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      Trump Cheers the Defeat of Rapinoe and the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team

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      The former president taunted a U.S. team after its defeat on the world stage.When the United States lost to Sweden in the Women’s World Cup on Sunday, many American viewers saw it as a painful collapse on the grandest stage — the sort of agonizing moment that happens in sports.For former President Donald J. Trump, it was a sign of national decline.The loss was “fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform.“Many of our players were openly hostile to America — No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close,” he added. “WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA.”The taunt was an extension of a longstanding feud between Mr. Trump and Megan Rapinoe, the retiring soccer star who once refused to visit the Trump White House, and whose missed penalty kick contributed to the team’s loss. (After the game, Ms. Rapinoe summed up the miss as a sort of “sick joke.”)But it was also a striking example of the unforgiving moment in right-wing politics, when a former president will taunt an American team competing on the national stage and relish the agony of its defeat.President Biden congratulated the team on Twitter: “I’m looking forward to seeing how you continue to inspire Americans with your grit and determination — on and off the field.”“Your unwavering support means a lot to us,” the team said to its fans on Sunday. “Our goal remains the same, to win.”Criticism of the team was common in the online right-wing ecosystem even before its loss.Megyn Kelly, the podcast host, said that Ms. Rapinoe had “poisoned the entire team against the country for which they play” ahead of the game. The right-wing activist Brigitte Gabriel wrote late last month, “I love America and that’s why I am rooting against the woke U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team this year.”Richard Lapchick, the president of the Institute for Sport and Social Justice, drew a parallel between Mr. Trump’s attack on Ms. Rapinoe and his attacks in 2017 on N.F.L. players who, inspired by Colin Kaepernick, knelt for the national anthem to protest racial inequality and police brutality. After Mr. Trump’s criticism six years ago, “what was seemingly a dimming protest movement in the N.F.L. was suddenly reignited so that they had even owners and coaches” expressing support, Dr. Lapchick said.“I think that his doing this again this week will reinforce the base of athlete activism that I think has grown significantly stronger in the last couple of years,” he said.The conservative criticism has been focused on both Ms. Rapinoe’s political statements — including her support of gay and transgender rights, which Mr. Trump has attacked — and the women’s national team’s fight for pay equity. Mr. Trump and others disparage these stances as “woke,” the right’s catchall shorthand for progressive views on gender, race and other issues.A recent article in The Washington Examiner, a conservative publication, accused the women’s national soccer team of appearing “far more concerned pushing a woke agenda regarding equal pay for female athletes and the rights of L.G.B.T. citizens than they have been with winning games.”Ms. Rapinoe has been a target of the right since at least 2019, when she refused to visit the White House after the United States won the last Women’s World Cup. Mr. Trump criticized her at the time. She has long been outspoken, and she is among the athletes who have knelt for the national anthem.While “anti-woke” attacks have reliably stirred the right-wing base, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicates that they don’t reflect most voters’ priorities.A minority of the presidential candidates, including former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, have urged Republicans to focus on concrete matters like inflation.Then again, so has Mr. Trump — to a point.“I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said in Iowa in June, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”Mary Jo Kane, a professor emerita and founder of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, suggested that the mere existence of Mr. Trump’s latest attack was “a reflection of the growth and the power and the significance of a cultural moment of women’s sports.”“The fact that the former president of the United States is commenting on women’s sports — nobody used to comment on women’s sports,” she said. “The fact that this has become yet another arena that is culturally contested and commented on is, ironically and unwittingly, a demonstration of the role of women’s sports in our society.” More

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      DeSantis Bluntly Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Defeat: ‘Of Course He Lost’

