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      Racing to Stop Trump, Republicans Descend on the Iowa State Fair

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      Over decades of presidential campaigns, the Iowa way has been to hop from town to town, taking questions from all comers and genuflecting to the local culinary traditions. Going everywhere and meeting everyone has been the gospel of how to win over voters in the low-turnout midwinter caucuses that kick off the American presidential cycle.Now former President Donald J. Trump is delivering what could be a death blow to the old way.Five months from the 2024 caucuses, Mr. Trump holds a comfortable polling lead in a state he has rarely set foot in. If any of his dozen challengers hope to stop his march to a third straight nomination, they will almost certainly have to halt, or at least slow, him in Iowa after spending the better part of a year making their case. A commanding victory by Mr. Trump could create a sense of inevitability around his candidacy that would be difficult to overcome.As Mr. Trump and nearly all of his Republican rivals converge in the coming days at the Iowa State Fair, the annual celebration of agriculture and stick-borne fried food will serve as the latest stage for a nationalized campaign in which the former president and his three indictments have left the rest of the field starved for attention.“You’ve got to do it in Iowa, otherwise it’s gone, it’s all national media,” said Doug Gross, a Republican strategist who was the party’s nominee for governor of the state in 2002. “The chance to show that he’s vulnerable is gone. You’ve got to do it here, and you’ve got to do it now.”At the Iowa State Fair on Wednesday, Dana Wanken, known as Spanky, cleaned the grill outside the pork tent, one of the destinations where Republican presidential candidates will converge in the coming days to compete for the attention of voters.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMost of the Republican candidates are trying to do Iowa the old way, and all of them are less popular and receiving far less visibility than Mr. Trump, who has visited the state just six times since announcing his campaign in November.The same polling that shows Mr. Trump with a wide lead nationally and in Iowa also indicates that his competitors have a plausible path to carve into his support in the crucial first state. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that while Mr. Trump held 44 percent of the support among Iowa Republicans — more than double that of his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider backing another candidate.Mr. DeSantis, for all his bad headlines about staff shake-ups, campaign resets and financial troubles, holds significant structural advantages in Iowa.He has endorsements from a flotilla of Iowa state legislators; a campaign team flush with veterans from the 2016 presidential bid of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who beat Mr. Trump in the state; and a super PAC with $100 million to spend. Mr. DeSantis has also said he will visit all 99 counties, a quest that has long revealed a candidate’s willingness to do the grunt work of traveling to Iowa’s sparsely populated rural corners to scrounge for every last vote.Convincing Iowans that they should be searching for a Trump alternative may be Mr. DeSantis’s toughest task.“Trump’s supporters are very vocal, so sometimes being very vocal sounds like there’s a lot of them,” said Tom Shipley, a state senator from southwest Iowa who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his family at the Clayton County Fair in Iowa last weekend. While Mr. DeSantis has drawn receptive crowds and has been cheered at the state’s big political events, there is no flood of Iowans rushing to support him.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesYet while Mr. DeSantis has drawn receptive crowds and has been cheered at the state’s big political events, there is no flood of Iowans rushing to support him. Through the end of June, just 17 Iowans had given his campaign $200 or more, according to a report filed to the Federal Election Commission. Nikki Haley, who lags far behind him in polls, had 25 such Iowa donors, while Mr. Trump had 117. Former Vice President Mike Pence had just seven.(The number of small donors Mr. DeSantis had in Iowa is not publicly known because his campaign has an arrangement with WinRed, the Republican donor platform, that effectively prevented the disclosure of information about small donors.)Mr. DeSantis’s supporters are quick to point out that the three most recent winners of competitive Iowa caucuses — Mr. Cruz, Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008 — each came from behind with support from the same demographic: social conservatives. None of the three won the presidential nomination, but all of them used Iowa to propel themselves into what became a one-on-one matchup with the party’s eventual nominee.Operatives and supporters of the non-Trump candidates warn that Iowa caucusgoers are notoriously fickle. Around this point in 2015, Mr. Cruz had just 8 percent support in a poll by The Des Moines Register. Mr. Trump was first at 23 percent and Ben Carson was second, with 18 percent.“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” said Chris Cournoyer, a Republican state senator from Le Claire who is backing Nikki Haley, who was at 4 percent in the recent Times/Siena poll.What’s different about Iowa this time, according to interviews with more than a dozen state legislators, political operatives and veterans of past caucuses, is that before Republicans consider a broad field of candidates, they are asking themselves a more basic, binary question: Trump or not Trump?Jeanne Dietrich of Omaha, Neb., displayed an autograph from former President Donal J. Trump after attending the opening of his Iowa campaign headquarters in July. Five months from the 2024 caucuses, Mr. Trump holds a comfortable polling lead in the state.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesWhere in the past Iowans might have told those running for president that they were on a list of three or four top contenders, Mr. Trump’s dominance over Republican politics has left candidates fighting for a far smaller slice of voters. The longer a large field exists, the harder it will be for Mr. DeSantis or anyone else to consolidate enough support to present a challenge to Mr. Trump.“These people are absolutely going to vote for the former president, and those people are absolutely not going to vote for the former president,” said Eric Woolson, who has been in Iowa politics so long he was part of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 1988 presidential campaign before working for a series of Republican presidential hopefuls: George W. Bush, Mr. Huckabee, Michele Bachmann and Scott Walker.Now Mr. Woolson, who owns an organic catnip farm in southern Iowa, serves as the state director for Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who is polling at 1 percent in Iowa. Mr. Woolson said the first hurdle for 2024 campaigns was sorting out which voters would even consider candidates other than Mr. Trump.“In past elections, voters were keeping an open mind of, ‘Well, maybe I can still vote for this candidate, or maybe this one’s my second choice or whatever,’” he said. “Now there’s just such stark lines that have been drawn.”Those lines are compounded by a political and media environment centered not on Iowa’s local news outlets but on conservative cable and internet shows.Nikki Haley, who lags far behind Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump in polls, reported that just 25 Iowans had given her campaign $200 or more through the end of June, according to a report filed to the Federal Election Commission.