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      Republican 2024 Hopefuls Gather in Iowa Without Trump and DeSantis

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      Republicans gathered in the state Saturday in a kickoff event that lacked the attendance of two front-runners, though their presence was felt.More than nine months before the Iowa caucuses, eight declared and potential presidential candidates came to a gathering of Christian conservatives on Saturday evening to test a question: Can flesh-and-blood politicians eyeing the highest office in the land be upstaged by a canned, prerecorded video?The answer was almost certainly yes.The audio did not quite match the video on former President Donald J. Trump’s recorded message to the hundreds gathered at the largest cattle call yet of the fledgling campaign season. The delivery of his trademark hyperbole was rushed to fit into the final, 10-minute window that closed the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition’s spring kickoff.But the reception given to the man who wasn’t there was strikingly different from the applause given to those who were, and the candidates who bothered to make the trip barely bothered to try to knock the front-runner from his perch.Their strategy appeared straightforward: Avoid confrontation with the better known, better funded front-runners, hope Mr. Trump’s attacks take out — or at least take down — Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is second in most Republican polls, and hope outside forces, namely indictments, take out Mr. Trump.Then it’s anybody’s game.“I think it’s going to come down to me and Donald Trump very soon in this race,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, said in an interview before delivering an address in which the former president’s name was not uttered. “I know that may sound odd to folks like you who are tracking the present, but if you’re going to see where the puck is going, there’s a hunger for an outsider.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and author, did not mention former President Donald J. Trump during his address at the event.Charlie Neibergall/Associated PressThe Iowa conservatives who attended the events on Saturday swore they were open to a Republican nominee not named Trump. They munched on Chick-fil-A sandwiches, listened attentively and were eager to talk politics eight years after the last real Republican presidential contest in Iowa.“I like to see them battle it out,” said Dan Applegate, a former co-chairman of the Dallas County, Iowa, G.O.P. “The good candidates are the ones who can make it through.”Former Vice President Mike Pence made an appearance, greeted like a celebrity by potential voters though his pitch for military aid to Ukraine garnered a tepid response. So was Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, and some others who were far below the radar, like the radio personality Larry Elder, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman-turned-conservative gadfly, and a businessman named Perry Johnson.Mr. Johnson, in fact, was the only speaker to challenge a front-runner by name when he concluded his remarks: “I just want to say, DeSantis is making a huge mistake by not coming here. And I don’t understand it, but each to his own.”Otherwise, the hopefuls just wanted to avoid the candidates who opted not to come in person.“It’s about being able to deliver a message that resonates and recognizing that we want a tomorrow that will be better than yesterday. We want a next year that needs to be better,” said Mr. Hurd, on his first trip ever to Iowa, “and I think anybody who taps into that, regardless of the competition, can be can be successful.”It is early in the race, extremely early. In April 2015, two months before Mr. Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy, those gathered at the same Faith and Freedom forum had no idea what was about to hit them. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida warned of the metastasizing threat of Islamic jihadists. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky fretted over Common Core, a long-forgotten concern about the nationalization of school curriculums.Senator Ted Cruz of Texas railed against a Supreme Court that was one vote away from ordering small businesses to serve gay couples, while Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, bragged that under his leadership, his state had ended abortions after 20 weeks, a threshold that would be considered the height of timidity in the post-Roe v. Wade G.O.P.Former Vice President Mike Pence was greeted as a celebrity by attendees at the event.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesOnce Mr. Trump entered, those issues would be swept away by his peculiar brand of personality politics and name calling.This time, the potential candidates know exactly what they are up against, but they just didn’t address it. Mr. Pence fretted over “radical gender ideology” and pupils penalized for improper pronouns. Mr. Scott, preaching his trademark optimism and unity, nonetheless warned that “the radical left, they are selling the drug of victimhood and the narcotic of despair.”In private, Mr. Ramaswamy suggested that true voters of faith could see through Mr. Trump’s assumed trappings of religiosity, and he castigated Mr. DeSantis for refusing to sit down with news outlets he deems ideologically hostile and to speak on college campuses. In public, he was far more oblique, declining to name names when he said that if a conservative could not bring himself to visit a college campus, he probably should not be sitting across a negotiating table with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.Mr. Trump could give the audience what it was looking for, hailing the overturning of Roe v. Wade — “nobody thought it was going to happen” — and the most anti-abortion presidency ever, while promising to “obliterate the deep state,” hunt down “the radical zealots and Marxists who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education.” He concluded, “The left-wing gender lunacy being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse, and it will stop immediately.”It went over well. Paul Thurmond, a 65-year-old from Des Moines, chatted amiably and shook hands with Mr. Pence as the former vice president made his way from table to table. But Mr. Thurmond, though he said he was open-minded, was clearly partial to Mr. Trump.“Right now, I think Pence is too nice a guy,” he said. “He won’t be able to contend with the evil that the Democrats will rain down on him.” More

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      Will the Fox-Dominion Settlement Affect Its News Coverage? Don’t Count on It.