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      “Joe Biden’s the president,” the Florida governor said in an interview with NBC News. He and other Republican presidential candidates have been testing new lines of attack against Donald Trump.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida clearly stated in a new interview that Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, diverging from the orthodoxy of most Republican voters as the former president’s struggling G.O.P. rivals test out new lines of attack against him.“Of course he lost,” Mr. DeSantis said in an interview with NBC News published on Monday. “Joe Biden’s the president.”The comments came after Mr. DeSantis, who is polling well behind Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, acknowledged on Friday that the former president’s false theories about a rigged 2020 election were “unsubstantiated.”For years, Mr. DeSantis dodged direct answers to questions about whether he believed the election was stolen. During the 2022 midterms, he also campaigned for Republican candidates nationwide who vehemently denied the 2020 results.Now, Mr. DeSantis’s increasingly aggressive stance suggests that Mr. Trump’s legal problems have sent his Republican competitors looking for some way to take advantage. While none of his top rivals are openly attacking him over his latest criminal charges, they are trying to press on his weaknesses — acknowledging reality and bursting the bubble of denial that he and many Republicans live in.Mr. DeSantis’s latest answer, while accurate, may put him at odds with much of the Republican base. Although the 2020 election was widely found to have been secure, roughly 70 percent of Republican voters say that President Biden’s victory was not legitimate, according to a CNN poll conducted last month. Mr. Trump continues to insist that he was the rightful winner.So far, of the most prominent candidates, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and former Vice President Mike Pence have spoken out most strongly against Mr. Trump. Mr. Christie is running on an explicitly anti-Trump platform. Mr. Pence has said that Mr. Trump deserves the “presumption of innocence” but has also said he would testify in the former president’s trial over Jan. 6, 2021, if called to do so.“The American people deserve to know that President Trump asked me to put him over my oath to the Constitution, but I kept my oath and I always will,” Mr. Pence told CNN. “And I’m running for president in part because I think anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”But neither argument appears to be resonating with Republican voters. Mr. Christie is polling at about 2 percent in national surveys, and Mr. Pence has not yet qualified for the first Republican debate later this month. At a dinner for the Republican Party of Iowa late last month, the audience booed former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, a long-shot candidate, after he accused the former president of “running to stay out of prison.”In the NBC interview, Mr. DeSantis still said he saw problems with how the 2020 election was conducted, citing the widespread use of mail-in ballots, private donations to election administrators from the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and efforts by social media companies to limit the spread of a report about Hunter Biden’s laptop.“I don’t think it was a good-run election,” Mr. DeSantis said. “But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back. You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.”Still, his more forceful response to the 2020 question serves as a reminder to Republican voters that under Mr. Trump, the party has performed poorly in three elections in a row.His remarks may help assuage the fears of some big-money donors. Robert Bigelow, who contributed more than $20 million to a super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis, told Reuters last week that he would not give more money unless Mr. DeSantis adopted a more moderate approach. The governor’s campaign is experiencing a fund-raising shortfall and last month laid off more than a third of its staff.Mr. DeSantis has also had more opportunities to address sensitive subjects like 2020 in recent weeks. As part of a “reboot” of his campaign, he has opened himself up to more interviews with mainstream news outlets, retreating from the safety of sitting down only with hosts from Fox News and conservative pundits. He has recently given one-on-one interviews to CNN, CBS, ABC and The Wall Street Journal, in addition to NBC, and has also taken far more questions from reporters on the campaign trail.He has used those platforms to dig at Mr. Trump for his age, his failure to “drain the swamp” during his term in office, and the “culture of losing” that Mr. DeSantis says has overtaken the Republican Party under Mr. Trump’s leadership.But he has also defended Mr. Trump over the criminal charges, saying they represent the “weaponization” of federal government against a political rival of Mr. Biden. Taken together, Mr. DeSantis’s comments on the former president suggest he is inching, rather than running, toward more direct confrontation.In the NBC interview, Mr. DeSantis also stated his belief that Republicans must move their focus beyond the indictments against Mr. Trump to challenging Mr. Biden, and continued to defend Florida’s new standards on how slavery is taught in schools.And he provided more of an explanation for his campaign-trail promise that migrants suspected of smuggling drugs across the southern border would be shot. Mr. DeSantis has often said that smugglers who try to break through the border wall would be left “stone-cold dead,” usually to thunderous applause at campaign events. But he has not said how U.S. law enforcement would identify them.“Same way a police officer would know,” Mr. DeSantis replied when asked to explain the mechanics of his policy. “Same way somebody operating in Iraq would know. You know, these people in Iraq at the time, they all looked the same. You didn’t know who had a bomb strapped to them. So those guys have to make judgments.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      Nikki Haley Fights to Stay Competitive in GOP Primary Dominated by Trump