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesFor decades, presidential candidates from both parties have flocked to The Des Moines Register’s state fair soapbox, a centrally located stage that has served as a gathering spot for the political news media and passers-by on their way to the Ferris wheel and the butter cow. It was at the soapbox in 2011 where Mitt Romney responded to a heckler with his infamous quip, “Corporations are people, my friend.”Mr. Trump skipped The Register’s soapbox in 2016 in favor of a far more dramatic appearance — landing at the fair in his helicopter and offering rides to children.This year, only lower-polling candidates — Ms. Haley, Mr. Pence and Vivek Ramaswamy, among others — are scheduled to speak at the soap box. All of the contenders except Mr. Trump will instead sit for interviews at the fairgrounds with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, a Republican who has pledged to stay neutral but has clashed with Mr. Trump. The scripted nature of those appearances is likely to cut down on the kinds of viral moments that once drove politics at the fair.Mr. Trump does not need to participate in Iowa’s retail politics, his supporters say, because he is already universally known and has been omnipresent on the conservative media airwaves as he fights against his indictments.“Trump can rely on the network that’s out here already,” said Stan Gustafson, a Republican state representative from just south of Des Moines. “It’s already put together.”Yet at least a few Iowa Republicans supporting Mr. Trump say they are looking to the future — just a bit further out than next year’s caucuses. Mr. Gustafson, who has endorsed Mr. Trump, said he was eyeing which candidates he might support in 2028.Tim Kraayenbrink, a state senator who also backs Mr. Trump, said Iowa’s turn in the campaign cycle was a good opportunity to judge which candidates would make a good running mate — as long as it is not Mr. Pence, he clarified.“He’s going to have some quality people to choose from for vice president,” Mr. Kraayenbrink said of Mr. Trump.Andrew Fischer More

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      Let’s Have a Face-Off on Trump’s Indictment

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      The latest Trump indictment is much more complicated than the first two Trump indictments and probably any indictment that would come out of Fulton County, Ga. It attacks a scheme that played out across several weeks, in several states, involving dozens of others, including Trump-allied activists, those cited as co-conspirators and G.O.P. hacks who tried to overturn the 2020 election in state after state.I thought the best way to understand the challenges the prosecution and the defense would face before jurors and appellate judges would be to let both sides have their say — through me. Each side’s factual and legal arguments will play out in hundreds of pages of briefs and countless hours of trial testimony and oral advocacy. Let me cut to the chase, arguing the primary issues without, I hope, losing too much of the complexity of the case.Imagine two lawyers arguing their cases for you, a nonlawyer:Prosecution: Look, I know the indictment is long — and the trial may well last for weeks — but the elevator pitch is simple. Donald Trump conspired with a number of other individuals to overturn an election that he knew he lost. That scheme included a number of elements, from deliberately lying to state legislators to defraud them into altering the results to orchestrating a fake elector scheme that cast sham Electoral College votes to threatening a state official to help Trump “find” the votes necessary to change the outcome in Georgia.Defense: Sure, that all sounds compelling, but on closer examination, the case collapses. Let’s just start with the word “knew.” You’re going to present evidence that a number of administration officials and others rendered an opinion that the election was fair and that Joe Biden won. We’re going to present evidence that Trump received an avalanche of legal counsel to the contrary. He heard from lawyer after lawyer who told him that there may well have been decisive amounts of fraud in key swing states. Trump heard from two sets of lawyers who disagreed with each other, and he decided to follow the advice of one team of attorneys over the other. Following bad legal advice shouldn’t land anyone in jail.And you well know that each and every statute in your indictment requires a showing of criminal intent. For example, your most attention-grabbing count — 18 U.S.C. Section 241 — which protects the right to vote from criminal conspiracies, requires proving my client possessed “the intent to have false votes cast.” He intended for electors to cast true votes, in his favor.You also know that the viability of two other counts — obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding — “hangs on by a thread,” in the words of Lawfare’s Saraphin Dhanani. The statute itself is poorly written and may not even apply to Trump’s conduct, and the intent requirement may be more strenuous than you believe. After all, in an appeals court ruling upholding a verdict against a Jan. 6 defendant, Judge Justin Walker wrote in his concurrence that to prove corrupt intent, you don’t just have to prove a defendant knew he was obtaining an unlawful benefit but also that obtaining that unlawful benefit was his “objective” or “purpose.”Good luck making that case. Trump’s objective was to expose fraud.Prosecution: The people you call Trump’s lawyers, we call his co-conspirators. A number of the people that you say Trump relied on weren’t providing legal counsel in good faith; they were scheming right along with him to commit crimes. And you don’t have to trust my word on that. Look at court cases and bar actions. Several of Trump’s co-conspirators have been fined by courts and now face the potential loss of their law licenses because of the advice they gave.In fact, “advice” is the wrong word. Lawyers aren’t fined and disbarred for giving good-faith legal advice. But co-conspirators are punished for breaking the law.Moreover, you might fool Trump supporters, but you won’t fool the jury. Proving intent is not nearly as difficult as you’re telling the public. Defendants lie about their intentions all the time, and juries are fully capable of seeing through those lies. We’re going to show the jury that every credible official gave Trump the same advice, and we’re going to show that Trump thought at least some of his allies’ advice was “crazy” and that he thought Mike Pence was “too honest.” Cassidy Hutchinson told the House Jan. 6 committee that Trump told his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, something like, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”The man wasn’t trying to expose fraud. He was committing fraud.Defense: You believe that Trump told Pence he was too honest? Or that he said Sidney Powell’s case was crazy? Your witnesses are lying. He never said Pence was too honest.Prosecution: So you’re telling me that Trump is going to take the stand and deny those statements to the jury? And then I get to cross-examine him?Defense: I’ll get back to you on that.Prosecution: And don’t get me started on that First Amendment defense I’ve watched you make on Fox News. First-year law students learn, as a former federal prosecutor told The Times, “there is no First Amendment privilege to commit crimes just because you did it by speaking.” Look at the indictment again. We acknowledge that Trump had the right to challenge the election and to file all those absurd lawsuits. We’re not indicting him for any of that. We’re not even indicting him simply for lying. We know that politicians have lied about elections practically since the founding of this country. We’re indicting him for entering into conspiracies, and we both know there is no First Amendment privilege to conspire to cast false electoral votes. Courts have heard cases involving fraud and conspiracies against rights — including voting rights — for decades, and the First Amendment doesn’t shield proven conspirators from criminal liability.Defense: So we’re talking about court precedents now, are we? The key precedents you cite are old. The most