on the site today.On Dec. 6, four days after the first Twitter Files release, I was asked to appear at a congressional hearing focused on the files and Twitter’s alleged censorship. In that hearing, members of Congress held up oversize posters of my years-old tweets and asked me under oath whether I still held those opinions. (To the extent the carelessly tweeted jokes could be taken as my actual opinions, I don’t.) Ms. Greene said on Fox News that I had “some very disturbing views about minors and child porn” and that I “allowed child porn to proliferate on Twitter,” warping Mr. Musk’s lies even further (and also extending their reach). Inundated with threats, and with no real options to push back or protect ourselves, my husband and I had to sell our home and move.Academia has become the latest target of these campaigns to undermine online safety efforts. Researchers working to understand and address the spread of online misinformation have increasingly become subjects of partisan attacks; the universities they’re affiliated with have become embroiled in lawsuits, burdensome public record requests and congressional proceedings. Facing seven-figure legal bills, even some of the largest and best-funded university labs have said they may have to abandon ship. Others targeted have elected to change their research focus based on the volume of harassment.Bit by bit, hearing by hearing, these campaigns are systematically eroding hard-won improvements in the safety and integrity of online platforms — with the individuals doing this work bearing the most direct costs.Tech platforms are retreating from their efforts to protect election security and slow the spread of online disinformation. Amid a broader climate of belt-tightening, companies have pulled back especially hard on their trust and safety efforts. As they face mounting pressure from a hostile Congress, these choices are as rational as they are dangerous.We can look abroad to see how this story might end. Where once companies would at least make an effort to resist outside pressure, they now largely capitulate by default. In early 2023, the Indian government asked Twitter to restrict posts critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In years past, the company had pushed back on such requests; this time, Twitter acquiesced. When a journalist noted that such cooperation only incentivizes further proliferation of draconian measures, Mr. Musk shrugged: “If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”It’s hard to fault Mr. Musk for his decision not to put Twitter’s employees in India in harm’s way. But we shouldn’t forget where these tactics came from or how they became so widespread. From pushing the Twitter Files to tweeting baseless conspiracies about former employees, Mr. Musk’s actions have normalized and popularized vigilante accountability, and made ordinary employees of his company into even greater targets. His recent targeting of the Anti-Defamation League has shown that he views personal retaliation as an appropriate consequence for any criticism of him or his business interests. And, as a practical matter, with hate speech on the rise and advertiser revenue in retreat, Mr. Musk’s efforts seem to have done little to improve Twitter’s bottom line.What can be done to turn back this tide?Making the coercive influences on platform decision making clearer is a critical first step. And regulation that requires companies to be transparent about the choices they make in these cases, and why they make them, could help.In its absence, companies must push back against attempts to control their work. Some of these decisions are fundamental matters of long-term business strategy, like where to open (or not open) corporate offices. But companies have a duty to their staff, too: Employees shouldn’t be left to figure out how to protect themselves after their lives have already been upended by these campaigns. Offering access to privacy-promoting services can help. Many institutions would do well to learn the lesson that few spheres of public life are immune to influence through intimidation.If social media companies cannot safely operate in a country without exposing their staff to personal risk and company decisions to undue influence, perhaps they should not operate there at all. Like others, I worry that such pullouts would worsen the options left to people who have the greatest need for free and open online expression. But remaining in a compromised way could forestall necessary reckoning with censorial government policies. Refusing to comply with morally unjustifiable demands, and facing blockages as a result, may in the long run provoke the necessary public outrage that can help drive reform.The broader challenge here — and perhaps, the inescapable one — is the essential humanness of online trust and safety efforts. It isn’t machine learning models and faceless algorithms behind key content moderation decisions: it’s people. And people can be pressured, intimidated, threatened and extorted. Standing up to injustice, authoritarianism and online harms requires employees who are willing to do that work.Few people could be expected to take a job doing so if the cost is their life or liberty. We all need to recognize this new reality, and to plan accordingly.Yoel Roth is a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the former head of trust and safety at Twitter.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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      California Lawmakers Push for a Court Ruling on Trump’s Eligibility

