Trump, Donald J

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Trump, the Worst Boss You’ve Ever Had

      by

      Donald Trump did not — and does not — recognize any distinction between himself and the office of the presidency. He is it and it is him.This view is as close a fundamental rejection of American constitutionalism as you can imagine — and it helps explain much of the former president’s behavior in and out of office. It is why he could not abide any opposition to anything he tried to pursue, why he raged against the “deep state,” why he strained against every limit on his authority, why he rejected the very idea that he could lose the 2020 presidential election and why he decided he could simply take classified documents to his home in Florida.For Trump, he is the president. He is the government. The documents, in his mind, belonged to him.What this means in practical terms is that as Trump runs for president, he has promised to bring key parts of the federal government under his control as soon as he takes office. He wants to clear out as much of the executive branch as possible and swap professionals for true believers — a new crop of officials whose chief loyalty is to the power and authority of Donald Trump, rather than their office or the letter of the law. And in particular, Trump wants to clear house at the Department of Justice, which is investigating him for mishandling those documents.Trump cannot tolerate the existence of an independent Justice Department, and so, if made president again, he’ll simply put it under his thumb.Obviously, if it is a preoccupation for Trump, it is a preoccupation for the Republican Party. And in addition to covering for the former president in the face of federal charges, the other Republicans vying for the nomination have adopted his view that the independence of federal law enforcement violates his (and potentially their) authority as president.Ron DeSantis — whose tight grip on the operations of government has been a hallmark of his tenure as governor of Florida — made his distaste for an independent law enforcement apparatus clear in a set of recent comments. “I think presidents have bought into this canard that they’re independent, and that’s one of the reasons why they’ve accumulated so much power over the years,” he said of the Justice Department. “We will use the lawful authority that we have.”Former Vice President Mike Pence has promised to “clean house at the highest levels of the Justice Department” if elected president. “Lady Justice is blind,” Pence said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And there are tens of millions of Americans who have reason to believe that the blinders have been taken off and that we haven’t seen equal treatment under the law.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has said, similarly, that if elected president, he will “clean out the political appointments in the Department of Justice to restore confidence and integrity in the D.O.J.”As to what ends? It is not hard to imagine a world where a second-term President Trump orders a newly purged and reconstituted Justice Department to investigate any group or individual that happens to be a target of MAGA rage, whether they broke the law or not.Trump has upended nearly half a century of tradition with his contempt for the idea that law enforcement ought to remain separate and independent of the White House. But his actions grow naturally from an increasingly vocal faction within the conservative movement, as well as reflect a key change in the nature and composition of the Republican coalition.With regard to the former, there is the recent enthusiasm among so-called nationalist or populist conservatives for using the state to enforce a particular social order. And with regard to the latter, there is the way that, influenced by Trump, the Republican Party has begun to take on the values and attitudes of the small-time capitalist and the family firm.Of course, business owners have always been a critical part of state and local Republican politics. The nation’s state legislatures and county boards of supervisors are full of the proprietors of family-owned car dealerships, fast food franchises, construction companies, landscaping businesses and regional distribution firms. And in fact, many of the most visible and important families in conservative politics have their own family firms, albeit supersized ones: the Kochs, the DeVoses, the Crows and the Trumps.Among the elements that distinguish this closely held model of ownership from that of, say, a multinational corporation is the degree to which the business is understood to be an extension of the business owner, who appears to exercise total authority over the place of production, except in cases where the employees have a union (one of the many reasons members of this class are often intensely and exceptionally anti-labor).If the nature of our work shapes our values — if the habits of mind we cultivate on the job extend to our lives beyond it — then someone in a position of total control over a closely held business like, say, the Trump empire might bring those attitudes, those same habits and pathologies, to political office.Donald Trump certainly did, and as the Republican Party has come to shape itself around his person, it has also adopted his worldview, which is to say, the worldview and ideology of the boss. No longer content to run government for business, the Republican Party now hopes to run government as a business.But this doesn’t mean greater efficiency or responsiveness or whatever else most people (mistakenly) associate with private industry. It means, instead, government as the fief of a small-business tyrant.The next Republican president, in short, will almost certainly be the worst boss you, and American democracy, have ever had.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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6

