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      There’s No Escaping Trump

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. We skipped our conversation last week because I was in Ukraine. But even from there, it was hard to miss the news about Donald Trump’s most recent pending indictment. Your thoughts?Gail Collins: Bret, I’m in awe of your Ukraine expedition but slightly depressed to realize that Americans can’t escape Trump, even when they’re at a hospital in Irpin.Bret: Trump returning to the White House and pulling the plug on American support for Kyiv is the second-biggest threat to Ukraine, after Vladimir Putin. And did you hear Trump call the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping both “smart” and “brilliant”?But back to the latest potential indictment ….Gail: Criminal-justice wise, I think it’s very important to assure the country that nobody, including a president, can just get away with urging an angry crowd to attack the Capitol.Bret: Especially a president.Gail: But politically, I have a terrible suspicion that indictment will help him in the Republican primaries. So sad the law-and-order party has apparently lost interest in the law — or, for that matter, order — when it doesn’t suit their purpose.Bret: If there were truth in advertising, Republicans would have to rename themselves the Opposite Party. They were the party of law and order. Now they want to abolish the F.B.I. They were the party that revered the symbols of the nation. Now they think the Jan. 6 riots were like a “normal tourist visit.” They were the party of moral character and virtue. Now they couldn’t care less that their standard-bearer consorted with a porn star. They were the party of staring down the Evil Empire. Now they’re Putin’s last best hope. They were the party of free trade. Now they’re protectionists. They were the party that cheered the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which argued that corporations had free speech. Now they are being sued by Disney because the company dared express an opinion they dislike. They were the party that once believed that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” as George W. Bush put it. Now some of them want to invade Mexico.Gail: Woof …Bret: So that makes me want to ask you about your column last week. What’s not to like about No Labels?Gail: Bret, gonna skip my normal diatribe on the evils of Joe Lieberman, the spokesman-symbolic-head of No Labels, which is running around the country trying to get a presidential line on ballots in a bunch of states.Bret: Lieberman may be our one irreconcilable difference. I love the guy.Gail: My bottom line is that third parties — even those led by people far better than Mr. L. — are a danger to the American democratic system. You start a party that makes a big deal out of … helping hummingbirds. Tell voters who don’t love either of the two regular candidates that they can Vote Hummer and feel good. You won’t win the election, but you can throw everything into chaos. In some states, that little shift could be enough to bestow victory somewhere you’d never have wanted it to go. Say the Crow Coalition.Bret: I’d be opposed to No Labels if I were convinced that all they will do is take votes from Joe Biden and throw the election to Trump. But that depends on who takes the No Labels slot: If it’s a former Democrat, it probably hurts Biden. If it’s a former Republican, it could hurt Trump even more.Gail: Maybe. I’d rather just make people pick between the two real possibilities — each of them representing a broad coalition and certainly offering a stark choice. I don’t like plotting to win by cluttering up the ballot.Bret: But the main thing, Gail, is that I need a party I can vote for. And I think the feeling is shared by a growing fraction of voters who might be center-left or center-right but are increasingly appalled by progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. So any party that represents our views is good for democracy, not a threat to it.Gail: No, no Bret. Even if you vote for a third party that perfectly represents your views — or at least your view on a favorite issue — if it isn’t going to win, you’re throwing away your vote. A vote for the Green Party, for instance, is a vote that Biden would probably have gotten otherwise. Which means the Green Party is helping Trump.Bret: I agree — mostly. I used to vote exclusively for Republicans, even though I disagreed on a lot of social issues. Now I vote mostly for Democrats, even though I disagree on a lot of economic issues. But I’ve never before felt such a level of disaffection with both parties, which makes No Labels … intriguing. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.Gail: OK, I’ve ranted enough. Let’s talk about something important that no one ever wants to talk about: Congress. The big defense budget is being bogged down by some House Republicans who want to include right-wing social issues that everyone knows the Senate will never accept. Even the normal military promotions are stalled by one Republican Senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who wants to eliminate travel aid to enlisted women seeking abortions.These are all supposed to be your guys — explain what we can do about all this.Bret: Well, this is just another way in which I’m totally appalled by so many of today’s Republicans. They had no trouble effectively freezing and even reducing military spending for the sake of their debt-ceiling antics, despite claiming to be seriously concerned by the military threat from China (or Iran or Russia). And now they’re committing the exact sin they routinely accuse liberals of doing: injecting a partisan social agenda into questions of national security.But Gail, Congress is too depressing. Let’s talk about the actors’ and writers’ strikes. Should we join them, at least morally speaking?Gail: I see two big things about the strikes. One is complicated and important — how do you compensate the creative talent when movies and TV are available around the clock via streaming?The other is more emotional and understandable: The creative talent is scrambling to get adequate pay while the top guys — the producers and company executives — are making a mountain of money from the current system.In a word, I’m on the writer-actor side. How about you?Bret: Don’t tell anyone this, but I am, too. I think the strike is about more than the particulars of how the so-called creative class gets paid. It’s really about whether or not there can be a creative class at all.My working assumption is that within 20 years, if not much sooner, A.I. will be able to write, direct and act (via computer-generated images that are indistinguishable from real people) movies and TV shows. It will write credible novels and news stories and opinion columns, and compose film scores and pop music. That may not really affect me, if only because I’ll be close to retirement. But it will mean a growing number of creative endeavors will no longer easily find meaningful vocational outlets. It will amount to a kind of material degradation to human civilization that may prove irreversible.Gail: Grab a picket sign!Bret: Never thought I’d be a fan of any form of organized labor, but there it is. And it’s also a good occasion to praise President Biden for trying to create some shared ethical guidelines for the development of A.I.Gail: I’m the last one to make an informed prediction on anything relating to science and technology, but you’re right, it’s good to know we’ve got some principled leaders trying to figure things out.Bret: Even though the depressing reality is that humanity doesn’t have a particularly good track record of controlling new technologies, particularly when they can make some people richer or other people more powerful. The historian in me says the same might have been said with every past transformative technology, from the wheel to the printing press to nuclear energy. Maybe artificial intelligence will follow the same path. But A.I. is also the first technology I can think of that doesn’t supplement human creativity, but rather competes with it.Gail: And gee, Bret, we’ve agreed about almost everything this week — including organized