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      The former South Carolina governor is campaigning at a grueling pace, but polling suggests that so far, Republican voters aren’t flocking to her.Nikki Haley is campaigning at a grueling pace as she fights to stay competitive in the Republican presidential contest, crisscrossing Iowa and New Hampshire to find a clear lane forward in a race dominated by Donald J. Trump and his mountain of legal problems.So far, that path is elusive.By many measures, Ms. Haley is running a healthy campaign poised to capitalize on rivals’ mistakes. She has built a robust fund-raising operation and her team has cash to spare: A super PAC backing her this week announced a $13 million advertising effort in Iowa and New Hampshire. And at events, voters often like what she has to say.“She is not pounding the pulpit,” Eric Ray, 42, a Republican legal defense consultant in Iowa, said after watching her speak at a barbecue restaurant last weekend in Iowa City, adding that she had his vote. “She is not jumping up and down. She is not screaming the word ‘woke.’ She is making reasonable arguments for reasonable people.”Yet as Ms. Haley tries to occupy a lonely realm between the moderate and far-right wings of her party, her attempts to gain national traction — talking openly about her positions on abortion, taking a hard stance against transgender girls playing in girls’ sports, attacking Vice President Kamala Harris — appear to be falling flat with the Republican base at large.Polls show Ms. Haley stuck in the low single digits in Iowa and New Hampshire, and trailing both Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in her home state, South Carolina. Nationally, the first New York Times/Siena College poll of the 2024 campaign showed Mr. Trump carrying the support of 54 percent of likely Republican primary voters. Ms. Haley sat in a distant third, tied at 3 percent with former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.Ms. Haley is polling in the low single digits in Iowa and New Hampshire, and trailing both Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in her home state, South Carolina.John Tully for The New York TimesWorryingly for Ms. Haley, as Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has stumbled and given his competitors an opening, it has been Mr. Scott, her local Republican rival, who has appeared best positioned to benefit.“I wouldn’t dismiss her just yet,” said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. But, he added, “When you are treading water among your own party’s voters — that is a problem.”Allies of Ms. Haley, 51, the sole Republican woman in the race, argue that she has beaten long odds before, stunning political analysts to win the South Carolina governor’s office by climbing from fourth place in the polls and fund-raising.Her campaign says it has exceeded its benchmarks: At least 2,000 gathered in Charleston, S.C., for the kickoff of her presidential bid. Ms. Haley has held more events in Iowa and New Hampshire than most of her competitors, and her bid is attracting the interest of a wide mix of donors.When voters ask about how she can prevail, Ms. Haley points to retail politics — “get used to this face, because I am going to keep on coming back” — and her financial strength. Her top competitors have spent millions of dollars, with little to show for it, she suggests, because few voters have been paying attention in these early summer months.“We haven’t spent anything,” she said in Iowa City, declaring her campaign was about “to kick into full gear.” She added, “You will see me finish this.”But Mr. Trump poses a different type of obstacle for her, and for every other Republican candidate playing catch-up.Ms. Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under the former president, has carefully calibrated her approach to Mr. Trump and his unwavering followers. Delivering many of the same broadsides he does, but cloaking them in calm tones and plain language, she has alternated between criticism and praise of the former president.Ms. Haley at a campaign stop last month in Iowa City. She has spent years toeing the line between Reagan-Bush neoconservatism and the Trump-centric politics of today’s Republican voters.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesHer unwillingness to directly confront Mr. Trump has drawn criticism from some anti-Trump Republicans. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey recently compared the reluctance of Ms. Haley and other candidates to mention Mr. Trump to the “Harry Potter” world’s fear of uttering the name “Voldemort.”“Nikki, it’s OK,” Mr. Christie said. “Say his name. It’s all right.”Ms. Haley fired right back, saying: “I’m not obsessively anti-Trump like he is. I talk about policies.”At a gathering with six other Republican rivals on Sunday in Iowa — though not including Mr. Trump — Ms. Haley mentioned the former president in passing, not as a 2024 rival, but to recall how he “lost his mind” in delight over a briefing book she prepared while serving as his U.N. ambassador. Her speech was heavy on foreign policy, most notably warning that China was outpacing the United States in shipbuilding, hacking American infrastructure and developing “neuro-strike weapons” to “disrupt brain activity, so they can use it against military commanders.”Ms. Haley has spent years toeing the line between the Reagan-Bush neoconservatism she once sought to emulate and the Trump-centric politics of today’s Republican voters.During the 2016 election, when Mr. Trump first ran, she did not support him in the Republican primary or his pledge to build a border wall. But she eventually said she would vote for him and later agreed to serve as his ambassador. She left on good terms at the end of 2018, receiving a rare glowing review from Mr. Trump in an administration in which staff turmoil and turnover were rampant.After the Capitol riot, she faulted the president. But she later contended that he was needed in the Republican Party and lavished praise on his approach to foreign policy, including his dealings with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. She has since echoed Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration message, including an idea to deploy the military against drug cartels in Mexico.In recent stump speeches and political events, Ms. Haley has turned China — and not Mr. Trump — into her foil, amplifying her attacks on the Biden administration for its attempts to thaw relations with the global superpower.As governor of South Carolina, she lauded and welcomed Chinese companies, helping them expand or open new operations in the state. But on the 2024 trail, she has argued that this investment accounted for less than 2 percent of the jobs and projects her administration brought in, and that she did not learn how dangerous China was until she became U.N. ambassador.