      by

      An ecosystem of true believers is promoting a tale of persecution rather than prosecution that has migrated to the heart of presidential politics.Six months since the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol completed its work, a far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced “J6” as the animating force of their lives.They attend the criminal trials of the more prominent rioters charged in the attack. They gather to pray and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the outer perimeter of the District of Columbia jail, where some two dozen defendants are held. Last week, dozens showed up at an unofficial House hearing convened by a handful of Republican lawmakers to challenge “the fake narrative that an insurrection had occurred on Jan. 6,” as set forth by Jeffrey Clark, a witness at the hearing and a former Justice Department official who worked to undo the results of the 2020 election.The 90-minute event was a through-the-looking-glass alternative to the damning case against former President Donald J. Trump presented last year by the Jan. 6 committee. In the version advanced by five House Republicans who attended the hearing — Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, Ralph Norman, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Troy Nehls — as well as conservative lawyers and Capitol riot defendants, Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceful Trump supporters, followed by a continuing Biden administration campaign to imprison and torment innocent conservatives.Writ large, their loudest-in-the-room tale of persecution rather than prosecution might be dismissed as fringe nonsense had it not migrated so swiftly to the heart of presidential politics. Mr. Trump has pledged to pardon some of the Jan. 6 defendants if he returns to the White House, and his chief challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has signaled he may do the same.Representatives Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, both Republicans, were among the members of Congress who held a hearing criticizing the Jan. 6 prosecutions.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMore than half, or 58 percent, of self-described conservatives say that Jan. 6 was an act of “legitimate political discourse” rather than a “violent insurrection,” according to a poll three months ago by The Economist/YouGov.The counternarrative is in part animated by a series of particularly stiff sentences for the Jan. 6 defendants, including one of more than 12 years in prison handed down on Wednesday for a rioter who savagely assaulted a D.C. police officer, Michael Fanone.The audience for the hearing in the Capitol Visitor Center included several of the most avid and successful promoters of the Jan. 6 counternarrative.Among them were Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and QAnon adherent who was fatally shot by a Capitol police officer during the riot and is now heralded as a martyr by the far right; Nicole Reffitt, whose husband, Guy Reffitt, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in the riot and who now helps organize nightly vigils at the D.C. jail; Tayler Hansen, who has claimed to possess videotaped evidence of antifa elements instigating the violence at the Capitol, but who did not respond to a request from The New York Times to view the footage; and Tommy Tatum of Mississippi, who describes himself as an independent journalist and has inferred from various unidentified characters who appear in his own footage that sophisticated teams of plainclothes federal agents orchestrated the breach of the Capitol.The Jan. 6 deniers range from true believers to flighty opportunists, with fevered arguments among them as to who is which. Mr. Tatum and William Shipley, a lawyer who has represented more than 30 Jan. 6 defendants, have for example accused each other on Twitter of cynical profiteering.Micki Witthoeft, whose daughter, Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot during the riot, attended the hearing at the Capitol Visitor Center.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesOne generally admired within the group is Julie Kelly, a former Illinois Republican political consultant, cooking class teacher and pandemic lockdown critic who writes for the conservative website American Greatness. Ms. Kelly has asserted that the Biden administration is “on a destructive crusade to exact revenge against supporters of Donald Trump” and has accused Mr. Fanone, who was beaten unconscious by the rioters at the Capitol, of being a “crisis actor.” She was a frequent guest on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show before Fox fired him in April.Last month, aides to Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Ms. Kelly and two other conservative writers, John Solomon of Just the News and Joseph M. Hanneman of The Epoch Times, permission to ferret through the Capitol’s voluminous Jan. 6 security footage, the only journalists other than Mr. Carlson to obtain such access.In an interview the day before the House hearing, Ms. Kelly said she was scouring the video in hopes of learning the provenance of the infamous gallows that were seen on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. “Did Trump supporters go there and build that? I doubt it,” she said. Ms. Kelly also hopes to learn whether nefarious “agitators” were already inside the Capitol before the breach. She variously termed Jan. 6 “an inside job” and a “fed-surrection.”Ms. Kelly recounted a meeting she and a fellow supporter of Jan. 6 defendants, Cynthia Hughes, had last September with Mr. Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She said she told the former president that the defendants felt abandoned by him: “They’re saying to me: ‘We were there for him. Why isn’t he here for us?’” Ms. Hughes informed Mr. Trump that the federal judges he appointed were “among the worst” when it came to the treatment of the riot defendants.Surprised, Mr. Trump replied, “Well, I got recommendations from the Federalist Society.” Ms. Kelly said he then asked, “What do you want me to do?” She replied that he could donate to Ms. Hughes’s organization, the Patriot Freedom Project, which offers financial support to the defendants. Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC subsequently gave $10,000 to the group.Former President Donald J. Trump has pledged to pardon some of the Jan. 6 defendants if he returns to the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOthers in the ecosystem contend that Mr. Trump’s contribution to the cause is manifest by the slings and arrows he has himself suffered since that day. “I call him Jan. Sixth-er Number One,” said Joseph D. McBride, perhaps the most visible of the lawyers representing the defendants. “He’s under the gun. He’s being investigated and indicted.”Mr. McBride’s clients include Richard Barnett, who posed for a photograph with his foot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, as well as Ryan Nichols, who exhorted fellow protesters to target elected officials, yelling, “Cut their heads off!”Mr. McBride also represented two Stop the Steal rally organizers subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, Ali Alexander and Alex Bruesewitz. It was Mr. Bruesewitz who introduced Mr. McBride to Donald Trump Jr., which led to several invitations to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.“I’ve lost count at this point,” Mr. McBride said, adding that the club “is a good place to network.”Mr. McBride was also a frequent guest on Mr. Carlson’s show, including the time he claimed that a mysterious man seen at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his face obscured in red paint was “clearly a law enforcement officer.” Shown evidence later that week by a HuffPost reporter that the man was a well-known habitué of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games, Mr. McBride replied: “If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care.”He did acknowledge a certain dubiousness to the claim that the mostly white male conservatives who showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6 had the judicial deck stacked against them.“Pre-Jan. 6, anytime you heard the term ‘two-tier system of justice,’ it’s Blacks, it’s Latinos, it’s the infringed, it’s the poor, it’s the drug addicted, it’s the marginalized, it’s the L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. That coalition of victims, Mr. McBride insisted, now included the MAGA supporters he represented.Joseph McBride, left, and his client Richard Barnett, center, arriving for a court hearing in Washington.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesInsha Rahman, the vice president for advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, agrees, up to a point. Mr. McBride and the others are raising “unfortunately a fact of life for over two million Americans who are behind bars,” said Ms. Rahman, who has visited the D.C. jail several times and concurs that its conditions are inhumane, though no worse, she said, than detention facilities in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.Still, she said, the privileges afforded the Jan. 6 pretrial detainees in their particular wing — individual cells, a library, contact visits, the ability to participate in podcasts — “are not at all typical.”“But I don’t want to call that special treatment,” Ms. Rahman said. “That’s the floor for what every incarcerated person in America should have a right to expect.”For now, the protagonists of the alternative Jan. 6 narrative are not particularly focused on prison reform. Nor are they willing to give up.As Mr. McBride said: “Do I think we’ll ever get to the bottom of it? We still haven’t solved the J.F.K. assassination.” More