important Supreme Court precedent involving conspiracies against rights was written by Thurgood Marshall. Let’s just say that his jurisprudence is out of fashion with the court’s conservative majority.In reality, the Supreme Court has been busy narrowing the reach of federal fraud statutes. If you haven’t read National Review’s editorial about the case, I’d urge you to read it now. Fraud statutes are designed to prevent citizens from swindling the government out of money or tangible property. The obstruction statute is designed to stop witness tampering or destruction of evidence, not to stop litigants from making bad legal arguments about election fraud. And the conspiracy-against-rights count applies a Reconstruction-era statute that was designed to, as National Review argues, “punish violent intimidation and forcible attacks” against Black Americans who tried to vote.In other words, even if you prove the facts of your case, the statutes just don’t apply.Prosecution: Yes, I’ve read the National Review editorial, but might I direct you to the former prosecutor Ken White’s comprehensive response? The bottom line is that you’re describing what you want the law to be, not what the law is. For example, your arguments about the fraud count don’t apply to the actual fraud statute we charged. Moreover, National Review’s interpretation of the law conflicts with court precedent that’s more than a century old.In 1910 the court wrote that the definition of a conspiracy to defraud the United States “is broad enough in its terms to include any conspiracy for the purpose of impairing, obstructing or defeating the lawful function of any department of government.”I know you don’t think that Section 1512, the obstruction statute, applies to this case, but the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld our broader interpretation just this April — in a case you already cited, by the way. You’re banking on the Supreme Court disagreeing with a decision rendered by a circuit court majority that included a judge who once clerked for Brett Kavanaugh.As for Section 241, which prohibits a “conspiracy against rights,” once again our interpretation of the statute is supported by generations of precedent. A review of relevant case law takes us from a series of critical cases in the 1930s to the 1974 Supreme Court opinion I talked about earlier and to a conviction this year of a man named Douglass Mackey. He engineered a scheme to deceive Hillary Clinton voters into “voting” by text message rather than casting an actual, legal ballot. His scheme wasn’t violent or forcible, but it was certainly illegal.Look, lawyers make good-faith arguments to reverse or revise precedent all the time. Sometimes those arguments succeed. But you need to tell your client that the existing case law is on my side, not yours, and if he is resting his defense on the Supreme Court coming to his aid, you might want to remind him that even the justices he appointed rejected or refused to hear his legal arguments many times before.Defense: There’s a Supreme Court case you failed to mention, McDonnell v. United States. I know it doesn’t involve the statutes at issue here, but the case shows the Roberts court’s desire to narrow broad criminal statutes. A unanimous Supreme Court threw out the conviction of the former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell on the grounds that the lower courts had construed the term “official act” too broadly in a bribery case. This is a clear indication that the Supreme Court is looking to limit, not expand, the interpretation of federal criminal statutes.Also, remember the rule of lenity? When a law is unclear or ambiguous, the benefit of the doubt goes to the defendant, not the government. And again, this is a principle embraced by justices across the ideological spectrum. This term, the court used the rule of lenity to rule in favor of a defendant in a Bank Secrecy Act case, and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Neil Gorsuch were in lock step agreement. I can read the judicial signs, and the signs point toward narrowing the law.Prosecution: We’re not applying new or novel interpretations to criminal law. Every single count is supported not just by the text but also by a vast amount of precedent. You say the age of our precedent is a problem. I say it’s an advantage. The law has already been interpreted. It is already clear. There is no legal ambiguity in casting fake electoral votes or in utilizing clear threats of criminal prosecution to try to coerce state officials to change the outcome of an election.Your best legal argument rests on what the law might be. Our legal argument rests on what the law actually is. You need to disrupt American law to prevail. We simply need to persuade a conservative court to remain conservative, to follow its instincts to resist radical change.Defense: We’ve not yet begun to fight. I’ve barely scratched the surface of your proof problems. Your indictment might fool Democrats and those Never Trump traitors, but it doesn’t fool me. For example, in Paragraph 66 of the indictment, you say that “fraudulent electors convened sham proceedings” to cast “fraudulent electoral ballots” at the “direction” of Trump.But that’s a conclusory statement. Where is the actual evidence that he was in command of that process and not one of his lawyers and allies? You’re making a big, bold claim, and that’s going to require big, bold evidence. And that indictment just doesn’t deliver the goods.Prosecution: The indictment describes in detail Trump’s intimate cooperation with his co-conspirators. Are you arguing they were acting on their own? That Trump was just a bystander to the fraudulent efforts on his behalf? Trump was so involved in the effort to overturn the election that he made calls. He said Georgia’s secretary of state and legal counsel faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution if they (as we said in our indictment) “failed to find election fraud as he demanded.” He called the Republican National Committee chairwoman to put the fake electors plan in motion. Yes, Trump had free-agent allies who tried to help him steal the election, but none of the co-conspirators were free agents. They were all his partners in crime. Besides, as you well know, this indictment is the summary of our evidence, not the sum total of our evidence. Not only do we possess the evidence sufficient to make that claim; the grand jury is still at work.I think this exercise spotlights the most important issues, for now. Both sides have barely begun to fight, and the public has barely begun to consider the full range of evidence and arguments in the case.Moreover, this piece doesn’t deal at all with the effect of the prosecution on the body politic. On Tuesday, The Times published a compelling piece by a Harvard Law School professor, Jack Goldsmith, warning of the consequences of prosecuting a former president during an election campaign.My view is that the American government faces greater risks if prosecutors don’t try to punish Trump for his coup attempt. As I wrote on the day of the indictment, it’s necessary to prosecute Trump on these facts — not because a conviction is inevitable but because our nation cannot set a precedent that presidents enjoy a zone of impunity for their misconduct that no other citizen enjoys.I wouldn’t just be comfortable bringing this case to a jury; I’d be eager to make my argument. But I’d also know that Trump’s legal team has its own defenses, and it’s far from certain that a judge or a jury will agree with the prosecution’s case. But democracies aren’t sustained without risk, and prosecuting Trump is a risk our nation needs to take.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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      Ron DeSantis Faces Four Main Challenges Ahead of 2024

