Trump, Donald J

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      Trump Cannot Be Unseen

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      Gail Collins: Hey Bret, good to be conversing again. Heck of a lot going on. Before we get to the border or the budget, though, let me admit I’m shallow and start with the Trump town hall on CNN.Bret Stephens: Not shallow, Gail. But you are depressing me.Gail: Trump lost your Republican vote a long time ago, but if you were still on the fence, was there anything on display that evening that would have had an impact?Bret: I’m not exactly a reliable gauge of how today’s Republicans think: In November, I wrote a column called “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished,” which I may have to spend the rest of my life living down.That said, I would guess that if you’re the sort of voter who liked 80-proof Trump, you’re gonna love 120-proof Trump. And that’s what he was in that CNN town hall: more mendacious, more shameless, more unapologetic, more aggressive, nastier. But also undeniably vigorous, particularly when compared with Joe Biden. My guess is the town hall will consolidate his lead as the Republican front-runner.Your take? Should CNN have given him the platform?Gail: Don’t see any reason CNN shouldn’t have done the interview. Except that it reduces pressure on Trump to show up for any Republican primary debates. Which he naturally wants to avoid, given his ineptitude when it comes to actual policy questions.Bret: I’m of two minds. The media has a responsibility to cover the Republican front-runner, and I thought Kaitlan Collins, the CNN moderator, handled the responsibility about as well as anyone could have. Yet nonstop media attention is the oxygen on which Trump thrives. The more attention we give him — which is what we are doing right now — the stronger he gets.Gail: About the impact: Yeah, if you liked Trump before, you wouldn’t be deterred by his willingness to let the nation default, or his being “inclined” to pardon a lot of the Jan. 6 rioters.Really would like to hear an everybody-in primary debate, though. Without Trump, I guess the only suspense would be whether Ron DeSantis is capable of being … not terrible.Bret: Well, as much as I dislike DeSantis for his views on abortion and Ukraine and free speech, I also have to ask whether I’d prefer him to Trump as the Republican nominee. And there the answer is a resounding yes, much as I’d much prefer a peptic ulcer to stomach cancer.Gail: I’m still not inclined to pick DeSantis over — pretty much anybody. Yeah, Trump is worse when it comes to personal morality, and DeSantis probably wouldn’t be as divisive in the sense of not being exciting enough to really rile up the base.But his position on social issues like abortion is scary: He truly believes in imposing his extremist convictions on the country.Bret: True, but Trump believes in imposing his despotic convictions on the country.I also think it’s imperative that Democrats — and I don’t mean Robert Kennedy Jr. — start thinking about challenging Biden in the primary. That Washington Post-ABC poll showing Biden with a 36 percent approval rating and running 6 points behind Trump should scare the bejeezus out of Democrats — and that’s before we wind up in a recession or a full-scale banking crisis or a shooting war with China (or all three).Gail: Real-life fact is that no Democrat with the standing to potentially win a primary would challenge a sitting president. Especially one like Biden whose performance is … not bad. He’s had some real achievements, particularly in the super-important battle against global warming. Overall yes, he’s unexciting, and these days incapable of forcing the House Republicans to do anything really constructive. But his standards and character are high.Bret: As you know, I will vote for him over Trump or DeSantis. But Democrats overstate his achievements and underestimate his unpopularity at their own — actually, our own — peril.Gail: We both were wishing he’d announce he wasn’t running and open the door for other promising candidates to jump in. But since it’s not gonna happen … it’s not gonna happen.Bret: Probably right. Next subject: Your thoughts about the budget negotiations?Gail: I have faith that there’s not going to be a crushing default — that in a total crisis the Fed will figure out something. But when it comes to the bottom line I’m on the side of Joe Biden. (Surprise!) You do not use the country’s credit standing to stage a stupid battle about cutting funds for the poor.Bret: Well, by the same token, you do not use the country’s credit standing to insist that no spending cuts should even be countenanced and that able-bodied single adults should not have to find work as a condition of obtaining government benefits.Gail: The Republicans are attacking the status quo, not some new program the Democrats are trying to push through. And I’ve always been wary of the must-work stuff because all the paperwork, even in our technological era, makes it so easy for people to get cut off for no reason except bureaucratic confusion.Bret: The conservative in me hates subsidizing indolence, especially when jobs are abundant. Welfare should go to those who truly need it, not people who just can’t be bothered to work.Gail: Also, I think this must-work discussion has to begin with quality child care for every low-income family that needs it. Very bottom bottom line is that kids come first.About the budget — I guess Congress could just decide there just shouldn’t be a debt ceiling. After all, we went more than 125 years without one. Is that something you think they should rally around?Bret: The debt ceiling reminds me a bit of the Doomsday machine in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” In theory, it’s supposed to encourage restraint and responsibility. In practice, it’s likely to destroy the world. I’d be interested to see the administration test the theory that the 14th Amendment, which says that the public debt of the United States “shall not be questioned,” makes the debt ceiling unconstitutional, although I doubt they could win that case in court.The other crisis, Gail, is happening at the southern border. Looking back, anything the administration might have done to avert it?Gail: Not gonna be silly enough to claim the Biden folks have been completely on top of the whole situation.Bret: Our awesome veep ….Gail: But it looks like we’ll finally be getting a lot of new federal workers to deal with the people who show up at the border.And the Biden administration is working on it. The Trump administration was totally useless on the problem.Bret: Not useless but definitely cruel. But what voters will remember is that under Trump, we didn’t have this scale of a crisis.Gail: Not sure the scale is really going to be that overwhelming as the year moves on. And I still have to note that I hate, really hate, your idea of finishing that wall.Bret: A wall won’t stop all illegal immigration. But it can help deter the most dangerous and reckless border crossings, which have left thousands of migrants dead. It should be part of an overall immigration compromise that includes automatic citizenship for Dreamers and more permissive rules for legal immigration through normal consular channels in the migrants’ home countries. Right now we have the worst of both worlds: a totally chaotic border that makes a bipartisan legislative compromise a political nonstarter.Gail: Bret, these people have a lot of reasons for coming — including seeking asylum from government oppression. But most of them are coming for jobs, and as you’ve always pointed out, our economy really needs the workers. In New York, we’ve gotten a ton of newcomers. They’re having a terrible time, particularly with housing, but employers, especially in the service industries, are desperate for their help. We just need to work out a system to make it possible.Bret: Sadly, as our news-side colleague Hannah Dreier chronicled last month, many recent border