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      How the Rise of QAnon Broke Conspiracy Culture

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      The date was Jan. 20, 2021, and Stephen Miles Lewis was trying to keep the peace.Two weeks before, a mob of pro-Trump protesters had stormed the Capitol building, and the circles Mr. Lewis ran in were now brimming with tension. Many of his closest friends had been outraged by what they saw. But he also knew someone who had been there, who now claimed that the violence had been stirred up by antifa agents disguised as Trump supporters.Mr. Lewis, a middle-aged man with a round face and a gray beard who goes by the nickname SMiles, sat at his desk, in front of a wall covered with posters of aliens, flying saucers and Bigfoot. In a YouTube video, he urged viewers to “take a step back and hopefully think, meditate, reflect on the times that we’re in,” to not “malign the others’ viewpoint.” He expressed frustration that the term “conspiracy theorist” was increasingly being used as an insult. After all, he pointed out: “I am a conspiracy theorist.”At the time, Mr. Lewis was trying to project calm, to help ensure that the community he’d been part of since he was 18 didn’t tear itself apart. But in the years since, he has found himself unsettled by the darker elements of a world he thought he knew.Over the past year, I’ve been part of an academic research project seeking to understand how the internet changed conspiracy theories. Many of the dynamics the internet creates are, at this point, well understood: We know its capacity to help users find one another, making it easier than ever for people to get involved in conspiracy networks; we also know how social media platforms prioritize inflammatory content and that as a result, ideas and information that make people angry travel farther.What we felt was missing from this story, though, was what this period of change looked like from the perspective of conspiracy theorists themselves.My team has been speaking to researchers and writers who were part of this world or connected to it in the pre-social media era. And we’ve learned something surprising: Many of the people we’ve interviewed told us they, too, have spent the past few years baffled by the turn conspiracy culture has taken. Many expressed discomfort with and at times outright disgust for QAnon and the related theories claiming the 2020 election had been stolen and said that they felt as if the very worst elements of conspiracy culture had become its main representatives.It’s worth noting that our sample was biased by who agreed to speak to us. While all of conspiracy culture can be characterized by its deep skepticism, that skepticism doesn’t always point in the same direction. Although we’ve approached as many people as possible, so far it’s mostly been those on the left of the political spectrum who have been interested in talking to university researchers. (They’ve also been overwhelmingly men.)Still, what our interviewees had to say was striking: The same forces that have made conspiracy theories unavoidable in our politics have also fundamentally changed them, to the extent that even those who pride themselves on their openness to alternative viewpoints — Sept. 11 truthers, Kennedy assassination investigators and U.F.O. cover-up researchers — have been alarmed by what they’ve seen.Mr. Lewis’s sense that conspiracy networks would be rived by tensions in the aftermath of Jan. 6 was well founded. Rumors immediately began circulating that the rioters had been infiltrated by agents instigating violence — an accusation that some of the rioters themselves took to social media to denounce. Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack, was simultaneously lionized as a martyr and derided as a false flag.All this ultimately left Mr. Lewis less inclined to play peacemaker and more inclined to take a step away from it all. Today, he says, he increasingly avoids some of the language that floats around the conspiracysphere: Terms like “the illuminati” used to feel like fun ideas to play with. Now he worries they could be used to create scapegoats, or even encourage violence.SMiles Lewis grew up in Austin, Texas, with his mother — his parents separated when he was very young — and it was his close connection with her that first sparked his interest in the unexplained: “There was a sense, early on with my Mom and I, where we felt like we were reading each other’s minds,” he said. The two of them would watch shows like “That’s Incredible!,” which retold stories of paranormal encounters. Mr. Lewis recalls his mother telling him after one episode: “If you are ever in distress, just concentrate on me really hard, and I will get the message.” Her theory got put to the test when Mr. Lewis was a teenager: Once, when home alone, he heard voices in their yard after dark. Afraid, he considered calling his mother, but the fear of losing precious new adult freedoms stopped him. The next day she asked him if everything had been all right, because out of nowhere, she had felt the overwhelming urge to call. Mr. Lewis took this as confirmation that there was more to human abilities than science could yet rationalize.Once Mr. Lewis graduated from high school, he joined the Austin chapter of the Mutual U.F.O. Network, an organization for enthusiasts to meet and discuss sightings. From there, he became the leader of a support group for people who believed they’d had close encounters with aliens. Mr. Lewis never had such an experience himself, but he said the group didn’t mind — they just appreciated that he kept an open mind.U.F.O.s and conspiracy theories have always been intertwined, but it was Sept. 11 that really turned Mr. Lewis political. As he speculated in an editorial for The Austin Para Times after the planes hit the towers, he felt that he had “been a witness to Amerika’s greatest Reichstag event ” — a planned disaster to justify fascist encroachment on civil liberties, something many of the writers Mr. Lewis admired had warned of.For Mr. Lewis, conspiracism was always about thinking critically about the narratives of the powerful and questioning your own biases. In our interviews, he saw his interest in the parapolitical — in how intelligence and security services quietly shape the world — as connected to his political activism, not so different from attending an abortion rights rally or joining a local anti-Patriot Act group. All were about standing up for civil liberties and citizen privacy against an opportunistic, overreaching state.But for all Mr. Lewis’s political idealism, there was also something undeniably invigorating about conspiracy culture. This was a scene free from the stifling hegemony of sensible mainstream thought, a place where writers, filmmakers and artists could explore whatever ideas or theories interested them, however weird or improper. This radical commitment to resisting censorship in all its forms sometimes led to decisions that, from the perspective of 2023, look like dangerous naïveté at best: Reading countercultural material from the 1990s can feel like navigating a political minefield, where musings about the North American “mothman” and experimental poetry sit side-by-side with Holocaust denial. Conspiracy culture was tolerant of banned or stigmatized ideas in a way many of our interviewees said they found liberating, but this tolerance always had a dangerous edge.Still, Mr. Lewis looks back nostalgically on days when there seemed to be more respect and camaraderie. The aftermath of Sept. 11 and the war on terror presented, he said, a threat to citizens that the conspiracy-friendly left and right could unite over. Now the rift between the two was deep and vicious. He felt as if the ideas that had first attracted him to conspiratorial thought had been “weaponized,” pointing people away from legitimate abuses of power and toward other citizens — the grieving parents of Sandy Hook, for example — and at times involved real-world violence.When I asked Mr. Lewis when he first heard of QAnon, he told me a story about a family member who’d sent him a video that began with what he saw as a fairly unobjectionable narrative of government abuses of power. “I’m nodding my head, I’m agreeing,” he said. Then it got to the satanic pedophile networks.The conspiracy culture that Mr. Lewis knew had celebrated the unusual and found beauty in the bizarre. He had friends who considered themselves pagans, friends who participated in occult rituals. “The vast majority of them are not blood-drinking lunatics!” he told me. Some of his friends were no longer comfortable talking about their beliefs for fear of becoming targets.Others we interviewed told us similar stories: about a scene that had once felt niche, vibrant and underground but had transformed into something almost unrecognizable. Greg Bishop, a friend of Mr. Lewis’s and editor of the 1990s zine The Excluded Middle, which covered U.F.O.s, conspiracy theories and psychedelia, among other things, told me that as the topics he’d covered had become more mainstream, he’d watched the vitriol and division increase. “You’d see somebody at a convention who was frothing at the mouth or whatever, figuratively, and that’s changed into something that’s basically a part of the culture now.”Joseph E. Green, an author and parapolitical researcher, described how in the