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      There is little reason to think Fox News will adjust its coverage after paying a $787.5 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems. Its audience won’t let it.After the 2020 election, the talk inside Fox News was all about “a pivot” — a reorienting of its coverage away from former President Donald J. Trump and toward the more conventional Republican politics favored by the network’s founding chairman, Rupert Murdoch.Mr. Murdoch said then that he wanted to make Mr. Trump a “non person.” And as recently as January, when he was deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, his feelings hadn’t changed. “I’d still like to,” Mr. Murdoch said.But Fox’s audience — the engine of its profits and the largest in all of cable — may not let him.Anyone expecting that Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion this week would make the network any humbler or gentler is likely to be disappointed. And there probably won’t be much of a shift in the way the network favorably covers Mr. Trump and the issues that resonate with his followers.“How are you going to make an argument to your hosts to not do things that rate?” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News editor and on-air personality who was fired by the network in 2021 and was lined up to be a witness in the Dominion case. “You can’t tell people, ‘Do anything to get a rating, but don’t cover the most popular figure in the Republican Party.’”After a hiatus from the network that lasted much of 2022, Mr. Trump is back on Fox News. He’s sat for three interviews with the network in less than a month. The most recent one, which was taped earlier this month with Mark Levin, will air on Sunday.Even voter fraud — the issue that resulted in Fox being sued for billions of dollars by Dominion and another voting technology company, Smartmatic — hasn’t entirely gone away. In Mr. Trump’s recent interview with the Fox host Tucker Carlson, he implied that there was good reason to doubt the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory, saying, “People could say he won an election.”Mr. Carlson, for his part, has also dipped back into election denialism recently. “Jan. 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam of my lifetime,” he said on the air on March 14. (His private text messages, revealed as part of Dominion’s suit, show him discussing with his producers how there was no proof the results of the 2020 election were materially affected by fraud.)The Fox host Tucker Carlson with former President Donald J. Trump last year. Mr. Carlson has recently dipped back into election denialism on air.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn the immediate term, Mr. Murdoch seems unlikely to make any major changes at any of his Fox properties. Doing so, said three people who have worked closely with him, would be seen as the kind of acknowledgment of wrongdoing he is loath to make. The Dominion settlement included no apology — just a glancing reference to a judge’s findings that Fox had broadcast false statements about Dominion machines and their role in a fanciful plot to steal the election from Mr. Trump.The $787.5 million payout is huge — itself an acknowledgment of wrongdoing of sorts, as one of the largest settlements ever in a defamation case. But it did not lead to the same degree of personal humiliation as the phone hacking scandal involving Mr. Murdoch’s British newspapers. Then, in 2011, he had to appear before Parliament and atone for how his journalists had illegally hacked the voice mail accounts of prominent figures. He had a foam pie thrown in his face and admitted during his testimony, “This is the most humble day of my life.”But his signature American news channel is showing few signs of humility. It devoted two short segments on Tuesday to news of the Dominion settlement. Its coverage then quickly returned to the same subjects it’s been hammering since Mr. Biden was elected.Its news reports on the surge of migrants at the southern border are presented under the rubric “Biden Border Crisis.” Republican lawmakers’ efforts to pass laws banning transgender girls from school sports teams receive prominent attention — when only a tiny number are actually playing, and sometimes none at all in states where the laws have been fiercely debated. President Biden is variously portrayed as incoherent, corrupt and weak — especially regarding his posture toward China. Footage of criminals ransacking stores, assaulting police officers and attacking unwitting bystanders play on a loop — often with perpetrators who are Black.Even Mr. Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 presidential election have cropped up here and there. Last week, the right-wing commentator Clay Travis appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” which last year replaced a more straight news program at 7 p.m., and declared that Mr. Biden “only won by 20,000 votes after they rigged the entire election, after they hid everything associated with Hunter Biden, with the big tech, with the big media, and with the big Democrat Party collusion that all worked in his favor.”Mr. Watters did not correct or respond to those remarks on the air.The Fox host Jesse Watters did not correct or respond to false statements made on his show about the 2020 presidential election by the right-wing commentator Clay Travis.