crossers are children working in conditions worthy of Dickens or Dreiser. Seeing mothers with young children strapped to their backs while hawking candies at traffic stops was something I was accustomed to in my hometown of Mexico City. It’s jarring to encounter them at road intersections and on subway platforms in New York City. If Biden doesn’t get a handle on this, it could cost him the election and lead to an ugly public backlash that will make Trump’s immigration policy seem tame.Speaking of subways, Gail, your thoughts on the killing of Jordan Neely?Gail: We’re talking about a former Michael Jackson impersonator who used to entertain subway passengers, but had deteriorated into a homeless man who was mentally ill and sometimes scary.Bret: Very scary. He was a person who had previously been arrested more than 30 times. He had punched an elderly woman in the face. He had exposed himself and peed inside of a subway car. He had walked out on a residential treatment program. There was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his death — but cops probably wouldn’t have found out about it because a group sued to stop the police from detaining people solely to check for arrest warrants. He was the sort of guy who makes the subway frightening for a lot of passengers, particularly women. People ought to know these facts before rushing to judgment.Gail: Neely was acting out and frightening people on the day he died. Daniel Penny, the former Marine who tackled him, was trying to stop an unnerving incident from happening. But he used chokehold force in a way that killed Neely.I can’t absolve Penny. But the big problem here is that the low-or-no-income mentally ill need more services than they’re getting in New York or pretty much anywhere.Bret: Obviously, I don’t support vigilantism. But that’s what you get when police are hampered from maintaining public order. The answer is to give the police the authorities and resources they need to deal with someone like Neely before a tragedy occurs.Gail, this is too grim a note on which to end — and we haven’t even touched on George Santos’s indictment.Gail: Now there’s a high note!Bret: Before we go, I want to put in a word for Sam Roberts’s obituary for Mike Pride, a former editor of The Concord Monitor, who died last month in Florida at 76, and whom we both knew through his stewardship of the Pulitzer Prizes. Mike showed that you can often make the greatest difference as a newsman by writing about issues that are near to people’s everyday lives. He reminded us that local journalism matters. And that it’s at least one thing that deserves to be made great again.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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      How Much Did Election Denial Hurt Republicans in the Midterms?

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      The NewsDenying the results of the 2020 election and casting doubts about the nation’s voting system cost statewide Republican candidates 2.3 to 3.7 percentage points in the midterms last year, according to a new study from States United Action, a nonpartisan group that promotes fair elections.Why It Matters: Consequential races were close.Even at the lowest end of the spectrum, 2.3 percentage points would have been enough to swing several critical midterm races that Republicans lost, including the contests for governor and attorney general in Arizona and the Senate elections in Nevada and Georgia.In each of those races, the Republican nominee had either expressed doubts about the 2020 election or outright rejected its legitimacy.And as former President Donald J. Trump illustrated at a town-hall event last week, election denialism is very much alive within the Republican Party.But spreading such conspiracy theories again could hamper Republicans as they look to take back the Senate in 2024.“The problem for a lot of Republicans right now is that the gap between what the base wants and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten very long,” said Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist.Background: A series of losses for election deniersIn the midterms, a slate of election-denying candidates ran together as the America First coalition. These candidates, organized in part by Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada, sought to take over critical parts of the nation’s election infrastructure by running for secretary of state, attorney general and governor in states across the country.But in every major battleground state, these candidates lost.“What we found was lying about elections isn’t just bad for our democracy, it’s bad politics,” said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Action.The group arrived at the 2.3 to 3.7 percentage-point “penalty” number by comparing election-denying candidates in 2022 with Republicans who did not espouse similar views, and then comparing the 2022 performance to that of 2018.On the whole, 2022 was a better year for Republicans than 2018 was. As expected, in statewide races with no election denier, Republicans did much better in 2022 than in 2018 on average, but the same did not hold true for election-denying candidates.What’s Next: Big Senate races in 2024Several candidates who were a core part of the election denial movement have signaled an intent to run again in 2024, including Mr. Marchant in Nevada. Others, including Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano, who lost races for governor in Arizona and Pennsylvania, are reportedly considering bids for Senate.And as Mr. Trump continues to demand fealty to such beliefs and hold sway over Republican primaries, the issue is likely to linger in G.O.P. politics.Most battleground states are not holding contests for governor and secretary of state until 2026, but several marquee Senate races next year will determine control of the chamber.“What’s really interesting is that the results there are different from the results for congressional races and state legislative races,” Ms. Lydgate said. “We think that’s because in these statewide races for governor, state attorney general, secretary of state, voters really came to understand that those are the people who oversee voting. Those are the people who are in charge of your freedom to vote.” More

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      DeSantis Impresses Voters and Trolls Trump in Iowa Swing

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      The former president canceled a rally in Des Moines, citing a storm warning. The Florida governor made the most of his rival’s absence, as DeSantis allies taunted Mr. Trump.For the first time in months, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday showed the aggressive political instincts that his allies have long insisted he would demonstrate in a contest against former President Donald J. Trump.After headlining two successful political events in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis made an unscheduled stop in Des Moines — a move aimed at highlighting the fact that Mr. Trump had abruptly postponed a planned Saturday evening rally in the area because of reports of possible severe weather.Mr. Trump’s explanation for postponing the event drew skepticism from local Iowa officials and derision from DeSantis allies about the “beautiful” weather. And Mr. DeSantis — who has avoided direct conflict with Mr. Trump — essentially kicked sand in the former president’s face by coming to an area that Mr. Trump claimed to have been told was too dangerous for him to visit.After wrapping up his events on Saturday evening elsewhere in the state, Mr. DeSantis headed to Jethro’s BBQ Southside, where he and his wife, Casey DeSantis, stood on a table outside and spoke to a cheering crowd. The barbecue joint was a short drive from where Mr. Trump had planned to host his own rally.