past, attending conferences on conspiracy topics, “there’s always a couple of guys in there who will tell you after they get familiar with you that the Jews run the world.” Mr. Green had no interest in such ideas, but nor did he think they ran much risk of going mainstream. But somewhere along the way, conspiracy spaces on the internet had become “a haven” for the “lunatic fringe” of the right wing, which in turn spilled back into the real world.Jonathan Vankin, a journalist who wrote about the conspiracy scene of the 1990s, said watching the emergence of QAnon had been disillusioning. Mr. Vankin never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, but as a journalist he felt an appreciation for them. They may not have always gotten the facts right, but their approach was a way of saying, “The official story, the way we’re fed that every day, isn’t really necessarily the way it is.” Now, he said, conspiracy theories felt more like “tools of control” that changed how people saw the world, not in a liberatory sense but “in a distorted way” — one that no longer challenged power but served its interests.Have conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists gotten nastier? It’s worth recalling that the reactionary, violent impulse that we think of as characterizing contemporary conspiracism was always there: The John Birch Society of the 1960s and its hunt for secret Communists in the very top levels of government has been described by some historians as an early ancestor of QAnon. And it’s also worth remembering that the historical friendliness between left and right conspiracism could be ethically murky. When Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more, he said he was acting in retaliation for the Waco siege of 1993 and its aftermath — what he and many others in militia circles saw as the government covering up a deliberate massacre of its own citizens. Some liberal writers in the conspiracy scene defended him — some even went as far as to suggest he had been framed.What does seem clear is that conspiracy theories have become less of a specialist interest and more of an unavoidable phenomenon that affects us all, whether in the form of anti-vaccination sentiments or election denialism. With both Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump running for president, none of this seems likely to fade away anytime soon.Michael Barkun, a scholar of religious extremism and conspiracy theories, describes conspiracy-minded networks as spaces of “stigmatized knowledge” — ideas that are ignored or rejected by the institutions that society relies on to help us make sense of the world. Recently, though, Mr. Barkun writes, in part because of the development of the internet, that stigma has been weakening as what “was once clearly recognizable as ‘the fringe’ is now beginning to merge with the mainstream.”The story we’ve heard from our interviewees is that this mainstreaming process has had profound effects, fundamentally altering the character of both the theories themselves and those who claim to be adherents, by making conspiracy theories more accessible and more potentially profitable. It’s these shifts that have left people like Mr. Lewis feeling so out of place in the spaces they once saw as their ideological homes.The conspiracy scene, on left and right, immediately grasped the significance of the World Wide Web’s arrival in the 1990s. For people who wanted to explore stigmatized topics, the liberatory potential was obvious, and most of the people we spoke to were early adopters. Mr. Lewis himself at one point had between 70 and 80 registered domain names.And yet, despite pouring more effort into his passion than some people put into their jobs, Mr. Lewis never made much, if any, money from it. When I asked him about it, it didn’t even seem to have occurred to him to try. This wasn’t unusual; the biggest names in conspiracy culture before the internet — radio hosts like Bill Cooper and Mae Brussell — may have sold books and tapes but hardly built media empires. Making money seemed secondary to the principle of getting the truth — as they saw it, at least — out there, for like-minded people to debate and discuss.Today’s conspiracy theorists are different. Termed “conspiracy entrepreneurs” by academics, they combine the audience-growth strategies of social media lifestyle influencers with a mixture of culture war and survivalist rhetoric. They’re active on various platforms, constantly responding to new developments, and most of them are selling their audience something on the side.One of the first entrepreneurs to pioneer this approach was Alex Jones, who a recent court case revealed had an estimated combined net worth with his company of up to $270 million. Before his name became synonymous with conspiracy theories, Mr. Jones got his start in Austin community access television in the 1990s — a scene that Mr. Lewis was intimately familiar with. But as Mr. Lewis and others tell it, Mr. Jones always possessed both an aggressive streak and a sense of showmanship that many of his contemporaries lacked, making him perfect for social media, where conspiracy theorists, like everyone else, are competing in an attention economy.“The last thing I want to do is sit on a recorded video and say to you, ‘In our day, conspiracy theories were kinder and gentler,’” said Ruffin Prevost, an editor at ParaScope, a now-defunct site set up in 1996 that covered U.F.O.s, secret societies, and mind control, among other subjects. “But there is definitely a different tenor to how people go about this stuff now,” he said. “It’s almost like you’ve got to be strident and hard-core about whatever your thing is to have enough bona fides to capture that audience.”The belief that the incentives of social media had shorn conspiracy research of its serious, scholarly edge was a common theme. “The things that we’re describing are not really the same thing,” Mr. Green declared to me flatly, comparing the archival work and conferences that he had been involved with to the salacious videos of QAnon influencers. The scholarly work “is never going to have that commercial appeal,” he said. “You know, just like if I try to get somebody to watch a film by Ingmar Bergman, it’s much more difficult than to get them to watch a film by Michael Bay. It’s almost not even the same thing, right?”In the minds of many conspiracy theorists, Mr. Jones and his imitators don’t deserve the title. In his 2017 book, “Trumpocalypse Now!: The Triumph of the Conspiracy Spectacle,” Kenn Thomas, a towering figure in the world of 1990s conspiracy, termed the recent crop of opportunists looking to profit from the hard work of researchers “conspiracy celebrities.” And the conspiracy celebrity in chief, Mr. Thomas said, was Donald Trump, who referred to conspiracy theories he hadn’t researched and didn’t understand. To the world at large, it might seem as if we’re living in a time in which conspiratorial thinking is ascendant. But in his foreword to Mr. Thomas’s book, Robert Sterling, editor of a 1990s and 2000s countercultural conspiracy blog called The Konformist, argued otherwise: “If this moment is a victory for the conspiracy culture,” he wrote, “it is a Pyrrhic victory at best.”“There’s a few different stories we can tell about what happened,” Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and author, told me. Conspiracy culture up through the ’90s was dominated by what could be called a “radio sensibility.” Fringe topics were mostly discussed on late-night talk shows. There were guest experts, and listeners could call in, but the host still functioned as a (lenient) gatekeeper, and the theories themselves conformed to a narrative format. They were, for the most part, complete stories, with beginnings, middles and ends.In the digital age, he said, sense-making had become a fragmented, nonlinear and crowdsourced affair that as a result could never reach a conclusion and lacked internal logic. There were always potential new connections to be spotted — in the case of the 2020 election, for instance, two imprisoned Italian hackers, or a voting machine company founded by Venezuelans. This lack of satisfying resolution meant the new theories had no natural stopping point, he said, and their perpetual motion eventually brought them to a place that was “much more strident” — “even amongst the left.”The new “born-digital” conspiracy theories, like QAnon and the Great Reset, are constantly looking forward by necessity. Attaching themselves to the fast-paced flow of current events and trending topics is a matter of survival on social media, which can also explain why those who perpetuate them rarely stay focused on unpacking just one event: The Great Reset theory, for example, began by alleging that the Covid-19 pandemic had been deliberately engineered by the global elite, but soon expanded to encompass climate change, economic inflation and local traffic schemes.Some academics have argued that even when conspiracy theories warn of dark and dystopian futures, they are fundamentally optimistic: They are assertions that humans are ultimately in control of events, and humans can stop whatever terrible catastrophe is coming around the corner. But perhaps the problem is that human beings are no longer really in control of the conspiracy theories themselves. Even when Q, the anonymous figure who sparked the QAnon movement, stopped