labor! Next week I swear we’ll talk about something that stirs up a fight.Bret: I’m sure I’ll have strong views about the Oppenheimer film once I’ve seen it. Have I ever mentioned that I think Harry Truman was completely right to drop the bombs?Gail: We can compare thoughts then. Hope you get a chance to see “Oppenheimer” soon — although I should warn you it did feel as if three hours was a long time to contemplate atomic warfare. In an old theater with squeaky seats.I’m most certainly not an expert on World War II, but I hate the idea of killing something like 200,000 people to make a point about our nation’s breakthrough in technological firepower.Bret: History is filled with counterfactuals. I wonder how many American fighting men, including my grandfather — and, for that matter, how many Japanese soldiers and civilians — would have been killed if we had invaded the Japanese home islands the way we had to take Iwo Jima or Okinawa. I think the aggregate number would have been far higher.Gail: I can see that our ongoing conversation about this is going to be hard and deep, Bret. I’ll bring wine. And maybe we should also make it a point to see “Barbie” before we chat again. We can talk about global destruction and mass market capitalism at the same time.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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      Rebooting Ron DeSantis’s Campaign

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      Admitting you’ve made mistakes is tough for anyone. For a hard-charging, hyperscrutinized political candidate who presents himself as infallible, it can be as excruciating as a root canal without anesthesia.But Ron DeSantis clearly has hit the point where his presidential quest is crying out for a serious course correction. I know it. You know it. Anxious Republican strategists and donors know it. And Team DeSantis knows it, no matter what kind of happy talk the candidate was spewing in his interview with CNN last week. (Tip: If you find yourself babbling about being one of the few folks who knows how to define “woke,” you are not nailing your message.)If things were going well for Mr. DeSantis — if he were catching fire as the less erratic, unindicted alternative to Donald Trump — there’s not a snowball’s chance he would have set foot in CNN. But as things stand, consorting with nonconservative media outlets, which he until recently avoided like a pack of rabid raccoons, is part of a bigger overhaul.Team Trump intends to have some fun with this. “Some reboots were never going to be successful, like ‘Dynasty,’ ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ or even ‘MacGyver,’” the campaign mocked in a statement last week. “And now we can add Ron DeSantis’s 2024 campaign to the list of failures.”But campaign reboots are nothing to be ashamed of. Honest! They are a common, even healthy, part of the process. Handled properly, they give candidates the chance to show off their decisiveness, tenacity, adaptability, unflappability — you name it.Not all overhauls are created equal, of course. Ronald Reagan’s in the 1980 presidential race? Golden. Jeb Bush’s in 2016? Oof. And plenty have fallen somewhere in between: John Kerry 2004, John McCain 2008, Hillary Clinton 2008. As the DeSantis campaign starts down this path, it has an abundance of recent cases to consult for potential tips, tricks and red flags.While every floundering candidacy is floundering in its own way, there are a few foundational moves common to presidential campaign reboots:1. Slash spending, which typically involves cutting campaign staff and salaries.2. Shake up the leadership team.3. Shift the focus toward more grass roots stumping in the early voting states.Spending issues are almost a political rite of passage. So many campaigns get carried away early on with high-priced advisers or an overabundance of staff members, especially with front-runners eager to project an aura of inevitability.The DeSantis campaign is still doing solidly with fund-raising, but there have been warning signs (especially in the small-donor department) that have it cutting staff and rethinking priorities. (Even more Iowa!) This is obviously no fun and may presage even less fun to come. But it is better to start making these adjustments before things get really ugly. During the summer of 2007, the struggling McCain campaign found itself nearly broke, prompting massive layoffs and pay cuts and causing general upheaval as the high-level finger-pointing spiraled.Money matters aside, a campaign’s top leadership not infrequently requires tweaking — or tossing. The candidate needs to lock down savvy people he trusts and will listen to, even as he jettisons the troublemakers. When making such assessments, there is little room for sentimentality. Sometimes even (maybe especially) longtime friends and advisers need to be … repurposed … particularly if the chain of command has become confused and internal bickering is taking its toll. This can lead to even more tumult. When Mr. McCain cut loose a couple of his top advisers in 2007, several senior staff members followed them out the door.But a failure to deal with such a situation can leave the whole enterprise feeling increasingly dysfunctional, as was often the case with Hillary’s 2008 campaign. So much infighting and backbiting. So many competing power centers. This is when a candidate really needs to step up and impose order.In many cases, a reboot may call for pushing out a new narrative. Postdownsizing, Team McCain sought to reassure donors and supporters with a plan to get lean and mean and start “Living off the land.” The candidate doubled down on wooing New Hampshire (Iowa’s social conservatives were never a natural fit for him), playing up his bus tours and broadly aiming to recapture the underdog, maverick spirit of his 2000 presidential run. John Kerry, way down in the polls behind Howard Dean in 2003, wanted to create a comeback-kid narrative by notching back-to-back victories in Iowa and New Hampshire; he lent money to his campaign and basically lived in Iowa for weeks to help execute his one-two punch.It’s hard to say how a DeSantis variation of something like this would work. He plans to start talking less about his record leading the state “where woke goes to die” and double down on an “us against the world” theme, according to NBC. This latter bit sounds very Trumpian, maybe a tad too much so, considering Mr. Trump himself is still running with a version of that line. DeSantis’s heavy investment in Iowa, along with his chummy relationship with the state’s governor, could bring Kerry-like benefits. Then again, multiple candidates are campaigning hard there and could wind up splitting the non-Trump vote.The harsh reality of reboots is that some presidential hopefuls are just too out of step with the political moment to rescue. Mr. Bush strode into the 2016 race as the man to beat. But Republicans were in no mood for his policy-heavy, mellow style of politics. (Mr. Trump’s “low energy” insult was brutally resonant.) By the fall of 2015, Team Jeb was slashing staff and hoping for the debates to help him win free media. No one cared.To be sure, Mr. DeSantis has proved himself willing to get much nastier and more reactionary than did Mr. Bush in appealing to his base’s basest instincts. (That Trump-trashing anti-L.G.B.T.Q. video his campaign shared on social media — at once homophobic and homoerotic — was certainly something special.) No way anyone is going to catch Gov. Pudding Fingers being squishy on a culture-war hot topic like trans rights or immigration.Yet the governor does carry a whiff of out-of-touch wonkiness. He can’t help but get all right-wing jargony at times — “accreditation cartels”? Really? — and his bungled, Twitter-based campaign announcement was clearly designed more to impress the online bros than the working-class voters he needs to woo away from Mr. Trump. Someone really should be working with him to fix this.In the end, of course, it may be that Mr. DeSantis is on track to crash into that highest and hardest of reboot hurdles: likability.This was, fundamentally, what kept the presidency just out of Mrs. Clinton’s reach. Even beyond the Republican haters, too many voters found her off-putting. She was not a natural retail politician. She struck people as standoffish and inauthentic. Time and again, her advisers tried to address this, but to no avail. Presidential contests have a lot to do with vibes, and she never quite managed to radiate the ones needed to go all the way.Mr. DeSantis seems to be in a dangerously similar spot. He is famously awkward on the campaign trail — and with people in general. He stinks at the whole backslapping, glad-handing thing. He has trouble making eye contact. He presents as brusque, impatient, uninterested. He’s got the obnoxious parts of Trumpism down, without the carnival barker fun.This doesn’t mean his presidential dreams are doomed. But it does suggest that a key element of his reboot should be figuring out how not to come across as a stilted, smug jerk who doesn’t care about voters.Hey, no one said this would be easy.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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      A ‘Leaner-Meaner’ DeSantis Campaign Faces a Reboot and a Reckoning