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesStories of voter fraud, often exaggerated and unsubstantiated, have been part of the network’s D.N.A. well before 2020. In 2012, Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News with Mr. Murdoch, sent a team of journalists to Ohio to investigate still-unproven claims of malfeasance at the polls after former President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there. There are, however, some subtle signs that Fox wishes to move past the Dominion episodes and its embarrassing disclosures of network executives privately belittling the same fraud claims they allowed on the air. It has recently started a promotional campaign highlighting its team of global correspondents in 30-second ads. “We have a mission to be on the ground reporting the big stories,” one says. The tensions between its news division and its prime-time hosts were exposed as part of the Dominion case, with private messages from late 2020 showing that hosts like Mr. Carlson and Sean Hannity had mocked and complained about reporters in the Fox Washington bureau who would fact-check the former president’s fraud claims.And last week, Fox chose not to renew the contract of one of the most vociferous election deniers on its payroll, Dan Bongino, formerly the host of a Saturday evening show.A spokeswoman for Fox News said in a written statement that the network had “significantly increased its investment in journalism over the last several years, further expanding our news gathering commitment both domestically and abroad.” The statement added, “We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists.”In his deposition, Rupert Murdoch, the founding chairman of Fox News, acknowledged referring privately to Mr. Trump as “nuts,” “plain bonkers” and “unable to suppress his egomania.”Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Trump undoubtedly remains one of the biggest stories of the moment, putting the network’s leadership in a position it finds less than ideal. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch acknowledged referring privately to the former president as “nuts,” “plain bonkers” and “unable to suppress his egomania.” His personal politics are much closer to an establishment Republican in the mold of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader whom Mr. Ailes worked for as a media consultant decades ago.Mr. Trump can still draw high ratings, even if he is no longer the singular figure he once was in the Republican Party. His interview with Mr. Carlson, after his indictment in Manhattan on felony charges, drew an audience of 3.7 million. An interview that Mr. Carlson did several weeks before with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida drew 3.1 million.In the end, the numbers may be the decisive factor about what kind of coverage Fox gives the former president, no matter Mr. Murdoch’s preferences.A former Fox executive, John Ellis, summarized the conundrum the network has with its audience in his newsletter after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign — an event that Fox News broadcast live. “The power of Fox News to influence the outcomes of GOP primaries can be decisive,” he wrote. Fox’s audience has plenty of Trump supporters, of course, but also many others who may prefer another Republican as the nominee. People who identify as politically independent watch it far more than they do CNN or MSNBC, according to data from Nielsen in January and February.“Trump probably cannot win the 2024 nomination if Fox News is determined to defeat him,” Mr. Ellis added. “But in order to defeat him, Fox News must have the permission of its audience to do so.”Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting. More

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      Tim Scott Faces Long Odds

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      Last week, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina announced on “Fox and Friends” that he was forming an exploratory committee for the 2024 presidential election.“I have found that people are starving for hope,” he said. “They’re starving for an optimistic, positive message that is anchored in conservative values.”There wasn’t a lot of fanfare around the announcement, in part because Scott immediately fumbled the ball with a disastrously awkward answer on abortion, in which he refused to say whether he would support Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed 15-week federal abortion ban. There’s also the simple fact that Donald Trump is almost certainly going to win the Republican nomination for president for a third time. Scott’s campaign, in other words, is doomed from the start.But just because it appears to be futile doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. Scott was appointed to the Senate in 2012 to fill the seat vacated by Senator Jim DeMint, who left to serve as president of the Heritage Foundation. Scott won a full term in 2016, becoming the first Black American elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction. He’s no moderate — he is, like his predecessor, a bona fide South Carolina reactionary — but he tempers his hard right politics with the cheerful affect of a happy warrior.Scott is obviously not the first Black person to vie for the Republican presidential nomination. That distinction goes to Frederick Douglass, who received one vote at the 1888 Republican convention. (The first Black person to receive any votes for national office at a major party’s nominating convention was Senator Blanche Bruce of Mississippi, who received eight votes for vice president at the 1880 convention in Chicago.) There is a short list of more recent contenders as well. Alan Keyes ran for the Republican nomination in 1996, 2000 and 2008; Herman Cain ran and withdrew in 2011; and Ben Carson ran in 2016.Tim Scott, however, would be the first Black Republican officeholder to run for the party’s presidential nomination, should he move past the exploratory phase. There’s no one else, as far as I can tell.Which makes sense. Beginning in the 1890s, Black Americans were systematically excluded from participation in two-party politics. Even the Black communities in the booming cities of the North lacked meaningful political clout. It was not until World War I and the beginning of the Great Migration that we saw a real rejuvenation of Black participation in electoral politics, because of the absence of Jim Crow voting restrictions in northern cities and the presence of political machines that were nothing if not opportunistic.Even then, there were few Black people elected to national office, with a total of eight serving between 1914 and 1965. And with the exception of Oscar Stanton De Priest — elected from Illinois’ First District, the South Side of Chicago, in 1928 — they were Democrats. And that fact speaks to how the collapse of the Republican Party in the South and the strength of Democratic machines in the urban North changed the partisan political calculus for Black Americans, setting the stage for the lasting affiliation with the Democratic Party that began to take shape under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.