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      Can Liberalism Save Itself?

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      Liberalism is under siege. It is not just a problem for America’s Democratic Party, which once again may face either losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory with a bare majority. Around the world, the entire outlook of political liberalism — with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law — is widely seen to be in trouble.It wasn’t long ago that liberals were proclaiming the “end of history” after their Cold War victory. But for years liberalism has felt perpetually on the brink: challenged by the rise of an authoritarian China, the success of far-right populists and a sense of blockage and stagnation.Why do liberals find themselves in this position so routinely? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind. It was in that era when liberals reinvented their ideology, which traces its roots to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — and reinvented it for the worse. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied by the continuity of liberal government and the management of threats that might disrupt it, the same preoccupations liberals have today. To save themselves, they need to undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their creed.Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His administration capped more than a century in which liberalism had been promising to unshackle humanity after millenniums of hierarchy — dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and breaking down barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all of these achievements were haunted by racial disparities. At its most visionary, liberalism implied that government’s duty was to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.Yet just a few years later, Cold War liberalism emerged as a rejection of the optimism that flourished before the mid-20th century’s crises. Having witnessed the agonizing destruction of Germany’s brief interwar experiment with democracy, liberals saw their Communist ally in that battle against fascism converted into a fearful enemy. They responded by reconceptualizing liberalism. Philosophers like the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin emphasized the concept of individual liberty, which was defined as the absence of interference, especially from the state. Gone was the belief that freedom is guaranteed by institutions that empower humanity. Instead of committing to make freedom more credible to more people — for example, by promising a bright future of their own — these liberals prioritized a fight against mortal enemies who might crash the system.This was a liberalism of fear, as another Cold War liberal intellectual, the Harvard professor Judith Shklar, said. In a way, fear was understandable: Liberalism had enemies. In the late 1940s, the Communists took over China, while Eastern Europe fell behind an Iron Curtain. But reorienting liberalism toward the preservation of liberty incurred its own risks. Anyone hostage to fear is likely to exaggerate how dangerous his foes actually are, to overreact to the looming threat they pose and to forsake better choices than fighting. (Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who signed up to beat the Nazis only to see paranoia spoil the country he volunteered to save.)During the Cold War, concern for liberty from tyranny and self-defense against enemies sometimes led not just to the loss of the very freedom liberals were supposed to care about at home, it also prompted violent reigns of terror abroad as liberals backed authoritarians or went to war in the name of fighting Communism. Millions died in the killing fields of this brutal global conflict, many of them at the hands of America and its proxies fighting in the name of “freedom.”Frustratingly, the Soviet Union was making the kinds of promises about freedom and progress that liberals once thought belonged to them. After all, in the 19th century liberals had overthrown aristocrats and kings and promised a world of freedom and equality in their stead. Liberals like the French politician and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, though concerned about possible excesses of government, imagined democracy as a form of politics that offered startling new opportunities for equal citizenship. And while such liberals placed too much faith in markets both to emancipate and to equalize, they eventually struggled to correct this mistake. Liberals like the English philosopher John Stuart Mill helped invent socialism, too.The Cold War changed all that. It wasn’t just that socialism became a liberal swear word for decades (at least before Senator Bernie Sanders helped revive it). Liberals concluded that the ideological passions that led millions around the world to Communism meant that they should refrain from promising emancipation themselves. “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” the Columbia professor and Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling explained.The Cold War transformation of liberalism wouldn’t matter so profoundly now if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their creed in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to disregard their own mistakes, in spite of the long-run consequences in our time. Instead, liberals doubled down. After several decades of endless wars against successor enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals have been shocked by blowback. History didn’t end; in fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in backsliding new democracies and in the United States now find it wanting.A great referendum on liberalism kicked off in 2016, after Mr. Trump’s blindsiding election victory. In books like Patrick Deneen’s best-selling “Why Liberalism Failed,” there was an up-or-down vote on the liberalism of the entire modern age, which Mr. Deneen traced back centuries. In frantic self-defense, liberals responded by invoking abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy” and “truth,” to which the sole alternative is tyranny, while distracting from their own errors and what it would take to correct them. Both sides failed to recognize that, like all traditions, liberalism is not take it or leave it. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; liberals can revive their philosophy’s promises only by recommitting to its earlier impulses.Is that likely? Under President Biden’s watch, China and Eastern Europe — the same places where events shocked Cold War liberals into their stance in the first place — have attracted a Cold War posture. Under Mr. Biden, as under Mr. Trump before him, the rhetoric out of Washington increasingly treats China as a civilizational threat. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has once again made Eastern Europe a site of struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Some like to claim that the war in Ukraine has reminded liberals of their true purpose.But look closer to home and that seems more dubious. Mr. Trump is the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee (if not the potential winner of the election). Yet liberals seem to be betting their success less on a positive vision for America’s future and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation. Even if one of Mr. Trump’s many prosecutors manages to convict him, this will not rescue American liberalism. The challenge cuts deeper than eliminating the current enemy in the name of our democracy if it is not reimagined.Since his election in 2020, Mr. Biden has been championed by some pundits — and by his administration itself — as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt warned that “too many of those who prate about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things as they were. Democracy should concern itself also with things as they ought to be.”Mr. Biden, despite an ambitious agenda of so-called supply-side liberalism, doesn’t seem to have internalized the message. And for their part, voters do not yet seem fully convinced. A liberalism that survives must resonate with voters who want something to believe in. And liberalism once had it, revolving not around fear of enemies but hope in institutions that lead to what Mill called “experiments in living.” He meant that people everywhere would get the chance from society to choose something new to try in their short time. If their hands are forced — especially by a coercive and unequal economic system — they will lose what is most important, which is the chance to make themselves and the world more interesting.If there is any silver lining in the next phase of American politics, which Mr. Trump continues to define, it is that it provides yet another opportunity for liberals to reinvent themselves. If they double down instead on a stale Cold War ideology, as they did after 1989 and 2016, they will miss it. Only a liberalism that finally makes good on some of its promises of freedom and equality is likely to survive and thrive.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.Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale and the author of the forthcoming book “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.” More