“I’ve been across the negotiating table from China,” Ms. Haley told an audience of more than 50 people at a manufacturing company in Barrington, N.H., promising to crack down on the “Chinese infiltration at our universities” and the importation of fentanyl from China across the Southwestern border. “They don’t play by the rules, they never have.”A bright spot for Ms. Haley is her fund-raising. She raised $7.3 million through her presidential campaign and affiliated committees from April through June, according to financial filings that revealed her strong appeal to small donors. Her robust network of bundlers, or supporters who raise money from friends and business associates, includes 125 such backers. Forty percent of them are first-time bundlers, and the group includes powerful women in business and politics, according to her campaign.Ms. Haley has turned China into her foil, attacking the Biden administration for its attempts to thaw relations with the global superpower.John Tully for The New York TimesJennifer Ann Nassour, one of her bundlers and a former chairwoman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, said Ms. Haley was in a prime position to break out at the first Republican debate this month.“No one wants to see another Trump-Biden showdown,” Ms. Nassour said, adding that it was “not good for democracy.”At the town hall event in Barrington, Toby Clarke, 64, asked Ms. Haley a question weighing on many G.O.P. voters who would like to move on from Mr. Trump: How can the Republican Party come together and avoid splitting its primary results in a way that hands the nomination to the former president?“Everybody is worried that this is going to turn into 2015 all over again,” Ms. Haley responded, assuring Mr. Clarke that the field of Republican candidates was smaller and that she was meeting the necessary benchmarks to pull ahead. “It’s not going to be 2015 all over again.”At an event at a vineyard in Hollis, N.H., later that day, with attendees shielded under umbrellas as rain poured from the sky, Ms. Haley expressed optimism, promising to outwork her rivals.“Republicans have lost the last seven out eight popular votes for president — that is nothing to be proud of,” she said. “We need a new generational leader.”Trip Gabriel More

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      Trump Calls for Recusal of Judge as His Lawyer Denies Pence’s 2020 Claims

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      Former President Donald J. Trump spent the weekend on the attack on Truth Social while his lawyer, John F. Lauro, ran through a gantlet of interviews Sunday morning.Appearing on five television networks Sunday morning, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump argued that his actions in the effort to overturn the 2020 election fell short of crimes and were merely “aspirational.”The remarks from his lawyer, John F. Lauro, came as Mr. Trump was blanketing his social media platform, Truth Social, with posts suggesting that his legal team was going to seek the recusal of Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the case, and try to move his trial out of Washington.With his client facing charges carrying decades in prison after a federal grand jury indicted Mr. Trump for his role in trying to overturn the election, his third criminal case this year, Mr. Lauro appeared in interviews on CNN, ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS. He endeavored to defend Mr. Trump, including against evidence that, as president, he pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to reject legitimate votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of false electors pledged to Mr. Trump.“What President Trump didn’t do is direct Vice President Pence to do anything,” Mr. Lauro said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He asked him in an aspirational way.”Mr. Lauro used the same defense on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” when asked about Mr. Trump’s now-infamous call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger. During that call, President Trump pressured Mr. Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” to win the state and suggested that Mr. Raffensperger could face criminal repercussions if he did not.“That was an aspirational ask,” Mr. Lauro said.His portrayal of Mr. Trump’s approach is at odds with two key moments in the indictment.In one, prosecutors say that on Jan. 5, 2021, Mr. Trump met alone with Mr. Pence, who refused to do what Mr. Trump wanted. When that happened, the indictment says, “the defendant grew frustrated and told the Vice President that the defendant would have to publicly criticize him.”Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, then alerted the head of Mr. Pence’s Secret Service detail, prosecutors said.That same day, after The Times reported that Mr. Pence had indeed told Mr. Trump that he lacked the authority to do what Mr. Trump wanted, the president issued a public statement calling the report “fake news.” According to the indictment, Mr. Trump also falsely asserted: “The Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.”As Mr. Lauro made the rounds on all five Sunday news shows — what is known as the “full Ginsburg,” from when Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William Ginsburg, did the same amid allegations about her affair with President Bill Clinton — Mr. Trump waged his own campaign on Truth Social.“WOW, it’s finally happened! Liddle’ Mike Pence, a man who was about to be ousted as Governor Indiana until I came along and made him V.P., has gone to the Dark Side,” Mr. Trump wrote on Saturday. A few days earlier, he mocked Mr. Pence, now a 2024 rival, for “attracting no crowds, enthusiasm or loyalty from people who, as a member of the Trump Administration, should be loving him.”Mr. Trump went on: “I never told a newly emboldened (not based on his 2% poll numbers!) Pence to put me above the Constitution, or that Mike was ‘too honest.’”His attack came after a judge warned Mr. Trump against intimidating witnesses and after prosecutors flagged another Truth Social post by Mr. Trump as potentially threatening.On Sunday, Mr. Trump also attacked Jack Smith, the special counsel in the Jan. 6 case, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, calling Mr. Smith “deranged” and Ms. Pelosi “sick” and “demented.”In one all-caps message, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Smith of waiting to bring the case until “right in the middle” of his election campaign.In the other posts, Mr. Trump attacked Ms. Pelosi, the former House speaker, who recently said that the former president had seemed like “a scared puppy” before his arraignment. “She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!” Mr. Trump wrote.And he channeled his grievances with the court process toward Judge Chutkan and toward the population of Washington, D.C., writing that he would never get a “fair trial.”For his part, Mr. Pence has been criticizing Mr. Trump’s actions in carefully calibrated terms. He has repeatedly used the same phrases, arguing that anyone who “puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” He repeated similar lines on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” following Mr. Lauro’s appearance, and on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”“What I want the American people to know is that President Trump was wrong then and he’s wrong now: that I had no right to overturn the election,” Mr. Pence told the CNN anchor Dana Bash. “I had no right to reject or return votes, and that, by God’s grace, I did my duty under the Constitution of the United States, and I always will.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Republican Attacks on ‘Woke’ Ideology Falling Flat With G.O.P. Voters

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      New polling shows national Republicans and Iowa Republican caucusgoers were more interested in “law and order” than battling “woke” schools, media and corporations.When it comes to the Republican primaries, attacks on “wokeness” may be losing their punch.For Republican candidates, no word has hijacked political discourse quite like “woke,” a term few can define but many have used to capture what they see as left-wing views on race, gender and sexuality that have strayed far beyond the norms of American society.Gov. Ron DeSantis last year used the word five times in 19 seconds, substituting “woke” for Nazis as he cribbed from Winston Churchill’s famous vow to battle a threatened German invasion in 1940. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”The term has become quick a way for candidates to flash their conservative credentials, but battling “woke” may have less political potency than they think. Though conservative voters might be irked at modern liberalism, successive New York Times/Siena College polls of Republican voters nationally and then in Iowa found that candidates were unlikely to win votes by narrowly focusing on rooting out left-wing ideology in schools, media, culture and business.Instead, Republican voters are showing a “hand’s off” libertarian streak in economics, and a clear preference for messages about “law and order” in the nation’s cities and at its borders.The findings hint why Mr. DeSantis, who has made his battles with “woke” schools and corporations central to his campaign, is struggling and again show off Mr. Trump’s keen understanding of part of the Republican electorate. Campaigning in Iowa in June, Mr. Trump was blunt: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”It was clearly a jab at Mr. DeSantis, but the Times’s polls suggest Mr. Trump may be right. Social issues like gay rights and once-obscure jargon like “woke” may not be having the effect many Republicans had hoped“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” explained Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md., who retired from a successful career in Hollywood where he said he saw his share of political correctness and liberal group think. Mr. Boyer said he didn’t like holding his tongue about his views on transgender athletes, but, he added, he does not want politicians to intervene. “I am a laissez-faire capitalist: Let the pocketbook decide,” he said.“Your idea of ‘wokeism’ might be different from mine,” said Christopher Boyer, a 63-year-old Republican actor in Hagerstown, Md.