(Still, there was a lasting affiliation among some Black voters with Republicans through the 1960s, as demonstrated by Richard Nixon’s attempt to capture a larger share of the Black vote in the 1960 presidential election, Jackie Robinson’s ill-fated presence at the 1964 Republican convention and the election of Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1966.)By the time there were Black lawmakers with the presence and national platform to run for president, most Black voters were Democrats and the Republican Party had already begun its ideological migration to the white South and the Sunbelt. It’s no accident that the first Black American to run a national campaign for the Democratic nomination for president was Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York, and that the two most successful Black candidates for the Democratic nomination, Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, came out of Chicago.It has essentially taken a century for someone like Tim Scott to emerge. And his political position reflects the conditions set by the structure of Black two-party politics in the 20th century. A modern-day Republican, Scott has few Black supporters and even fewer ties to the institutions of contemporary Black politics.Tim Scott, whatever you think of his political views, would be a sui generis figure. Or, if you prefer, an odd man out.What I WroteMy Tuesday column took another stab at the Thomas-Crow affair, this time from the perspective of elite impunity and legal double standards.The idea that Thomas will face any penalty, much less an official investigation by the Supreme Court, is obviously wish-casting. The politics of the court, the lack of any internal check on the court’s members and the general unwillingness of Congress to challenge the court’s power — or even scrutinize its affairs — mean Thomas can act with relative impunity. And even if he couldn’t, even if there were meaningful and politically feasible consequences for misconduct among members of the Supreme Court — impeachment is practically a dead letter — there’s the fact that the law is simply more forgiving of the rich and the powerful.My Friday column built off the idea of “one rule for some, another rule for others” with a look at how Republicans are pursuing a vision of “intrusive government” aimed at the most vulnerable members of our society.With or without Trump in control, the Republican Party has a clear, well-articulated agenda. It just falls outside the usual categories. It’s not that today’s Republicans have a vision for “big” government or “small” government; it’s that Republicans have a vision for intrusive government, aimed at the most vulnerable people in our society.Also, I was on “All In With Chris Hayes” on Thursday discussing gun violence and right-wing paranoia.Now ReadingGabriel Rosenberg and Jan Dutkiewicz on the meat industry for Vox.Matthew Sitman on the Jan. 6 report for Dissent magazine.Ilyse Hogue on the fight for abortion rights after Dobbs for Democracy.Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross on automobile debt for n+1 magazine.Madison Mainwaring on ballet for The New Republic.Photo of the WeekJamelle BouieThis is a fun truck done in the style of a character from the movie “Cars.” I saw it while driving through South Carolina over Christmas break. I took the photo on Kodak Gold film in medium format.Now Eating: Spinach, Tofu and Sesame Stir-FryAs always, the key to using tofu is to prep it beforehand by pressing as much water out of it as possible. I use a tofu press, but wrapping a block of tofu in a towel and placing a few heavy books on it works just as well. Also, I would go heavy on the garlic and ginger, but that’s my preference. A little more sesame oil would not hurt, either. Serve with steamed rice, white or brown, your choice. Recipe from New York Times Cooking.Ingredients1 tablespoon canola oil½ pound tofu, cut in small dice1 large garlic clove, minced1 teaspoon grated or minced fresh ginger¼ teaspoon red chili flakesSoy sauce to taste16-ounce bag baby spinach, rinsed2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds1 teaspoon sesame oilDirectionsHeat the canola oil over medium-high heat in a large nonstick skillet or wok, and add the tofu. Stir-fry until the tofu is lightly colored, three to five minutes, and add the garlic, ginger and chili flakes. Cook, stirring, until fragrant, about one minute, and add soy sauce to taste. Add the spinach and stir-fry until the spinach wilts, about one minute. Stir in the sesame seeds, and add more soy sauce to taste. Remove from the heat.Using tongs, transfer the spinach and tofu mixture to a serving bowl, leaving the liquid behind in the pan or wok. Drizzle with the sesame oil, and add more soy sauce as desired. More

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      DeSantis Faces Republican Scrutiny on Issues While Trump Skates By