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      Ron DeSantis has cut back, reorganized, reset and refocused his presidential campaign. We talked to Republican strategists about what they think he ought to do next.The presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis is clearly in a downward spiral, whether measured by polling, internal upheaval, shifting strategies or money woes.Early this year, Mr. DeSantis seemed to have a clear path to the Republican nomination: He was a political fighter in the mold of Donald J. Trump, but without the chaos and with a solid record of conservative achievements in Florida.But those best-laid plans have met reality — a Trump rebound and a crowded Republican field — and now the Florida governor is desperately struggling to regain his footing after his campaign this week announced its third major shake-up in a month.In interviews, Republican strategists with experience in presidential races (but unaffiliated with Mr. DeSantis or his 2024 rivals) diagnosed some of the top problems of his campaign.What to do about Trump?There is no way around it. Solving the Trump problem is the master key to this election, and no one has found it. Mr. DeSantis, like almost every other Republican in the race, adopted a strategy of never criticizing Mr. Trump, for fear of alienating his ardent base. The theory was that at some point Mr. Trump would disqualify himself, and Mr. DeSantis would be positioned to inherit his supporters.But now, after three criminal indictments have failed to dent Mr. Trump’s popularity with Republican voters, pressure is mounting on Mr. DeSantis to stop pretending Mr. Trump isn’t in the race and take him on directly.“The people who want Trump don’t need a mini-me Trump,’’ said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress from Virginia, who is not a fan of either the former president or Mr. DeSantis.This week, Mr. DeSantis took a small step in the direction of taking on Mr. Trump by stating plainly that “of course” he lost the 2020 election, a position that conflicts with what many Republican voters believe.“Trump is the de facto Republican incumbent, and in order to beat an incumbent you have to give voters a fire-able offense,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016.A related problem: Mr. DeSantis has failed to captivate voters, either with a charismatic stump speech or with a new charm offensive in which he wades into crowds, poses for selfies and engages in chitchat. Sarah Longwell, who conducts focus groups of Republican voters, said that recently she had witnessed something novel: Not one G.O.P. voter brought up Mr. DeSantis’s name in the groups. “People are like, we gave you a look and we’re not that interested,’’ she said.A muddled message.“The No. 1 failing for any campaign, and it’s clearly DeSantis’s problem — what is his elevator pitch?” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based strategist who has advised multiple presidential campaigns.One day, Mr. DeSantis is reminding voters about taking on the Walt Disney Company over what he views as “woke” corporate meddling. Another day, he is picking a fight with Representative Byron Donalds, the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, over the state’s new standards for teaching Black history.These headline-making fights may break into the Trump-dominated media coverage, but Mr. Carney said they hadn’t given voters a slogan they remember.“You have to have a message that’s relatable and simple and that you can communicate,’’ he said. “‘Morning in America,’ ‘Are you better off than four years ago?,’ Make America Great Again.’”Just what that should be, of course, is up for debate.Mr. Sullivan said he thought Mr. DeSantis was on point when he talks about electability. Mr. DeSantis has often suggested that Mr. Trump, now saddled with criminal charges stemming from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, can’t win a general election.“The messaging the other day was very smart — if the election is about January 2021, and not about Joe Biden’s record, we will lose,” Mr. Sullivan said.Gail Gitcho, a consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Mr. DeSantis needed to talk about his achievements in Florida.“He’s got something no one else has — executive experience in a big state with countless examples of his effectiveness and conservatism,” she said. “Stop with the donor-induced shake-ups and run on his record.”Too much talk about donor-induced shake-ups?All summer, media reports have been filled with accounts of Mr. DeSantis’s struggles, fed by campaign insiders, his wealthy donors and other Republicans with a close view. It has led to steady headlines about campaign restarts and reboots and a revolving door of personnel. The coverage feeds a narrative of a campaign in trouble, which becomes self-fulfilling.Mr. Sullivan said Mr. DeSantis needed to just run the plays without discussing them.“You just have to keep your head down and execute. Win the day. Win the week. Then string them together,” he said.Putting all the chips on Iowa.In an earlier reboot, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign said it would zero in on Iowa, touring the state by bus, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private air travel, and visit all 99 counties. Such a hyperlocal strategy of retail engagement with voters is traditionally what underfunded long shots pursue. But it also raises the stakes for Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, a state where he was trailing Mr. Trump by 24 percentage points in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.Although the Iowa caucuses are still several months away, Mr. DeSantis is playing a risky expectations game, one that could make it difficult for him to rebound if he doesn’t post a strong showing in Iowa.“Clearly, they said they’re going to win Iowa,” Mr. Carney said. “I just think a campaign that talks too much, that brags about what they’re going to do — they set themselves up for traps.”Ms. Longwell, on the other hand, said an all-in-on-Iowa strategy made sense.“Iowa is hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “You have to get a story in Iowa that Ron DeSantis is running close to Trump — because now it’s all a downward death spiral.” More

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      Biden Pitches Manufacturing Boom on Southwest Tour

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      During a stop in New Mexico, the president highlighted how one of his signature pieces of legislation will benefit blue-collar workers.President Biden on Wednesday entered a wind tower manufacturing plant surrounded by desert boasting of declining unemployment, waning inflation and a manufacturing boom — all metrics that should make his three-state Southwest tour a victory lap.“Our plan is working,” Mr. Biden said, referring to his economic agenda. “When I think climate, I think jobs.”But hours before he entered Belen, the president reflected on the challenge hanging over the White House during his tour of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Even as he traverses the country to promote his economic policies, many voters are still skeptical of — or unclear on — Mr. Biden’s legislative record.He addressed the issue of voter sentiment during a fund-raiser at a private residence shortly after arriving in Albuquerque on Tuesday night.Noting recent infrastructure projects funded by his policies, Mr. Biden said: “They’re beginning to realize what we actually passed is having an impact. It’s just going to take a little while.”White House officials are hoping tours around the nation like Mr. Biden is doing this week can change that. As extreme weather rages across the country, the White House has framed one of its signature pieces of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, as both a means to improve environmental justice and a source of manufacturing jobs for wind and solar.A day after seeking to galvanize environmental activists by designating a fifth national monument near the Grand Canyon on Tuesday, Mr. Biden traded talk of conservation for remarks focused on “renewable manufacturing” that can provide “high-paying jobs and dignity to the people who have long been waiting for that.”Mr. Biden talking to Ed Keable, the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, on Tuesday.