“My better half and I have been able to be all over Iowa today, but before we went back to Florida we wanted to come by and say hi to the people of Des Moines,” a grinning Mr. DeSantis said. “So thank you all for coming out. It’s a beautiful night, it’s been a great day for us.”Mr. DeSantis’s pointed pit stop was a clear rebuke to Mr. Trump, who has tried to torment the Florida governor for months, mocking him for his falling poll numbers and perceived dearth of charisma. Mr. DeSantis’s resistance to hitting back while not a declared candidate as he finished the state’s legislative session, combined with a handful of unforced errors, had allowed the former president to take control of the race for 2024 and frustrated some of Mr. DeSantis’s allies. But as he prepares to take on Mr. Trump, who has dominated every Republican he has campaigned against in the past, Mr. DeSantis moved to show he doesn’t intend to suffer the same result. “If someone’s punching you in the face, you better punch them back,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — a race in which Mr. Rubio was criticized for not fighting back enough against Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has been outflanked by Mr. Trump’s team at various turns until now. Saturday was the first time Mr. DeSantis has taken advantage of an opportunity to show up Mr. Trump over a perceived misstep. Mr. DeSantis needs to string together many more days like Saturday in a campaign that will rely heavily on winning the Iowa caucus early next year. But Republican activists in the state say there is an opening with caucus-goers for someone other than Mr. Trump. And the visit Saturday, where he also traveled to Sioux Center — populated by Christian conservatives whose support he must gain — was seen as a positive development by Republicans who want to defeat Mr. Trump but have been dismayed by Mr. DeSantis’s stumbles as he steps onto the national stage.Casey DeSantis mingled with attendees at the event in Cedar Rapids on Saturday.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesDespite the unforeseen — albeit indirect — jab at Jethro’s, the governor is unlikely to criticize Mr. Trump directly until after he formally announces his campaign, according to two people familiar with his political operation. And even when he does jump into the race, which is expected to happen imminently, he will largely focus on contrasting his record with Mr. Trump’s — particularly on issues like the coronavirus pandemic — while making the case that he is the candidate better equipped to defeat President Biden in a general election. It’s a strategy that avoids relitigating Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, and one the governor is foreshadowing as he barnstorms Republican events around the country. It also positions Mr. DeSantis — who is decades younger than the 76-year-old Mr. Trump, who was recently indicted and faces the possibility of additional ones in other investigations — as interested in the future and not the past.“If we make this election about a referendum on Joe Biden and his failed policies, and we provide a positive alternative to take America in a new direction, I think Republicans will win across the board,” Mr. DeSantis said at a Saturday evening fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Iowa in Cedar Rapids. That event was shown on Fox News during time that Mr. Trump had claimed Fox News was reserving to show his rally. Mr. DeSantis’s message is already appealing to some voters, including Amy Seeger, who traveled from Milwaukee to see him speak earlier in the day at a picnic in Sioux Center.“I would vote for a shoe over Trump,” Ms. Seeger said in an interview. “It is time to move forward. Trump is very wrapped up in 2020 and playing the victim.”Mr. DeSantis also used the Iowa trip to show off the sometimes enigmatic lighter side of his personality, flipping burgers at the picnic and talking about his life as a family man with his wife at the evening fund-raiser in Cedar Rapids.At that second event, Ms. DeSantis joined her husband on stage for an interview conducted by the state Republican Party chair, Jeff Kaufmann, following remarks from the governor. Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech focuses almost exclusively on policy, leaving out the biographical details that politicians are generally expected to supply. His wife seemed to try to fill in those gaps, telling personal stories about Mr. DeSantis’s childhood in Florida, his military service, and their three young children.“When he gets home, don’t think for a second that he goes and goes right to bed,” she said. “I hand three small kids over to him and I go to bed.”The moment resonated with the crowd. “There was a tender side to him, a family side, that I didn’t really have an appreciation for,” said Bob Carlson, a physician from Muscatine who was in the audience.Mr. DeSantis greeted supporters after making an unscheduled visit to the Jethro’s BBQ Southside in Des Moines on Saturday.Bryon Houlgrave/USA Today NetworkAs Mr. DeSantis builds toward an announcement, he is beginning to show other signs of political strength in ways that matter beyond having financial backing. The outing to Iowa — where he is expected to make a return visit fairly soon — came as a super PAC backing his all-but-official presidential campaign announced support from 37 state lawmakers. Local elected officials tend to pay less attention to national polls than members of Congress, who have been slower to endorse the governor.In contrast, Mr. Trump — who had scheduled a rally to try to blot out Mr. DeSantis’s visit by appearing on the same day — abruptly called off his own event in the middle of the afternoon, citing a tornado watch.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the Iowa event was sold out but that “due to the National Weather Service’s Tornado Watch in effect in Polk and surrounding counties, we were unfortunately forced to postpone the event. We will be there at the first available date.”But although it rained heavily at points, it was sunny mid-afternoon and no severe weather such as a tornado materialized, which raised questions among Iowans about whether Mr. Trump was concerned he would fail to draw the crowd he had anticipated. The lack of dangerous storms was noted by local activists who want to see the party move on from Mr. Trump. “We’re all outside on a nice night,” the influential podcast host Steve Deace wrote on Twitter from the scene of Mr. DeSantis’s barbecue victory lap. “Pretty big crowd too. No severe weather in sight. Planes landing and taking off as scheduled.”While Mr. Trump canceled his Iowa appearance, he later called in to an event hosted by the ReAwaken America Tour, a Christian nationalist, far-right movement led by Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the QAnon promoter and national security adviser who Mr. Trump forced out early in his term. The group, which helps promote conspiracy theories, paid one of Mr. Trump’s clubs in Florida, the Doral, to hold it there. Mr. DeSantis’s hope for a win in the Iowa caucuses involves uniting a careful coalition of social conservatives who backed candidates like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee in 2016, along with suburban moderates who went for Mr. Rubio.Yet Mr. DeSantis may be poised to pick up support from enough corners of the state to increase his support. For instance, the influential social conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats has met with the governor and has praised him publicly.Mr. DeSantis’s day was also punctuated with appearances with Senator Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds, both Iowa Republicans. Those visits don’t necessarily mean endorsements from those officials are in the offing, but they do indicate a willingness in the state to support someone other than Mr. Trump and less concern than once existed about retribution from the former president.Bret Hayworth contributed reporting from Sioux Center, Iowa. More

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      It’s Been a Week. What Does It Tell Us About 2024?