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      Catch the Smug Mug on That Thug!

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      WASHINGTON — If there were any justice in the world, Donald Trump would have taken the Mug Shot of Dorian Gray.As with Oscar Wilde’s charismatic and amoral narcissist, the Picture of Donald Trump should have been a “foul parody,” a reflection of what the chancer has done with his life. It should have shown Trump’s corroding soul rather than his truculent face.It should have revealed a man so cynical and depraved that he is willing to smash our nation’s soul — our democracy — and destroy faith in our institutions. All this simply to avoid being called a loser.“Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away,” Wilde wrote of Dorian’s portrait. “The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.”Now that would have been some primo merch: Trump slapping a rotting mug shot on a mug and selling it on his campaign website for the low, low price of $25.Trump has long felt that squinting or scowling is a good look for him. Timothy O’Brien, a Trump biographer, recalled that Trump once told him that Clint Eastwood was the greatest movie star ever, and O’Brien believed that Donald and Melania modeled their squints on Eastwood’s. Maggie Haberman noted in The Times that when Trump posed for his official White House portrait, he scowled into the camera and told aides he thought he looked “like Churchill.”Thursday night was performative for Trump: sweeping in with his private jet and giant motorcade that screamed two-tiered justice system, with law enforcement clearing the Atlanta streets, like centurions clearing the way for Caesar.Trump told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly after the arraignment that he had “never heard the word ‘mug shot’” until his was taken — which just shows again that Trump is a pathological liar. Everyone in America has heard the term “mug shot.”Trump said that being booked at the horror chamber known as the Fulton County Jail — its location on Rice Street is cited in songs by rappers who have logged time there — was “a terrible experience.”“I went through an experience that I never thought I’d have to go through, but then, I’ve gone through the same experience three other times,” the 77-year-old said, adding about his mug shot, “They didn’t teach me that at the Wharton School of Finance.”They didn’t teach him not to be a big liar and cheat, either. Wharton is a place where they should teach you about mug shots. All American business schools should have a class on mug shots.Trump did another woe-is-me interview with Fox News Digital, admitting that getting processed by Georgia officials, who “insisted” he have the mug shot taken, was “not a comfortable feeling — especially when you’ve done nothing wrong.”He no doubt workshopped his stroppy mug-shot look in front of the mirror, trying to convey “Never surrender!” as he was literally surrendering. And in another master stroke of projection, he accused the prosecutors pursuing him for election interference of “election interference.”But Trump is feral and cunning, and deep in his amygdala, he must have shivered, thinking to himself, “Damn, I could go to prison. My liberty is actually at risk.” Even though he has spent his whole life getting away with things, sliding out of things, stiffing people, conning people, he had to have a moment at the jail when he realized he is in the prosecutors’ sights. He even went out and hired a real criminal lawyer.Perplexing as it is, Trump devotees continue to adore him. President Biden sarcastically called Trump a “handsome guy,” but many on the right thrilled to his jailhouse portrait. “I say this with an unblemished record of heterosexuality,” Jesse Watters swooned on “The Five” on Fox News. “He looks good, and he looks hard.”At the Republican debate, no one was big enough to shove him aside. Nikki Haley seemed the most appealing. Ron DeSantis’s inability to smile is disqualifying. It was pathetic that the best the Florida governor could muster, asked if Mike Pence acted properly when he certified the election, was to say, “I got no beef with him.”Vivek Ramaswamy seemed smarmy. Scott Jennings, a Republican commentator on CNN, said that Ramaswamy was Scrappy-Doo to Trump’s Scooby-Doo. That comparison is not fair to Scooby or Scrappy, who are positive forces in the world, helping to unmask crooks, unlike Trump and his mini-me.On Friday afternoon, Trump put out a fund-raising pitch based on his 20 minutes in hell.“It’s violent,” Trump said of the jail where, as he let his fans know in his fund-raising email, he was given booking number 2313827. “The building is falling apart. Inmates have dug their fingers into the crumbling walls and ripped out chunks to fashion over 1,000 shanks. Just this year alone, 7 inmates have died in that jail.”Yep, he’s getting scared.As Audrey Hepburn said in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” after she tangled with the law, “There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl’s complexion.”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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      Fact-Checking Ramaswamy’s Claims on Campaign Trail, Including on Climate and Jan. 6