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe president pointed to the company hosting him, Arcosa Wind Towers Inc., which received $1.1 billion of new orders for wind tower equipment after the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the White House.The message most likely resonated with people in New Mexico, where many rural communities are still focused more on job growth rooted in energy production than the fight against climate change, according to Brian Sanderoff, the president of New Mexico-based Research & Polling Inc. But it has not broken through to the nation at large, according to recent surveys.Mr. Biden remains broadly unpopular among a voting public that is pessimistic about the country’s future, and his approval rating is just 39 percent, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. That survey found him in a neck-and-neck tie with former President Donald J. Trump.The poll did find that more Americans think the economy is in excellent or good shape: 20 percent, compared with 10 percent a year ago.On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, defended the administration’s messaging strategy, saying on CNN that “polls don’t tell the entire story.” She then indicated that the public would see more trips like Mr. Biden’s current swing through the Southwest.The president will be “talking directly to the American people about how wages are actually going up, about how inflation is going down over a long, extended period of time,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.In the weeks ahead, however, Mr. Biden must convince Americans that they will feel the impact of provisions of his infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductor packages — even if much of the funding may not be spent for years to come.“People live through day-to-day challenges of the economy,” Mr. Sanderoff said. “You can tout big legislation, comprehensive legislation that you passed through Congress, but people are busy getting their kids through school and dealing with the cost of bread.”Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a center-left think tank, said the way Mr. Trump’s criminal indictments have dominated Americans’ attention lately makes it even more important for Mr. Biden to travel to small markets and speak directly to the American people.“People have to begin to feel it in their life or understand what the president has done,” Mr. Bennett said. “That takes time.”During his visit to the wind tower facility on Wednesday, Mr. Biden appeared to agree.“I’m not here to declare victory on the economy,” he said. “We have a lot more work to do.” More

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      A Bipartisan Plan to Limit Big Tech

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      More from our inbox:DeSantis Admits the Inconvenient Truth: Trump LostScenarios for a Trump Trial and the Election‘Thank You, Mr. Trump’Mushroom CloudsMacho C.E.O.s Erik Isakson/DigitalVision, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “We Have a Way for Congress to Rein In Big Tech,” by Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren (Opinion guest essay, July 27):The most heartening thing about the proposal for a Digital Consumer Protection Commission is its authorship.After years of zero-sum legislative gridlock, to see Senators Warren and Graham collaborating is a ray of hope that governing may someday return to the time when opposing parties were not enemies, when each party brought valid perspectives to the table and House-Senate conference committees forged legislation encompassing the best of both perspectives.David SadkinBradenton, Fla.To the Editor:Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren propose a new federal mega-regulator for the digital economy that threatens to undermine America’s global technology standing.A new “licensing and policing” authority would stall the continued growth of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence in America, leaving China and others to claw back crucial geopolitical strategic ground.America’s digital technology sector enjoyed remarkable success over the past quarter-century — and provided vast investment and job growth — because the U.S. rejected the heavy-handed regulatory model of the analog era, which stifled innovation and competition.The tech companies that Senators Graham and Warren cite (along with countless others) came about over the past quarter-century because we opened markets and rejected the monopoly-preserving regulatory regimes that had been captured by old players.The U.S. has plenty of federal bureaucracies, and many already oversee the issues that the senators want addressed. Their new technocratic digital regulator would do nothing but hobble America as we prepare for the next great global technological revolution.Adam ThiererWashingtonThe writer is a senior fellow in technology policy at the free-market R Street Institute.To the Editor:The regulation of social media, rapidly emerging A.I. and the internet in general is long overdue. Like the telephone more than a century earlier, as any new technology evolves from novelty to convenience to ubiquitous necessity used by billions of people, so must its regulation for the common good.Jay P. MaillePleasanton, Calif.DeSantis Admits the Inconvenient Truth: Trump Lost Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s Defeat: ‘Of Course He Lost’” (news article, Aug. 8):It is sad to see a politician turn toward the hard truth only in desperation, but that is what the failing and flailing Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has done.Mr. DeSantis is not stupid. He has known all along that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, but until now, he hedged when asked about it, hoping not to alienate supporters of Donald Trump.Now Mr. DeSantis says: “Of course he lost. Joe Biden is the president.”In today’s Republican Party, telling the inconvenient truth will diminish a candidate’s support from the die-hard individuals who make up the party’s base.We have reached a sad point in the history of our country when we have come to feel that a politician who tells the truth is doing something extraordinary and laudable.Oren SpieglerPeters Township, Pa.Scenarios for a Trump Trial and the Election Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Layered Case in Indictment Reduces Risk” (news analysis, front page, Aug. 6):It may well be that the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, has fashioned an indictment ideally suited for achieving a conviction of Donald Trump. However, even in the event that the trial comes before the election, there is little reason to believe that it will relieve us of the scourge of Mr. Trump’s influence on American life.First, there is the possibility of a hung jury, even in Washington, D.C. Such an outcome would be treated by Trump supporters as an outright exoneration.A conviction would not undermine his support any more than his myriad previous shocking transgressions. While the inevitable appeals would last well past the election, his martyrdom might improve his electoral chances.And were he to lose the election, he would surely claim that he lost only because of these indictments. Here he would have a powerful argument because so many of us hope that the indictments will have precisely that effect.The alternative, that he wins the election, either before or after the trial, is too dreadful to contemplate.If there is anything that can terminate the plague of Trumpism, it is for a few prominent Republicans whose seniority makes their voices important — Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush — to speak out and unequivocally state that Donald Trump is unfit for office. That they all believe this is generally acknowledged.If they fail to defend American democracy at this time, they will be complicit in what Trumpism does to the Republican Party and to the Republic.Robert N. CahnWalnut Creek, Calif.