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      The presidential race has started to crystallize, with flawed standard-bearers, worried political parties and voters unhappy with their choices.Eighteen months is an eternity in politics.But rapid-fire and high-profile events over the past week have set the tone and clarified the stakes of a still nascent presidential race featuring an incumbent president and a Republican front-runner whom many Americans, according to polling, do not want as their choices — but may feel resigned to accept.The week began with a surprising poll — probably an outlier — that showed President Biden losing to both former President Donald J. Trump and his closest presumptive primary competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.Then in quick succession came a jury’s verdict holding Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse, a raucous New Hampshire town hall that brought the former president’s falsehoods and bluster back into the spotlight, the lifting of pandemic-era controls at the U.S.-Mexico border, and a raft of endorsements for Mr. DeSantis — and an unscheduled visit to show up Mr. Trump — in Iowa that showed many Republican leaders are open to a Trump alternative.All of that left leaders, strategists and voters in both parties exceptionally anxious.“We’re in the midst of a primary that has yet to even really form, and meanwhile the opportunity to pound Biden into dirt with his incompetence is slipping,” said Dave Carney, a longtime Republican consultant in New Hampshire, where the first Republican primary votes will be cast in February. “It’s scattershot right now.”Democrats, who would be expected to rally around their standard-bearer, have spent the week expressing a divide on border security and questioning the president on key policy issues.Strategists have begged Democratic voters to get over their discontent and accept the president as the best they’re going to get.“Live in the real world,” Stuart Stevens, the longtime Republican political consultant who bolted from the party as Mr. Trump rose to power, exhorted after the New Hampshire town hall. “If you saw Donald Trump tonight and aren’t supporting Biden, you are helping elect Trump. It’s not complicated.”Representative Ro Khanna of California, a liberal Democrat often willing to say openly what other rank-and-file Democrats won’t, laid out a vision for economic renewal in a Friday speech in New Hampshire that contrasted the president’s more modest ambitions with his failure to secure the allegiance of white working-class voters whom Mr. Biden has said he is uniquely qualified to win back.“People are so desperate for some healing, for leadership that can unify,” Mr. Khanna told Democrats at a dinner in Nashua. “We do not need to compromise who we are to find common cause.”In an interview on Saturday, he said it was not meant to be a criticism. But it was “an appeal for a bolder platform that captures the imagination of working-class Americans and inspires them.”There’s no question that political predictions this far from an election are unreliable. Mr. DeSantis has yet to declare his candidacy for the White House, though he and Mr. Trump have been circling each other and competing in a shadow contest in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first contests for the Republican presidential nomination. Even Iowa voters tend not to tune in to the race until later in the year, noted David Kochel, a longtime Iowa Republican consultant.Still, the question of the moment remains: Where are we?Simon Rosenberg, who correctly predicted that a surge of Democratic activism would blunt the promised “red wave” of the 2022 midterms, said the “fear of MAGA” that powered Democratic victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022 had not diminished ahead of 2024. If anything, abortion bans rolling from state to state across the country, a disheartening surge in mass shootings and a Republican assault on educational freedom will only sharpen those fears, he said.Mr. Trump’s performance at a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening — in which the former president repeatedly lied about the 2020 election; mocked E. Jean Carroll, whose accusations of sexual abuse and defamation ended in a $5 million judgment against him; and promised a return to some of his least popular policies — only reiterated why Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans have turned away from the G.O.P. in the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania.The Biden re-election campaign, now in full gear after his formal announcement last month, was making the case to reporters after the town hall, pointing to Mr. Trump’s pride in the overturning of Roe v. Wade; his dismissive take on the economic catastrophe that could ensue if the federal government defaults on its outstanding debt; his referring to Jan. 6, 2021, as “a beautiful day”; and his refusal to commit to accepting the 2024 election results.One Biden campaign adviser suggested that Mr. Trump had supplied a trove of material for attack ads. The campaign began posting videos almost immediately. Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, called the 70-minute performance “over an hour of nonsense.”The crucial question for both parties in 2024 is how to retain the voters they have and regain those they have lost.“It’s hard to understand how someone could vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, given that Trump is just going to get more Trumpy,” Mr. Rosenberg said, adding, “I’d still much rather be us than them.”Mr. Rosenberg’s assessment may be why 37 Republican officials in Iowa, including the State Senate president, Amy Sinclair, and the House majority leader, Matt Windschitl, endorsed Mr. DeSantis last week, as did the New Hampshire House majority leader, Jason Osborne.Republican consultants in both states said Mr. Trump’s universal name recognition and political persona might give him the highest floor for Republican support, but the same factors lower the ceiling of that support, giving Mr. DeSantis and other challengers a real chance to take him down, if they are willing to take it.The Trump campaign seemed aware of that dynamic last week as it attacked would-be rivals, not only those clearly preparing to enter the race but also some far from it. On Saturday, Mr. Trump laid into Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for being disloyal, just days after an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggested the governor was keeping his options open.Mr. DeSantis has had his own stumbles out of the gate. His war with Disney has provided fodder for rivals who have questioned a Republican’s intrusion into the free market. His signing of a six-week abortion ban and his state’s aggressive censorship of school textbooks have raised questions among would-be Republican donors and swing voters alike. But the Florida governor also has plenty of time to make his case.