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      Nine California legislators asked the state’s attorney general to seek a court opinion on whether former President Donald J. Trump is disqualified from office under the 14th Amendment.Nine California lawmakers asked the state’s attorney general in a letter on Monday to seek a court opinion on whether former President Donald J. Trump should be excluded from Republican primary ballots under the 14th Amendment.The letter is part of an escalating effort across multiple states to establish whether Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election — including his actions before and during his supporters’ storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — disqualify him from the presidency under the amendment. It says that anyone who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution after taking an oath to defend it is ineligible to hold office.“The purpose of this letter is to request in haste the office of the attorney general seek the court opinion as to whether or not Donald J. Trump should be removed from the ballot of the presidential primary election scheduled in California on March 5, 2024,” the letter says. It describes Mr. Trump’s actions and tells Attorney General Rob Bonta, “You are uniquely positioned to proactively seek the court’s opinion to confirm Mr. Trump’s inability to hold office given these facts.”Eight members of the California Assembly — Mike Fong, Mike Gipson, Corey Jackson, Alex Lee, Evan Low, Kevin McCarty, Stephanie Nguyen and Philip Ting — and one member of the California Senate, Josh Becker, signed the letter. All nine are Democrats.Mr. Low, who wrote the letter, said that he saw calls for secretaries of state to unilaterally remove Mr. Trump from ballots as politically problematic and arguably antidemocratic, and that ordinary lawsuits would not resolve the question quickly enough. California law requires the secretary of state to announce by Dec. 8 which candidates are eligible for the ballot.“Having one official do it themselves in their own interpretation is politically not expedient, nor does it help on the division of our democracy,” he said, expressing concern about violence from the right if officials acted unilaterally. “This naturally will be seen as a political effort, but again that’s why the court’s opinion will be incredibly important.”Mr. Low said he and the other lawmakers were “trying to not make this a political issue but rather a constitutionality issue.”They believe, based on conversations with legal advisers, that Mr. Bonta has the ability to seek declaratory relief, essentially asking a court to tell him what his legal obligations are outside the context of a traditional lawsuit. The letter did not identify a specific court.A spokeswoman for Mr. Bonta said: “We are aware of the letter and will review the request internally. There is no denying that Donald Trump has engaged in behavior that is unacceptable and unbecoming of any leader — let alone a president of the United States. Beyond that, we have no additional comment.”Even if a court ruled that Mr. Trump were ineligible, it would not definitively resolve the question. Mr. Trump or his campaign would be certain to appeal, and the Supreme Court would most likely have the final say.The argument has been percolating since the Jan. 6 attack but gained traction this summer after two conservative law professors, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas, concluded that Mr. Trump was disqualified. Two other prominent scholars — the conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence H. Tribe — made the same case in The Atlantic.Earlier this month, six Colorado voters filed a lawsuit with the help of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking a state court to order the Colorado secretary of state not to print Mr. Trump’s name on primary ballots there. An obscure Republican presidential candidate, John Anthony Castro, is suing separately with the same aim in New Hampshire, and the liberal group Free Speech for People urged several secretaries of state last month to exclude Mr. Trump.The 14th Amendment was written in the context of Reconstruction, and the disqualification clause — Section 3 — was originally used to bar people who had fought for the Confederacy from holding office. The clause’s modern application has not been tested in a case anywhere near as prominent as Mr. Trump’s. The outcome will depend on how the courts answer several questions, including what counts as insurrection and even whether the amendment applies to the presidency.Several constitutional law experts have told The New York Times that they feel unprepared to weigh in or to guess how judges will rule, describing the questions as complex and novel.“I think anybody who says that there’s an easy answer is probably being a little reductive in their analysis,” Anthony Michael Kreis, an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, said in a recent interview.Shawn Hubler More

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      An About-Face on Whether the 14th Amendment Bars Trump From Office

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      Steven Calabresi, a founder of the Federalist Society, recently — and forcefully — said the former president was disqualified. He has had a change of heart.A little more than a month ago, a law professor who helped found the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, enthusiastically endorsed a new law review article arguing that Donald J. Trump was ineligible to be president.The article was “a tour de force,” the professor, Steven G. Calabresi, told me. It demonstrated, he said, that Mr. Trump was subject to a provision of the Constitution that bars some officials who have engaged in insurrection from holding government office.“Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot, and each of the 50 state secretaries of state has an obligation to print ballots without his name on them,” said Professor Calabresi, who teaches at Northwestern University.He appeared to be offering considered views, and he elaborated on them in a blog post titled “Trump Is Disqualified From Being on Any Election Ballots.”Last week, in an extraordinary about-face, the professor changed his mind.In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he said he had been persuaded by an opinion article in that newspaper that the provision — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — did not apply to Mr. Trump.In that article, Michael B. Mukasey, who served as attorney general under President George W. Bush, focused on a part of the provision that limits its scope to people who had taken an oath to support the Constitution “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state.”The only category that even arguably applies to Mr. Trump is “an officer of the United States,” Mr. Mukasey wrote. But that phrase, he asserted, “refers only to appointed officials, not to elected ones.”That proposition is not self-evident, and the 126-page law review article that had set off the discussion, by William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas, considered the meaning of “officer of the United States” at length.It concluded that “the ordinary sense of the text” of the Constitution, “the structure and logic of its provisions,” “the evident design to be comprehensive,” “the seeming absurdity of the prospect of exclusion of the offices of president and vice president from triggering the disqualification” and other factors “all convince us that the natural conclusion is the correct one: Section 3 includes in its coverage, or ‘triggering’ language, insurrectionists who once served as president and vice president.”They added a plea for a little common sense: “A reading that renders the document a ‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings discernible only by a select priesthood of illuminati is generally an unlikely one.”Steven Calabresi in 2005. Professor Calabresi has reversed his opinion on whether Mr. Trump is eligible for the 2024 election.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesIn his letter to The Journal, Professor Calabresi said he now agreed with Mr. Mukasey’s take on the relevant part of Section 3, which he called the “disqualification clause.”“Former President Donald Trump isn’t covered by the disqualification clause, and he is eligible to be on the ballot in the 2024 presidential election,” Professor Calabresi wrote. “I am correcting the public record on this important issue by sending you this letter.”Mr. Mukasey’s article was not met with universal approval.“Let me be clear,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, said last week on his podcast. “This is a genuinely stupid argument.”On Saturday, Professor Calabresi issued another blog post, this one called “Donald Trump Should Be on the Ballot and Should Lose.”“Trump is loathsome, but because of a technicality in the drafting of the disqualification clause of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the clause does not apply to Trump,” he wrote, adding: “So, Trump’s name should appear on election ballots in the 2024 presidential election, but I strongly urge my fellow Americans to vote against Trump, almost no matter what else is the alternative.”Professor Calabresi wrote that his thinking had been influenced by a new article posted on Tuesday by two other professors, Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law Houston and Seth Barrett Tillman of Maynooth University in Ireland, who have long pressed arguments that some provisions of the Constitution do not cover the president.Their article, also 126 pages long, collected and considered what it said was “substantial evidence that the president is not an ‘officer of the United States’ for purposes of Section 3.”It added: “Numerous sources that we cited discussed this issue; no one spoke in a ‘secret code,’ as Baude and Paulsen charge. If we are correct, Trump is not subject to Section 3 at all. If we are right, then states cannot unilaterally remove Trump from the ballot under the authority of Section 3.”Professor Calabresi is, of course, entitled to change his mind. As Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in a 1949 dissent, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”In an interview on Saturday, Professor Calabresi said his revised position was the product of study and reflection.“I carefully reread the materials on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump,” he said, “and concluded that it most likely does not.”He added that politics had not figured in his thinking. “I will support,” he said, “any Republican or Joe Biden over Trump in the 2024 election.” More

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      The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

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      This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.Along with that activism came the constriction of the party’s vision for the public good. Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. At moments like the “Reagan revolution,” Jack Kemp’s work to broaden conservatism’s appeal to more working-class voters or George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s ambition to build an enduring Republican majority around an “opportunity society,” the party’s collective effort could take on a confident and expansive cast.But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.For example, the vitriol and paranoia that attended the election of 1800, pitting the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, underscored the danger that a politics unfettered by strong parties poses to the Republic. The election featured not merely epic bouts of mudslinging but credible threats of collective violence and secession from both sides.The construction of mass political parties in subsequent generations — organizations with huge electoral bases and institutions like nominating conventions