posting, the movement’s adherents carried on.Before we had even spoken over Zoom, Mr. Lewis sent me a 2022 Medium article written by Rani Baker that he said summed up a lot of his feelings about the topic. It was titled “So When, Exactly, Did Conspiracy Culture Stop Being Fun?” It was a question he said he had been struggling with too.When I asked Mr. Lewis if he had become more moderate over time, he was ambivalent. He said he maintains his skepticism about power and the state, but he’s less dogmatic these days — perhaps because he’s gained a new appreciation for the destructive power of uncompromising narratives. His thinking on Sept. 11, in particular, has evolved, from what truthers call MIHOP (Made It Happen on Purpose) to LIHOP (Let It Happen on Purpose) to today, when he allows it might have been something very different: an event foreseeable in the abstract, but as a horrific consequence of decades of U.S. interference in the Middle East, not a government’s deliberate attack on its own people.But from Mr. Lewis’s perspective, asking if he had moderated his views wasn’t quite the right question. For him and many of the others we spoke to, the paranormal and the parapolitical had been their passion and their home for their entire adult lives, places where they had found friends, ideas and ways of theorizing about the world that fascinated and excited them. They were used to their interest in these topics making them outsiders. Now they found themselves living with one foot in and one foot out of the current conspiracy scene, which had become increasingly popular, ubiquitous and dangerous. As they saw it, it wasn’t that they had rejected conspiracy culture; conspiracy culture was leaving them behind.As we wrapped up one of our interviews, Mr. Lewis told me that he finds himself increasingly returning to listening to old broadcasts of his to see if he can make sense of when that turning point began.“I keep trying to imagine,” he said. “Like, I think of the time before, and I think of the time now, and it’s like, yeah, where did the transition happen? Were there milestones along the way? Were there signs, portents, that we could have recognized?” He trails off and pauses. “And I don’t have the answer to this, but that’s kind of where my mind keeps going.”Annie Kelly is a postdoctoral researcher working on conspiracy theories at King’s College London and the University of Manchester. She is also the British correspondent for the podcast “QAnon Anonymous.”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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      Pence Reaches Fork in Road of 2024 Campaign With New Trump Indictment

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      Through four years as Donald J. Trump’s vice president, or perhaps three years and 350 days, Mike Pence brandished a peerless talent: insisting that all was going smoothly amid plain evidence to the contrary.His 2024 campaign, he has long insisted, is going smoothly.“I have great confidence in Republican primary voters,” he said in an interview, riding to an Iowa hog roast last weekend. “I’m confident we’re going to get a fresh look.”It seemed notable that Mr. Trump, never shy about knocking anyone he views as a threat, had barely bothered to attack him in the race to that point.It was early, Mr. Pence suggested.“I think we’re coming,” he said calmly, “to a fork in the road.”The fork has arrived.As the former lieutenant to the Republican front-runner and a critical witness to that front-runner’s alleged crimes against democracy, Mr. Pence is campaigning now as many things: anti-abortion warrior, unbending conservative, believer in “heavy doses of civility.”Yet he is running most viscerally, whether he intends to or not, as a cautionary tale — a picture of what can happen when anyone, even someone as loyal as he was, defies Mr. Trump.“Anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president,” Mr. Pence said on a campaign conference call on Wednesday, during which supporters were reassured that he was on track to qualify for the first Republican debate. “Anyone who asks someone else to put them over their oath to the Constitution should never be president again.”At minimum, he has gotten his former running mate’s attention.“I feel badly for Mike Pence,” Mr. Trump posted on Wednesday on his social media site, Truth Social, repeating unfounded election claims. His former vice president, he said, was “attracting no crowds, enthusiasm or loyalty from people who, as a member of the Trump administration, should be loving him.”Mr. Pence’s most prominent turns this summer have been in court documents regarding his former boss, not in early states.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Pence’s early difficulties are not shocking. Mr. Trump continues to dominate among Republicans, and much of the party’s base despises Mr. Pence for his lone act of major public defiance: resisting efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss.But to see Mr. Pence up close, at stops across Iowa and New Hampshire in recent weeks, is to absorb the bracing particulars of a campaign not sparking — the creaky score of polite clapping in modest rooms — and of a candidate convinced he will be judged kindly by history, unable to hustle that history along.His most prominent turns this summer have been in court documents, not in early states. Many key details in the federal indictment against Mr. Trump, which said that Mr. Pence took “contemporaneous notes,” are culled from conversations between them. At one point, the indictment recounted, Mr. Trump let fly a three-word rebuke: “You’re too honest.”If so, this does not seem to have done Mr. Pence many favors as a candidate (though the campaign has already repurposed the “Too Honest” label for T-shirts and hats). His fund-raising has been meager. He is polling, at best, a very, very distant third or fourth.While his team says the campaign has gone according to plan, noting his late entry in the race compared with some competitors’, seven other Republicans say they have qualified for the debate later this month, a group that includes two rivals who joined the primary the same week he did in June.At a candidate forum last week in Des Moines, where multiple extended ovations greeted Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence strained to coax applause at times even while serving up the reddest of meat. (“Americans are facing one man-made crisis after another, and that man’s name is Joe Biden,” he said, to near silence.)Mr. Pence has compelled supporters to worry openly about the size of his venues as he speaks in modest rooms.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesHe has failed to dissuade voters from ascribing foreboding meaning to the mundane. (“Is that a sign?” a woman whispered in Hudson, N.H., noticing a small snake near Mr. Pence’s foot as he spoke outdoors.)He has compelled some supporters to worry openly about the size of his venues.“So tiny — you’re a vice president, for heaven’s sake,” Shirley Noakes, 84, said before he arrived to another crowd of dozens in Meredith, N.H.For those who once considered Mr. Pence the chief enabler in Mr. Trump’s White House — buoying him through relentless executive chaos that rattled democratic institutions well before January 2021 — any campaign stumbles amount to a well-earned comeuppance.Mr. Trump was the nation’s essential man, Mr. Pence long attested, and more than that, “a good man.” (He does not use that adjective anymore.)Asked in the interview if he saw himself as an example to other Republicans who remain devoted to the former president, Mr. Pence did not say no. He reiterated his pre-Jan. 6 dedication to Mr. Trump “through thick and thin, until my oath to the Constitution required me to do otherwise.”“I would leave to others,” he said, “any judgment about what that says about the president.”Among some who admire Mr. Pence, for his stand at the Capitol and otherwise, his campaign thus far has been confounding, a mission without a near-term political rationale.“He doesn’t really have a unique selling proposition,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who has both praised Mr. Pence for what he did on Jan. 6 and been accused of helping to perpetuate Mr. Trump’s election lies. “In terms of John F. Kennedy’s ‘Profiles in Courage,’ I think that Pence is a very admirable person. In terms of that being a way to win the Republican nomination, I think it doesn’t have any traction.”Mr. Pence said he thought Mr. Gingrich was “not giving Republican primary voters enough credit.”But regardless, Mr. Pence said, this race is a calling for him and his wife, Karen Pence, no matter how it ends. “Campaigns should be about something more important than the candidate’s election,” he said.Mr. Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, during the opening prayer at the Iowa hog roast. Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAnd this one, at least, is poised to answer some questions in the interim.What do Americans think of Mike Pence now, without someone else blocking their view? What should they think?“You want to take a picture or something?” he asked with a smile recently in Barrington, N.H., arriving unannounced to a home décor shop whose Republican proprietors appreciated the visit, they said later, but did not support him. “Just in case I turn out to be somebody important.”Trump’s opposite ‘in every way’Mr. Pence has imagined himself as a prospective president for some time, entertaining White House runs during his years as a congressman and Indiana governor.