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      Republican voters seem to be grading Donald Trump on a curve in his third presidential campaign, while Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida faces a more traditional form of scrutiny.When former President Donald J. Trump called Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, “smart” in the days after Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the remark caused a brief media stir and nothing more — another off-the-cuff, provocative statement from someone who is famous for such comments.But when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida painted the fight in far less extreme terms, as a “territorial dispute,” the reaction from Republicans in Washington and a range of donors was alarm and anger.When the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling was undone by the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Trump — who appointed three of the justices responsible for overturning it after promising to do so during his 2016 campaign — acted like a bystander, telling allies it could be bad for Republicans electorally and blaming anti-abortion forces for losses in the 2022 midterm campaigns.Since then, he has refused to say where he stands on federal action curtailing abortion, an issue on which he has changed his position over the years. Yet Mr. DeSantis faced extensive backlash from voters whose support he might need in a general election when he moved to the right of Mr. Trump and signed a law banning abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy.Mr. Trump, a rich businessman and celebrity who served four years as president and is now running his third campaign, is something of a known unknown commodity. For the last eight years, a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump as a political figure has been that he is graded on something of a curve, his more outrageous comments striking some voters as musings rather than as deeper views on policy.“He has never adhered to the unwritten rules of electoral politics, and he has cemented his MAGA brand by openly flouting them,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “In 2016, Trump was exempt from the punitive standards we hold conventional politicians to, and what’s remarkable is that seven years and a presidential term later, that still holds true.”Voters, Mr. Donovan said, see Mr. Trump “differently, and make exceptions, consciously or otherwise, for his statements and his behavior.”That defined Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, when a series of candidates flamed out in the Republican primaries as they were judged by traditional standards against a rival who actively sought to burn down those standards.And if Mr. Trump is succeeds in winning the nomination again, the degree to which he is viewed through a fundamentally different lens from those applied to other politicians will be a significant reason. Support for the primary campaign by Mr. Trump — who last month earned the dubious distinction of being the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges — has only increased.By contrast, Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman and current governor, is being held to the standards of a typical politician, just as all of those who unsuccessfully tried to stop Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were. And against those conventional standards, in his first foray onto the national stage, Mr. DeSantis has been struggling.Gov. Ron DeSantis speaking in Doral, Fla., last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesHe has made a series of unforced errors that have been the focus of news coverage and have caused public and private alarm among Republican donors who saw him as the antidote to Mr. Trump.Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has gone from decades of being active in New York politics to running as an outsider in 2016, followed by an ascent to party leader as president, and is now racking up endorsements from political elites as the front-runner for the Republican nomination.Mr. Trump has for decades engaged in the kind of glad-handing that benefits candidates — which Mr. DeSantis is said to eschew — such as working phones, sending notes and attending events. He also has the ability to invite people on a private plane or to an opulent members-only club.Mr. Trump also has the advantage of celebrity, and over the course of his presidency, his base became conditioned to dismiss his contradictory policy impulses and statements as just the way Mr. Trump talks.By contrast, Mr. DeSantis’s words and actions harden as soon as they happen, which Mr. Trump plays to his advantage.Recently, Mr. Trump mocked Mr. DeSantis for describing Mr. Putin as “basically a gas station with a bunch of nuclear weapons” in a March interview with the broadcaster Piers Morgan. Mr. Trump put out a campaign video in which he defended Mr. Putin and attacked Mr. DeSantis for offering “exactly the kind of simple-minded thinking that has produced decades of failed diplomacy and ultimately war.”Yet in his own interview with Mr. Morgan last year, Mr. Trump agreed when the interviewer described Mr. Putin as an “evil genocidal monster” amid the devastating scenes in Ukraine.“I do” agree with that assessment, Mr. Trump said in response to Mr. Morgan’s prodding. “And who wouldn’t?”Yet in segments with conservative media outlets, Mr. DeSantis often faces criticism that Mr. Trump does not.Shortly after Mr. DeSantis’s interview with Mr. Morgan on Russia, the influential Fox News host Tucker Carlson took issue with his calling Mr. Putin a “war criminal,” without mentioning that Mr. Trump had described him in even harsher terms.Jason Miller, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, said that the former president has an ability “to bypass the filter of political media and build a personal relationship directly with voters.” He described it as a “sense of familiarity” forged through Mr. Trump’s time in business and entertainment and noted that Mr. Trump had brought millions of nontraditional voters to the table.For the most part, Mr. Trump’s 2024 rivals have avoided taking him on directly by name, or challenging his presidency. The exception is Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, who is traveling in advance of a possible campaign of his own and who laid out a series of policy failures he said Mr. Trump had committed as president.“All of those failings are policy failings, but they’re bigger than that,” Mr. Christie said at a town hall in New Hampshire on Thursday night. “They’re broken promises.”Whether such a line of attack will stick remains to be seen. But it is at odds with how Mr. DeSantis has approached the race so far, some Republican strategists say.“DeSantis’s flawed strategy so far has been to try to beat Trump by out-Trumping Trump without understanding that he’s going to be graded on a conventional curve,” Rob Stutzman, a California-based operative, said, suggesting that Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to formally enter the race in the coming weeks, needed a course correction. “Only Trump rides the Trump curve.” More