for party decision-making — channeled individual ambition into collective public purposes. At times, to be sure, as when Democratic pioneers of the mass party of the 19th century aimed for a cross-sectional politics that would sideline the divisive slavery question, the stability achieved through party politics actually suppressed conflict necessary to providing genuine political alternatives.But with mass parties came a shared understanding that the erosion of collective party principle could threaten a reversion to the 18th century’s politics-as-cabal. As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. And for all their defenses of Mr. Trump against his several indictments, his Republican presidential rivals have generally shied away from taking the critical step of saying they would have acted differently from Mike Pence when the Electoral College votes were counted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.Might that project emerge from Republican governors? Lacking the option of substituting antics for governance, they have forged viable approaches in power. Indeed, many of the country’s most popular governors are Republicans.But our polarized political system is also a nationalized one, where state-level success as a problem solver too often obstructs rather than clears a path to national influence within the Republican Party. And we have no illusions that behavior dangerous to democracy will lead to long-lasting punishment at the polls.To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor of political science at Colgate, and Daniel Schlozman, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, are the authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”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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      Trump Says He Hopes Meadows Will Remain ‘Loyal’ to Him in Election Case

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      The former president, who has been warned against saying anything that could influence witnesses in his election interference case, made the statements during an interview on “Meet the Press.”Former President Donald J. Trump said he hoped Mark Meadows — his final White House chief of staff and a co-defendant in a sweeping racketeering indictment in Georgia stemming from efforts to thwart the 2020 election — was still “loyal” to him.Mr. Trump made his comment during a lengthy interview with Kristen Welker, the new moderator of NBC’s “Meet The Press,” broadcast on Sunday morning. Mr. Trump has been warned by the federal judge in a case also stemming from his efforts to stay in office, brought against him by the special counsel Jack Smith, to avoid saying anything that might affect the testimony of witnesses. His comment about Mr. Meadows could attract new interest.A lawyer for Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Both Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump are among 19 co-defendants in the Fulton County, Ga., indictment brought by the district attorney, Fani T. Willis. It accuses those charged with a criminal conspiracy to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the state in his re-election effort.“By the way, do you think your former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is still loyal to you? He just pleaded not guilty in the Georgia case,” Ms. Welker asked.“Well, I hope he’s loyal to me,” Mr. Trump said.“Do you worry about him flipping?” Ms. Welker asked.“I mean, I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Trump replied.Legal experts have suggested that prosecutors may push to have some of the defendants in the case plead guilty and become witnesses against others involved.Mr. Trump recorded the interview with Ms. Welker late last week. On Friday, a day after the interview, prosecutors asked the judge in the federal election interference case, Tanya S. Chutkan, for a limited gag order against Mr. Trump after weeks of attacks on the special counsel, among others.“Like his previous public disinformation campaign regarding the 2020 presidential election,” they wrote, “the defendant’s recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals — the court, the jury pool, witnesses and prosecutors,” Mr. Smith’s office wrote in the request, which they said they wanted to be narrowly tailored.Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Smith again shortly after the request was made, writing on his social media site, “I’m campaigning for President against an incompetent person who has WEAPONIZED the DOJ & FBI to go after his Political Opponent, & I am not allowed to COMMENT? How else would I explain that Jack Smith is DERANGED, or Crooked Joe is INCOMPETENT?”Judge Chutkan has yet to rule on the request.In his “Meet the Press” interview, Mr. Trump extensively reiterated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, despite facing indictment in both Georgia and Washington on the matter.When Ms. Welker pointed out to him that the most senior lawyers in his administration had told him following dozens of legal challenges that he had lost, and that he listened to outside groups of lawyers, Mr. Trump said it was because “I didn’t respect them.”“But I did respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged,” Mr. Trump said.And when Ms. Welker noted that he himself had reportedly said some of his outside lawyers had “crazy theories” about election interference, he replied, “You know who I listen to? Myself. I saw what happened. I watched that election, and I thought the election was over at 10 o’clock in the evening.”As she asked fresh questions, he went on: “My instincts are a big part of it. That’s been the thing that’s gotten me to where I am, my instincts. But I also listen to people. There are many lawyers. I could give you many books.” But ultimately, he told her, “It was my decision. But I listened to some people.”Mr. Trump’s statements were in keeping with — and yet could ultimately complicate — his efforts to raise what is known as an advice of counsel defense in the election interference case. Under the strategy, defendants seek to avoid liability for criminal charges by arguing that they were merely following the professional advice of their lawyers.Alan Feuer contributed reporting. More

