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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

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      Trump Seeks UAW Endorsement as the Union Wavers on Backing Biden

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      A video from the former president attacked electric vehicles, predicting the demise of the American automotive industry.Donald J. Trump, seeing an opening with organized labor, appealed on Thursday for an endorsement from the United Auto Workers for his White House bid and said only his return to the presidency could save the automotive industry from President Biden’s “ridiculous Green New Deal crusade.”Mr. Trump’s apocalyptic vision of the state of the American auto industry does not comport with the reality of an auto sector that has steadily gained jobs over the past three years. But there has been friction between the White House and the new leadership of the old-line industrial auto union.The United Auto Workers, which has a record of backing Democratic candidates for president, including Mr. Biden, has been angered with the Biden administration for pumping tax money into nonunion electric vehicle suppliers, and has withheld its endorsement, even as most labor unions have rushed to back Mr. Biden’s re-election. The U.A.W.’s new president, Shawn Fain, met with Mr. Biden in the White House on Wednesday as contract talks with the Big Three automakers heat up over electric vehicle parts suppliers.In a video on Thursday, Mr. Trump predicted the demise of American auto manufacturing and the “slaughter” of 117,000 auto jobs. “I hope United Auto Workers is listening to this because I think you’d better endorse Trump,” he said. He explicitly warned that Mr. Biden’s policies would cost jobs in the key swing state of Michigan, as well as the more reliably Republican states of Ohio and Indiana.The auto industry has actually gained jobs steadily since Mr. Trump left office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment among auto manufacturers and their parts suppliers reached 1,071,600 in June, up 129,000 since December 2020, the last full month of Mr. Trump’s presidency.Mr. Trump’s insistence that electric vehicles are piling up unsold on car lots contradicts the industry’s own view of its inventory.“We would assert that demand for traditional vehicles and for electric vehicles is strong,” said Matt Blunt, a former Republican governor of Missouri, now president of the American Automotive Policy Council, the domestic auto industry’s trade association in Washington. “This is a time of dramatic transition, but the U.S. industry is well positioned.”But the tension between the U.A.W. and the Biden administration is real. It takes fewer workers to assemble an electric vehicle than one with an internal combustion engine. That has made organizing parts suppliers, especially battery makers, an imperative of the union’s insurgent new leadership.Yet much of the new battery investment prompted in part by Mr. Biden’s climate change policies and infrastructure law is landing in the union-resistant Southeast, especially Georgia, a vital battleground state in the 2024 election. That state has had more than 40 electric vehicle-related projects introduced since 2020, promising investments worth $22.7 billion and the creation of 28,400 jobs.Mr. Biden was at Philadelphia’s shipyard on Thursday, talking up new rules attached to his climate change law intended to help union apprenticeship programs vault workers into the middle class without a college degree.“A lot of my friends in organized labor know, when I think climate, I think jobs,” he said. “I think union jobs.”But Mr. Trump, looking beyond the Republican primaries to a rematch with Mr. Biden, continues to aim for the vote of union workers, if not their leaders. More

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      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

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      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More

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      Obstruction Law Cited by Prosecutors in Trump Case Has Drawn Challenges