“There’s a lot of game left to play, and I don’t see anything gelling yet,” Mr. Kochel said. “There’s still a lot of room for candidates not named Trump.”What Republicans seem most amazed by is the docility of Democrats in the face of Mr. Biden’s obvious weaknesses. Age and infirmity are real issues, not Republican talking points, consultants say.A Washington Post-ABC News poll published on Monday showed Mr. Biden losing head-to-head races against Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis by between five and six percentage points. Democratic pollsters have dismissed those results, pointing to anomalies like the poll’s showing Mr. Trump winning young voters outright while dramatically closing the gap with Mr. Biden for Black and Hispanic votes.Even so, there was much in the poll to undermine Mr. Biden’s claim that he, more than any other Democrat, can vanquish a Republican comeback just as he defeated Mr. Trump in 2020.Republicans say that’s just not possible.Mr. Carney said the dynamic would get worse, not better, as the 2024 campaign took shape. Chaotic scenes from the southwestern border in the coming weeks will inflame Republican voters’ fears of an “invasion” of illegal immigrants; the Republican National Committee on Friday held the president responsible for 1.4 million “gotaway” migrants that it said had crossed the border and disappeared into the interior since he took office.More important, the situation at the border could crystallize a sense among swing voters that Mr. Biden is simply not in control. With erstwhile allies like New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, and Chicago’s outgoing mayor, Lori Lightfoot, pleading for assistance with a flood of migrants, that conclusion will not be contained to Republican voters.The brewing showdown over how to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit threatens to provoke a catastrophic financial crisis as soon as next month. And while voters might blame Republicans in Congress at first, economic turmoil eventually ends up in the president’s lap.Perhaps Mr. Biden’s voters will not defect back to Mr. Trump, Republicans agree, but they could simply stay home on Election Day.“Democrats keep saying, ‘Oh, Trump’s so bad it doesn’t matter,’” Mr. Kochel said. “I don’t know. I think it matters.” More

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      The Week in Business: Trump on TV

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      Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Up? (May 7-13)CNN’s TrumpcastUntil last week, former President Donald J. Trump had not appeared on CNN since 2016. But at a town hall hosted by the network on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential campaign, resumed the lies and name-calling that marked his presidency. Answering questions from the anchor Kaitlan Collins, he repeated misinformation about the 2020 election, called the writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a suit accusing him of sexual abuse and defamation, a “wack job” and derided Ms. Collins as a “nasty person.” When Ms. Collins tried to correct Mr. Trump’s lies, he often talked over her. The largely sympathetic audience cheered him on throughout the evening. Critics of CNN’s forum said it was reckless to give Mr. Trump such a large platform for his message, especially because it proved difficult to fact check his statements in real time. The chairman of CNN, Chris Licht, defended the broadcast on Thursday, saying it underscored that covering Mr. Trump would “continue to be messy and tricky.”Inflation Is SlowingA closely watched report on Wednesday showed that inflation in the United States had reached a noteworthy milestone: April was the 10th straight month that the pace of price increases slowed. The Consumer Price Index climbed 4.9 percent from a year earlier, surpassing analysts’ expectations — in a good way. Economists in a Bloomberg survey had forecast a 5 percent climb. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and fuel costs, also fell slightly. The report comes on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s 10th consecutive increase to its benchmark rate. The latest inflation data, along with other signs of a slowdown in the economy, could make the May increase the last one for now. Elon Musk’s AnnouncementElon Musk long ago asked users on Twitter if he should step down as chief executive of the platform. “I will abide by the results of this poll,” he said. The results came in: Almost 58 percent of the 17.5 million people who voted agreed that Mr. Musk should leave his post. But it was still somewhat surprising when Mr. Musk announced on Friday that he had chosen his replacement: He said his successor would be Linda Yaccarino, the chair of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. Mr. Musk said Ms. Yaccarino, who recently interviewed him onstage at an advertising event in Miami, would focus on business operations while he would continue to work on product design and technology.Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Next? (May 14-20)Senate Hearings on the Banking CrisisTwo groups that have sought to blame each other for the recent bank failures will appear at a pair of Senate hearings this week — the heads of those banks and the federal regulators who oversee them. On Tuesday, Greg Becker, the former chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, who stepped down from his post after the bank’s collapse in March, will testify before the Senate Banking Committee. Two former top executives from Signature Bank, which failed two days later, will also testify. They are expected to meet a harsh reception from lawmakers. In a letter summoning Mr. Becker to appear, the chairman of the committee wrote, “You must answer for the bank’s downfall.” Regulators can expect a grilling, too, at a separate hearing on Thursday. When regulators appeared before the committee last month, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle faulted shortcomings in oversight for the banking crisis. Regulators also pointed the finger at the banks’ mismanagement.More Turmoil at FoxDominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News, which was settled for $787.5 million in April, may have been only the opening salvo in a long fight to hold the network accountable for airing misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Last week, Nina Jankowicz, a prominent specialist in Russian disinformation and online harassment, filed a new defamation suit accusing Fox of spreading lies about her that led to serious threats to her safety and harm to her career. That’s not Fox’s only legal trouble. It still faces a defamation suit from another election technology company, Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, the network’s star host who was recently ousted and is still under contract, has said he is starting his own show on Twitter, a sign that negotiations to reach an amicable separation with the network have broken down.Report Cards for Big Box StoresWalmart and Target, two of the country’s largest retailers, will release their quarterly earnings reports this week, providing a glimpse at how inflation — which is falling but persistent — is affecting consumers. For the three months that ended in January, Walmart reported that its revenue was 7.3 percent higher than a year earlier and said December was its best month for sales at its U.S. stores in its history. But the company warned of dimmer prospects for the rest of the fiscal year, suggesting that consumers’ ability to absorb higher prices could be approaching its limit. Other retailers struck similar downbeat notes, suggesting that they expected conditions to worsen in the coming months.What Else?Goldman Sachs said on Monday that it would pay $215 million to settle a gender bias suit accusing the bank of hindering women’s career advancement and paying them less than their male colleagues. Disney, in its quarterly earnings report last week, said that it had narrowed its streaming losses but that revenue from its old-line TV channels had fallen sharply. And Peloton said it was recalling more than two million exercise bikes because of reports of a faulty part. More

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      No Playing Ostrich With Trump