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      Trump Says Abortion Ban DeSantis Signed Was ‘a Terrible Mistake’

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      The former president, while denouncing his chief rival for the Republican nomination, also largely evaded questions on the issue.Former President Donald J. Trump, whose Supreme Court appointments led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, harshly criticized his top rival in the Republican presidential primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for a six-week abortion ban that he called a “terrible thing.”Mr. Trump issued his broadside — which could turn off socially conservative Republican primary voters, especially in Iowa, where evangelicals are a crucial voting bloc — during an interview with the new host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kristen Welker, that was broadcast on Sunday morning.Asked whether Mr. DeSantis went too far by signing a six-week abortion ban, Mr. Trump replied: “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”Since announcing his candidacy last November — just a week after Republicans underperformed expectations in midterm elections shaped by a backlash against the overturning of the abortion ruling — there has been no policy issue on which Mr. Trump has appeared more uncomfortable than on abortion.In interview after interview since the repeal of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Trump has ducked questions about whether he would support a federal ban on most abortions at 15 weeks — the baseline position of many Republicans, including the leading anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.With Ms. Welker on Sunday, Mr. Trump again refused to clarify his position.“What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months,” Mr. Trump said. “You’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy.”He made a far-fetched promise that as president he would “sit down with both sides” and negotiate a deal on abortion that would result in “peace on that issue for the first time in 52 years.”In reality, Mr. Trump — who years ago said he supported abortion rights before switching his position in 2011 as he considered a presidential campaign that year — appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, providing a majority to reverse the Roe ruling. Democrats have made clear they plan to make Mr. Trump’s role in Roe’s end a key focus in the 2024 general election if he is the nominee.What’s more, Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a measure similar to the one Mr. DeSantis made law. A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment.“This further confirms to Iowans this is not the same Trump we once knew,” said Steve Deace, a conservative Iowa talk show host who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. “This Trump only attacks Republicans from the left.”Mr. Trump’s advisers are mindful that abortion was a political loser for Republicans in the 2022 midterm cycle. Mr. Trump himself, when a draft of the court opinion undoing Roe leaked publicly, told advisers it would hurt his party’s electoral chances.So as he looks ahead to the general election, Mr. Trump — the front-runner for his party’s nomination by a wide margin in national polls — has tried to avoid taking a clear position in the hopes of not alienating additional voters.“I’m almost like a mediator in this case,” Mr. Trump told Ms. Welker. Pushed on whether he would support a federal ban, he said: “It could be state or it could be federal. I don’t frankly care.”Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of S.B.A. Pro-Life America, who had previously described Mr. Trump’s presidency as “the most consequential in American history for the pro-life cause,” indicated she was less than thrilled by Mr. Trump’s attack on Mr. DeSantis’s anti-abortion legislation. Yet she did not directly criticize him for it.“We’re at a moment where we need a human rights advocate, someone who is dedicated to saving lives of children and serving mothers in need,” Ms. Dannenfelser said on Sunday morning in response to Mr. Trump’s comments on “Meet the Press.” “Every single candidate should be clear on how they plan to do that.”She added, “It begins with focusing on extremes of the other side, and ambition and common sense on our own. Anything weaker than 15 weeks as a federal minimum standard makes no sense in this context.”A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, Andrew Romeo, responded to Mr. Trump’s attack by criticizing the former president for suggesting he could negotiate with Democrats on abortion, adding that the “disastrous results of Donald Trump compromising with Democrats” while he was president included “$7 trillion in new debt” and “an unfinished border wall.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, a strict social conservative who has run to the right of everyone in the Republican presidential field on the abortion issue, cast his former running mate’s comments in stark moral terms.“Donald Trump continues to walk away from the pro-life legacy of our administration,” Mr. Pence said in a statement Sunday morning. “There’s no negotiating when it comes to the life of the unborn. We will not rest, we will not relent, until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the nation.” More

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      Why Does the Republican Field All Sound the Same?