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      The campaign’s missteps and swelling costs have made donors and allies anxious. One person close to the Florida governor said he had experienced a “challenging learning curve.”Throughout the spring, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his advisers waved off his sagging poll numbers with the simple fact that he wasn’t yet an actual candidate for president.Two months in, however, his sputtering presidential campaign is still struggling to gain traction.Allies are complaining about a lack of a coherent message about why Republican voters should choose Mr. DeSantis over former President Donald J. Trump. Early strategic fissures have emerged between his own political team and the enormous super PAC that will spend tens of millions of dollars to help him. His Tallahassee-based campaign has begun shedding some of the more than 90 workers it had hired — roughly double the Trump campaign payroll — to cut swelling costs that have included $279,000 at the Four Seasons in Miami.Now, his advisers are promising to reorient the DeSantis candidacy as an “insurgent” run and remake it into a “leaner-meaner” operation, days after the first public glimpse into his political finances showed unsustainable levels of spending — including a taste for private planes — and a fund-raising operation that was alarmingly dependent on its biggest contributors and that did not meet its expectations.One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.Mr. DeSantis has privately forecast that the now twice-indicted Mr. Trump would struggle as his legal troubles mounted, but the governor continues to poll in a distant second place nationally.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe DeSantis campaign declined to comment on specific questions about its spending, the candidate’s travel and the video. The communications director, Andrew Romeo, said in a statement that Mr. DeSantis was “ready to prove the doubters wrong again and our campaign is prepared to execute on his vision for the Great American Comeback.”“The media and D.C. elites have already picked their candidates — Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” Mr. Romeo said. “Ron DeSantis has never been the favorite or the darling of the establishment, and he has won because of it every time.”Second-guessing from political donors has intensified as Mr. DeSantis traveled this week from the Hamptons to Park City, Utah, to see donors. Records show the DeSantis campaign made an $87,000 reservation at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah for a retreat where donors were invited to cocktails on the deck on Saturday followed by an “investor appreciation dinner.” It’s the type of luxury location that helps explain how a candidate who has long preferred to fly by private jets burned through nearly 40 percent of every dollar he raised in his first six weeks without airing a single television ad.One senior DeSantis adviser who was supposed to oversee the campaign’s messaging on television recently departed, as the reality of a disappearing advertising budget set in. Now the governor is expected to hold smaller-scale events in early states while outsourcing some event planning to outside groups to tamp down costs. His team, for the second time in three months, is telegraphing a plan to engage more with the mainstream media he has long derided, calling it the “DeSantis is everywhere” approach.DeSantis supporters have watched anxiously as Mr. Trump has swamped the governor in coverage and outmaneuvered him in defining the contours of the race. Since his entry, Mr. DeSantis has received zero congressional endorsements. One person close to Mr. DeSantis, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about a candidate whom the person still supports, said the governor had experienced a “challenging learning curve” that has left him “a little bit jarred.”In a note to donors on Thursday, Generra Peck, the DeSantis campaign manager, cast the campaign as making tough but necessary changes, writing that it would pursue an “underdog” approach going forward.“All DeSantis needs to drive news and win this primary is a mic and a crowd,” Ms. Peck wrote.Mr. DeSantis has privately forecast that the now twice-indicted Mr. Trump would struggle as his legal troubles mounted, but the governor continues to poll in a distant second place nationally.Ms. Peck, who has never worked at a senior level on a presidential campaign but made herself a trusted confidante of Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, has found herself under fire from both inside and outside a campaign that has been defined by silos, with various departments unaware of what is happening elsewhere. That the campaign did not hit expected fund-raising targets — and spent exorbitantly — caught the candidate and his wife by surprise, a person with knowledge of their reactions said.Mr. DeSantis still has time to reset. There have been no debates yet. His super PAC, which is called Never Back Down, brought in $130 million. And the first votes are nearly six months away in Iowa, where Mr. Trump has made missteps of his own.“Six months is a lifetime in politics,” said Terry Sullivan, who served as Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign manager, noting that in July 2015 Jeb Bush was still ahead in some polling averages. “He has definitely burned a lot of time, but it’s been a learning process for his campaign.”Mr. DeSantis remains the only challenger to Mr. Trump polling in the double digits, and the only candidate that Mr. Trump himself treats as a serious threat.“What would concern me is if I woke up one day and Trump and his team were not attacking Never Back Down and Ron DeSantis,” said Chris Jankowski, the DeSantis super PAC’s chief executive. “That would be concerning. Other than that, we’ve got them right where we want them.”Two developments — the campaign’s failure to hit expected fund-raising targets and its exorbitant spending — caught Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, by surprise, a person with knowledge of their reactions said.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesA memo that hints at a splitStill, time is ticking. From the start, Mr. DeSantis has been trapped between the political reality that he is an underdog compared with the former president and the desire to project himself as a fellow front-runner separated from the rest of the G.O.P. pack.Mr. DeSantis himself acknowledged in a recent interview with Fox News that his earlier higher standing was only a “sugar high” from his landslide re-election and how that victory contrasted with the 2022 losses of several Trump-backed candidates.But the campaign has increasingly been tempted to punch down at lower-polling rivals, as in a memo to donors in early July that singled out Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as someone who would soon receive “appropriate scrutiny.”That campaign memo landed at the pro-DeSantis super PAC’s Atlanta headquarters with a thud. It seemed to rebuke the super PAC, calling into question the group’s decision to stay off the airwaves in New Hampshire and the pricey Boston market. Legally, super PACs and campaigns cannot coordinate strategy in private, so leaked memos are one way they communicate.