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Pence looks like a presidential candidate who knows that he looks like a presidential candidate.“Out of central casting,” Mr. Trump used to say of him, in happier times, and the Pence 2024 team seems inclined to sustain the aesthetic.He still shakes hands with his whole body — leaning, nodding, left palm on a voter’s upper back.He still remembers names and local favorites, pandering with impunity. (In New Hampshire: “I stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts the other day …” In Iowa: “I look forward to seeing you at Casey’s and Pizza Ranch…”)He is still liable to point straight ahead suddenly, as if drawing a firearm in the credits of a Hoosier James Bond, for the closing flourish of his remarks.“The best” — point! — “days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”Mr. Pence, 64, has imagined himself as a prospective president for some time, entertaining White House runs during his years as a congressman and Indiana governor. In his 2022 memoir, he said he had developed “a healthy distrust of my own ambition.”Much of Mr. Pence’s career can read now as a study in suboptimal timing, with a politician who could seem almost ostentatiously out of step with the moment.In 2004, dismayed at the spending decisions of a Republican administration, Mr. Pence said he felt like “the frozen man” as a lonely voice for fiscal restraint in Congress. “Frozen before the revolution, thawed after it was over,” he said then. “A minuteman who showed up 10 years too late.”In 2016, he endorsed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for president days before Mr. Cruz dropped out. “Cruz’s vision of our party hewed the closest to mine,” he reasoned in his book.It was Mr. Trump who gave Mr. Pence a timely lifeline anyway, inviting him on the ticket during a tough re-election race in Indiana.For all of Mr. Trump’s volatility, people who know both men said, their relationship was often buttressed by genuine affection.Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, recalled Mr. Trump’s glee at introducing him to Mr. Pence shortly after their election in 2016. “He said, ‘Robert, he is absolutely fantastic,’” Mr. Jeffress remembered. “‘He is opposite me in every way.’”Surely it helped relations that the dynamic between the two was never ambiguous: There was one star, one principal, one sun around which the operation would orbit.Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence a timely lifeline when he invited him on the ticket during a tough re-election race back home.Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn his stump speech, Mr. Pence speaks about being “well-known” but “not known well,” a man often seen standing quietly behind another man.“Just a half-step off,” he told a couple dozen supporters in Ames, Iowa, “off the shoulder of the president.”In the interview, he noted: “I don’t believe that we ever agreed to a single profile interview in four years. Because I never wanted the story to be about me.” (As it happened, Mr. Trump did not want that, either.)Eventually, nightmarishly, the story became about him.Mr. Pence said he sensed in the days after the Capitol riot that Mr. Trump was “deeply remorseful about what had occurred.”The former president offers no apology for his role in the violence that surrounded Mr. Pence and his family that day.Breaking a vise grip he helped createMr. Pence at a first-responder round table meeting in Nevada, Iowa, last month, where he repeated a mantra of his on the campaign trail: “So help me God.”Jordan Gale for The New York TimesFour words accompany almost any public appearance by Mr. Pence.“So help me God,” he said in Nevada, Iowa, convening with first responders.“So help me God,” he said in Napa, Calif., at a gathering of Catholic conservatives.“So help me God,” he said in Meredith, N.H. “Which happens to be the title of my book.”Friends say Mr. Pence was always cleareyed about — and unmoved by — his steep odds in 2024. That he joined the field anyway, they suggest, says more about his faith than his ego.“My sense is there was a really long and interesting discussion with God,” said Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who decided against a run himself, speaking highly of Mr. Pence after watching the candidate forum in Des Moines.But a vexing political irony for Mr. Pence has persisted: Mr. Trump’s unyielding support among many conservatives — a vise grip that the former vice president must break to have any electoral hope — can be traced in large measure to Mr. Pence.Mr. Jeffress said the symbolic resonance of Mr. Pence’s 2016 selection by Mr. Trump was immeasurable to evangelical voters especially, enshrining a stalwart of the right beside an ideologically flexible nominee. “And now, the overwhelming majority of evangelicals still support Trump,” he added, “because he has a track record.” (Mr. Jeffress is supporting Mr. Trump.)Mr. Pence suggested that this history is partly why he felt called to the 2024 campaign. In 2016, he said, Mr. Trump made “a tacit promise” to govern as a conservative.“He makes no such promise today,” Mr. Pence said.As other candidates, including Mr. Trump, hedge and deflect their positions on abortion restrictions, Mr. Pence has eagerly promoted his role in vetting the Trump-nominated Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.“He has forced the other contenders to step up and say where they stand,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. “I think he has the potential to do that as well on other issues.”Mr. Pence has tried to reach conservative voters by taking a stand on abortion, an issue other candidates, including Mr. Trump, have avoided.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesA smattering of encouragement has come from the nonvoting set. In Meredith, where several guests thanked Mr. Pence for his actions on Jan. 6, a 15-year-old named Quinn Mitchell sent the Q. and A. session into a brief hush.Given the former president’s conduct, he asked, “do you think Christians should vote for Donald Trump?”Mr. Pence held for a beat, proceeding carefully.“I’m running for president of the United States because I think I should be the next president,” he said to applause.The young attendee understood, he said later, that the candidate was probably best served avoiding a clean yes or no.But when the two met afterward, Mr. Pence took care to commend the questioner.“You have a bright future,” he wrote on a poster the teen had brought. “God bless.” More

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      Donald Trump’s Way of Speaking Defies All Logic

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      Not long after Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, left the White House, I asked him about the rambling telephone call he had participated in during which Mr. Trump told Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to find him enough votes to overcome Joe Biden’s lead in the state.During our conversation, Mr. Meadows didn’t exactly try to defend Mr. Trump or himself but rather took a stab at putting this potentially criminal request in the context of the unusual epistemology that almost everyone around Mr. Trump has come to regard as part and parcel of his presidency.“The president has a certain way of speaking,” said Mr. Meadows. “And what he means — well, the sum can be greater or less than the whole.”The words that will very likely get Mr. Trump indicted in Georgia, and possibly Mr. Meadows along with him, were, a weary Mr. Meadows seemed to be saying, more of the same, part of Mr. Trump’s unmediated fire hose of verbiage, an unstoppable sequence of passing digressions, gambits and whims, more attuned to the rhythms of his voice than to any obligation to logic or, often, to any actual point or meaning at all and hardly worth taking notice of.Does Mr. Trump mean what he says? And what exactly does he mean when he says what he says? His numerous upcoming trials may hinge on these questions.Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal” — as bewildered more than 30 years ago by Mr. Trump’s disconnected-from-reality talk as anyone might be today — came up with a formulation that tried to put Mr. Trump’s rhetorical flights from earth in the context of a salesman’s savvy. In other words, if you took him at his word, you were the fool, and yet, perhaps even more to the point, he succeeds because he comes to believe himself, making him the ultimate fool (as well as the ultimate salesman).Yes, he might have seemed to call for insurrection on Jan. 6, but as the events that day unfolded, according to various people in contact with him in the White House, he seemed uncomprehending and passive. He waved a classified document in front of a writer he was trying to impress, bragging about the secrets illegally in his possession. That certainly is in character, uncaring about rules, negligent about his actions, unthinking of the consequences. At the same time, his defense, that he had no such document, that he was waving just press clippings, that he was essentially making it all up, is in perfect character, too.And then there was the laughable plan to mobilize new state electors. Here was certainly an effort to subvert the election, but it was also a fantasy with no hope in hell of ever succeeding; indeed, he seems to have long delighted in surrounding himself with clownish people (especially lawyers) performing clownish feats to gain his approval — more court jesters than co-conspirators.His yearslong denial of the 2020 election may be an elaborate fraud, a grifter’s denial of the obvious truth, as prosecutors maintain, but if so, he really hasn’t broken character the entire time. I’ve had my share of exposure to his fantastic math over the years — so did almost everyone around him at Mar-a-Lago after the election — and I don’t know anyone who didn’t walk away from those conversations at least a little shaken by his absolute certainty that the election really was stolen from him.It is precisely this behavior, unconcerned with guardrails or rules, unmindful of cause and effect, all according to his momentary whim — an overwhelming, almost anarchic instinct to try to invert reality — that prosecutors and much of the political establishment seem to most want to hold him accountable for. The chaos he creates is his crime; there is, however, no statute against upsetting the dependable order. Breaking the rules — often seemingly to no further purpose than just to break the rules as if he were a supreme nihilist or simply an obstreperous child — is not much of a grand criminal enterprise, even though for many, it’s infuriating coming from someone charged with upholding the rules.Many Democrats have come to assume that the dastardly effect of Mr. Trump’s political success must mean that he has an evil purpose. During his trials, prosecutors will try to establish that precise link. But that might not be such a trivial challenge. He is being pursued under several broad, ill-defined statutes like the Espionage Act, RICO, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Without an exchange of money or quid pro quo, proving his crimes will largely come down to showing specific intent or capturing his state of mind — and with Donald Trump, that’s quite a trip down the rabbit hole.His prosecutors will try to use his words against him: among them, his exhortations that arguably prompted the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, his admission — on tape! — that he still had classified documents, his various, half-baked plots about how to game the Electoral College system, his relentless and unremitting insistence that he won his lost election and his comments to his bag man, Michael Cohen, before he paid off Stormy Daniels.For Democrats, it’s an explosion of smoking guns.And yet the larger pattern, clear to anyone who has had firsthand experience with the former president, is that he will say almost anything that pops into his head at any given moment, often making a statement so confusing in its logic that to maintain one’s own mental balance, it’s necessary to dismiss its seriousness on the spot or to pretend you never heard it.Jack Smith, Fani Willis and Alvin Bragg will try to prove that the former president’s words are nefarious rather than spontaneous, that there has been a calculated effort to deceive rather than just idle talk, a series of crowd-pleasing gestures or cuckoo formulations and that his efforts to obstruct the investigations against him were part of a larger plan rather than just the actions of a bad boy. I’d guess that the Trump opposition doesn’t much care which it is — nefarious or spontaneous — but are only grateful that Mr. Trump, in his startling transparence, has foolishly hoisted himself with his own petard.There is a special urgency here, of course, as Mr. Trump’s chances of clinching the Republican nomination seem to grow stronger by the day. The terrible possibility for Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and the media that he could become the president again is balanced only by their fail-safe certainty of conviction on at least some of the state and federal felony charges he is facing (a complicated paradox for a democracy, to say the least).Personally, I’m less sure of Mr. Trump’s legal fate. Prosecutors will soon run up against the epistemological challenges of explaining and convicting a man whose behavior defies and undermines the structures and logic of civic life.There’s an asymmetric battle here, between the government’s precise and thorough prosecutors and Mr. Trump’s head-smacking gang of woeful lawyers. The absolute ludicrousness and disarray of the legal team defending Mr. Trump after his second impeachment ought to go down in trial history. Similarly, a few months ago, a friend of mine was having a discussion with Mr. Trump about his current legal situation. A philosophical Mr. Trump said that while he probably didn’t have the best legal team, he was certain he had the best looking, displaying pictures of the comely women with law degrees he had hired to help with his cases.Here liberals see a crushing advantage: As ever, Mr. Trump seems unable to walk a straight line even in his own defense. But his unwillingness or, as likely, inability to play by the rules or even understand them creates a chaos often in his favor. Indeed, the prosecutors’ story of his grand scheming will most likely require them to present a figure of the former president — calculated, methodical, knowing and cunning — that none of his supporters or anyone who has ever met him or reasonable jurors and perhaps even the world at large would recognize.I can’t imagine what will be produced by this dynamic of strait-laced prosecutors versus a preposterous Mr. Trump, his malfeasance always on the edge of farce. But my gut tells me the anti-Trump world could be in for another confounding disappointment.Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is the author of three books about Donald Trump, including, most recently, “Landslide: Inside the Final Days of the Trump Presidency.”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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      This Is the Most Frightening Part of the Trump Indictment

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      Buried in the federal indictment of Donald Trump on four counts tied to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election is one of the most chilling paragraphs ever written about the plans and intentions of an American president.It concerns a conversation between Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel, and Co-Conspirator 4. On the morning of Jan. 3, 2021, Co-Conspirator 4 accepted the president’s offer to become acting attorney general, a job he ended up never holding. That means Co-Conspirator 4 is almost certainly Jeffrey Clark, whom Trump hoped to install as attorney general because Clark “purportedly agreed to support his claims of election fraud,” as a report in The Times put it.Later that day, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with Philbin, who told him that “there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the defendant” — President Trump — “remained in office nonetheless, there would be ‘riots in every major city in the United States.’” To which Co-Conspirator 4 is said to have responded, “Well, that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”You may recall that Trump considered invoking the Insurrection Act — which enables the use of the military to suppress civil disorder, insurrection or rebellion — to quell the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Trump wanted thousands of troops on the streets of Washington and other cities, and he had repeatedly urged top military and law enforcement officials to confront protesters with force. “That’s how you’re supposed to handle these people,” Trump reportedly said. “Crack their skulls!”We don’t know Trump’s exact plans for what he would have done if his schemes to overturn the election had been successful. We don’t even know if he had a plan. But the fact that he surrounded himself with people like Clark suggests that if Trump had actually stolen power, he might well have tried to use the Insurrection Act to suppress the inevitable protests and resistance, which could have killed hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of Americans in an attempt to secure his otherwise illegitimate hold on power.That this was even contemplated is a testament to Trump’s striking contempt for representative self-government itself, much less the Constitution. With his self-obsession, egoism and fundamental rejection of the democratic idea — that power resides with the people and isn’t imbued in a singular person — Trump’s attempt to subvert the American constitutional order was probably overdetermined. And it’s not hard to imagine a world in which his defeat was a little less decisive and key Republicans were a little more willing to bend to his will. There, in that parallel universe, Jan. 6 might have gone in Trump’s favor, if it was even necessary in the first place.The thin line between Trump’s success and failure is why, despite the protests of conservative media personalities and Republican politicians, this indictment had to happen. There was no other choice. Even if his opponents must ultimately defeat him at the ballot box, it would have been untenable for the legal system to stay quiet in the face of an effort to put an end to the American experiment in republican self-government. Trump is the only president in the history of the United States to try to nullify an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Extraordinary actions demand an extraordinary response.