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      There’s a late-summer-fade quality to the Republican primary contest, as if the candidates are passively sliding into the inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch.Donald Trump and a variety of other people see the animating factor here as the indictments against him. “We need one more indictment to close out this election,” Mr. Trump joked last month. This is also the prism through which the other candidates get discussed: that they don’t criticize Mr. Trump much, especially over his indictments.But there’s a bigger and more claustrophobic reality to the fading quality of Ron DeSantis and all these other Republicans: It’s as if they constructed their identities as Trump alternatives and ended up all the same.Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote this summer that Mr. DeSantis can sound generic next to Vivek Ramaswamy: They talk the same way about China and TikTok, about how they will use military force against the cartels in Mexico (even though this really sounds as if we will be going to war with Mexico), about the F.B.I.Two weeks before Mr. Wallace-Wells was in Iowa watching Mr. Ramaswamy make Mr. DeSantis sound generic, I heard Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott use a similar metaphor about the border — houses, which are being broken into — in events 18 hours apart. If we don’t control the border, it might not be our country, Mr. Scott said. We will repel the intrusion with force, Mr. DeSantis said. We will finish the wall, they said.“That’s why you see these things like weaponization of agencies, because nobody’s held them accountable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired watching the weaponization of the D.O.J. against their political opponents, against pro-life activists,” Mr. Scott said. On Day 1, Mr. DeSantis said, we’ll have a new F.B.I. director. The first three things we have to do, Mr. Scott said, are fire Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray. “You’re going to have housecleaning at the Department of Justice,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We should actually eliminate every single political appointee in all the Department of Justice,” said Mr. Scott, who wants to “purge” the politicization of the department for the benefit of all Americans. They walked off the stage to the same song (Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel”).It can be hard to remember what made Mr. Trump distinct eight years ago, because it has become the texture of our lives. The 1980s tabloid dimension of his language — weeping mothers, blood and carnage, rot and disease in institutions, brutal action — crushed the antiseptic piety and euphemisms of the post-Bush Republican Party. The lurid, fallen vision of American life that implicitly casts critics as naïve chumps or in on the corruption is the one we still occupy.Now they all sound kind of like that. Politicians’ impulse to shorthand and flatten major policies and controversies is eternal, but it’s not just that they use similar words. The way these politicians talk takes the old, once-novel Trump themes, aggressive energy and promises and packages them into indoctrination and the administrative state.At the event in July where Mr. DeSantis sounded so like Mr. Scott did the evening before, he was midway through a period that the campaign had signaled would be a reset. At first, speaking to a midday crowd in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis ventured onto different ground, talking about economic concerns, the cost of things, debt. But he ended up talking about woke ideology, the administrative state, Disney and all the rest. If you spend a few days in New Hampshire, seeing Mr. Ramaswamy here and Mr. DeSantis there, or the full field at something like Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner, you can imagine nearly the entire Republican presidential field, hands joined, heads turning at once and saying with one voice, “End the weaponization of the Justice Department.”This dynamic might be on display in its purest form on the subject of voting and elections, in the way what Mr. Trump cares about flows through the base and becomes the starting premise of what the other candidates talk about. Mr. DeSantis runs a state with well-regarded early voting and ballot-counting practices — one where Mr. Trump won twice, along with a bunch of down-ballot Republicans. He transformed widespread voter fraud, an (illusory) concern of Mr. Trump’s, into a unit that would address (rare) instances of voter fraud and arrested a handful of people, some of whom have said they had no reason to believe they couldn’t vote, to prove the point that he takes Mr. Trump’s fake concerns seriously.Practically every candidacy right now is about Mr. Trump: The protest candidates exist to oppose Mr. Trump; the alternatives basically seem constructed in the negative (Trump but nice, Trump but we’ve got to win the suburbs again, Trump but competent) and grown inside the Trump concerns lab. Here and there, the candidates talk about health care, education costs, the economic changes with artificial intelligence or anything that might be kitchen table — things that exist beyond Mr. Trump’s reach — but it’s amazing how little some of this stuff is emphasized beyond inflation and energy costs.During the August debate, the Fox News moderators put something Nikki Haley said — that trans kids playing girls’ sports is “the women’s issue of our time” — to a few candidates. When they asked Ms. Haley, she barely registered her own line and led with, in what seems to be her real voice: “There’s a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we’ve got to get these kids reading. If a child can’t read by third