“We will not cede New Hampshire,” read one line that appeared in boldface for extra emphasis. In a reference to Boston, the memo read, “We see no reason why more expensive markets in New Hampshire should not also be prioritized.”But the super PAC, which has studied the memo line by line, may be unmoved by the suggestions. “We’re not easily going to change our course,” said one senior official with the DeSantis super PAC who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about strategic decisions.According to a person with direct knowledge of the process, the memo, first published by NBC News, was written by Ms. Peck, but without the input or knowledge of the broader campaign leadership team, an unusual move for such a highly scrutinized document.The candidate himself soon made clear that he, too, wanted to see changes.“I can’t control” the super PAC, Mr. DeSantis said recently on Fox News, before adding some specific stage directions. “I imagine they’re going to start lighting up the airwaves pretty soon with a lot of good stuff about me, and that’s going to give us a great lift,” he said.Since then, the super PAC has not aired a positive ad about Mr. DeSantis or returned to the airwaves in New Hampshire.‘He brought over almost his entire state apparatus’From the moment Mr. DeSantis entered the race with a two-day event at the ritzy Four Seasons in Miami, his team operated on the false premise that he could campaign the same way he did as governor, when Florida’s lax campaign finance rules allowed him to collect million-dollar donations and borrow the private planes of friends at will.Mr. DeSantis raised a robust $20 million in less than six weeks. But $3 million of that is earmarked for a general election and cannot be spent now, and his spending rate averaged more than $212,000 per day.The state of the campaign’s finances could be even more bleak than the snapshot presented in public filings. Some vendors did not show up on the report at all, suggesting some bills have been delayed, which would make the books look rosier.There were also signs of a severe slowdown in his online donations. In Mr. DeSantis’s first week as a candidate, in late May, his campaign paid significantly more in fees to WinRed, the main donation-processing platform for Republicans that receives a cut of every online dollar donated, than it did in the entire month of June.In addition to the roughly 10 staff members who were let go in mid-July, two more senior advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, left this month to work for an outside nonprofit that can boost Mr. DeSantis.“He brought over almost his entire state apparatus, and I think they looked at it and said we don’t need all of those people,” said Hal Lambert, a Republican donor who is raising money for the DeSantis campaign.The disclosures also exposed Mr. DeSantis’s dependence on his biggest contributors. Only 15 percent of his contributions came from donors who gave less than $200. Even more stark is that the lion’s share of his money came from donors who gave the legal maximum in the primary of $3,300.Mr. DeSantis raised a robust $20 million in less than six weeks. But his spending rate averaged more than $212,000 per day.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThe challenge for Mr. DeSantis in relying so heavily on bigger donors is twofold: It means that he must travel the country extensively to attend fund-raisers to gather their larger checks and that those big donors cannot give to him more than once. That the governor and his wife prefer to travel by private planes adds significant costs, and cuts into the net money raised when crisscrossing the nation for fund-raisers.His report showed $179,000 in chartered plane costs, along with $483,000 to a limited liability company that was formed within days of his campaign kickoff, with the expenditure only labeled “travel.” A senior campaign official said the campaign planned to make changes to travel practices “to maximize our capabilities,” though the person would not specify what changes were coming.One way to save on air travel is to have Mr. DeSantis burrow deeper into Iowa, where officials say he may visit all 99 counties.“He is positioned to do well in Iowa,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential evangelical leader in the state, whose group, The Family Leader, hosted Mr. DeSantis and other candidates in Iowa for a recent forum. (Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC paid $50,000 to the group’s foundation, records show, which a super PAC official said was for a sponsorship of the event.)The DeSantis super PAC emphasized that after being overwhelmed by Mr. Trump in free media coverage and millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads, Mr. DeSantis was still standing.“Any other candidate would be bleeding on the ground,” said Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer. “DeSantis,” she added, “is still No. 2.” More

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      The Stagnation of Ron DeSantis

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      Is it possible to rapidly “reboot” a struggling presidential campaign? Pundits have to hope so, since otherwise our advice-giving beat becomes a bit irrelevant. But thinking back over recent primary candidacies that seemed to sag and then recovered, from John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008 to Joe Biden in 2020, it’s hard to identify brilliant strategic pivots. Instead what you see is candidates with fundamental strengths who hung around until events conspired to make those strengths more relevant, their opponents’ weaknesses more manifest, and their campaigns suddenly triumphant.For Ron DeSantis, currently engaged in a campaign reset after months of stagnant polling, there’s no way to sell these case studies to his restive donors. “Don’t worry, we’re going to hang around and hope things break our way at the last minute” isn’t exactly an inspiring rallying cry, especially for a candidate who briefly seemed poised to become the 2024 front-runner, but now languishes 20 or 30 points behind Donald Trump.And it’s easy enough to list things that DeSantis could be doing differently. Some of them, like talking less about the swiftly-receding Covid era and seeking combat with the mainstream media, are obvious enough that the campaign is already trying to adapt. Other possibilities seem to still elude his team — above all, the benefits of breaking out of the movement-conservative box a bit more, making big promises on economic as well as social policy, and avoiding a replay of Ted Cruz’s ideologically self-limiting 2016 campaign.But any benefit from these shifts is likely to be incremental rather than dramatic. Meanwhile, the reset that’s so often urged on DeSantis — the idea that he needs to go hard after Trump’s unfitness for high office — is a theory supported by exactly zero polling evidence.The reality is that if there were some obvious path to rising higher in the polls at this stage of the campaign, another Republican candidate would have probably discovered it. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio, no great DeSantis admirer, pointed out a week ago, amid all the talk about his faltering campaign the Florida governor’s support “exceeds the combined share of every candidate who’s trailing him, a field that includes a sitting senator, two former governors, and the most recent former vice president of the United States.”The Trump-friendly Vivek Ramaswamy, often portrayed as the breakout figure in the non-DeSantis field, stands just shy of 5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The most forthrightly anti-Trump figure, Chris Christie, stands at 2 percent. The sunny donor favorite Tim Scott is at 3 percent.Those numbers make DeSantis’s stagnant 20 percent look pretty good, and his Trump-adjacent positioning like a much stronger play than the alternatives.Yes, it’s not as strong as it looked during Trump’s post-midterm swoon. But the argument I made back then — that Trump was far more likely to lose in a fade than in a knockout — isn’t obviated by the fact that he hasn’t faded yet. Quite the reverse: It’s precisely Trump’s recovery and resilience amid multiplying indictments that suggests the futility of a Christie-style assault, while leaving DeSantis’s more hedged strategy with a narrowing but still discernible path.That path looks like this: First, in Iowa, DeSantis needs some of the very conservative voters who temporarily backed away from Trump after the midterms to back away again. Then in New Hampshire, he needs the momentum of an Iowa victory to reconcile the party’s moderates to the necessity of rallying to him, instead of sticking with Scott or Christie or Nikki Haley. Pull off that combination, and he’s well positioned for South Carolina, Florida and beyond.There’s no reason to expect things to play out this way. We’ve seen repeatedly how Trump’s supporters always seem to want to return to him, and how Trump’s skeptics always seem incapable of uniting effectively. We haven’t seen enough potency from DeSantis-the-candidate to expect him to make those patterns break.But sitting at 20 percent for a long time and then riding an early primary victory to consolidation is an imaginable scenario, at least, and one that tracks with recent examples of campaigns that first disappointed and ultimately surged. Whereas all the other scenarios for beating Trump, whether involving current contenders or some late-entering white knight, seem like wishcasting from Republicans who don’t want to settle for DeSantis.Maybe this will change in the debate season, whose set-pieces are more likely to actually reset DeSantis’s campaign than any move his team makes now, while giving his rivals their best opportunities to shake his hold on second place.But pending those confrontations, the disappointment with DeSantis doesn’t change the fact that the guy stagnating in second is more likely to finish first than all the distant others.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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      The Risks of Sanctions, the Tool America Loves to Use

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      There is nearly universal consensus that certain egregious violations of international laws and norms demand a forceful and concerted response. Think only, for example, of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the development of nuclear weapons capabilities in Iran and North Korea. Harsh economic sanctions have long been viewed as the answer.The eternal question, though, is: What comes next? When do sanctions stop working? Or worse, when do they start working against the United States’ best interests?These are important questions because, over the past two decades, economic sanctions have become a tool of first resort for U.S. policymakers, used for disrupting terrorist networks, trying to stop the development of nuclear weapons and punishing dictators. The number of names on the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions list has risen steadily, from 912 in 2000 to 9,421 in 2021, largely because of the growing use of banking sanctions against individuals. The Trump administration added about three names a day to the list — a rate surpassed last year with the flurry of sanctions that President Biden announced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Given their increasing use, then, it is useful to understand not only how sanctions can be a tool for successful diplomacy but also how, when not employed well, they can ultimately undermine American efforts to promote peace, human rights and democratic norms across the globe.The Invisible Costs of SanctionsPolicymakers turn to sanctions so frequently — the United States accounts for 42 percent of sanctions imposed worldwide since 1950, according to Drexel University’s Global Sanctions Database — in part because they are seen as being low cost, especially compared with military action.In reality, the costs are substantial. They are borne by banks, businesses, civilians and humanitarian groups, which shoulder the burden of putting them into effect, complying with them and mitigating their effects. Sanctions can also take a toll on vulnerable people — often poor and living under repressive governments, as academics are increasingly documenting.Officials rarely factor in such costs. While sanctions are easy to impose — there are dozens of sanctions programs administered by multiple federal agencies — they are politically and bureaucratically difficult to lift, even when they no longer serve U.S. interests. What’s worse, sanctions also escape significant public scrutiny. Few officials are held responsible for whether a particular sanction is working as intended rather than needlessly harming innocent people or undermining foreign policy goals.Mr. Biden came into office promising to rectify that lack of accountability. The Treasury Department conducted a comprehensive review of sanctions in 2021 and released a seven-page summary that October. The review process was an important step. It concluded, among other things, that sanctions should be systematically assessed to make sure they are the right tool for the circumstances, that they be linked to specific outcomes and include our allies where possible and that care should be taken to mitigate “unintended economic and political impacts” on American workers, businesses, allies and other innocent people.The Treasury Department is making some progress in carrying out the review’s recommendations, but Treasury is just one of many government agencies responsible for fulfilling sanctions. Every one of them should conduct regular, data-driven analyses to ensure that the benefits of sanctions outweigh the costs and that sanctions are the right tool, not just the easiest one to reach for. It is also important that the results of such analyses are communicated to Congress and the public.Sanctions Need Clear, Achievable OutcomesWhat is already known is that sanctions are most effective when they have realistic objectives and are paired with promises of relief if those objectives are met. Perhaps the best example is the 1986 law targeting apartheid-era South Africa, which laid out five conditions for sanctions relief, including the release of Nelson Mandela. Sanctions by the United States and other nations helped convince South Africa’s whites-only government that its policies mandating racial segregation were unsustainable.Sanctions on Communist Poland in 1981 in response to the crushing of the Solidarity movement are another example of how this can work. The United States and its allies gradually lifted sanctions with the release of most imprisoned activists, helping usher in a new era of political freedom in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.It’s notable that the sanctions against South Africa and Poland were aimed at bringing about free and fair elections, not regime change. Sanctions aimed at regime change often incentivize defiance, not reform. They have a terrible track record, as the cases of Cuba, Syria and Venezuela make clear.In Venezuela, open-ended sanctions with sweeping ambition — to oust the dictator Nicolás Maduro — have so far achieved the opposite. After he dissolved the democratically elected National Assembly in 2017 and was declared the winner of a sham presidential election in 2018, the Trump administration imposed maximum-pressure sanctions on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to cut off a crucial source of funds to the Maduro dictatorship.While harsh individual sanctions against Mr. Maduro were necessary, the blacklisting of Venezuela’s oil sector has exacerbated a humanitarian crisis: As this editorial board warned, cutting off oil revenue deepened what was already the worst economic contraction in Latin America in decades. Sanctions on the oil industry, which accounts for about 90 percent of the country’s exports, caused dramatic cuts in government revenue and significant increases in poverty, according to a study last year by Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.The policy, meanwhile, failed to push Mr. Maduro out of power. He instead consolidated his grip on Venezuela, blamed its economic