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      The upstart Republican candidate has made inaccurate claims about climate change as well as the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, while mischaracterizing his own positions and past comments.Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and author, commanded considerable attention during the first Republican primary debate as his standing was rising in national polls.Railing against “wokeism” and the “climate cult,” Mr. Ramaswamy has staked out unorthodox positions on a number of issues and characterized himself as the candidate most likely to appeal to young and new conservative voters.Here’s a fact check of his recent remarks on the campaign trail and during the debate.Climate change denialWhat Mr. Ramaswamy Said“There was this Obama appointee, climate change activist, who also believes as part of this Gaia-centric worldview of the earth that water rights need to be protected, which led to a five- to six-hour delay in the critical window of getting waters to put out those fires. We will never know, although certain science points out to the fact that we very well could have avoided those catastrophic deaths, many of them, if water had made it to the site of the fires on time.”— at a conservative conference in Atlanta in AugustThis lacks evidence. Mr. Ramaswamy was referring to M. Kaleo Manuel, the deputy director for Hawaii’s Commission on Water Resource Management, and overstating his ties to President Barack Obama as well as the potential effect of the requested water diversion.First, Mr. Manuel is not an “Obama appointee” but rather participated in a leadership development program run by the Obama Foundation in 2019. Mr. Ramaswamy and other conservative personalities have derided comments Mr. Manuel made last year when he said that native Hawaiians like himself used to consider water something to “revere” and something that “gives us life.”On Aug. 8, the day wildfire engulfed a historic town in Hawaii, Mr. Manuel was contacted by the West Maui Land Company, a real estate developer that supplies water to areas southeast of the town of Lahaina on Maui island, The New York Times has reported. Noting high winds and drought, the company requested permission to fill a private reservoir for fire control, though the reservoir was not connected to fire hydrants. No fire was blazing in the area at the time.The water agency asked the company whether the fire department had made the request, received no answer and said that it needed the approval of a farmer who relied on the water for his crops. The company said that it could not reach the farmer, but that the agency approved the request hours later.Asked for evidence of Mr. Ramaswamy’s claim that filling the reservoir when initially requested would have prevented deaths from the fire, a spokeswoman said it was “common sense — if you can put out a fire faster using water, you can save lives.”But state officials have said it is unlikely that the delay would have changed the course of the fire that swallowed Lahaina, as high winds would have prevented firefighters from gaining access to the reservoir. In an Aug. 10 letter to the water agency, an executive at the West Maui Land Company acknowledged that there was no way to know whether “filling our reservoirs” when initially requested would have changed the outcome, but asked the agency to temporarily suspend existing water regulations. The executive, in another letter, also wrote that “we would never imply responsibility” on Mr. Manuel’s part.What Mr. Ramaswamy Said“The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”— in the first Republican debate on WednesdayFalse. There is no evidence to support this assertion. A spokeswoman for Mr. Ramaswamy cited a 2022 column in the libertarian publication “Reason” that argued that limiting the use of fossil fuels would hamper the ability to deliver power, heat homes and pump water during extreme weather events. But the campaign did not provide examples of climate change policies actually causing deaths. The World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, estimated in May that extreme weather events, compounded by climate change, caused nearly 12,000 disasters and a death toll of 2 million between 1970 and 2021. Extreme heat causes about 600 deaths in the United States a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2021 study found that a third of heat-related deaths could be attributed to climate change. In campaign appearances and social media posts, Mr. Ramaswamy has also pointed to a decline in the number of disaster-related deaths in the past century, even as emissions have risenThat, experts have said, is largely because of technological advances in weather forecasting and communication, mitigation tools and building codes. The May study by the World Meteorological Organization, for example, noted that 90 percent of extreme weather deaths occur in developing countries — precisely because of the gap in technological advances. Disasters are occurring at increasing frequencies, the organization has said, even as fatalities decrease.Mr. Ramaswamy, a millennial, has described himself as the candidate most likely to appeal to young and new conservative voters.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesJan. 6 and the 2020 electionWhat Mr. Ramaswamy Said“What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right? There’s very little evidence of people being arrested for being armed that day. Most of the people who were armed, I assume the federal officers who were out there were armed.”