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      As Sun Tzu says, ‘Know the enemy.’WASHINGTON — My brothers Michael and Martin attended baseball’s opening day at the old Griffith Stadium in April 1951, with the Senators (as our team was then called) playing the Yankees. President Harry Truman had been invited to throw out the first pitch, and the stadium erupted in boos; Truman had just fired the extremely popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur as commander of the Far East, and the crowd was irate.When the boys got home, Martin confessed to our father that he had stood up to boo the president before Michael pulled him down.“Dad told me that President Truman was a great man,” Martin later recalled. “He said that if Truman fired MacArthur, he must have his reasons and that I should never boo another president. I never did.”It seems so quaint now, the idea of respecting the president. Gallant has vanished; gladiatorial is in. Patriotism is no longer a premier American virtue. And to a large degree, we have Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch to thank for that.Trump always ridiculed people, but when he brought that into the presidential arena, it was like injecting a virus of cruelty into the political bloodstream.When I flip on Fox News at night, I cringe at the way they make fun of President Biden, the sick delight they take in sniping at any perceived infirmity.Mitt Romney brought some rare Republican rectitude to the Capitol when he was asked about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll trial.“He just is not suited to be president of the United States and to be the person who we hold up to our children and the world as the leader of the free world,” Romney told CNN’s Manu Raju. (The Utah senator also earlier chided Representative George Santos, saying, “You don’t belong here.”)Todd Young, the mild-mannered conservative senator from Indiana, made it clear Thursday, after Trump’s brazen performance at the CNN town hall, that he’d had enough.He told reporters on the Hill that he would not be supporting the former president as the Republican nominee. Asked why, he replied, “Where do I begin?” — a bracing echo of Joseph Welch’s “Have you no sense of decency?” line to that earlier bully boy Joe McCarthy.As a video circulates of Trump celebrating his CNN performance by dancing to “Macho Man” by the pool at Mar-a-Lago, we see Trump unplugged. The existential threat is aiming to get back in the Oval, this time without anyone trying to keep him from going completely off the rails, and with the scary new world of superevolved A.I. chatbots to help him lie and smear. (Trump posted a doctored video on Friday of Anderson Cooper saying “That was President Donald J. Trump ripping us” a new one “here on CNN.”)Trump is spiraling into even more of a self-deluded narcissist, if that’s possible. And he’s even more obsessed with numbers — if that’s possible. When he was asked by the terrific Kaitlan Collins if he regretted his actions on Jan. 6, he began rhapsodizing about, and exaggerating, the size of the crowd that day.“I have never spoken to a crowd as large as this,” he said, adding: “They were there with love in their heart. That was an unbelievable — and it was a beautiful day.”He called one of the most heinous days in American history “a beautiful day.” He called the Black Capitol Police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt, who was trying to break into the House chamber, a “thug.”New Hampshire voters in the audience were cheering on Trump, and many even laughed when he crudely re-defamed E. Jean Carroll.The town hall was enlightening — and frightening. But we needed that reminder to be on full alert, because Trump is not just an unhinged and dangerous extremist; he is also a cunning and dominating insurgent.The argument that the media should ignore Trump and keep him under a bushel basket is ridiculous. You can’t extinguish Trump by not talking to him. He’s always going to find a platform.Sun Tzu stressed that victory depends on knowing the enemy — “Force him to reveal himself.” Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer, did a skillful job of letting Trump convict himself in the deposition.President Biden needs to see what he’s up against. There are only so many times Biden can say “C’mon, man!” in a debate. The more he sees Trump in action, the less likely he is to be steamrolled. Biden’s team has been blithely underestimating the opponent. The cascading indictments allow Trump to play the gilt-dipped martyr on an even larger scale.The task is to challenge Trump and expose him, not to put our fingers in our ears and sing “la, la, la.”“It strikes me as fundamentally wrong to deny voters a chance to see candidates, and particularly front-running candidates, answering challenging questions from journalists and citizens in open forums,” David Axelrod told me Friday. “You can’t save democracy from people who would shred its norms by shredding democratic norms yourselves.”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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      Why Ron DeSantis Is Limping to the Starting Line

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      In November, Representative Byron Donalds scored a coveted speaking slot: introducing Gov. Ron DeSantis after a landslide re-election turned the swing state of Florida deep red. Standing onstage at a victory party for Mr. DeSantis in Tampa, Mr. Donalds praised him as “America’s governor.”By April, Mr. Donalds was seated at a table next to another Florida Republican: Donald J. Trump. He was at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club, for a multicourse dinner with nine other House Republicans from Florida who had spurned their home-state governor to endorse the former president’s 2024 run. Red “Make America Great Again” hats decorated their place settings.In six short months from November to May, Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 run has faltered before it has even begun.Allies have abandoned him. Tales of his icy interpersonal touch have spread. Donors have groused. And a legislative session in Tallahassee designed to burnish his conservative credentials has instead coincided with a drop in the polls.His decision not to begin any formal campaign until after the Florida legislative session — allowing him to cast himself as a conservative fighter who not only won but actually delivered results — instead opened a window of opportunity for Mr. Trump. The former president filled the void with personal attacks and a heavy rotation of negative advertising from his super PAC. Combined with Mr. DeSantis’s cocooning himself in the right-wing media and the Trump team’s success in outflanking him on several fronts, the governor has lost control of his own national narrative.Now, as Mr. DeSantis’s Tallahassee-based operation pivots to formally entering the race in the coming weeks, Mr. DeSantis and his allies are retooling for a more aggressive new phase. His staunchest supporters privately acknowledge that Mr. DeSantis needs to recalibrate a political outreach and media strategy that has allowed Mr. Trump to define the race.Mr. DeSantis, on his book tour in Iowa in March, has made a series of missteps that has cost him the support of some donors and lawmakers.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesChanges are afoot. Mr. DeSantis is building a strong Iowa operation. He has been calling influential Republicans in Iowa and is rolling out a large slate of state legislator endorsements before a weekend trip there.“He definitely indicated that if he gets in, he will work exceptionally hard — nothing will be below him,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa evangelical leader whom Mr. DeSantis hosted recently for a meal at the governor’s mansion. “I think he understands — I emphasized that Iowa’s a retail politics state. You need to shake people’s hands, look them in the eye.”Still, his central electability pitch — MAGA without the mess — has been badly bruised.A book tour that was supposed to have introduced him nationally was marked by missteps that deepened concerns about his readiness for the biggest stage. He took positions on two pressing domestic and international issues — abortion and the war in Ukraine — that generated second-guessing and backlash among some allies and would-be benefactors. And the moves he has made to appeal to the hard right — escalating his feud with Disney, signing a strict six-week abortion ban — have unnerved donors who are worried about the general election.