‘Thank You, Mr. Trump’Former President Donald Trump has made his 2024 race principally about his own personal grievances — attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him.David Degner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Playing Indicted Martyr, Trump Draws In His Base” (news article, Aug. 9):Thank you, Mr. Trump, for sacrificing yourself for the greater good. And when you spend years and years and years in prison, we will never forget what you did to (oops, I mean for) us.Winnie BoalCincinnatiMushroom Clouds U.S. Department of DefenseTo the Editor:Re “A Symbol Evoking Both Pride and Fear,” by Nicolas Rapold (Critic’s Notebook, Arts, Aug. 1):Richland High School in Washington State is in an area, highly restricted during World War II, where plutonium essential to building the first atomic bombs was produced. As in areas of New Mexico, there have been numerous “downwind” cancer cases, as well as leakage of contaminated water into the Columbia River basin.Bizarrely, Richland High’s athletic teams are called the Bombers; a mushroom cloud is their symbol on uniforms and the gym floor. This must be the worst “mascot” on earth.Nancy AndersonSeattleMacho C.E.O.s Illustration by Taylor CalleryTo the Editor:Re “We’re in the Era of the ‘Top Gun’ C.E.O.” (Sunday Business, July 30):The propensity of the current class of business leaders to grab at team-building gimmicks knows no bounds. Simulating the role of fighter pilots at $100,000 a pop might give a C.E.O. a fleeting feeling of exhilaration, but it is a poor substitute for actual team-building.That happens when organizations and compensation levels are flattened to more down-to-earth levels. With some C.E.O.s pulling in pay rewards that are hundreds, if not thousands, of times more than their median employee, team-affirming commitment in the boardroom is far from genuine.Employees are not fooled by C.E.O.s trying to play Top Gun for a day, and making more in that short time than most employees will earn in a year.J. Richard FinlayTorontoThe writer is the founder of the Finlay Center for Corporate and Public Governance. More

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      Trump Tells Supporters His Indictments Are ‘For You’ on 2024 Campaign Trail

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      The former president, who has made his 2024 campaign principally about his own personal grievances, is attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him.As lawyers for Donald J. Trump float various legal arguments to defend him in court against an onslaught of criminal charges, the former president has settled on a political defense: “I’m being indicted for you.”In speeches, social media posts and ads, Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared the prosecutions a political witch hunt, and he has cast himself as a martyr who is taking hits from Democrats and the government on their behalf.“They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom,” Mr. Trump told the crowd at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you.”In two previous campaigns, 2016 and 2020, Mr. Trump presented himself to voters as an insurgent candidate who understood their grievances and promised to fight for them. Now, however, Mr. Trump has made his 2024 race principally about his own personal grievances — attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him. He continues to argue, falsely, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and to present it as a theft also against his voters. The legal jeopardy he now faces from multiple indictments, he tells followers, is the sort of persecution that they, too, could suffer.There is evidence that the message is resonating.Lorraine Rudd, who attended Mr. Trump’s appearance in New Hampshire, said that after his third indictment last week, in a point-by-point 45-page account of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, she felt that she, too, could be wrongly prosecuted.“If they can do it to him and take him down, they can come for me,” Ms. Rudd, a 64-year old Massachusetts resident, said.She said she firmly agreed with Mr. Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election. “What, am I next?” she said.In March, when Mr. Trump announced his candidacy before any indictments, he told supporters, “I am your retribution.” The shift to the recent plaint of “I am being indicted for you” suggests a further tailoring of his campaign pitch, as he paints the criminal cases against him as an effort to prevent him from returning to the White House.In June, after being charged with retaining government secrets, Mr. Trump told a Republican gathering in Michigan: “Essentially, I’m being indicted for you.”On Aug. 3, the day of his third indictment, for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump posted on his social media site that facing fraud and obstruction charges in Washington was an “honor” because, as he wrote in all caps, “I am being arrested for you.”Portraying himself as a victim of the criminal justice system — and echoing themes from when he faced an investigation over Russian influence in the 2016 campaign and his first impeachment — has served to consolidate Republican support around Mr. Trump.Since his very first indictment in March, in New York on charges related to payments to a porn star, Republican voters have buoyed Mr. Trump in polls. Congressional Republicans, mindful that the party base has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, have leaned into investigations of what they call the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. And many of Mr. Trump’s 2024 Republican rivals have repeated his pledge to fire the F.B.I. director and end the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House.In a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, before Mr. Trump’s latest indictment, 71 percent of Republican voters said he had not committed serious federal crimes and that Republicans needed to stand behind him.When a long-shot challenger of Mr. Trump, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, told a Republican gathering in Iowa recently that the former president was running not to represent people who supported him in 2016 or 2020 but “to stay out of prison,’’ Mr. Hurd was booed.In public comments, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have indicated they will mount a free-speech defense in the latest case related to the 2020 election. They have argued that anything Mr. Trump said leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot were merely “aspirational” requests. Those include lying about widespread fraud to voters, pressuring Mr. Pence to ignore the Constitution and asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to help him win the state.The former president and his allies in the conservative media and in Congress are simultaneously waging a battle for public opinion by accusing Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, of misconduct in business dealings and trying to tie allegations of shady practices to Mr. Biden himself when he was vice president. Investigations led by House Republicans have turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden, but the effort has convinced many Republicans that Mr. Trump’s indictments are part of a conspiracy to divert scrutiny from Mr. Biden and his family.On Tuesday, Mr. Trump promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bidens, his likely political rival should he win the G.O.P. nomination. He also continued his personal attacks on Jack Smith, the special counsel in the federal cases against Mr. Trump, calling him “deranged.”And without referring to her by name, he criticized Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is Black, as a “racist.” She is overseeing a separate investigation into alleged efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to interfere with the election in the state, where he lost to President Biden.With Mr. Trump dominating every Republican primary poll, a few 2024 rivals have lately been more direct in challenging him on the subject of the 2020 election.