— in an interview with The Atlantic in JulyFalse. Mr. Ramaswamy has echoed the right-wing talking point that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol did not involve weapons and was largely peaceful. His spokeswoman argued that he was merely asking questions.But as early this month, 104 out of about 1,100 total defendants have been charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon, according to the Justice Department. At least 13 face gun charges.It is impossible to know just how many people in the crowd of 28,000 were armed, as some may have concealed their weapons or chosen to remain outside of magnetometers set up at the Ellipse, a sprawling park near the White House, where Mr. Trump held his rally. Still, through those magnetometers, Secret Service confiscated 242 canisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 stun guns, 30 batons or blunt instruments, and 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles or screwdrivers, according to the final report from the Jan. 6 committee.What was SaidChris Christie, former governor of New Jersey: “In your book, you had much different things to say about Donald Trump than you’re saying here tonight.”Mr. Ramaswamy: “That’s not true.”— in the Republican debateMr. Ramaswamy was wrong. During the debate, Mr. Ramaswamy vigorously defended Mr. Trump, calling him “ the best president of the 21st century.” Mr. Christie was correct that Mr. Ramaswamy was much more critical of Mr. Trump in his books.In his 2022 book, “Nation of Victims,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote that despite voting for Mr. Trump in 2020, “what he delivered in the end was another tale of grievance, a persecution complex that swallowed much of the Republican Party whole.”Mr. Ramaswamy added that he was “especially disappointed when I saw President Trump take a page from the Stacey Abrams playbook,” referring to the Democratic candidate for Georgia governor who, after her 2018 defeat, sued the state over accusations of voter suppression. Moreover, he wrote, Mr. Trump’s claims of electoral fraud were “weak” and “weren’t grounded in fact.”In his 2021 book, “Woke Inc.,” Mr. Ramaswamy described the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as a “a disgrace, and it was a stain on our history” that made him “ashamed of our nation.”And after the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Ramaswamy wrote on Twitter, “What Trump did last week was wrong. Downright abhorrent. Plain and simple.”Foreign policyWhat Mr. RAMASWAMY said“Much of our military defense spending in the last several decades has not actually gone to national defense.”— in an interview on the Fox Business Network in AugustFalse. A spokeswoman for Mr. Ramaswamy said he was comparing military aid to foreign countries and “homeland defense.” But the amount the United States has spent on security assistance pales in comparison to general military spending and homeland security spending.According to the federal government’s foreign assistance portal, military aid to other countries ranged from $6 billion to $23 billion annually from the fiscal years 2000 to 2022, peaking in the fiscal years 2011 and 2012 when aid to Afghanistan alone topped $10 billion a year.In the past two decades, the Pentagon’s annual budget ranged from over $400 billion to over $800 billion. Operation and maintenance is the largest category of spending (36 percent) and includes money spent on fuel, supplies, facilities, recruiting and training, followed by compensation for military personnel (23 percent), procurement of new equipment and weapons (19 percent), and research and development (16 percent).The Department of Homeland Security itself has an annual budget that has increased from $40 billion in the 2004 fiscal year, when the agency was created, to over $100 billion in the 2023 fiscal year.Mr. Ramaswamy’s claim reflects a common misconception among American voters, who tend to overestimate the amount spent on foreign aid. Foreign aid of all categories — including military aid as well as assistance for health initiatives, economic development or democratic governance — makes up less than 1 percent of the total federal budget. In comparison, about one-sixth of federal spending goes to national defense, according to the Congressional Budget Office.Outside of official government figures, researchers at Brown University have estimated that since Sept. 11, military spending in the United States has exceeded $8 trillion. By that breakdown, the United States has spent $2.3 trillion in funding for overseas fighting versus $1.1 trillion in homeland security defenses. But that figure also includes spending that cannot be neatly categorized as overseas versus domestic defense spending: $1.3 trillion in general military spending increases and medical care, $1.1 trillion in interest payments and $2.2 trillion for future veterans care.What Was SaidNikki Haley, former United Nations ambassador: “You want to go and defund Israel, you want to give Taiwan to China. You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia.”Mr. Ramaswamy: “Let me address that. I’m glad you brought that up. I’m going to address each of those right now. This is the false lies of a professional politician.”— in the Republican debateBoth exaggerated. Ms. Haley omitted nuance in describing Mr. Ramaswamy’s foreign policy positions, but her characterizations are far from “lies.”In interviews and campaign appearances, Mr. Ramaswamy has said that he views the deal to provide Israel with $38 billion over 10 years for its security as “sacrosanct.” But he has said that by 2028, when the deal expires, he hopes that Israel “will not require and be dependent on that same level of historical aid or commitment from the U.S.”In a nearly hourlong speech at the Nixon Library this month, Mr. Ramaswamy said his administration would “defend Taiwan if China invades Taiwan before we have semiconductor independence in this country,” which he estimated he could achieve by 2028. But, he continued, “thereafter, we will be very clear that after the U.S. achieves semiconductor independence, our commitments to send our sons and daughters to put them in harm’s way will change.”On Russia’s war in Ukraine, Mr. Ramaswamy has said he would “freeze the current lines of control” — which includes several southeastern regions of Ukraine — and pledge to prohibit Ukraine from being admitted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if Russia ended its “alliance” with China. (The two countries do not have a formal alliance.)Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.We welcome suggestions and tips from readers on what to fact-check on email and Twitter. More