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.Most people who cast a ballot in the 2016 election voted against Trump for president. But in the American system, not all votes are equal. Instead, the rules of the Electoral College gave a small fraction of voters in a few states decisive say over who would win the White House. The will of a majority of the people as a whole — or at least a majority of those who went to the polls — meant nothing compared with the will of a select few who, for reasons not too distant from chance, could decide the election.Trump won fewer votes, but the system, in its wisdom, said he won his first election anyway. Is it any wonder, then, that in 2020, when a majority of the voting public rejected his bid for power a second time, the former president immediately turned his attention to manipulating that system in order to remain in power? And make no mistake, Trump’s plot hinged on the complexities of the Electoral College.“Following the election, President Trump worked ruthlessly to convert loss into victory, exploiting pressure points and ambiguities in the protracted and complex process, partly constitutional and partly statutory, that we refer to collectively as the Electoral College,” observed the legal scholar Kate Shaw, who is also a contributing Opinion writer to this newspaper, in a 2022 article for The Michigan Law Review. This “baroque and multistep process,” she continued, “afforded Trump a number of postelection opportunities to contest or undermine, in terms framed in law and legal process, the results of an election he had plainly lost.”Rather than try to call out the Army or foment a mob, Trump’s opening gambit in his attempt to overturn the election was to contest our strange and byzantine system for choosing presidents — a system that runs as much on the good faith of the various participants as it does on law and procedure. And so, before Jan. 6, there was the attempt to delay certification of electors, the attempt to find new electors who would vote in Trump’s favor, the attempt to pressure Republican-led state legislatures into seizing the process and deciding their elections for Trump and the attempt to pressure the vice president into throwing the election to the House of Representatives, where statewide Republican delegations would give Trump the victory he couldn’t win himself.But it’s not just that our process for choosing presidents is less resilient than it looks. In addition to its structural flaws, the Electoral College also inculcates a set of political fictions — like the idea that a “red” state is uniformly Republican or that a “blue” one is uniformly Democratic — that can make it easier, for some voters, to believe claims of fraud.There is also the broader problem of the American political system when taken in its entirety. There is the inequality of voting power among citizens I mentioned earlier — some votes are worth much more than others, whether it’s a vote for president, senator or member of the House — and the way that that inequality can encourage some voters to think of themselves as “more equal” and more entitled to power than others.Trump is pathological, and our political system, to say nothing of one of our two major political parties, has enabled his pathology. We do not know how the former president will fare in the courts, and it is still too early to say how he will do in the next election if he stands, for a third time, as the Republican nominee for president.But one thing is clear, if not obvious: If we truly hope to avoid another Jan. 6, or something worse, we have to deal with our undemocratic system as much as we do with the perpetrators of that particular incident. Whatever benefits our unusual rules and procedures are supposed to have are more than outweighed, at this point in our history, by the danger they pose to the entire American experiment. The threat to the integrity of the Republic is coming, as it often has, from inside the house.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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      Is Trump Leaving an Opening in Iowa?

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      The former president’s poll numbers are still strong. But the caucuses could be his rivals’ best chance to make him look vulnerable.Donald J. Trump’s standing in our Iowa poll is weaker than in our national results.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesDonald J. Trump has dominated the Republican Party for eight years, and our recent poll results show that he is dominating the Republican primary race again. So it’s not wrong to wonder whether Mr. Trump is simply undefeatable — even after his third criminal indictment.But there was one moment — one fleeting moment — when it really did look like Republicans might move on. It was in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm election, when Mr. Trump’s party and his preferred candidates fared far worse than expected. It undermined the perception of his strength and dominance. He was a loser.With that in mind, consider our first New York Times/Siena College survey of the Iowa caucus, released Friday. It is by no means a bad survey for Mr. Trump: He leads Ron DeSantis by a comfortable margin, 43 percent to 20 percent. Tim Scott sits even further back, at 9 percent.But Mr. Trump’s position is unequivocally weaker in our Iowa poll than in our nationwide survey. His support is well beneath 50 percent in Iowa, and his opponents seem stronger. Mr. DeSantis has the highest favorability ratings in the poll, and clear majorities of likely caucusgoers consider him more “likable” and “moral” than the former president. Mr. Trump’s electability advantage over Mr. DeSantis is also far smaller — just 9 points — than it is nationwide.A 23-point deficit is still a daunting gap for Mr. DeSantis. But unlike the national poll, our Iowa poll has revealed a few cracks in Mr. Trump’s armor. If Mr. DeSantis (or another challenger) could ever pry those cracks open and win the Iowa caucuses — the first nominating contest of the race — one wonders what kind of effect that might have on Republican voters.After all, the only time Republicans were prepared to move on from Mr. Trump was the one time he and his supporters had to accept that he lost, after the 2022 midterm election.A few other tidbits from our polling this week (moderately wonky)Will Hurd, the former Texas congressman, narrowly missed the qualifying threshold for the first G.O.P. debate on Aug. 23 in our national poll earlier this week. He had the support of 0.57 percent of Republican primary voters, near the 1 percent needed to help him qualify for the event (Mr. Hurd has not yet qualified for the debate; The Times is tracking who has qualified, here). Usually, 0.57 percent would be rounded to 1 percent, but while the poll was being conducted we decided that wasn’t appropriate for this survey. Republicans had set a 1 percent threshold to winnow the debate field; rounding to the nearest whole number didn’t seem like it was in the spirit of the cutoff for candidates in this case.Vivek Ramaswamy also had cause to be disappointed in our polls. He received 2 percent of the vote in our national survey, compared with about 6 percent in the FiveThirtyEight polling average and over 10 percent in some online polls. I’ll offer two basic theories for why he did worse in our poll.One is that it’s about survey administration: In an online survey, you see a long list of candidates, read them over, and then you choose one. In our phone survey, you either immediately volunteered your preference after hearing the question, or you heard a list of more than a dozen candidates and chose an answer at the end. If you’re an undecided voter, the online setting might help you find and choose someone you’re not especially familiar with. You may be overwhelmed on the phone, and even if you liked Mr. Ramaswamy when he was mentioned 20 seconds earlier, you could forget by the time the interviewer is done asking the question.A second possibility is that it’s about the kind of voters who participate in the big online panels that power so many polls today. Maybe they’re, shall we say, a little too online — and perhaps unusually likely to be aware of Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign. My guess is that this is probably a factor: Online polls recruited by mail and by YouGov, the gold standard of this kind of polling, don’t show Mr. Ramaswamy doing so well, even though they were also conducted online.This Times/Siena national poll used an elaborate model of the likely Republican primary electorate, but it’s hard to say it made any difference in the result. Mr. Trump would have held a commanding lead with at least 50 percent of the vote no matter how we defined G.O.P. primary voters.The Democratic primary, however, is a case where more sophisticated modeling of the primary electorate might make a huge difference. While President Biden leads Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by a wide margin, 64 percent to 13 percent, among Democratic leaners, he enjoys a far wider lead — 74 percent to 8 percent — among those Democratic leaners who have ever actually voted in a primary, including 92 percent to 4 percent among those who voted in a Democratic primary in 2022.My guess: if we had done an elaborate Democratic primary poll — and we did not, in the absence of a competitive race — Mr. Biden’s lead would have grown.As I mentioned a few days ago, we’ve started to mull whether and how we can use respondents who begin to take our polls but don’t complete the interview. In our longer national surveys, about 15 percent of our respondents fall into this category, and they’re the kind of less educated and less reliable voters whom we want included in our polls.Interestingly enough, including these voters might have made a slight difference in our national poll this week. Rather than being tied, Mr. Trump would have led Mr. Biden by one point, 43 percent to 42 percent, if the survey had included respondents who decided to stop taking the survey before it was completed.It’s not clear whether this is just a random blip or indicative of a systematic tendency for these drop-off voters to back Republican candidates. Until now, we haven’t had the data necessary to fully evaluate this issue. In particular, we haven’t had the self-reported educational attainment of these respondents. But it’s something we’ve begun to track and may ultimately incorporate into our design. More