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWhen presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for a “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”Around 65 percent said they would choose the law and order candidate.Among those 65 and older, often the most likely age bracket to vote, only 17 percent signed on to the “anti-woke” crusade. Those numbers were nearly identical in Iowa, where the first ballots for the Republican nominee will be cast on Jan. 15.Mr. DeSantis’s famous fight against the Walt Disney Company over what he saw as the corporation’s liberal agenda exemplified the kind of economic warfare that seems to fare only modestly better. About 38 percent of Republican voters said they would back a candidate who promised to fight corporations that promote “woke” left ideology, versus the 52 percent who preferred “a candidate who says that the government should stay out of deciding what corporations should support.”Christy Boyd, 55, in Ligonier, Pa., made it clear she was no fan of the culture of tolerance that she said pervaded her region around Pittsburgh. As the perfect distillation of “woke” ideology, she mentioned “time blindness,” a phrase she views as simply an excuse for perpetual tardiness.But such aggravations do not drive her political desires.“If you don’t like what Bud Light did, don’t buy it,” she added, referring to the brand’s hiring of a transgender influencer, which contributed to a sharp drop in sales. “If you don’t like what Disney is doing, don’t go. That’s not the government’s responsibility.”Indeed, some Republican voters seemed to feel pandered to by candidates like Mr. DeSantis and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whose book “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” launched his political career.Lynda Croft, 82, said she was watching a rise in murders in her hometown Winston-Salem, N.C., and that has her scared. Overly liberal policies in culture and schools will course-correct on their own, she said.“If anyone actually believes in woke ideology, they are not in tune with the rest of society,” she said, “and parents will step in to deal with that.”In an interview, Mr. Ramaswamy said the evolving views of the electorate were important, and he had adapted to them. “Woke” corporate governance and school systems are a symptom of what he calls “a deeper void” in a society that needs a religious and nationalist renewal. The stickers that read “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek” are gone from his campaign stops, he said, replaced by hats that read “Truth.”“At the time I came to be focused on this issue, no one knew what the word was,” he said. “Now that they have caught up, the puck has moved. It’s in my rearview mirror as well.”Law and order and border security have become stand-ins for “fortitude,” he said, and that is clearly what Republican voters are craving.(The day after the interview, the Ramaswamy campaign blasted out a fund-raising appeal entitled “Wokeness killing the American Dream.”)DeSantis campaign officials emphasized that the governor in recent days had laid out policies on border security, the military and the economy. Foreign policy is coming, they say. But they also pointed to an interview on Fox News in which Mr. DeSantis did not back away from his social-policy focus.Along with several other Republican-led states, Florida passed a string of laws restricting what G.O.P. lawmakers considered evidence of “wokeness,” such as gender transition care for minors and diversity initiatives. Mr. DeSantis handily won re-election in November.“I totally reject, being in Iowa, New Hampshire, that people don’t think those are important,” he said of his social policy fights. “These families with children are thanking me for taking stands in Florida.”For candidates trying to break Mr. Trump’s hold on a Republican electorate that sees the former president as the embodiment of strength, the problem may be broader than ditching the term “woke.”As it turns out, social issues like gender, race and sexuality are politically complicated and may be less dominant than Mr. Trump’s rivals thought. The fact that Mr. Trump has been indicted three times and found legally liable for sexual abuse has not hurt him. Only 37 percent of Republican voters nationally described Mr. Trump as more moral than Mr. DeSantis (45 percent sided with Mr. DeSantis on the personality trait), yet in a head-to-head matchup between the two candidates, national Republican voters backed Mr. Trump by 31 percentage points, 62 percent to 31 percent.The Times/Siena poll did find real reluctance among Republican voters to accept transgender people. Only 30 percent said society should accept transgender people as the gender they identify with, compared with 58 percent who said society should not accept such identities.But half of Republican voters still support the right of gay and lesbian people to marry, against the 41 percent who oppose same-sex marriage. Fifty-one percent of Republican voters said they would choose a candidate promising to protect individual freedom over one guarding “traditional values.” The “traditional values” candidate would be the choice of 40 percent of Republicans.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, responded simply: “Americans want to return to a prosperous nation, and there’s only one person who can do that — President Trump.”Mr. Boyer, who played Robert E. Lee in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” bristled at having to make a choice: “It’s hardly an either-or: Why wouldn’t I want someone to fight for law and order and against this corrupt infiltration in our school systems?” he asked.But given a choice, he said, “the primary job of government is the protection of our country and there’s a tangible failure of that at our border.” More

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      Republicans Chose Their Fate When They Chose to Shield Trump