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      DeSantis’s Puddin’ Head Campaign

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      WASHINGTON — Back in the more openly sexist days of Hollywood, writers would get notes on their scripts about women characters. The studio suits would ask questions like, “Can they go to a strip club here?” or “Can you chain her to a wall?”The most common note from male executives was, “Make the girl more likable.”No doubt Ron DeSantis’s advisers are getting notes from donors these days with the message, “Make the guy more likable.”As David Axelrod told me, the Florida governor is coming across like “the high school quarterback who throws the geek against the lockers to get a laugh from the cheerleaders — and that’s not a good look.”He said DeSantis is learning a lesson: “The kind of tricks you use to get elected to other offices don’t work in a presidential race because you get scrutinized so closely.”Even in a world made crueler by social media and Donald Trump, DeSantis seems mean, punching out at Mickey Mouse, immigrants, gays and women; pushing through an expansion of his proposal to ban school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity to include all grades, as well as a draconian ban on abortion after six weeks. He even admonished some high school kids during the pandemic for wearing masks. On Thursday, DeSantis signed a bill cutting the number of jurors needed to give a defendant the death sentence from 12 to 8.DeSantis seems contrived with Tucker Carlson, weak against Robert Iger, robotic against Trump and inept with potential donors and endorsers. The 76-year-old Trump and the 44-year-old DeSantis can both be nasty, but Trump’s base finds him entertaining, with his “DeSanctimonious” and “DeSanctus” nicknames for the rival he deems “dull.”Trump is so eager to trash DeSantis that he jumped in on the side of woke Disney and later posted an MSNBC headline on his social media site, “Ron DeSantis’ D.C. charm offensive was a massive failure.”On Friday, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event outside D.C., DeSantis took a shot at Trump, saying he could send Florida workers to finish Trump’s wall.But as Axelrod dryly noted, “If they’re going to get into a food fight, Trump always comes with more food.”Trump 2024 put out a slashing attack on DeSantis the same day, describing Florida as tumbling into destruction (even though Trump seems quite happy living there), harkening back to Bush père’s vicious attacks on Massachusetts when he ran against Michael Dukakis.The bitchy Trump has plenty of ammunition when DeSantis wears white boots redolent of Nancy Sinatra, as Jimmy Kimmel said, to tour Southwest Florida after a hurricane; or when a report alleges (denied by the governor) that DeSantis ate chocolate pudding with his fingers. (Trump backers already have an ad up about that beauty.) DeSantis let Fort Lauderdale go underwater, inundated by flash floods, while he gallivanted around testing the waters.The word “likable” became a flashpoint for Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, with some women supporters claiming it was sexist to talk about that with women candidates.But as Jerry Brown once told me: “I think we’re always judged on likability and I think that’s something a lot of politicians don’t want to admit. But I can tell you, when they throw you out, most times they didn’t like you. They got tired of you.”Ken Langone, a Republican megadonor who gave $200 million to the N.Y.U. medical center, told The Washington Post that he was concerned about DeSantis’s rigid manner and his strict abortion ban. Former Representative David Trott, a Michigan Republican, told Politico’s Playbook that in the two years he sat next to DeSantis on the Foreign Affairs Committee, “he never said a single word to me,” even hello. “If you’re going to go into politics, kind of a fundamental skill that you should have is likability,” Trott said, adding, “He’s just a very arrogant guy, very focused on Ron DeSantis.”Representative Greg Steube of Florida also told Playbook that the governor had never reached out to him — or replied to his efforts to get in touch — even when he was in the hospital after falling 25 feet off a ladder in January. Trump was the first to call him, he said. Trump has also wined and dined Florida lawmakers at Mar-a-Lago.On Monday, Steube endorsed Trump (as of Friday, 11 Florida representatives were for Trump and one for DeSantis) and he later tweeted, “Sad to see the Florida House and Senate, two bodies I had the honor to serve in, carrying the water for an unannounced presidential campaign.”DeSantis had declared himself “kind of a hot commodity” to The Times of London. Now the governor is prowling in that uncomfortable place best conjured by Hemingway in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”People are wondering: What is that leopard doing at this altitude?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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      Testimony Suggests Trump Was at Meeting About Accessing Voting Software in 2020