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said this week that “of course” Mr. Trump lost re-election in his most blunt acknowledgment yet of a reality he has tiptoed around for three years. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who could be a star witness in a trial focused on Jan. 6, said that Mr. Trump pushed him to “essentially overturn the election.”Roughly an hour northwest of Mr. Trump’s rally on Tuesday night, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, one of Mr. Trump’s toughest critics in the race, mocked the former president’s proclamations.“As I’m walking around Ukraine, he’s waltzing into a courtroom in Washington, D.C., to tell us that he’s being indicted for us. For us! How lucky are we! That we have such a selfless, magnanimous leader,” Mr. Christie said, prompting laughter and a sprinkling of applause. “Because you know that the government was coming to get you and on their way to get you, lo and behold, they came across Donald Trump and they said, ‘Okay, we won’t get you, we’ll get him, for you.’”The narrative of unfair persecution by the criminal justice system, which Republicans as the party of law and order once staunchly defended, has taken strong root among Mr. Trump’s supporters.Steve Vicere, who drove all the way from his home in Florida to see Mr. Trump in New Hampshire, said the indictments were a “diversion” and represented attempts by Democrats to stop Mr. Trump from regaining power.“Everyday freedoms are being systematically taken away, and nobody ever gets held accountable,” Mr. Vicere, 54, said.Dean Brady, a limo driver from Newmarket, N.H., embraced Mr. Trump’s message that he was taking a hit on behalf of his supporters.“He’s representing us,” Mr. Brady, 60, said. “He’s not in it for himself, he could quit this and just go on with life. He’s up there because he loves America and he cares about us.”But not all Republican voters embrace Mr. Trump’s sense of victimhood. Jean Davis, who attended a barbecue in Iowa on Sunday to hear seven of Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. rivals, said that his latest indictment ought to disqualify him as a candidate.Her husband, Russ Davis, who supports Mr. DeSantis, said that if Mr. Trump were to become the nominee, his chances of defeating Mr. Biden would be “next to nothing.”“There are so many people on the Republican side who just can’t get past his loud mouth,’’ he said. More

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      The ‘Never-Again Trumper’ Sham

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      Shortly after last year’s midterms, when Republicans failed to take the Senate and eked out only a thin majority in the House, Paul Ryan gave an interview to ABC’s Jonathan Karl in which he described himself as a “Never-Again Trumper.” It’s worth recalling what Ryan and other Republicans said about Donald Trump the first time he ran to see what a sham this feeble self-designation is likely to become.In 2015, Ryan, the House speaker then, denounced Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as “not conservatism,” “not what this party stands for” and “not what this country stands for.” Then-Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana privately complained that Trump was “unacceptable,” according to the G.O.P. strategist Dan Senor, before he accepted the vice-presidential nomination. Ted Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” for insulting his wife, Heidi, before declaring that “Donald Trump will not be the nominee.”They all folded — and they all will fold again. Their point of principle wasn’t that Trump had crossed so many moral and ethical lines that they would rather live with a Democrat they could honorably oppose than a Republican they would be forced to dishonorably defend. Their point was simply that Trump couldn’t win. When he did, they become powerless to oppose him.Seven years later, they’ve learned nothing.In his interview with ABC, Ryan said he was “proud of the accomplishments” of the Trump years, citing tax reform, deregulation, criminal-justice reform, and conservative Supreme Court justices and federal judges. So why oppose Trump in 2024? “Because I want to win,” Ryan said, “and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20 and now in 2022.”The best that can be said about this argument is that it’s a half-clever way for Ryan and the type of “normal Republicans” he represents to salute and absolve themselves at the same time — to claim, in effect, that the conservative policy wins of the Trump years were all their doing, while the Republican electoral defeats were all his.But the analysis is shaky in its premises and dangerous in its implications, at least to Republicans like Ryan. Shaky, because does anyone remember the conservative policy achievements of the Romney-Ryan administration?Trump, the man everyone assumed couldn’t win in 2016, did. He brought millions of voters into the G.O.P. fold, including former Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders supporters. Did his manners and methods repel an even larger share of voters, particularly centrists who in previous years might have voted for Republicans? Probably. But the inescapable fact is that without MAGA voters there would have been no victory in 2016 and none of the conservative victories of which the former speaker is proud. For Ryan to say “we lose with Trump” may or may not be right, but it fails to wrestle with the fact that Republicans can’t win without him.As for the danger of Ryan’s argument, it’s that it fails to come to grips with what really ails the Republican Party.The trouble for Republicans does not lie in the difficulty of holding together a fractious coalition of MAGA and non-MAGA conservatives. That would be politics as usual in any major party. It lies in the depressing combination of MAGA bullies and non-MAGA cowards, with people like Ryan being a prime example of the latter. If there’s anything more contemptible than being a villain, it’s being an accomplice — less guilty than the former, but also less compelling, confident and strong.That’s what became of Ryan’s side of the G.O.P. in the Trump years. Every policy victory they helped achieve was a political victory for Trump and his side of the party. But every Trumpian disgrace was a disgrace for the Ryan side but not for Trump. The 2020 election lies and Jan. 6 and Trump’s blatant obstruction of justice in the documents case may trouble the conscience of Ryan. The MAGA crowd? They’re cool with it.This is why Trump is now cruising toward renomination, much to the chagrin of those conservatives who assumed he would have faded away by now. With the honorable exception of Asa Hutchinson and the intriguing one of Chris Christie, none of Trump’s most notable so-called opponents have actually bothered to oppose him. Vivek Ramaswamy wants to be a younger version of Trump; Ron DeSantis an angrier version. But just as people will prefer a villain to an accomplice, they’ll take the original over the imitation.Even at this point, it may be too late to change the fundamental dynamic of the Republican race, particularly since every fresh criminal indictment strengthens Trump’s political grip and advances his argument that he’s the victim of a deep-state conspiracy.But if the Paul Ryans of the conservative world want to make a compelling case against Trump, it can’t be that he’s unelectable. It’s that he’s irredeemable. It’s that he brought shame to the party of Lincoln; that he violated his oath to the Constitution; that he traduced every value Republicans once claimed to stand for; and that they will not support him if he is the Republican nominee.That may not keep Trump from the nomination or even the presidency. But on any road to redemption, the starting point has to be the truth, most of all when it’s hard.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 Georgia Election Inquiry: Grand Jury Likely to Hear Case Next Week