misery on American sanctions and drew his country closer to Russia and China. Sanctions are deeply unpopular in Venezuela, according to numerous opinion polls. Even the representative of Venezuela’s opposition in the United States, a group that previously supported broad sanctions, recently called on Mr. Biden to lift oil sanctions.Since taking office, Mr. Biden has taken steps to modify the sanctions against Venezuela to add specific, achievable objectives. His administration lifted some oil sanctions by giving Chevron permission to do limited work in the country, prompted by the spike in oil prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.The White House has promised additional relief if Mr. Maduro takes steps toward holding free and fair elections next year. Francisco Palmieri, the State Department’s chief of mission of the Venezuelan affairs unit in Bogotá, Colombia, recently released a detailed list of what has to be done in order for sanctions to be lifted. It includes setting a date for next year’s presidential election, reinstating candidates who have been arbitrarily arrested and releasing political prisoners.Mr. Maduro hasn’t complied so far. On June 30, he barred yet another well-known opposition figure from holding office. Nevertheless, this more modest policy, which supports a gradual return to democracy rather than abrupt regime change, is a better approach.The Biden administration should be more explicit about which sanctions in Venezuela would be lifted and when, especially those on the state-owned oil company. That would make American promises more credible. An agreement in November between Mr. Maduro and the opposition to use Venezuela’s frozen assets for humanitarian purposes was another promising step, but it is in limbo because the funds have yet to be released.The delay is causing Venezuelans to lose hope in a negotiated solution to the crisis, according to Feliciano Reyna, the president and founder of Acción Solidaria, a nonprofit organization that procures supplies for public hospitals in Venezuela. Although he has a special license to import supplies, he said he still had trouble obtaining what he needed. Some companies, he said, preferred not to sell to Venezuela rather than deal with the headache of making sure it was legal — a phenomenon known as overcompliance.“The situation internally is really dire,” Mr. Reyna said.The loss of hope is, in part, why more than seven million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015, with more than 240,000 arriving at the U.S. southern border in the past two years. Many experts view sanctions as an important driver of migration from Venezuela because they worsen the economic conditions that push people to leave. In response, a group of Democratic lawmakers — including Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, who co-chairs Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign — implored him to lift sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba.In addition to making good on its commitments in Venezuela, the Biden administration can do much more to show that the United States is changing its sanctions policy to make it more humane. The first step would be to follow through on the recommendations of its 2021 review and formally take the humanitarian cost of any sanction into account before it is imposed. The Treasury Department in May hired two economists to take on that task; that should become standard practice for any agency with the responsibility for carrying out sanctions.Sanctions Need to Be ReversibleOnce the government begins conducting systematic reviews of existing sanctions, it’s crucial to ensure that any sanction imposed can be reversed.Consider the most glaring failure to do this: the open-ended trade embargo against Cuba. President John F. Kennedy put the embargo in place in 1962 with the stated goal of “isolating the present government of Cuba and thereby reducing the threat posed by its alignment with the Communist powers.” In the years since, American presidents have sent wildly different messages about what it would take to remove sanctions. Barack Obama moved to lift many of them in 2014 — an effort that Donald Trump reversed three years later. Last year Mr. Biden lifted some of the Trump-era sanctions. Yet only an act of Congress can end the embargo.Peter Harrell, who served on the National Security Council staff under Mr. Biden, argues that sanctions should automatically expire after a certain number of years unless Congress votes to extend them. That would cut down on cases of zombie sanctions that go on for decades, long after U.S. policymakers have given up on the sanctions’ achieving their goals.For sanctions to incentivize change rather than merely punish actions in the past, the United States should be prepared to lift sanctions — even against odious actors — if the stated criteria are met.Sanctions, as attractive as they are, rarely work without specific goals combined with criteria for sanctions to be lifted. That applies to current as well as future sanctions. Without goals and relief criteria, these measures — among the most severe in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal — risk working against American interests and principles in the long run.Source photograph by Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography, via Getty Images.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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      The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief

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      WASHINGTON — A man is running to run the government he tried to overthrow while he was running it, even as he is running to stay ahead of the law.That sounds loony, except in the topsy-turvy world of Donald Trump, where it has a grotesque logic.The question now is: Has Trump finally run out of time, thanks to Jack Smith, who runs marathons as an Ironman triathlete? Are those ever-loving walls really closing in this time?Or is Smith Muellering it?We were expecting an epic clash when Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 as a special counsel to head the investigation into ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia and his potential obstruction of justice. It was the flamboyant flimflam man vs. the buttoned-down, buttoned-up boy scout.Mueller, who had been a decorated Marine in Vietnam, was such a straight arrow that he never even deviated to wear a blue shirt when he ran the F.B.I.Amid the Trump administration chaos, Mueller ran a disciplined, airtight operation as special counsel, assembling a dream team of legal talent. But regarding obstruction of justice, the final report was flaccid, waffling, legalistic.Now, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (That classic movie remembers a time when politicians got ashamed when they were caught doing wrong. How quaint.)This special counsel is another straight arrow trying to deal with a slippery switchblade: In a masterpiece of projection, Trump has been denouncing Smith as a “deranged prosecutor” and “a nasty, horrible human being.” Trump has been zigzagging his whole life and now, unbelievably, he’s trying to zigzag back into the White House, seemingly intent on burning down the federal government and exacting revenge on virtually everyone.So it will be interesting to see what the top lawyer with the severe expression makes of the bombastic dissembler. Smith seems like a no-nonsense dude who works at his desk through lunch from Subway while Trump is, of course, all nonsense, all the time.Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup.His letter telling Trump he’s a target of the Jan. 6 investigation reportedly does not mention sedition or insurrection, which leaves people wondering exactly what Trump will be charged with.Of all the legal troubles Trump faces, this is the case that makes us breathe, “Finally,” as Susan Glasser put it in The New Yorker. It is, as she wrote, the heart of the matter.The Times reported that the letter referred to three criminal statutes: conspiracy to defraud the government; obstruction of an official proceeding; and — in a surprise move — a section of the U.S. code that makes it a crime to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Initially, the story explained, that last statute was a tool to pursue the Ku Klux Klan and others who engaged in terrorism after the Civil War; more recently it has been used to prosecute cases of voting fraud conspiracies.On an Iowa radio show on Tuesday, Trump warned it would be “very dangerous” if Smith jailed him, since his supporters have “much more passion than they had in 2020.”A May trial date has already been set in Smith’s case against Trump for retaining classified documents — despite Trump’s effort to punt it past the election. And Smith should have an ironclad case on Trump defrauding America because defrauding is what he has been doing since the cradle — lying, cheating and lining his pockets, making suckers of nearly everyone while wriggling out of trouble.Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest Republican challenger, defended Trump on Russell Brand’s podcast Friday, dismissing the idea that there was an overt effort to upend the 2020 election.“The idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true,” DeSantis said, “and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims.”DeSantis seems almost as delusional as Trump when he denies what we saw before our eyes in the weeks after the election.Just ask the Georgia officials who were pressured by Trump to “find 11,780 votes” or the police officers who were injured on Jan. 6. Remember the fake electors in Michigan and Georgia, among other places, and the relentless pressure on Mike Pence to invalidate the election results?Trump ultimately might not be charged with staging an insurrection or sedition. And that would be a shame. For the first time, a president who lost an election nakedly attempted to hold onto power and override the votes of millions of Americans.If that isn’t sedition, it’s hard to figure what is.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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      Tim Scott Is Turning Heads With Donors and Early-State Voters

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      The South Carolina senator is gaining in early-voting states and has money, a positive message and a compelling story. Now he needs to take on the Republican front-runners.He is rising in the polls and turning heads in Iowa and New Hampshire, behind heavy spending on ads that play to voters’ appetite for a leader who is upbeat and positive in a dark political moment.He has experience, a compelling personal story and a campaign war chest that gives him staying power in a Republican primary that so far has been a two-man race. And among Republican voters, he is the candidate that everyone seems to like.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is perfectly positioned to seize the moment if former President Donald Trump collapses under the weight of his criminal cases or if the challenge to him from Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida evaporates.The only question is whether either moment will come.Mr. Scott’s growing popularity in early primary states has made him more of a contender in the still-young primary campaign and — in the eyes of current and potential supporters, and donors — a possible alternative to Mr. DeSantis, who is seen as an alternative to Mr. Trump.Andy Sabin, a wealthy metals magnate who switched his allegiance from Mr. DeSantis to Mr. Scott and is hosting a fund-raiser for three dozen wealthy donors in the Hamptons next month, cited his frustration with the front-runners and said he hoped that more in the donor class would join him in backing Mr. Scott. Prospective donors, Mr. Sabin said, “all want to see what he’s about.”“They’re disenchanted with Trump and DeSantis,” he said. “And the others, I’ve seen very little momentum.”Since he entered the race in May, Mr. Scott’s standing has slowly crept up in Iowa and New Hampshire. A University of New Hampshire poll of likely voters, out Tuesday, found him in third place among the state’s primary voters, with 8 percent of the vote, ahead of former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, both of whom have focused intensely on the state.He is also running third in recent Iowa polls — at around 7 percent — and a few national polls have shown him as the second choice for many supporters of Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis, though it comes at a time when primary voters not committing to Mr. Trump are often considering several candidates.Mr. Scott’s strength in early states has caught the eye of other potential donors, including the billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, who met with Mr. Scott in South Carolina this month. In August, Mr. Scott will make a fund-raising swing through at least five states, including Colorado, Tennessee and Wisconsin.While he has not been as much of a presence on the campaign trail as his rivals have, Mr. Scott and his allied groups have poured considerable money into Iowa and New Hampshire, spending $32 million to run ads through January 2024 — more than any other Republican candidate or group on the airwaves, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. Mr. Scott is the only Republican contender who has booked ad time that far ahead.Mr. Scott, who has outspent his rivals on advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire, hopes to raise his national profile in next month’s first Republican debate.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Scott’s supporters say his positive campaign message and general appeal provide a contrast with the primary’s front-runners. The highest-ranking Black Republican, he is running on an only-in-America story as a candidate and a senator with roots in a low-income Charleston community.Still, though Mr. Scott has shown some momentum in the early states — including his home state — Republican voters have yet to flock to him en masse, and he is still relatively unknown nationally.A Quinnipiac University poll of voters nationwide found him tied with Mr. Christie in the primary among likely Republican voters, behind Ms. Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, who are tied for third. And while he is well-liked in early primary states, more than half of Republican voters surveyed nationally said they did not know enough about him to have an opinion.Alex Stroman, the former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, acknowledged the issue but said that it was solvable. “I think that the more people are introduced to Tim Scott, that they are going to like Tim Scott,” he said. “The problem is, it is a crowded primary.”Asked during a town hall in New Hampshire on Tuesday how voters should contend with such a crowded field, Mr. Scott said he expected that “the field will dwindle pretty quickly” by the time voters cast ballots in the state’s February primary election.Mr. Scott’s campaign has been focused on a positive message and his faith. But some conservatives have said he needs to sharpen his message on key issues.Mic Smith/FR2 Associated Press, via Associated PressThe first opportunity to introduce himself to a national audience will be the Aug. 23 Republican debate. Mr. Scott’s campaign manager, Jennifer DeCasper, said recently that Mr. Scott had met the donor and polling thresholds to be on the debate stage. Mr. Scott, who raised more than $6 million in the second quarter, has more than $20 million in the bank — one of the largest war chests in the primary and enough, Ms. DeCasper maintained, to keep his campaign afloat through the Iowa caucuses and all three of the early state primaries.