    • 63 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      The Run-Up Goes to Iowa

      by

      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicFor the past few months, The Run-Up has been reporting on political insiders and the work they’ve quietly been doing to shape the 2024 presidential election.What we’ve found is a group of people — Republicans and Democrats — all operating under the premise that this race will revolve around former President Donald Trump. That his nomination — and thus a rematch between Trump and President Biden — is almost inevitable.But if anything is going to blow up that assumption, it’s probably going to start in Iowa.As the first state in the Republican primary process, Iowa plays a key role in narrowing the field. If Trump wins there, it may effectively mean that he has secured the nomination.However, there’s a group of voters that holds disproportionate power in the state and in American culture more broadly. These voters were once part of Trump’s coalition — and they are now wavering.If they go another way, the whole race could open up.In our final episode of the season, The Run-Up goes to Iowa and inside the evangelical church. We speak with Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical activist with a history of picking Iowa’s winners. And we go to Eternity Church, where Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently spoke, and talk to Jesse Newman, the pastor, and other members of the congregation.Photo Illustration by The New York Times. Photo by Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesAbout ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is The New York Times’s flagship political podcast. The host, Astead W. Herndon, grapples with the big ideas already animating the 2024 presidential election. Because it’s always about more than who wins and loses. And the next election has already started.Last season, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots voters and shifting attitudes among the bases of both political parties. This season, we go inside the party establishment.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Vivek Ramaswamy Is ‘a Hint of the Future’: Our Writers on His Candidacy

      by

      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Vivek Ramaswamy, a hedge fund analyst turned biotech executive. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Trial Setting Could Provide Conservative Jury Pool

      by

      If Judge Aileen Cannon sticks to her initial decision to hold the trial in Fort Pierce, Fla., the jury would be drawn largely from counties that Donald Trump won handily in his previous campaigns.When Judge Aileen M. Cannon assumed control of the case stemming from former President Donald J. Trump’s indictment for putting national security secrets at risk, she set the stage for the trial to be held with a regional jury pool made up mostly of counties that Mr. Trump won handily in his two previous campaigns.She signaled that the trial would take place in the federal courthouse where she normally sits, in Fort Pierce, at the northern end of the Southern District of Florida. The region that feeds potential jurors to that courthouse is made up of one swing county and four others that are ruby red in their political leanings and that Mr. Trump won by substantial margins in both 2016 and 2020.She left open the possibility that the trial could be moved — and political leanings are not necessarily indicative of how a jury will decide — but the fact that the trial is expected to draw jurors who live in places that tilt Republican has caught the attention of Mr. Trump’s allies and veterans of Florida courts.“For years, it’s been a very conservative venue for plaintiffs’ lawyers,” said John Morgan, a trial lawyer who founded a large personal injury firm. Describing the various counties that feed into Fort Pierce, he said, “It is solid, solid Trump country.”In Okeechobee County, a rural county where just over 16,000 people voted in the 2020 election, Mr. Trump won 71.5 percent of the vote, according to the county’s election tally. In Highlands County, a rural area where more than 52,000 people voted in that election, Mr. Trump won with 66.8 percent of the vote.In Martin County, where more than 98,000 people voted, Mr. Trump got 61.8 percent of the vote. In Indian River County, which contains Vero Beach and where more than 97,000 votes were cast, Mr. Trump got 60.2 percent of the vote.Only St. Lucie County, where about 172,000 votes were cast, is a swing district. Mr. Trump eked out a victory there over President Biden in 2020 with 50.4 percent of the ballots cast, the data shows, and also won the county narrowly in 2016.Dave Aronberg, an outgoing Florida state attorney in Palm Beach County, said he could recall few major or politically sensitive cases in the Fort Pierce courthouse. He agreed that the Fort Pierce counties provide a “much more conservative jury pool,” although he suggested that a number of prospective jurors could be drawn from St. Lucie, which is more politically diverse.Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020, disclosed in an order on Tuesday that the trial and all the hearings connected to it would likely be held in Fort Pierce, about 120 miles north of Miami along the east coast of Florida.She left open the possibility of eventually moving the trial, noting in her order that “modifications” could “be made as necessary as this matter proceeds.”The trial of a former president who is also the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination is likely to involve substantial security issues as well as logistical challenges given the crush of interest in the case.When Mr. Trump was arraigned this month, the proceeding took place at the large federal courthouse complex in Miami, likely because the duty magistrate assigned to the initial hearing was based there. But now that Judge Cannon will handle the remainder of the case, it became her prerogative to move it to Fort Pierce, one of four other cities in the Southern District of Florida to have a federal courthouse. (Courthouses in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach sit in counties that Mr. Biden won in 2020.)The Fort Pierce courthouse, which sits on a busy state highway a few blocks from the water, is Judge Cannon’s home base. She is the sole district judge working from the building.First the Justice Department and then the special counsel, Jack Smith, investigated Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents for months in front of a grand jury in Washington. Had the case been prosecuted there, the former president and his allies would have almost certainly raised concerns about the fairness of the jury pool in the city.Many rioters charged in connection with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, sought to move their trials from Washington by claiming that local residents were largely liberals. But not one of the numerous attempts to move the trials elsewhere was approved by a judge. And Mr. Trump’s advisers are well aware that Florida, which Mr. Trump carried twice, is a more beneficial place for this particular defendant.Mr. Aronberg suggested that Judge Cannon’s order allowing flexibility could be a signal of a change down the road.“I’m not convinced this case is going to go in Fort Pierce,” he said, predicting a potential move to West Palm Beach, which would put it in the county where Mr. Trump lives and where the classified documents in question were stored after he left office. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Dodges Question on Endorsing Trump as 2024 Nominee