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      Trump’s Mug Shot: ‘Not Comfortable’ but Potentially Lucrative

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      The former president’s campaign immediately began fund-raising off his booking photo and started selling merchandise featuring it.Former President Donald J. Trump has done his best to appear unfazed and unbowed by having been indicted four times since March, but even he acknowledged that he did not enjoy one particular element of his booking in Georgia on Thursday night on racketeering charges: the mug shot.“It is not a comfortable feeling — especially when you’ve done nothing wrong,” he told Fox News’s website in an interview afterward.Nonetheless, he made the most of it.Not long after the release of the mug shot — the first taken of Mr. Trump in any of the criminal proceedings he faces and the first known to have been taken of any former president — it appeared prominently on Mr. Trump’s campaign website, under a “personal note from President Donald J. Trump.”At the bottom were several tabs users could click to donate to his campaign in small-dollar increments.Mr. Trump quickly posted the picture on X, marking his return to the platform formerly known as Twitter for the first time since he was banned by the company’s former ownership following the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021.The joint fund-raising website his campaign helps maintain immediately started offering mugs, beverage coolers and T-shirts in different colors and sizes with the mug shot and the words, “Never Surrender!” (Those words despite the fact that the photo was taken upon his surrender to authorities in Georgia.)Mr. Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., posted on X a link to his own website featuring merchandise with the photo. The younger Mr. Trump said he would donate proceeds from the sales to a legal-defense fund that his father’s advisers had set up to assist with bills accrued by people who are witnesses in the cases.By late afternoon Friday, the Trump campaign had sent an email blast with the photo and Mr. Trump’s booking number.The mug shot represented perhaps the former president’s best chance to juice his fund-raising numbers in several weeks, after raising several million dollars following his March indictment in New York on charges related to hush-money payments to a porn actress but seeing that figure drop after the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, filed charges against him in June for mishandling national security documents.Even before the mug shot was snapped at the jail in Atlanta, an email from his joint fund-raising committee primed his supporters by saying, “It’s been reported that if I am unjustly indicted and arrested in the Atlanta Witch Hunt, a mug shot will be taken of me.”Campaign officials did not make overnight fund-raising figures public on Friday morning.In a sign of how politically valuable the Trump campaign anticipated the mug shot could be to its fund-raising, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, Chris LaCivita, issued a warning on social media — with 11 siren emojis — to political entities that might seek to profit from the photo by using it to suggest a connection to the Trump campaign.“If you are a campaign, PAC, scammer and you try raising money off the mugshot of @realDonaldTrump and you have not received prior permission …WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU you will NOT SCAM DONORS,” he wrote on X. The photo was released by the Fulton County sheriff’s department and is a public document.Mr. Trump has never shied away from opportunities to wring financial benefit from what is happening in his life and career. But in this case the personal and the political were mixed in ways that he acknowledged were out of the ordinary even by his standards.“They insisted on a mug shot and I agreed to do that,” Mr. Trump told Fox News’s website after he was booked on a lengthy list of charges stemming from his efforts to remain in power after his election loss. “This is the only time I’ve ever taken a mug shot.”(President Biden, vacationing in Lake Tahoe, was asked by a reporter if he had seen the mugshot. “I did see it on television. Handsome guy,” he said.)In the New York case, the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, opted against a mug shot, which is used to identify criminal defendants in case they flee while awaiting trial. Federal officials came to the same conclusion that there was no need to take another picture of Mr. Trump, arguably one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.But in Fulton County, Ga., on Thursday, officials adhered strictly to protocol, even as Mr. Trump appeared at the jail with news helicopters tracking his motorcade.That decision left some of Mr. Trump’s rivals unsettled.“I think it’s disgraceful,” said Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, on Fox News on Friday. “I mean, the idea that we’re seeing a mug shot of a 77-year-old former president. I mean, how did we get to this point? And I don’t know that anyone in America should look at that and feel good about it.” More