grade, they’re four times less likely to graduate high school.” She can oscillate a bit, in and out of past and present iterations of the G.O.P., but as David Weigel wrote this spring, she accepts the premise of the Trump era: “I am very aware of a deep state,” she told a voter who asked about her plans to dismantle it this spring. “It’s not just in D.C.; it’s in every one of our states.”And none of them are winning! It might be the indictments that have firmed up Mr. Trump’s support, but the inescapable sameness of the candidates, especially when they should sound and seem different, is real.The idea some conservatives had for Mr. DeSantis — including Mr. DeSantis — was that he would be a singular figure, uniting the people attracted to the statist aggression of Mr. Trump and the people looking to move beyond Mr. Trump. Fundamentally, this depended on the idea that Mr. DeSantis is distinct from Mr. Trump, which seems like a misunderstanding. His appeal for certain kinds of conservatives, particularly donors, depended then on a subtle trust that he would not go too far and could shift into some other plane of political operation.But they were never distinct figures; Mr. DeSantis’s rise in the party as a competent aggressor exists because of the Trump era and the things that Mr. Trump is and isn’t. He makes happen what Mr. Trump talks about. And, like all the others who have defined themselves by being an alternative to an individual who is still always present, he has ended up talking about the same things and sounding the same as most of the others. Mr. Trump created the air that everyone now breathes.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Democratic Leaders Are More Optimistic About Biden 2024 Than Voters

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      Party leaders have rallied behind the president’s re-election bid, but as one top Democratic strategist put it, “The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll.”As President Biden shifts his re-election campaign into higher gear, the strength of his candidacy is being tested by a striking divide between Democratic leaders, who are overwhelmingly unified behind his bid, and rank-and-file voters in the party who harbor persistent doubts about whether he is their best option.From the highest levels of the party on down, Democratic politicians and party officials have long dismissed the idea that Mr. Biden should have any credible primary challenger. Yet despite their efforts — and the president’s lack of a serious opponent within his party — they have been unable to dispel Democratic concerns about him that center largely on his age and vitality.The discord between the party’s elite and its voters leaves Democrats confronting a level of disunity over a president running for re-election not seen for decades.Interviews with more than a dozen strategists, elected officials and voters this past week, conversations with Democrats since Mr. Biden’s campaign began in April, and months of public polling data show that this disconnect has emerged as a defining obstacle for his candidacy, worrying Democrats from liberal enclaves to swing states to the halls of power in Washington.Mr. Biden’s campaign and his allies argue that much of the intraparty dissent will fade away next year, once the election becomes a clear choice between the president and former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the Republican primary field.But their assurances have not tamped down worries about Mr. Biden from some top Democratic strategists and many of the party’s voters, who approve of his performance but worry that Mr. Biden, who will be 82 on Inauguration Day, may simply not be up for another four years — or even the exhausting slog of another election.“The voters don’t want this, and that’s in poll after poll after poll,” said James Carville, a longtime party strategist, who worries that a lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Biden could lead to lower Democratic turnout in 2024. “You can’t look at what you look at and not feel some apprehension here.”James Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, is among those who worry that the party’s voters are not enthusiastic enough about Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.Raul E. Diego/Anadolu Agency, via Getty ImagesIn recent days, a barrage of grim news for Mr. Biden, including an autoworkers strike in the Midwest that poses a challenge to his economic agenda and the beginning of impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, has made this intraparty tension increasingly difficult to ignore. Those developments come amid a darkening polling picture, as recent surveys found that majorities of Democrats do not want him to run again, are open to an alternative in the primary and dread the idea of a Biden-Trump rematch.A CNN poll released this month found that 67 percent of Democrats would prefer Mr. Biden not be renominated, a higher percentage than in polling conducted by The New York Times and Siena College over the summer that found half would prefer someone else.In quiet conversations and off-the-record gatherings, Democratic officials frequently acknowledge their worries about Mr. Biden’s age and sagging approval ratings. But publicly, they project total confidence about his ability to lead and win.