      by

      The Florida governor did say he would “respect the outcome” of the primaries while Donald Trump has refused to commit to backing the party’s 2024 nominee if the former president falls short.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Thursday avoided saying directly that he would endorse Donald J. Trump in 2024 should the former president win the Republican nomination, showing his reluctance to make a benign show of support for the man who is beating him by a wide margin in national polls and insulting him nearly every day.Asked by a reporter at a news conference in Tampa about whether he would endorse Mr. Trump, the governor responded by complaining that Mr. Trump had recently criticized his policies during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. DeSantis noted in particular that his rival had compared him unfavorably to New York’s former governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat.“So what I would say is this: When you are saying that Cuomo did better on Covid than Florida did, you are revealing yourself to just be full of it,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Nobody believes that.”“I remember in 2020 and 2021, when he was praising Florida for being open, saying we did it much better than New York and Michigan and everyone was coming to Florida and that we were one of the great governors in the United States,” he continued, his voice rising. “And he used to say that all the time. Now, all of a sudden, his tune is changing. And I would just tell people, do you find it credible? Do you honestly find it credible?”Mr. Trump himself has not pledged to back the party’s nominee in 2024 if a rival defeats him in the primaries, underscoring the level of division in the Republican field. Mr. Trump’s federal indictment has led some of the other candidates to more openly criticize him, questioning his judgment. But Mr. Trump, who regularly calls Mr. DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious” and accuses him of needing a “personality transplant,” retains the support of many Republican voters.At the end of his answer, Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing Mr. Trump by roughly 30 percentage points in national polls as more candidates jump into the race, turned to acknowledge the importance of the nominating contest.“It’s an important process and, you know, you respect the process and you respect the people’s decisions how this goes,” he said. “But I’m very confident that those decisions are going to be positive for us.”On social media, Mr. Trump’s allies quickly pounced on Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to pledge loyalty to his rival if he falls short.“Ron DeSantis just proved once again why he’s a Never Trumper in the mold of Liz Cheney and Jeb Bush, completely disqualifying him for 2024, as well as 2028,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.But Mr. Trump, of course, has taken a similar stance.“It would depend,” Mr. Trump said in a radio interview earlier this year when asked if he would support “whoever” won the party’s nomination. He added, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.”Republicans have generally shown far more grace to Mr. Trump than to his rivals, chastising those challenging the former president for sentiments similar to ones he has also expressed.The Republican National Committee has said that candidates must promise to support the party’s eventual nominee if they want to participate in debates.Later on Thursday, at a campaign event in South Carolina, Mr. DeSantis seemed to backtrack slightly, interrupting a reporter who asked why he had seemed to avoid committing to support Mr. Trump.“I didn’t avoid, no, I was misquoted,” Mr. DeSantis shot back. “Here’s what I said, I said: ‘You run this process. You compete and you respect the outcome of the process.’ And I’ve always said that. And so that’s what I said before. That’s what I’ll do. I think I’m going to be the nominee. No matter what happens, I’m going to work to beat Joe Biden.”Voters at the South Carolina event said they hoped Mr. DeSantis and other Republican candidates would back Mr. Trump, should the former president be the nominee.“I think everybody should unite, whoever gets the nomination,” said Shawn Risseeuw, 57, a mechanical engineer who lives in North Augusta, S.C., and described himself as a strong DeSantis supporter. “They’re fools if they don’t.” More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Senator Rick Scott of Florida Weighing 2024 Presidential Campaign