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      Former Justice Department Official Is Booked in Trump Georgia Case

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      As of late Friday morning, only one of the 19 defendants in the state election interference case involving former President Donald J. Trump had yet to turn himself in.Jeffrey A. Clark, the former high-ranking Justice Department official criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state, was booked at the Fulton County Jail early on Friday, a few hours after the former president’s dramatic booking at the same Atlanta facility.After Mr. Clark’s surrender and that of another defendant, Trevian C. Kutti, only one of the 19 defendants in the state election interference case — Stephen C. Lee, an Illinois pastor — had yet to turn himself in as of late Friday morning. The office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis gave the defendants a deadline of noon Friday to turn themselves in. After that point, arrest warrants for outstanding defendants would be put into effect.Mr. Clark, a former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, was released on a $100,000 bond. In addition to the state racketeering charge, he faces a felony charge of criminal attempt to commit false statements and writings, based on a letter he wanted to send in December 2020 to state officials in Georgia that falsely claimed that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” that would affect the state’s election results.Several of the defendants, including Mr. Clark, are seeking to have their cases shifted to federal court, a relatively uncommon step that is known as removal. Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Steve Jones rejected efforts by Mr. Clark and another defendant, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, to prevent them from being booked at the county jail while they were seeking removal of their cases to federal court.Ms. Kutti, a music publicist who prosecutors say harassed an election worker on Mr. Trump’s behalf, surrendered to the jail on Friday morning and was booked into the jail’s system, online records showed. She was released on $75,000 bond. Ms. Kutti has represented musicians like R. Kelly and the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye, in the past. More

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      Se difunde la primera foto policial de Donald Trump

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      El expresidente ingresó por la entrada trasera de la cárcel del condado de Fulton, en Georgia, para ser imputado de asociación delictiva. Se retiró 20 minutos después, luego de que se le tomaron las huellas y se le retrató.Es la cuarta ocasión en la que se presentan cargos penales contra el expresidente Donald Trump este año, pero el jueves fue la primera vez que fue registrado en una cárcel y que le tomaron una foto policial.Trump pasó unos 20 minutos en la cárcel del condado de Fulton, durante los que se sometió a algunas de las rutinas de admisión de los acusados penales. Le tomaron las huellas dactilares y le tomaron una fotografía.Se le asignó un número de identificación —P01135809— en el sistema de justicia penal del condado de Fulton.Pero el proceso fue mucho más rápido que para la mayoría de las personas acusadas. Tras 20 minutos, estaba de camino de vuelta al aeropuerto, donde lo esperaba su avión privado.Minutos después de ingresar a la cárcel, la ficha de Trump apareció en el sistema de registro del condado de Fulton, que lo catalogaba como alguien de cabello “rubio o color fresa”, una altura de 1,9 metros y un peso de 97,5 kilos. El peso es unos 10 kilos menos de lo que el médico de la Casa Blanca declaró que pesaba Trump en 2018.En la foto, Trump muestra una expresión severa, a diferencia de lo que hemos visto en algunos de los otros acusados, algunos de los cuales han sonreído.Trump, durante la sesión fotográfica para su foto oficial en la Casa Blanca poco antes de convertirse en presidente, frunció el ceño a la cámara y dijo a sus asistentes que pensaba que lucía “como Churchill”.Richard Fausset es corresponsal con sede en Atlanta. Escribe principalmente sobre el sur de Estados Unidos y se enfoca en política, cultura, raza, pobreza y justicia penal. Antes trabajó en The Los Angeles Times y fue, entre otras cosas, corresponsal en Ciudad de México. Más de Richard FaussetMaggie Haberman es corresponsal política sénior y autora de Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Formó parte del equipo que ganó un premio Pulitzer en 2018 por informar sobre los asesores del presidente Trump y sus conexiones con Rusia. Más de Maggie Haberman More

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      A Trump Mug Shot for History