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      It’s not too much to say that the 2024 Republican presidential primary is effectively over. In fact, it’s been over. The earliest you could say it was over was Jan. 7, 2021, when most Republican politicians closed ranks around Donald Trump in the wake of the insurrection. The next earliest date was Feb. 13 of the same year, when the majority of Senate Republicans voted to acquit Trump of all charges in his second impeachment trial, leaving him free to run for office.With Trump now shielded from the immediate political consequences of trying to seize power, it was only a matter of time before he made his third attempt for the Republican presidential nomination. And now, a year out from the next Republican convention, he is the likely nominee — the consensus choice of most Republican voters. No other candidate comes close.According to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, 54 percent of Republicans nationwide support Trump for the 2024 nomination. The next most popular candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, gets 17 percent support. The next five candidates have either 2 percent or 3 percent support.You might think that Trump’s overwhelming lead is the product of a fragmented field, but that’s not true. If every candidate other than DeSantis left the race, and their votes went to DeSantis, Trump would still win by a nearly two-to-one margin.You can’t even blame the poor performance of DeSantis’s campaign. Has he burned through campaign cash with little to show for it? Yes. Is he tangled up in multiple scandals and controversies, including one in which a (now former) staffer created and shared a video with Nazi imagery? Yes. But even a flawless campaign would flounder against the fact that Trump remains the virtually uncontested leader of the Republican Party.And make no mistake: Trump’s leadership has not been seriously contested by either his rivals or the broader Republican establishment. How else would you describe the decision to defend Trump against any investigation or legal scrutiny that comes his way? Republican elites and conservative media have successfully persuaded enough Republican voters that Trump is the victim of a conspiracy of perfidious liberals and their “deep state” allies.They have done a good job convincing those voters that Trump deserves to be back in office. And sure enough, they are poised to give him yet another chance to win the White House.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on Congress’s power to regulate, and discipline, the Supreme Court.Setting aside both the legislature’s power to impeach judges and its power of the purse over the judiciary — there’s nothing in the rules that says the court must have clerks, assistants or even a place from which to work — there are at least two provisions of the Constitution that authorize Congress to, in Alito’s words, “regulate the Supreme Court.”My Friday column was on the federal indictment of President Donald Trump on charges related to his effort to overturn the presidential election.The criminal-legal system is now moving, however slowly, to hold Trump accountable. This is a good thing. But as we mark this development, we should also remember that the former president’s attempt to overthrow our institutions would not have been possible without those institutions themselves.Now ReadingDavid Waldstreicher on writing history for the public for Boston Review.A.S. Hamrah on the “Mission: Impossible” franchise for The New York Review of Books.Brianna Di Monda on the film “Women Talking” for Dissent.The New Republic on the 100 most significant political films of all time.Richard Hasen on the federal case against Donald Trump for Slate.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieThis is the remnant of a downtown storefront in Quincy, Fla. I took this earlier in the summer during a trip to visit family in the area.Now Eating: Red Curry Lentils With Sweet Potatoes and SpinachThis is a wonderfully comforting vegetarian meal that is very easy to put together, especially if you have staples like lentils and coconut milk already on hand. If you don’t have vegetable stock, just use water. Or if you’re not a strict vegetarian and prefer chicken stock, you can go with that instead. Although this is Thai-inspired, I think it goes very well with a warm piece of cornbread. Recipe from New York Times Cooking.Ingredients3 tablespoons olive oil1 pound sweet potatoes (about 2 medium sweet potatoes), peeled and cut into ¾-inch cubes1 medium yellow onion, chopped3 tablespoons Thai red curry paste3 garlic cloves, minced (about 1 tablespoon)1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled and grated (about 1 tablespoon)1 red chile, such as Fresno or serrano, halved, seeds and ribs removed, then minced1 teaspoon ground turmeric1 cup red lentils, rinsed4 cups low-sodium vegetable stock2 teaspoons kosher salt, plus more to taste1 (13-ounce) can full-fat coconut milk1 (4-to-5-ounce) bag baby spinach½ lime, juicedFresh cilantro leaves, for servingDirectionsIn a Dutch oven or pot, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium-high. Add the sweet potatoes and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned all over, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer the browned sweet potatoes to a plate and set aside.Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil to the pot and set the heat to medium-low. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until translucent, 4 to 6 minutes. Add the curry paste, garlic, ginger, chile and turmeric, and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute.Add the lentils, stock, salt and browned sweet potatoes to the pot and bring to a boil over high. Lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until the lentils are just tender, 20 to 25 minutes.Add the coconut milk and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has reduced and the lentils are creamy and falling apart, 15 to 20 minutes.Add the spinach and stir until just wilted, 2 to 3 minutes. Off the heat, stir in the lime juice and season with salt to taste.Divide among shallow bowls and top with cilantro. More