      by

      If he runs, Mr. Scott would become the fourth Republican presidential candidate from Florida, joining Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami.Senator Rick Scott of Florida is considering a late entry into the Republican presidential primary race, a move that would make him the latest high-profile Florida Republican to try to wrest the nomination from Donald J. Trump, according to two people familiar with the discussions.Should he enter the race, Mr. Scott, Florida’s former governor, would be challenging both the front-runner, Mr. Trump, as well as the distant-second rival, Ron DeSantis, the state’s current governor. Mr. Scott would also join Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami as the fourth Republican presidential candidate from Florida. Mr. DeSantis in particular could see his support erode further if Mr. Scott adds to an already crowded field of Trump alternatives.Mr. Scott, who came to power as governor during the Tea Party wave of 2010, has been discussing a possible campaign for several weeks, according to the people familiar with the talks. Like other recent entries, Mr. Scott appears to be assessing a G.O.P. field in which Mr. DeSantis, with whom Mr. Scott has had a difficult relationship, has lost some support after a series of missteps and unforced errors.Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland, captured this sentiment in a recent CBS News interview, calling Mr. DeSantis’s campaign “one of the worst I’ve seen so far.” He added, “Everyone was thinking he was the guy to beat, and now I don’t think too many people think that.”On Thursday, Will Hurd, a moderate Republican and former Texas congressman, announced a long-shot candidacy for president in a video message.For Mr. Scott, who is 70 years old and wealthy enough that he can fund his own candidacy, the campaign could be the last chance he has to make a bid for the White House, a run he has long shown interest in. Should a Republican unseat President Biden in the 2024 election, it would be difficult for Mr. Scott or anyone else in the party to challenge that new president during a re-election effort four years later.But running for president would be a dramatic shift for Mr. Scott, who announced earlier this year that he would seek a second six-year term in the Senate in 2024 instead of a national campaign.Mr. Scott’s senior adviser, Chris Hartline, said in a statement to The New York Times: “It’s flattering that some have mentioned the possibility of Senator Scott running for President, but as he’s said many times, he’s running for re-election to the Senate.”If Mr. Scott does decide to enter the race, it is unclear how aggressively he would challenge Mr. Trump, who currently dominates the field even after being indicted twice.Mr. Scott led a major for-profit hospital chain before getting involved in politics. He served as governor of Florida for two terms before running for Senate in 2018. In 2021 and 2022, he was the chairman of the Senate Republican campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a prestige perch that senators often use to boost their national profiles ahead of a presidential campaign. Mr. Scott’s tenure was rocky, marked by a cash drain from the committee and criticisms about how the money was spent.Mr. Trump made clear early on that he planned on trying to keep his grip on the Republican Party after the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Scott visited Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club, in April 2021 to grant him a newly-created award from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.“This weekend I was proud to recognize President Donald Trump with the inaugural @NRSC Champion for Freedom Award,” Mr. Scott wrote on Twitter, posing in a picture with Mr. Trump. “President Trump fought for American workers, secured the border, and protected our constitutional rights.”At the time, Mr. Trump remained popular with the Republican Party’s base even after his baseless claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him. Mr. Scott, as chairman of a party committee, appeared to find harmony with Mr. Trump to be in the best interests of Senate nominees.Mr. Scott has had a more contentious relationship with Mr. DeSantis.Before Mr. DeSantis signed into state law a bill restricting most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, Mr. Scott said that he favored keeping what were then the current restrictions, after 15 weeks of pregnancy. He also called for “cooler heads” to “prevail” as Mr. DeSantis escalated a feud with Disney, the largest private employer in Florida. A monthslong fight between the governor and the company stemmed from the opposition some officials at Disney had to a new state law restricting gender and sexuality education in elementary schools.Mr. Scott was not a favorite of some of his colleagues in the Senate. In 2022, he ran an ultimately failed bid to oust the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, from his leadership position, the capstone in what had become a toxic relationship between the two Republicans.Should Mr. Scott abandon a re-election bid in favor of a presidential run, it would create an open primary for his Senate seat. And it would potentially add another layer to the Trump-DeSantis rivalry, as a Trump-backed candidate would likely face off against a DeSantis-backed one.A Republican congressman from Florida, Representative Mike Waltz, is strongly considering a run for Senate to replace Mr. Scott if Mr. Scott makes a bid for the White House, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Waltz has endorsed Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign for president. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Will Hurd Announces 2024 Presidential Election Bid