“I was in the DeSantis camp,” said Andrew Sabin, a metals magnate who gave the Florida governor $50,000 last year. “But he started opening his mouth, and a lot of big donors said his views aren’t tolerable.” He specifically cited abortion and Ukraine.Three billionaires who are major G.O.P. donors — Steve Wynn, Ike Perlmutter and Thomas Peterffy, a past DeSantis patron who has publicly soured on him — dined recently with Vivek Ramaswamy, the 37-year-old long-shot Republican.The early months of 2023 have exposed a central challenge for Mr. DeSantis. He needs to stitch together an unwieldy ideological coalition bridging both anti-Trump Republicans and Trump supporters who are nonetheless considering turning the page on the past president. Hitting and hugging Mr. Trump at the same time has bedeviled rivals since Senator Ted Cruz tried to do so in 2016, and Cruz veterans fill key roles in Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and his super PAC.Allies of both leading Republicans caution that it’s still early.“The Murdochs encapsulated him in a bubble and force-fed him to a conservative audience,” Steve Bannon said of Mr. DeSantis. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis has more than $100 million stored across various pro-DeSantis accounts. He is building good will with state party leaders by headlining fund-raisers. He remains, in public polls, the most serious rival to Mr. Trump. And a supportive super PAC called Never Back Down is staffing up across more than a dozen states, has already spent more than $10 million on television ads and has peppered early states with direct mail.DeSantis supporters point to polls showing that the governor remains well-liked by Republicans.“The hits aren’t working,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down. “His favorability has not changed.”The DeSantis team declined to provide any comment for this story.Six months ago, as Republicans were blaming Mr. Trump for the party’s 2022 midterm underperformance, a high-flying Mr. DeSantis made the traditional political decision that he would govern first in early 2023 and campaign second. The rush of conservative priorities that Mr. DeSantis has turned into law in Florida — on guns, immigration, abortion, school vouchers, opposing China — is expected to form the backbone of his campaign.“Now, the governor can create momentum by spending time publicly touting his endless accomplishments, calling supporters and engaging more publicly to push back on the false narratives his potential competitors are spewing,” said Nick Iarossi, a lobbyist in Florida and a longtime DeSantis supporter.A turning point this year for Mr. Trump was his Manhattan indictment, which Mr. DeSantis waffled on responding to as the G.O.P. base rallied to Mr. Trump’s defense.Yet Mr. Trump’s compounding legal woes and potential future indictments could eventually have the opposite effect — exhausting voters, which is Mr. DeSantis’s hope. A jury found Mr. Trump liable this week for sexual abuse and defamation. “When you get all these lawsuits coming at you,” Mr. DeSantis told one associate recently, “it’s just distracting.”‘So God Made a Fighter’The DeSantis team seemed to buy its own hype.Days before the midterms, the DeSantis campaign released a video that cast his rise as ordained from on high. “On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector,’” a narrator booms as Mr. DeSantis appears onscreen. “So God made a fighter.”For years, the self-confident Mr. DeSantis has relied on his own instincts and the counsel of his wife, Casey DeSantis, who posted the video, to set his political course, according to past aides and current associates. Mr. DeSantis has been written off before — in his first primary for governor; in his first congressional primary — so both he and his wife have gotten used to tuning out critics.Today, allies say there are few people around who are willing to tell Mr. DeSantis he’s wrong, even in private.In late 2022, the thinking was that a decision on 2024 could wait, and Mr. Trump’s midterm hangover would linger. Mr. DeSantis published a book — “I was, you know, kind of a hot commodity,” he said of writing it — that became a best seller. And Mr. DeSantis was on the offensive, tweaking Mr. Trump with a February donor retreat held only miles from Mar-a-Lago that drew Trump contributors.But it has been Mr. Trump who has consistently one-upped Mr. DeSantis, flying into East Palestine, Ohio, after the rail disaster there, appearing with a larger crowd in the same Iowa city days after Mr. DeSantis and swiping Florida congressional endorsements while Mr. DeSantis traveled to Washington.Representative Byron Donalds, a Florida Republican, praised Mr. DeSantis as “America’s governor” in November 2022. Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesOne Trump endorser, Representative Lance Gooden of Texas, backed the former president only hours after attending a private group meeting with Mr. DeSantis. In an interview, Mr. Gooden likened Mr. DeSantis’s decision to delay entry until after a legislative session to the example of a past Texas governor, Rick Perry, who did the same a decade ago — and quickly flamed out of the 2012 contest.“He’s relied, much like Rick Perry did, on local political experts in his home state that just don’t know the presidential landscape,” Mr. Gooden said.‘I’ve Said Enough’Mr. Trump has insinuated, without providing evidence, that Mr. DeSantis had inappropriate relationships with high school girls during a stint as a teacher in the early 2000s and that Mr. DeSantis might be gay.His team has portrayed Mr. DeSantis as socially inept, and a pro-Trump super PAC distributed a video — dubbed “Pudding Fingers” — playing off news articles about Mr. DeSantis’s uncouth eating habits.People close to Mr. Trump have been blunt in private discussions that the hits so far are just the start: If Mr. DeSantis ever appears poised to capture the nomination, the former president will do everything he can to tear him apart.Beginning with his response to the coronavirus outbreak, Mr. DeSantis’s national rise has been uniquely powered by his ability to make the right enemies: in academia, in the news media, among liberal activists and at the White House. But Mr. Trump’s broadsides and some of his own actions have put Mr. DeSantis crosswise with the right for the first time. It has been a disorienting experience for the DeSantis operation, according to allies.For the past three years, Mr. DeSantis has had the luxury of completely shutting out what he pejoratively brands the “national regime media” or “the corporate media” — though Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation does not, in his view, count as corporate media.This strategy served Mr. DeSantis well in Florida. But avoiding sit-down interviews with skeptical journalists has left him out of practice as he prepares for the most intense scrutiny of his career.“The Murdochs encapsulated him in a bubble and force-fed him to a conservative audience,” said Steve Bannon, a former strategist for Mr. Trump. “He hasn’t been scuffed up. He hasn’t had these questions put in his grill.”Even in friendly settings, Mr. DeSantis has stumbled. In a February interview with The Times of London, a Murdoch property, Mr. DeSantis cut off questions after the reporter pushed him on how he thought President Biden should handle Ukraine differently.The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson was so irked by Mr. DeSantis’s evasion that he sent a detailed questionnaire to potential Republican presidential candidates to force them to state their positions on the war, according to two people familiar with his decision.In a written response, Mr. DeSantis characterized Russia’s invasion as a “territorial dispute.” Republican hawks and some of Mr. DeSantis’s top donors were troubled. In public, the governor soon cleaned up his statement to say Russia had not had “a right” to invade. In private, Mr. DeSantis tried to calm supporters by noting that his statement had not taken a position against aid to Ukraine.While Mr. DeSantis has stuck to his preferred way of doing things, Mr. Trump has given seats on his plane to reporters from outlets that have published harsh stories about him. And despite having spent years calling CNN “fake news,” Mr. Trump recently attended a CNN town hall.DeSantis allies said the governor would begrudgingly bring in some of the “national regime media.” Some early proof: The governor’s tight-lipped team invited a Politico columnist to Tallahassee and supplied rare on-the-record access.