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      The district attorney in Atlanta is expected to take the findings from an election interference investigation to a grand jury, which could issue indictments.The fourth criminal case involving Donald J. Trump is likely to come to a head next week, with the district attorney in Atlanta expected to take the findings from her election interference investigation to a grand jury.The Georgia investigation may be the most expansive legal challenge yet to the efforts that Mr. Trump and his advisers undertook to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. Nearly 20 people are known to have been told that they could face charges as a result of the investigation, which Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has pursued for two and a half years.Ms. Willis has signaled that she would seek indictments from a grand jury in the first half of August. In a letter to local officials in May, she laid out plans for most of her staff to work remotely during the first three weeks of August amid heightened security concerns. Security barriers were recently erected in front of the downtown Atlanta courthouse, and at lunchtime on Tuesday, 16 law enforcement vehicles were parked around the perimeter.On Tuesday afternoon, two witnesses who received subpoenas to appear before the Fulton County grand jury said in interviews that they had not received notices instructing them to testify within the next 48 hours, a sign that the case will not get to the jury until next week.Earlier this month, Mr. Trump was indicted in a federal case brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, in an investigation also related to election interference that listed a number of unindicted co-conspirators. The Georgia inquiry, elements of which overlap with the federal case, involves not just the former president, but an array of his aides and advisers at the time of the 2020 election, several of whom are expected to face charges.If Mr. Trump were to be convicted in a federal prosecution, he could theoretically pardon himself if he were re-elected president. But presidents do not hold such sway in state matters. Moreover, Georgia law makes pardons possible only five years after the completion of a sentence. Getting a sentence commuted requires the approval of a state panel.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have described an indictment in Georgia as a foregone conclusion in recent legal filings, and the forewoman of a special grand jury that heard evidence for several months last year strongly hinted afterward that the group, which served in an advisory capacity, had recommended Mr. Trump for indictment.Two grand juries have been hearing cases at the Fulton County Courthouse during the current Superior Court term, which began on July 11 and runs through Sept. 1. Twelve of 23 jurors need to agree that there is probable cause to hand down criminal charges after hearing evidence in a case.“The work is accomplished,” Ms. Willis recently told a local TV station. “We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go.”“The work is accomplished,” Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., recently told a local TV station. “We’ve been working for two and a half years. We’re ready to go.”Audra Melton for The New York TimesHer office began investigating in February 2021 whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden.The inquiry focused on five things that happened in Georgia in the weeks after the election. They include calls that Mr. Trump made to pressure local officials, including a Jan. 2, 2021, call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, during which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse his loss.Ms. Willis’s office also scrutinized a plan by Trump allies to create a slate of bogus electors for Mr. Trump in Georgia, even though Mr. Biden’s victory had been certified several times by the state’s Republican leadership. The office also investigated harassment of local election workers by Trump supporters, as well as lies about ballot fraud that were advanced by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, and other allies during legislative hearings after the election.At times the investigation stretched beyond Fulton County, including to rural Coffee County, about 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, where Trump allies and contractors working on their behalf breached the election system in the first week of 2021.Ms. Willis has said that by bringing charges under Georgia’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, her inquiry could cover a wide range of issues. Broadly speaking, so-called RICO laws require prosecutors to prove that a group of people conspired to take part in organized criminal activity.With RICO indictments, Ms. Willis said in an interview last year, “there are sometimes acts that occurred outside of the jurisdiction that are overt acts that we can use if they are evidence of the greater scheme.”The special grand jury heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months and recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, its forewoman has said. The Trump aides and allies whose conduct has been scrutinized in the inquiry include Mr. Giuliani, who was told last year that he was a target who could face charges. A number of other lawyers who worked to keep Mr. Trump in power have also been under scrutiny in the investigation, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro.Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, was ordered to testify before the special grand jury last year. He traveled to Georgia after the election and became personally involved in the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office despite his loss.Ms. Willis’s office also sought the testimony of Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking official at the Justice Department, but was blocked by the department. Mr. Clark sought to intervene in Georgia on Mr. Trump’s behalf after the 2020 election, over the strong objections of more senior officials at the department.More than half of the 16 Republicans who were bogus Trump electors in Georgia are cooperating with Ms. Willis’s office, but others have been told they could face charges, including David Shafer, the former leader of the state Republican Party.Mr. Trump’s lawyers have called the Atlanta inquiry a “clown show” and have filed numerous court motions seeking to disqualify the district attorney and derail the investigation. They argued that the special grand jury proceedings were unconstitutional, and that Ms. Willis has made prejudicial public statements.But Georgia judges have shown no inclination to act before any charges are brought. Both the presiding Fulton Superior Court judge, Robert C.I. McBurney, and the Georgia Supreme Court have rejected motions from the Trump team in recent weeks.Two witnesses who have been subpoenaed to appear before Fulton grand jurors currently hearing cases — George Chidi, an independent journalist, and Jen Jordan, a former state senator — said Tuesday afternoon that they had not received 48-hour notices to appear this week. Mr. Chidi was one of a handful of reporters who discovered a December 2020 meeting of bogus Trump electors, and Ms. Jordan, a Democrat, attended a legislative hearing in which Mr. Giuliani and other Trump allies advanced false claims of election fraud.This has been a busy year for Mr. Trump’s lawyers. In April, he was indicted in state court in Manhattan on 34 felony counts related to his role in what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme, covering up a potential sex scandal to clear his path to the presidency in 2016.In June, he was indicted in Miami on federal criminal charges related to his handling of classified documents and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to recover them after he left office.Christian Boone contributed reporting. More