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      The former president’s booking photo is unprecedented. And that’s just the beginning of its significance.As soon as it was taken, it became the de facto picture of the year. A historic image that will be seared into the public record and referred to for perpetuity — the first mug shot of an American president, taken by the Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff’s Office after Donald J. Trump’s fourth indictment. Though because it is also the only mug shot, it may be representative of all of the charges.As such, it is also a symbol of either equality under the law or the abuse of it — the ultimate memento of a norm-shattering presidency and this social-media-obsessed, factionalized age.“It’s dramatically unprecedented,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “Of all the millions, maybe billions of photos taken of Donald Trump, this could stand as the most famous. Or notorious.” It is possible, he added, that in the future the mug shot will seem like the ultimate bookend to a political arc in the United States that began decades ago, with Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”In the photo, Mr. Trump is posed against a plain gray backdrop, just like the 11 of his fellow defendants whose mug shots were taken before him, including Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell and Rudolph Giuliani.As with them, his face is lit from above by a blinding white flash that hits his ash blond hair like a spotlight. As usual, he is dressed in the colors of the American flag: navy suit, white shirt, bright red tie — though his typical flag lapel pin is either absent or invisible in the picture. He glowers out from beneath his brows, unsmiling, eyes rendered oddly bloodshot, brow furrowed, chin tucked in, as if he is about to head-butt the camera. The image is stark, shorn of the flags and fancy that have been Mr. Trump’s preferred framings for photo ops at Mar-a-Lago or Trump Tower, or during his term in office, and that communicate power and the gilded glow of success.Was the photo necessary? In the last few years, a number of police departments and newsrooms around the country have been rethinking the practice of releasing mug shots to the public, viewing them as prejudicial at a time when a subject has not yet been proved guilty. The prosecutors in the other three Trump cases, both state and federal, have refrained from taking mug shots of Mr. Trump at all, given that he is one of the most recognizable people in the world and not considered a flight risk. Georgia laws, however, dictate that a mug shot be taken for a felony offense, and the Georgia sheriff in charge of booking has said that all defendants will be treated equally.Either way, it is part of the pageantry of the moment, part of the theater of law. And Mr. Trump is a man who has always understood the power and language of theater. Of putting on a show. Of the way an image can be used for viral communication and opinion-making.That’s part of why the “would they or wouldn’t they” discussion about mug shots resurfaced each time an indictment was handed down. In its concrete reality, the Fulton County mug shot may seem more irrevocable than anything else that has happened in the Trump cases thus far — at least until the two sides enter a courtroom. Perhaps that is why the concept alone started trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, even before Mr. Trump had boarded a plane to Georgia to surrender.While very few voters are likely to have read any of the Trump indictments in full, they will almost all definitely see the mug shot, and the former president — who posted this one on his recently reinstated feed on X, not long after it was released — cares deeply about his pictures. He always has.As far back as 2016, he was complaining about photos of him that NBC had used, especially one that he said showed him with a double chin. In 2017 he tweeted about a CNN book on the election: “Hope it does well but used worst cover photo of me!” In 2020, when a snap of him on the White House lawn with his hair blown back in the wind went viral, he chimed in: “More Fake News. This was photoshopped, obviously, but the wind was strong and the hair looks good? Anything to demean!”And earlier this month on Truth Social, he said of the Fox News show “Fox & Friends,” “They purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back.” (The picture he seemed upset about showed him with his chin tucked in, rather than jutting out, creating the appearance of a few extra chins.) The suggestion was that this was part of the reason he would not join the first Republican primary debate.He has crowed about how generals advising him were “better looking than Tom Cruise and stronger”; insisted that the women who work for him should “dress like women,” according to Axios; and griped that Vogue never gave Melania a cover while he was in the White House.He knows that for an electorate raised on TV and social media, the picture is what lasts. It’s what is remembered (and what is memed). What makes the myth. Or unmakes it. Words come and go, but imagery is a language everyone can understand. And this latest image is clear proof of a situation that is not within the former president’s control. It cannot be airbrushed or filtered or otherwise altered.Now that it exists, however, how it will be interpreted and used is still a question.Mug shots have, through history, been weaponized in different ways. They have been used to suggest guilt and shame, and to knock down the famous, as with O.J. Simpson, whose flat stare and five o’clock shadow ended up on the cover of Time — albeit in an image darkened unnecessarily by the magazine.But mug shots have also become symbols of pride: of those who stand against abuse of power and legal wrongs, as with the mug shots of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, or even Jane Fonda, whose 1970 mug shot after she had been arrested on false charges of drug smuggling, fist raised against the Vietnam War, became a call to action for a generation of activist women.Mr. Trump and his advisers understand this all too well. Indeed, his team had most likely been planning and thinking about how Mr. Trump should look in his mug shot, what expression he should use, since the photo became a possibility.There was little chance, for example, that he would be caught smiling, like John Edwards, the former senator whose mug shot was taken in 2011 when he was indicted on a charge of violating campaign finance laws.The Trump team had, after all, already created its own joke “mug shot” with a fake height chart, an ersatz name placard and the slogan “Not Guilty” below it all after his first indictment, splashing it on T-shirts and coffee cups in his campaign store, the better to make a mockery of the whole idea. Though it is also true that his expressions in both the fake and the real photos are similarly pugnacious. He and his team have been laying the groundwork for this particular contingency for awhile. More