      by

      Mr. Hurd, a moderate who represented a large swing district for three terms, called Donald J. Trump a “lawless, selfish, failed politician.”Will Hurd, a former Texas congressman who was part of a diminishing bloc of Republican moderates in the House and was the only Black member of his caucus when he left office in 2021, announced his candidacy for president on Thursday with a video message that attacked the G.O.P. front-runner, Donald J. Trump. “If we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump, who lost the House, the Senate and the White House, we all know Joe Biden will win again,” he said, referring to Republican losses in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, in addition to Mr. Trump’s own defeat in 2020.Mr. Hurd, 45, represented the 23rd District for three terms before deciding not to run for re-election in 2020, when a host of G.O.P. moderates in Congress chose to retire instead of appearing on a ticket led by President Trump.His district was larger than some states, extending from El Paso to San Antonio along the southwestern border.Mr. Hurd, who also made an appearance on “CBS Mornings,” emphasized in his video that Republicans needed to nominate a forward-looking candidate who could unite the party and country.”I’ll give us the common-sense leadership America so desperately needs,” he said. A formidable gantlet awaits Mr. Hurd, a long-shot candidate in a crowded G.O.P. presidential field. To qualify for the party’s first debate in August, candidates are required to muster support of at least 1 percent in multiple national polls recognized by the Republican National Committee. There are also fund-raising thresholds, including a minimum of 40,000 unique donors to individual campaigns.Before entering politics, Mr. Hurd was an undercover officer for the C.I.A. and his tenure of nearly a decade with the agency included work in Afghanistan.In Congress, he developed a reputation for working across the aisle and drew attention in 2017 when he car-pooled from Texas to Washington with Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat and House colleague.While Mr. Hurd largely toed the Republican line, he was also known for bucking Mr. Trump. During his final term in the House, Mr. Hurd voted more than one-third of the time against Mr. Trump’s positions. Mr. Hurd was a particularly strident critic of the president’s push to build a wall along the entire southern border, a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump that he ran on in 2016. In a 2019 interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Hurd called Mr. Trump’s border wall initiative a “third-century solution to a 21st-century problem.”It was not the first time that Mr. Hurd had spoken so bluntly in opposition to a piece of Mr. Trump’s agenda.When Mr. Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 blocking citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, one of the first acts of his presidency, Mr. Hurd condemned it, saying the policy “endangers the lives of thousands of American men and women in our military, diplomatic corps and intelligence services.”And when Mr. Trump attacked four freshman Democratic congresswomen of color in 2019, Mr. Hurd denounced the president and criticized the direction of the Republican Party.“The party is not growing in some of the largest parts of our country,” he said in a June 2019 speech to the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative L.G.B.T.Q. group. “Why is that? I’ll tell you.”“Don’t be a racist,” Mr. Hurd continued, according to The Washington Blade. “Don’t be a misogynist, right? Don’t be a homophobe. These are real basic things that we all should learn when we were in kindergarten.”But while Mr. Hurd broke with Mr. Trump on some notable occasions, he also dismayed Mr. Trump’s critics when he voted in lock step with House Republicans against impeaching Mr. Trump the first time in December 2019. Mr. Trump was impeached in a party-line vote by the House for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, but acquitted by the Senate. More