“It’s definitely got a paradoxical element to it,” said Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who is among a group of governors who put aside their national ambitions to support Mr. Biden’s re-election bid. “This is only a matter of time until the broad party, and broadly speaking, Americans, converge with the opinions of folks like myself.”Many party officials say that Mr. Biden is making a high-stakes bet that the power of incumbency, a good political environment for his party and the fact that Democrats generally like the president will eventually outweigh the blaring signs of concern from loyal supporters. Any discussion of an alternative is little more than a fantasy, they say, since challenging Mr. Biden would not only appear disloyal but would also most likely fail — and potentially weaken the president’s general-election standing.One Democratic voter who backed Mr. Biden in 2020, James Collier, an accountant in Houston, sees the situation slightly differently. He said he would like Mr. Biden to clear the way for a new generation that could energize the party’s base.“I think he’s a little — not a little — he’s a lot old,” Mr. Collier, 57, said. “I’m hoping he would in his own mind think, ‘I need to sit this out and let someone else do this.’”There are no indications that anyone prominent will mount a late challenge to Mr. Biden, though strategists working for other elected officials say that a number of well-known politicians would probably jump into the race if, anytime before the end of the year, the president signaled he was not running.The situation is almost the opposite of the Republican field, where Mr. Trump holds a commanding lead among the party’s base but remains far less beloved by a political class that fears his unpopularity among moderate and swing voters will lead to defeat in 2024.William Owen, a Democratic National Committee member from Tennessee, was full of praise for Mr. Biden and said he was puzzled by surveys that consistently showed the president struggling to win over Democratic voters.“I’m looking at all the polling, and I’m amazed that it has so little to do with reality,” he said in an interview this past week. “A big part of it is just pure ageism. The American people are prejudiced against old people.”Yet in describing his interactions with Democrats around Knoxville, which he represented for years in the Tennessee legislature, Mr. Owen said he could not escape questions about Mr. Biden’s health.“People ask me: ‘How’s Joe doing? Will he last another four years?’” Mr. Owen said. “That’s the real question. Will Joe Biden last another four years? I’m happy to say, yes, he will. He’s going to live to be 103.”Officials in Mr. Biden’s campaign insist that hand-wringing about his age is driven by news coverage, not by voters’ concerns. They dismiss his low approval ratings and middling polling numbers as typical of an incumbent president more than a year away from Election Day.A campaign spokesman cited articles about Democrats’ fretting about President Barack Obama before his second term and noted the limitations of polls so far from an election, suggesting that Mr. Biden had ample time to make his case.“President Biden is delivering results, his agenda is popular with the American people and we are mobilizing our winning coalition of voters well ahead of next year’s general election,” said Kevin Munoz, the spokesman. “Next year’s election will be a stark choice between President Biden and the extreme, unpopular MAGA agenda.”Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania, who is Black and has issued public warnings about Mr. Biden’s standing with Black voters, said that simply casting the election as a referendum on Mr. Trump and his right-wing movement — as Mr. Biden’s campaign did in 2020 — would not be enough to energize the Democratic base. Mr. Davis has urged the White House to be more aggressive about highlighting the impact of Mr. Biden’s accomplishments, particularly with Black voters.“Everyone is kind of exhausted by the fight between Biden and Trump,” he said. “People really want to hear leaders talk about how they’re going to improve the lives of their families.”Lt. Gov. Austin Davis of Pennsylvania has cautioned Democrats against framing the 2024 election as a referendum on former President Donald J. Trump.Matt Rourke/Associated PressOther Democrats argue that Mr. Biden’s campaign must make clearer that the stakes are bigger than just the president.“It’s about showing people that the future of American democracy is at stake,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan of Virginia, who is a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “It’s not just about which president can get through the day without tripping or stumbling over their words, which everybody is going to do, but which president is going to lead this country forward in a way that helps people solve problems and keeps American democracy intact.”Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid, said Mr. Biden needed to show voters that he was fighting for the American public, pointing to battles like his administration’s legal fight with pharmaceutical companies over their new Medicare pricing plan.“The question that I would want to answer is, is he is a strong leader?” Mr. Shakir said. “When people see he is a strong leader, they will feel different about his age. They will feel different about the economy. They will feel different about a lot of things.”Malcolm Peterson, 34, a waiter in St. Paul, Minn., said he thought Mr. Biden had done a good job tackling issues related to climate change during his first term, but worried about the president’s outlook for a second term.Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesMalcolm Peterson, a waiter from St. Paul, Minn., whose foremost political concern is climate change, said he generally approved of Mr. Biden’s work as president and thought he had done a good job tackling environmental issues. But he said he worried about whether the president would be able to continue that work in a second term.“I just wonder, because he’s quite old, what does he look like in another four years?” Mr. Peterson, 34, said. “I’m not a doctor. I just know what I’ve seen.” More