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      in Elections

      Raising a Hand for Donald Trump, the Man in the Mug Shot

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      One by one, some with a little hesitation, six hands went up on the debate stage Wednesday night when the eight Republican candidates answered whether they would support Donald Trump for president if he were a convicted criminal. Hand-raising is a juvenile and reductive exercise in any political debate, but it’s worth unpacking this moment, which provides clarity into the damage that Mr. Trump has inflicted on his own party.Six people who themselves want to lead their country think it would be fine to have a convicted felon as the nation’s chief executive. Six candidates apparently would not be bothered to see Mr. Trump stand on the Capitol steps in 2025 and swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, no matter if he had been convicted by a jury of violating that same Constitution by (take your choice) conspiracy to obstruct justice, lying to the U.S. government, racketeering and conspiracy to commit forgery, or conspiracy to defraud the United States. (The Fox News hosts, trying to race through the evening’s brief Trump section so they could move on to more important questions about invading Mexico, didn’t dwell on which charges qualified for a hand-raise. So any of them would do.)There was never any question that Vivek Ramaswamy’s hand would shoot up first. But even Nikki Haley, though she generally tried to position herself as a reasonable alternative to Mr. Ramaswamy’s earsplitting drivel, raised her hand. So did Ron DeSantis, after peeking around to see what the other kids were doing. And Mike Pence’s decision to join this group, while proudly boasting of his constitutional bona fides for simply doing his job on Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrated the cognitive dissonance at the heart of his candidacy.Only Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson demonstrated some respect for the rule of law by opposing the election of a criminal. Mr. Hutchinson said Mr. Trump was “morally disqualified” from being president because of what happened on Jan. 6, and made the interesting argument that he may also be legally disqualified under the 14th Amendment for inciting an insurrection. Mr. Christie said the country had to stop “normalizing” Mr. Trump’s conduct, which he said was beneath the office of president. Though he was accused by Mr. Ramaswamy of the base crime of trying to become an MSNBC contributor, Mr. Christie managed to say something that sounded somewhat forthright: “I am not going to bow to anyone when we have a president of the United States who disrespects the Constitution.” For this Mr. Christie and Mr. Hutchinson were both roundly booed.It’s important to understand the implications of what those six candidates were saying, particularly after watching Mr. Trump turn himself in on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail to be booked on the racketeering charge and 12 other counts of breaking Georgia law. Only Mr. Ramaswamy was willing to utter the words, amid his talk about shutting down the F.B.I. and instantly pardoning Mr. Trump, saying Mr. Trump was charged with “politicized indictments” and calling the justice system “corrupt.”“We cannot set a precedent where the party in power uses police force to indict its political opponents,” he said. “It is wrong. We have to end the weaponization of justice in this country.”This is the argument that Mr. Trump has been making for months, of course, but when more than three-fourths of the main players in the Republican field supports it, it essentially means that a major political party has given up on the nation’s criminal justice system. The party thinks indictments are weapons and prosecutors are purely political agents. The rule of law hardly has a perfect record in this country and its inequities are many, but when a political party says that the criminal justice system has become politicized, and that the indictments of three prosecutors in separate jurisdictions are meaningless, it begins to dissolve the country’s bedrock.Mr. Pence said he wished that issues surrounding the 2020 election had not risen to criminal proceedings, but they did, because two prosecutors chose to do their jobs faithfully, just as the former vice president did on Jan. 6. He piously told the audience that his oath of office in 2017 was made not just to the American people, but “to my heavenly father.” But any religious moralizing about that oath was debased when he said he was willing to support as president a man whose mug shot was taken Thursday at a squalid jail in Atlanta, who was fingerprinted and had his body dimensions listed and released on bond like one of the shoplifters and car burglars who were also processed in the jail the same day.Apparently Thursday’s proceedings were a meaningless farce to Mr. Pence, Ms. Haley and the other four. But most Americans still have enough respect for the legal system that they don’t consider being booked a particularly frivolous or rebellious act. The charges against Mr. Trump are not for civil disobedience or crimes of conscience; they accuse him of grave felonies committed entirely for the corrupt purpose of holding onto power.Being booked and mug-shotted for these kinds of crimes represents degradation to most people, despite the presumption of innocence that still applies at the trial level. How does a parent explain to a child why a man in a mug shot might be the nation’s next leader? That should be a very difficult conversation, unless you happen to be a Republican candidate for president.Source photographs by Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock and Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, via Associated Press.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