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      Hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters have been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, but the charge, which could be applied to former President Donald J. Trump, has come under scrutiny.Well before the prosecutors investigating Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election laid out for him three laws that could be the basis for an indictment, one of the statutes, covering obstruction of an official proceeding, had already been used against — and challenged by — scores of rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol.The legal questions around applying the obstruction law to the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, have spawned a pair of federal appeals court cases — and could even end up in front of the Supreme Court. But while it might seem risky for the special counsel, Jack Smith, to include the obstruction count in an indictment before the attacks against it are resolved, the way in which the law is written could make it almost uniquely suited to charging Mr. Trump.The count — formally known in the penal code as 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(2) — makes it a crime to “corruptly” obstruct, impede or interfere with any official government proceeding, and carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.In more than 300 Jan. 6 riot cases, prosecutors have used the law to describe the central event that day: the disruption of the Electoral College vote certification that was taking place inside the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.In general, defendants have been charged with the obstruction count when prosecutors believe they have evidence that their actions on Jan. 6 played some role in stopping the certification process or in chasing lawmakers away from their duties. But as soon as the charge began to be used in Capitol riot cases, defense lawyers started arguing that the government was stretching the statute far beyond its intended scope.By its plain text, the measure seemingly has nothing to do with mobs or riots. It was passed into law in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which sought to clamp down on corporate malfeasance, and was initially meant to prohibit things like shredding documents or tampering with witnesses in congressional inquiries.In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the use of the obstruction count, even while acknowledging that it had never been applied in quite the way it had been in the Jan. 6 cases.The decision by the three-judge panel — which included two Trump appointees — largely homed in on just one of the complaints against the statute. The panel said that any obstruction committed by rioters at the Capitol did not have to relate exclusively to the law’s original prohibitions against tampering with witnesses or destroying documents.But the panel reserved judgment on a separate challenge to the law, one involving the definition of the word “corruptly.” That issue could relate more directly to Mr. Trump, should he be charged with the count.In its arguments to the appeals court, the government said that acting corruptly should be broadly construed to include all sorts of unlawful behavior, such as destroying government property or assaulting police officers. The defense argued for a much narrower interpretation, seeking to define the term as acting illegally to procure something to directly benefit oneself.This challenge is at the center of the second appeals court case in Washington and could be decided any day now. It could also affect how the law applies to Mr. Trump: Unlike many of the rioters on the ground who stood to gain little for themselves by stopping the certification process on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump stood to gain something of immense personal value that day: a victory in the election.While it remains unknown how Mr. Smith might structure an obstruction charge, he could opt to use it to describe the pressure campaign that Mr. Trump and some of his allies mounted against Vice President Mike Pence. The president and lawyers close to him like John Eastman sought to strong-arm Mr. Pence into using his role in overseeing the election certification on Jan. 6 to unilaterally toss the race to Mr. Trump.Last year, the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 urged that Mr. Trump be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding among other counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and incitement to insurrection. But long before those recommendations were made, judges and lawyers involved in Jan. 6 criminal cases were exploring whether Mr. Trump’s behavior — specifically his attempts to pressure Mr. Pence — violated the obstruction count.In November 2021, for example, at an early hearing discussing the validity of the charge, James Pearce, a prosecutor who has handled many of the Justice Department’s thorniest Capitol riot legal issues, argued in court that if someone urged Mr. Pence to break the law on Jan. 6, it could qualify as a corrupt act of obstruction. While Mr. Pearce never mentioned Mr. Trump by name, it was clear he was discussing the former president’s attempts to get Mr. Pence to do his bidding that day.“One of the definitions of ‘corruptly’ is trying to get someone to violate a legal duty,” Mr. Pearce said.Mr. Smith’s election interference inquiry is not the first time prosecutors have used 1512(c)(2) as the basis for scrutinizing Mr. Trump. The provision was also instrumental in the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who examined whether Mr. Trump obstructed efforts to look for ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign.In 2018, William P. Barr, before he got the job as Mr. Trump’s attorney general, wrote a memo to top officials in the Justice Department complaining that Mr. Mueller’s use of the obstruction count was “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.”Mr. Mueller, Mr. Barr wrote, was “proposing an unprecedented expansion of obstruction laws” in an effort to find a way to charge Mr. Trump for actions that he had the constitutional power to carry out. (Mr. Mueller never sought to charge Mr. Trump.)Some legal experts have said that Mr. Trump could mount an attack against the obstruction charge, if it is brought by Mr. Smith, by arguing that he truly believed he had been robbed of victory by fraud in the election and, therefore, could not be accused of having acted corruptly.But last week, a senior federal judge in Washington, Royce C. Lamberth, found a high-profile Jan. 6 rioter guilty of the obstruction count despite the defendant’s repeated claims that he believed the election had been stolen.Judge Lamberth’s reasoning — which came in the case of Alan Hostetter, a former police chief turned yoga instructor from Southern California — made no mention of Mr. Trump’s potential criminal exposure, but it could set a legal basis for refuting any attempts by the former president to get around the law’s references to “corruptly.”“Even if Mr. Hostetter genuinely believed the election was stolen and that public officials had committed treason, that does not change the fact that he acted corruptly with consciousness of wrongdoing,” Judge Lamberth wrote. “Belief that your actions are serving a greater good does not negate consciousness of wrongdoing.” More