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      In a letter to federal officials, a liberal-leaning group highlighted testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee that described then-President Trump attending a meeting about the plan in December 2020.ATLANTA — Former President Donald J. Trump took part in a discussion about plans to access voting system software in Michigan and Georgia as part of the effort to challenge his 2020 election loss, according to testimony from former Trump advisers. The testimony, delivered to the House Jan. 6 committee, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to federal officials from a liberal-leaning legal advocacy group.Allies of Mr. Trump ultimately succeeded in copying the elections software in those two states, and the breach of voting data in Georgia is being examined by prosecutors as part of a broader criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the presidential election there. The former president’s participation in the discussion of the Georgia plan could increase his risk of possible legal exposure there.A number of Trump aides and allies have recounted a lengthy and acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, which one member of the House Jan. 6 committee would later call “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.” During the meeting, then-President Trump presided as his advisers argued about whether they should seek to have federal agents seize voting machines to analyze them for fraud.Testimony to the Jan. 6 committee from one aide who attended the meeting, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary and counselor, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Free Speech for People, a liberal nonprofit legal advocacy group. Mr. Lyons recounted that during the meeting, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, opposed seizing voting machines and spoke of how the Trump campaign was instead “going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” and that the access would be “voluntary.”Other attendees offered similar testimony to the committee, which released its final report on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in late December. Among those involved in the Oval Office discussion were two prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists: Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who spread numerous falsehoods after the 2020 election and who also discussed Mr. Giuliani’s comments in her testimony.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is trying to clarify Mr. Trump’s role in a number of efforts to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia — including the plan to gain access to voting machine data and software — and determine whether to recommend indictments for Mr. Trump or any of his allies for violating state laws.A spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment Friday on Mr. Lyons’s testimony. Marissa Goldberg, an Atlanta-area lawyer representing Mr. Trump in Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment.In its letter, Free Speech for People argued that the testimony and other details that have been made public prove that Mr. Trump “was, at a minimum, aware” of an “unlawful, multistate plot” to access and copy voting system software. The group urged the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to conduct “a vigorous and swift investigation.”On Jan. 7, 2021, a small group working on behalf of Mr. Trump traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, and gained access to sensitive election data; subsequent visits by pro-Trump figures were captured on video surveillance cameras.The group’s first visit to Coffee County occurred on the same day that Congress certified President Biden’s victory; the certification had been delayed by the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. The visitors to Coffee County apparently saw it as an ideal place to gather intelligence on what they viewed as voting irregularities: At one point, video footage shows the then-chair of the Coffee County Republican Party, Cathy Latham, appearing to welcome into the building the members of a forensics company hired by Ms. Powell.Ms. Latham was also one of the 16 pro-Trump fake electors whom Georgia Republicans had assembled in an effort to reverse the election results there.Text messages from that period indicate that some Trump allies seeking evidence of election fraud had considered other uses for the Coffee County election data and their analyses of it. One cybersecurity consultant aiding in the effort even raised the possibility, in a text message to other Trump allies in mid-January 2021, of using a report on Coffee County election data “to try to decertify” a highly consequential United States Senate runoff election that Democrats had just won in Georgia. CNN reported on the existence of that text message on Friday.The Trump allies who traveled to Coffee County copied elections software used across the state and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation, according to David Cross, a lawyer involved in civil litigation over election security in Georgia filed by the Coalition for Good Governance. The Coffee County data was also used earlier this year in a presentation to conservative activists that included unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, The Los Angeles Times has reported.Some of those involved with the Coffee County effort came to regret it. A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler, the consulting firm hired by Ms. Powell to help gain access to the county’s voting machines, would later release a statement saying that, “With the benefit of hindsight, and knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.” More

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      A Tough Question for Chris Christie: Would Hillary Clinton Have Been Better Than Trump?