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      Today’s Top News: Inside Trump’s Washington Arraignment, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Former President Donald J. Trump was arraigned on Thursday on four counts tied to his efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Trump Pleads Not Guilty to Plotting to Overturn the 2020 Election, with Charlie SavageTrump Leads G.O.P. in Iowa, but His Hold Is Less DominantThe U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Tries to Focus on What Comes After Portugal Tie, with Juliet MacurEli Cohen More

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      Trump’s Lead in Iowa Is Less Dominant, Poll Shows

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      New polling suggests that Gov. Ron DeSantis’s efforts in Iowa have been having an effect, but that the challenge of defeating Mr. Trump there is complicated by multiple factors.Former President Donald J. Trump’s pull among likely Republican voters is less dominant in Iowa than it is nationwide, though he still leads his nearest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in the key early state by double digits, according to a new New York Times/Siena College poll.The survey of 432 likely Iowa caucusgoers was taken before a third indictment against Mr. Trump was made public on Tuesday, this one charging him with federal crimes connected to his efforts to cling to office after losing re-election in 2020.But any dent in his dominance in the Hawkeye state may have more to do with factors like personality flaws and voters’ fatigue after eight years of Trumpian drama than his latest legal travails. Iowa Republicans showed some real doubts about which candidate — Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis — is more moral, likable or able to beat President Biden in 2024.Though some Iowa voters see Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as more moral and likable than former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Trump still leads.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesOverall, Mr. Trump has the support of 44 percent of Iowans polled, 10 percentage points lower than the commanding position he holds with Republicans nationwide. Mr. DeSantis is second with 20 percent, slightly better than his 17 percent standing nationwide. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has the support of 9 percent of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers, triple his national standing. Mr. Scott’s favorability rating among Iowa Republicans — 70 percent — is on par with Mr. Trump’s 72 percent and just behind Mr. DeSantis’s 77 percent.Further down, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and former Vice President Mike Pence each have single-digit support. Support for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey did not reach a full percent.The poll suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s efforts in Iowa have been having an effect, but that the challenge of defeating Mr. Trump there is doubly complicated: Several rivals are siphoning off the support he would need from voters who are open to alternatives to the former president, and Mr. Trump’s voters are still overwhelmingly behind him. And as with the national race, it seemed Mr. DeSantis was failing to win over voters with the issues he has made central to his campaign, including defeating so-called woke ideologies.The state is the first of the G.O.P. presidential nominating contests, and it looms large for Mr. Trump’s comeback. In 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas edged out Mr. Trump and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Iowa’s Republican base is strongly religious and white, and its position on the political calendar has ensured that voters get a good look at the candidates before they go to the caucuses. The power of evangelical leaders, some of whom are ready to move past Mr. Trump, could give other candidates an advantage when Iowans caucus on Jan. 15.A Trump victory in Iowa — despite mounting legal challenges — could give the former president a clear path to the nomination.Even Iowa Republicans who say they favor other candidates could still swing Mr. Trump’s way.“Each indictment gets me leaning toward Trump,” said John-Charles Fish, 45, a Waukon, Iowa, social media consultant who said he still supported Mr. DeSantis, but barely. “It wouldn’t take much for me to change my mind,” he said.For Mr. DeSantis and other competitors, the Iowa survey yielded glimmers of bright spots. About 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider other candidates. Among Republicans with at least a college degree, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are tied at 26 percent when the whole field is under consideration.In a head-to-head match between the front-runner and his closest rival, Mr. Trump leads Iowa handily, 55 percent to 39 percent, but he is well behind Mr. DeSantis among college-educated Republicans, 38 percent to 53 percent.Iowa Republicans More Likely Than National G.O.P to See DeSantis as Likable, ElectableRepublicans saying the following words or phrases better describe Ron DeSantis than Donald Trump:

      Based on New York Times/Siena College polls of the Republican nominating contests nationally and in IowaBy Ruth IgielnikAccording to the poll, Mr. DeSantis is seen as the more moral candidate, and although the Florida governor has been knocked for some awkward moments on the campaign trail, he is seen as considerably more likable than Mr. Trump. More than half of those surveyed said the term “likable” was a better fit for Mr. DeSantis, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Trump.The poll also suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s argument that he is the more electable Republican may be resonating with voters, at least in Iowa. Just under half of those surveyed said Mr. Trump is the candidate more able to beat Mr. Biden, while 40 percent said Mr. DeSantis is. Nationally, Mr. Trump holds a 30-percentage-point lead on the same question.Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, praised Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida’s sprawling economy, his ability to “get things done” and his “exemplary, outstanding life.”Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, said he preferred Gov. Ron DeSantis, worrying that nominating Mr. Trump in 2024 could mean Republicans losing the election.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesThe contrast between Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump “couldn’t be greater,” said Mr. Corry, 55, who worries that making Trump the Republican nominee could cost the party another election.Still, Mr. Trump remains a powerful and resilient force among Republicans, nationally and in Iowa. Of the Iowans supporting the former president, 97 percent say they support him strongly, compared with the 76 percent of Mr. DeSantis’s supporters who said the same for him. Among those who support other candidates, just over half — 54 percent — say they back their candidate strongly.“As far as the other candidates go, I feel that they’re all RINOs,” said Pamela Harrmann, 74, a retired intensive care nurse in Paullina, Iowa, and a Trump supporter who referred to the former president’s opponents as Republicans in name only. “And they’re all with the left agenda. They’re just covered up.”Tuesday’s indictment, which accuses Mr. Trump of defrauding the nation in his quest to subvert the will of its voters after he lost the 2020 election, may not change the depth or intensity of the front-runner’s support. Nor does the perception of Mr. DeSantis as the more moral candidate seem to carry much weight among the voters who might be expected to be more sensitive to such traits.Trump Weaker in Iowa Than NationallyIf the only choices were Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, who would you be more likely to vote for? More

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      Trump, Arraigned on Election Charges, Pleads Not Guilty