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      in Elections

      The Normal Paths to Beating Trump Are Closing

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      In the quest to escape Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics, there have been two camps: normalizers and abnormalizers.The first group takes its cues from an argument made in these pages by the Italian-born economist Luigi Zingales just after Trump’s 2016 election. Comparing the new American president-elect to Silvio Berlusconi, the populist who bestrode Italian politics for nearly two decades, Zingales argued that Berlusconi’s successful opponents were the ones who treated him “as an ordinary opponent” and “focused on the issues, not on his character.” Attempts to mobilize against the right-wing populist on purely moral grounds or to rely on establishment solidarity to deem him somehow illegitimate only sustained Berlusconi’s influence and popularity.The counterargument has been that you can’t just give certain forms of abnormality a pass; otherwise, you end up tolerating not just demagogy but also lawbreaking, corruption and authoritarianism. The more subtle version of the argument insists that normalizing a demagogue is also ultimately a political mistake as well as a moral one and that you can’t make the full case against a figure like Trump if you try to leave his character and corruption out of it.Trump won in 2016 by exploiting the weak points in this abnormalizing strategy, as both his Republican primary opponents and then Hillary Clinton failed to defeat him with condemnation and quarantines, instead of reckoning with his populism’s substantive appeal.His presidency was a more complicated business. I argued throughout, and still believe, that the normalizing strategy was the more effective one, driving Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms (when the messaging was heavily about health care and economic policy) and Joe Biden’s “let’s get back to normal” presidential bid. Meanwhile, the various impeachments, Lincoln Project fund-raising efforts, Russia investigations and screaming newspaper coverage seemed to fit Zingales’s model of establishment efforts that actually solidified Trump’s core support.But it’s true that Biden did a fair bit of abnormalizing in his campaign rhetoric, and you could argue that the establishment panic was successful at keeping Trump’s support confined to a version of his 2016 coalition, closing off avenues to expand his popular appeal.Whatever your narrative, the events of Jan. 6 understandably gave abnormalizers the upper hand, while inflation and other issues took the wind out of the more normal style of Democratic politics — leading to a 2022 midterm campaign in which Biden and the Democrats leaned more heavily on democracy-in-peril arguments than policy.But when this abnormalizing effort was successful (certainly more successful than I expected), it seemed to open an opportunity for normalizers within the Republican Party, letting a figure like Ron DeSantis attack Trump on pragmatic grounds, as a proven vote loser whose populist mission could be better fulfilled by someone else.Now, though, that potential dynamic seems to be evaporating, unraveled by the interaction between the multiplying indictments of Trump and DeSantis’s weak performance so far on the national stage. One way or another, 2024 increasingly looks like a full-abnormalization campaign.Post-indictments, for DeSantis or some other Republican to rally past Trump, an important faction of G.O.P. voters would have to grow fatigued with Trump the public enemy and outlaw politician — effectively conceding to the American establishment’s this-is-not-normal crusade.In the more likely event of a Biden-Trump rematch, the remarkable possibility of a campaign run from prison will dominate everything. The normal side of things won’t cease to matter, the condition of the economy will still play its crucial role, but the sense of abnormality will warp every aspect of normal partisan debate.Despite all my doubts about the abnormalization strategy, despite Trump’s decent poll numbers against Biden at the moment, my guess is that this will work out for the Democrats. The Stormy Daniels indictment still feels like a partisan put-up job. But in the classified documents case, Trump’s guilt seems clear-cut. And while the Jan. 6 indictment seems more legally uncertain, it will focus constant national attention on the same gross abuses of office that cost Trumpist Republicans so dearly in 2022.The fact that the indictments are making it tougher to unseat Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is just tough luck for anti-Trump conservatives. Trump asked for this, his supporters are choosing this, and his Democratic opponents may get both the moral satisfaction of a conviction and the political benefits of beating a convict-candidate at the polls.But my guesses about Trump’s political prospects have certainly been wrong before. And there is precedent for an abnormalization strategy going all the way to prosecution without actually pushing the demagogue offstage. A precedent like Berlusconi, in fact, who faced 35 separate criminal court cases after he entered politics, received just one clear conviction — and was finally removed from politics only by the most normal of all endings: his old age and death.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