‘I Was a Bit Insulted’Not long after Mr. DeSantis had won in a landslide last fall, the incoming freshman Representative Cory Mills, a Florida Republican, called the governor’s team to try to thank him for his support. Mr. Mills had campaigned on the eve of the election with Casey DeSantis and had appeared with the governor, too. “I called to show my appreciation and never even got a call back,” Mr. Mills said in an interview. “To be honest with you, I was a bit insulted by it.”The lack of relationships on Capitol Hill became a public headache in April when Mr. Trump rolled out what eventually became 10 Florida House Republican endorsements during Mr. DeSantis’s trip to Washington.People who have recently met with Mr. DeSantis say he has been far more engaged, a sign that he is responding to criticism.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDonors who contributed to Mr. DeSantis’s previous campaigns tell stories of meetings in which the candidate looked as though he would rather be anywhere else. He fiddled with his phone, showed no interest in his hosts and escaped as quickly as possible. But people who have recently met with Mr. DeSantis say he has been far more engaged. At recent Wisconsin and New Hampshire events, the governor worked the room as he had rarely done before.The governor and his team have had internal conversations acknowledging the need for him to engage in the basics of political courtship: small talk, handshaking, eye contact.For his part, Mr. Trump recently relished hosting the Florida House Republicans who had endorsed him.On one side of him was Mr. Mills. On the other was Mr. Donalds, who had introduced Mr. DeSantis on election night and who had been in Mr. DeSantis’s orbit since helping with debate prep during Mr. DeSantis’s 2018 run for governor.Mr. Donalds declined an interview. But footage of those private debate-prep sessions, first reported by ABC News, show Mr. DeSantis trying to formulate an answer to a question that will define his imminent 2024 run: how to disagree with Mr. Trump without appearing disagreeable to Trump supporters.“I have to frame it in a way,” Mr. DeSantis said then, “that’s not going to piss off all his voters.” More

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      We’re Asking the Wrong Questions About the Trump Town Hall

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      As a former executive of Fox News, I never expected to write this: CNN performed a valuable journalistic service this week by hosting a spirited town hall with Donald Trump.Like it or not, Mr. Trump is one of the two people who are most likely to win the presidency next year. He should be questioned by journalists at every opportunity, whether those be news conferences, live interviews, taped interviews, debates and, yes, town halls. Far too often, presidential candidates stick to scripted events, safe audiences and saturation advertising; days, even weeks, go by with a candidate — or a sitting president — not facing a single tough question.We’ve heard a lot of naysayers deriding the recent town hall or even the idea of mainstream media interviews with Mr. Trump as “platforming” a monster. Monster or not, Mr. Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination (he is about 30 points ahead of his nearest rival) and a central figure in some of the most high-profile political and legal debates in this country. Are we better off as a society if, after shunting Mr. Trump into his own MAGA bubble, we wake up in November 2024 and find that he has been elected president?With the first Republican primary debate scheduled for August, we need to confront this and some other uncomfortable questions now. Is American democracy so fragile that we cannot metabolize the outlandish views of a presidential candidate? If a candidate is the subject of serious investigations, shouldn’t the news media ask him about that? Are our ideas of journalism so degraded that providing airtime to a candidate is tantamount to an endorsement?When a reporter holds a politician’s feet to the fire by asking him tough questions, that does not mean she or the network endorses the politician’s answers. We need to reflect on why televising a town hall with a leading candidate, no matter how abhorrent he is to a portion of the country, could inspire not just outrage at his performance but also fundamental questions about a television network’s decision to host the candidate. The Constitution does not bar Mr. Trump from running and our democracy does not bar him from running — yet CNN should not ask him tough questions?Since the 1960 debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, television networks have played a role in our country’s politics. Television is second only to the internet in its ability to concentrate the country’s attention. The United States is a mature democracy. We must trust voters to assess candidates and the media to provide more, not less, information.Some Democrats think that Mr. Trump’s performance at the town hall will hurt him among swing voters, making it less likely that he will win in 2024. That may be so: Many swing voters have spent less time thinking about Mr. Trump these last two years because they don’t obsess about politics like partisans do. So it was a journalistic service to interrogate Mr. Trump’s brand of politics in a forum that allowed voters to assess the former president.I have spent a lot of time thinking about what motivates Americans to vote, and I wonder if there’s more driving the hyperventilating about the town hall than just providing a platform to a monster. Could Democrats be worried that Mr. Trump’s brio and showmanship might strike a chord with some voters? Could Mr. Trump’s performance remind some independents that while they may not be overtly pro-Trump, they are more than a little anti-anti-Trump?Having spent part of my career helping prepare news anchors to question presidential candidates in debates and town halls, I tip my hat to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. Under enormous pressure, Ms. Collins kept her composure and, crucially, never made it about herself. Furthermore, she elicited responses from the candidate that made news on topics from abortion to Ukraine.Mindful of Ms. Collins’s strong performance, critics have instead focused their ire on the town hall format, lamenting that it allowed Republican audience members to cheer on Mr. Trump’s insults and falsehoods. But not all the people in the room were pro-Trump — just the noisy ones. Besides, news organizations have been using town hall formats for years, rightfully reasoning that it’s important for candidates to hear from likely primary voters.Should we ban all town halls because the audience might side with the candidate? Should we ban live interviews because it’s too difficult to fact-check a candidate in real time? Or should we just ban Donald Trump altogether and get it over with, as many of his critics would prefer?We should do none of these things. That would be a journalistic disservice to a pluralistic society and electorate that is entrusted with listening, assessing and judging our leaders. Town halls like this one help Americans to think for themselves. It wasn’t so long ago that journalists were able to report hard truths and conduct tough interviews without worrying about upsetting some segment of their viewers. CNN deserves a lot of credit for attempting to return to a baseline that I always considered Journalism 101, but which now feels downright old-fashioned.Bill Sammon is the former managing editor of the Washington bureau of Fox News.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