“At the end of the day, candidates can post any number they want,” she said. “But the name of the game is how much actual cash you have on hand that’s available for use in the Republican primary.”On Tuesday, Trust in the Mission PAC, a group supporting Mr. Scott, announced that it would spend $40 million on broadcast and digital advertising in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — a gigantic outlay that far outpaces the spending of any other candidate in the G.O.P. field and could possibly reshape it.The PAC’s spending reflects a huge bet on increasing Mr. Scott’s profile, especially as he maintains a relatively limited presence on the campaign trail: He has relegated his time in early primary states this month to the few days of the week that he is not in the Senate. The group has already shelled out more than $7 million on advertisements through the summer; the $40 million buy will kick in beginning in September. It is also helping fund a small field operation of about a dozen canvassers in the early primary states.One challenge Mr. Scott still faces is presenting a policy message that separates him from the rest of the Republican primary field. His advertisements in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are biographical, and some touch on national security, warning of the threat that China could pose, while others seize on cultural issues, criticizing Democrats’ policies on education and their views on race.But trying to appeal to a broad swath of Republican voters without alienating key portions of the party’s primary electorate has proved challenging.Terry Amann, an Iowa pastor who has met with most of the Republican candidates, said Mr. Scott needed to articulate a more solid policy plan to connect with the conservative evangelicals who could decide the caucuses in January. Though the senator’s conservative message and his frequent biblical allusions have endeared him to many Republican faith-based voters, Mr. Amann said, Mr. Scott has not clearly defined his stance on abortion restrictions.“If you’re going to be the candidate that stands out on faith, there are some issues that I believe are worth laying it down for, and that’s one of them,” he said. “That would be my challenge to him if he wants to step off from the rest of the pack.”With just over a month until the first debate and six months until the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Scott’s campaign still sees an opening to refine his message and consolidate more voters. Still, while he tries to surpass Mr. DeSantis, the bigger challenge will be wresting the support of more than half of Republican primary voters from Mr. Trump.“These campaigns, candidates, have to figure out what the hell they want voters to know about them,” said Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire. Mr. Scott, because of his background, has a unique story to tell, which can get “people to listen a little bit,” Mr. Carney said. “That’s a great advantage.”But, he added, “the point isn’t just to get their interest — then you have to make the deal.”You have to sell the deal.”Ruth Igielnik More

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      Trump Classified Documents Trial Set for May 2024

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      Judge Aileen M. Cannon rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s request to delay the trial until after the election but pushed the start date past the Justice Department’s request to begin in December.The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of illegally retaining dozens of classified documents set a trial date on Friday for May 2024, taking a middle position between the government’s request to go to trial in December and Mr. Trump’s desire to push the proceeding until after the 2024 election.In her order, Judge Aileen M. Cannon said the trial was to be held in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a coastal city two-and-a-half hours north of Miami that will draw its jury pool from several counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous presidential campaigns.Judge Cannon also laid out a calendar of hearings, throughout the remainder of this year and into next year, including those concerning the handling of the classified material at the heart of the case.The scheduling order came after a contentious hearing on Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce where prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, and lawyers for Mr. Trump sparred over when to hold the trial.The timing of the proceeding is more important in this case than in most criminal matters because Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination and his legal obligations to be in court will intersect with his campaign schedule.The date Judge Cannon chose to start the trial — May 20, 2024 — falls after the bulk of the primary race contests. But it is less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July and the formal start of the general election season.Mr. Trump’s advisers have been blunt that winning the presidency is how he hopes to beat the legal charges he is facing, and he has adopted a strategy of the delaying the trial, which is expected to take several weeks, for as long as possible.The Justice Department declined to comment on Judge Cannon’s decision. But it did not come as a surprise to prosecutors, who set their initial, aggressive timetable expecting that she would select a date, probably sometime in the first half of 2024, and reject the Trump legal team’s request to push it past the election, according to a person familiar with the situation.It is not clear whether the May 2024 date will hold. As part of her order, Judge Cannon designated Mr. Trump’s case as “complex,” a move that could allow for additional delays.In a 38-count indictment filed last month by Mr. Smith’s office, the former president was charged with illegally holding on to a trove of 31 documents containing sensitive national security information in violation of the Espionage Act. He was also accused of conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the documents.Setting the schedule for Mr. Trump’s trial was the first significant decision in the case for Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020. She was randomly assigned to the case in June and faced enormous scrutiny after having made some rulings last year in a related matter that were favorable to Mr. Trump and that were ultimately overturned in a stinging reversal by a federal appeals court.But in her scheduling order on Friday, she split the difference between the two sides, giving neither the government nor the defense what they had wanted.She rejected Mr. Trump’s requests to delay the trial until after the election or to put off setting any schedule at all for the moment, saying that some basic amount of case management was required. But she also noted that the government’s proposal to seat a jury in December was “atypically accelerated and inconsistent with ensuring a fair trial.”Judge Cannon listed a number of reasons the case needed time to move toward trial.The amount of discovery evidence that Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have to sort through was “voluminous,” she wrote. It included more than 1 million pages of unclassified material, at least nine months of surveillance camera footage and more than 1,500 pages of classified documents. There was also additional discovery material from electronic devices seized by the government during its investigation.All of that, Judge Cannon wrote, was on top of what is expected to be a constellation of complex pretrial motions filed by Mr. Trump’s legal team.During the hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for Mr. Trump said they might file motions arguing that Mr. Trump was allowed to remove documents from the White House under the Presidential Records Act and attacking the special counsel’s authority to bring charges in the first place.They also noted that they would probably question the classification status of certain documents central to the case and challenge the validity of the grand jury process in Washington and Miami that led to the indictment.“The court will be faced with extensive pretrial motion practice on a diverse number of legal and factual issues,” Judge Cannon wrote.Mr. Trump is also under indictment in Manhattan on charges stemming from hush-money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. That case is scheduled to go to trial in March 2024.He was also informed this week that he could be indicted on federal charges related to his efforts to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, and the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is completing an investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss in Georgia.Maggie Haberman More