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      The former president appeared in federal court in Washington after being indicted over his efforts to overturn his defeat in 2020. His first pretrial hearing was set for Aug. 28.Former President Donald J. Trump appeared in federal court in Washington on Thursday for the first time to face charges that he conspired to remain in office despite his 2020 election loss, pleading not guilty at a hearing conducted in the shadow of the Capitol, where his supporters, fueled by his lies, had rampaged to block the peaceful transfer of power.Mr. Trump was booked and fingerprinted before entering the courtroom and offering a soft-spoken “not guilty” to each of the four counts lodged against him on Tuesday by Jack Smith, the special counsel.He was allowed to leave court without paying any bail or agreeing to any travel restrictions. A first pretrial hearing was set for Aug. 28.Mr. Trump arrived in Washington in the remarkable position of being under indictment in three separate cases as he is running for president again. In addition to the election case, he faces federal charges of mishandling classified documents and accusations in New York related to hush money payments to a porn star.But even as he sped in and out of Federal District Court in about an hour and a half, he was leading his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination by wide margins and remained defiant.Crowds gathered outside the federal courthouse where Mr. Trump appeared for his arraignment on Thursday.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“This is a very sad day for America,” Mr. Trump said at the airport in Washington before boarding his plane back to his golf club in New Jersey. “This is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America.”Holding his umbrella for him as he emerged from his SUV on the tarmac was Walt Nauta, his personal aide, who was charged alongside him in the classified-documents case.Thursday’s hearing was held inside a courthouse that has been the venue for hundreds of trials stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His lawyers used the procedural hearing to hint at one of his central defense strategies — a request to delay a second pending federal trial for months, if not years.The arraignment took place about six weeks after he entered another not-guilty plea in a Miami courtroom after being indicted on charges of illegally retaining classified documents at his resort in Florida and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them.Thursday’s arraignment had deeper historical resonance. It began a process in which federal prosecutors will seek to hold Mr. Trump to account for what they say was his refusal to adhere to core democratic principles, a trial that will be held little more than a mile and a half from the White House and at the foot of the Capitol complex where his supporters chanted two and a half years ago for his vice president to be hanged and tried to block Congress from certifying President Biden’s victory.The indictment charged that Mr. Trump lied repeatedly to promote false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that Mr. Biden had won. And it described how he ultimately pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to use so-called fake electors to subvert the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, that was cut short by the violence at the Capitol.Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya, who oversaw the roughly half-hour intake hearing on Thursday, ordered Mr. Trump not to communicate about the case with any witnesses except through lawyers or in the presence of lawyers. She set the first hearing before the trial judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, for Aug. 28 — the date chosen by Mr. Trump’s lawyers from among the three options she provided and the latest of them.Police officers near the federal courthouse.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesDelaying the proceedings as much as possible is widely expected to be part of Mr. Trump’s legal strategy, given that he could effectively call off federal cases against him if he wins the 2024 election.The jockeying began on Thursday. After Judge Upadhyaya gave prosecutors a week to propose a trial date, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, John F. Lauro, complained that the government had had years to investigate and that he and his colleagues were going to need time to defend their client. She directed him to bring it up with the trial judge and prosecutors to respond within five days of his filing.“Mr. Trump is entitled to a fair and just trial,” Mr. Lauro said after Justice Department prosecutors requested invocation of a provision that could result in a start date within 90 days.Mr. Trump’s defense team has signaled that it intends to employ a variety of arguments to fight the charges.They include asserting that Mr. Trump had a First Amendment right to promote his view that the 2020 election was marred by fraud, and making a case that Mr. Trump sincerely believed his claims that he had been robbed of victory, an argument intended to make it more difficult for prosecutors to establish that he intended to violate the law.The defense team has also suggested that it will argue that Mr. Trump was relying on advice from lawyers when he sought to block certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, and that it could seek to move the trial out of Washington — a Democratic stronghold — to a more politically friendly setting.The wrangling over the timetable underscored the logistical and political complexities facing Mr. Trump and his team as they juggle three criminal proceedings and a presidential campaign.To give a sense of the crowded calendar his legal team will face, some of its members are scheduled to be in Fort Pierce, Fla., for a hearing in the classified-documents case on Aug. 25, and then to turn around and be in Washington on Aug. 28. Mr. Trump does not need to be in the courtroom for the pretrial hearings.Judge Upadhyaya arrived for the hearing 14 minutes late — creating long periods of awkward silence and pen-twiddling as Mr. Trump and his team sat across from equally antsy prosecutors.While the lawyers sparred, most eyes in the courtroom were on the second face-to-face encounter between the former president and Mr. Smith, who has filed charges that could put the 77-year-old Mr. Trump in a federal prison for the rest of his life. This time, unlike in Miami, the two men were positioned in such a way that they could be visible to each other.Jack Smith, the special counsel, announced the indictment of Mr. Trump in Washington on Tuesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Smith entered the courtroom — normally used by the district’s chief judge, James E. Boasberg — about 15 minutes before the scheduled 4 p.m. start, with his lead prosecutor in the case, Thomas P. Windom, and positioned himself in a chair behind his team, with his back against the rail dividing participants from the gallery.Mr. Trump walked in very slowly in his signature long red tie and long blue suit coat, surveying the room and mouthing a greeting to no one in particular. He glanced briefly in the direction of Mr. Smith — whom he has called “deranged” — but he did not seem to make eye contact.Mr. Trump spoke in respectful tones when questioned by Judge Upadhyaya, the magistrate judge who presided over the proceeding.Yet if he had seemed chastened and ill at ease in Florida, he was more his defiant self on Thursday.When she asked his name, he replied, “Donald J. Trump” and then added “John!”When she asked his age, he raised his voice a notch and intoned, “Seven-seven!”At the end of the proceeding, Judge Upadhyaya thanked Mr. Trump, who said, “Thank you, your honor.” On the “all rise” command, he stood up. One of his lawyers put his arm on Mr. Trump’s back and guided him away from the table and out the courtroom door.Mr. Smith, known for his implacable demeanor, remained still for most of the hearing. But after Mr. Trump’s entourage exited, he appeared to let his guard down, smiling broadly as he shook hands with F.B.I. agents who had been working on the case.But the gravity of the case weighed heavily on participants and observers alike.At least three of the district court judges who have presided over trials of the Trump supporters charged for their roles in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 filed into the back row of the visitors’ gallery to observe. One was Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who had criticized what she called Mr. Trump’s “irresponsible and knowingly false claims that the election was stolen” in imposing a harsh sentence on a rioter who had bludgeoned a Capitol Police officer into unconsciousness.Outside the courthouse, security was heavy, with officers on foot and on horseback and barricades erected on the sidewalk. The crowd, made up of Mr. Trump’s critics and his supporters, clogged the area outside the courthouse, with some carrying pro-Trump signs and others shouting anti-Trump slogans, including “Lock him up!”The former president arrived in Washington by motorcade in the remarkable position of being under indictment in three separate cases.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMaggie Haberman More