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      The former governor of New Jersey — who ran against Donald Trump in 2016 and is exploring a presidential campaign in 2024 — tried to thread the needle with his answer at a New Hampshire town hall.At a town hall in New Hampshire on Thursday, Chris Christie cited a long list of promises that former President Donald J. Trump failed to deliver on while in office. Above all else, however, he expressed disgust at the idea that Republicans would consider renominating Mr. Trump after he “undermined our democracy” by lying about the 2020 election and inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The event took place on the campus of New England College. After several gray-haired attendees asked Mr. Christie about Medicare, prescription drug prices and the like, a 15-year-old audience member named Quinn Mitchell — who had also heard Mr. Christie strike similar themes a month earlier in New Hampshire — spoke up.A Question for Chris Christie“I heard you say that one of the reasons you endorsed Trump is that you really did not want Clinton to be president in 2016. And now, based on recent knowledge that Trump was arrested — Trump was prosecuted on criminal charges — do you think that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would have been the better bet for democracy in 2016?”The SubtextMr. Christie, who is exploring a 2024 Republican presidential bid, has positioned himself as the one G.O.P. hopeful willing to attack Mr. Trump. But a well-crafted question from Mr. Mitchell got to the heart of a contradiction in Mr. Christie’s posture, forcing him to own his support for the man he had just forcefully denounced.Chris Christie’s Answer“Hillary Clinton, in many, many ways, was a huge detriment to our democracy too. The American people had in 2016 the biggest hold-your-nose-and-vote choice they ever had. And so, look, philosophically, some of the stuff that Trump did accomplish is more in line with what I believe than what Hillary would have tried to accomplish. So I still would’ve picked Trump.”The SubtextMr. Christie’s answer was revealing. As much of a threat to democracy as he had just declared Mr. Trump to be, Mr. Christie, the former New Jersey governor, could not bring himself to say that Hillary Clinton would have been the better choice to preserve democracy.Mr. Christie’s unwillingness to declare that he would have voted for a Democrat if he had known what was coming gets to the heart of the dilemma for anti-Trump candidates. It’s why true Never Trumpers don’t trust candidates like Mr. Christie, who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016 and in 2020 and served as an outside adviser while Mr. Trump was president. At the same time, Mr. Christie is making the straightforward political calculation that a would-be 2024 Republican who acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton would have been the better president would be dead in any G.O.P. primary.The moment also highlighted the challenge that almost every current or potential Republican primary candidate faces against Mr. Trump: Almost all of them, some of whom served in his administration, have a history of praising or supporting Mr. Trump during his presidency — words that can be expected to come back to haunt them.Alyce McFadden contributed research. More

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      DeSantis Is Letting Trump Humiliate Him

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      Watching the nascent Republican primary race, I have a sickening sense of déjà vu. As much as I abhor Donald Trump’s opponents, I’m desperate for one of them to prevail. Trump might be easier for Joe Biden to beat, but anyone who gets the Republican nomination has a chance of being elected, and the possibility of another Trump term is intolerable. So it’s harrowing to see Trump abetted, again, by the cowardice of his opponents.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was supposed to stop Donald Trump, is deflating before even entering the race, with his poll numbers softening and donors fretting. Trump, meanwhile, seems more buoyed than hindered by his ever-proliferating scandals, and is racking up endorsements at DeSantis’s expense. There are several explanations for why this is happening, including the backlash to Trump’s indictment, DeSantis’s near total lack of charisma, and concern among Republican elites about the sweeping abortion ban he just signed. But there’s another dynamic at work here, and I think it’s the big one: Like Trump’s 2016 rivals, DeSantis is making the mistake of believing that the primary race is about issues, while Trump instinctively understands that it’s about dominance.Dueling super PAC attack ads about Social Security and Medicare illustrate DeSantis’s problem. The ad from the Trump camp is inspired by reporting about DeSantis eating pudding with his fingers on an airplane. Over a nauseating video of a man messily consuming chocolate pudding with his hands, the spot says, “DeSantis has his dirty fingers all over senior entitlements.” But the policy argument is just an excuse for the disgusting visuals; the point is not to disagree with DeSantis, but to humiliate him.The ad from DeSantis’s allies misses this point entirely. It attempts to fact-check the claims in the pro-Trump spot with video of DeSantis promising to protect Social Security, then tries to turn the tables by airing a clip of Trump saying that “at some point” he’ll “take a look” at entitlements. “Trump should fight Democrats, not lie about Governor DeSantis,” the ad continues — whining about Trump’s aggression rather than countering it.This approach didn’t work in 2016 and it’s not working now. Witness the parade of Florida Republicans turning their back on DeSantis and bending the knee to Trump with their endorsements.Republican attempts to outflank Trump from the right, a strategy tried by Ted Cruz in 2016, are also falling flat again. Before Mike Pence’s speech to the National Rifle Association last week, Politico reported that the former vice president was aiming “to get to the right of Donald Trump on guns, bringing debates the two once had behind closed doors in the White House into the public eye.” Pence ended up getting booed by the crowd and then mocked by his former boss.The upcoming Republican primary race, like the last one, is going to be fought on a limbic level, not an ideological one. It will be about who is weak and who is strong. That’s why, if Republicans want a non-Trump candidate in 2024, they’re going to have to find someone willing to tear him down. I understand that this is made difficult by the fact that Republican primary voters often seem excited by Trump’s most repulsive qualities, including his authoritarianism, rapacious greed, incitements to violence, friendly relations with white supremacists and antisemites, and the corruption that’s already led to multiple felony charges. It’s also hard to tar Trump as a loser when so much of the right-wing base believes the fantasy that in 2020 he actually won.Nevertheless, it’s worth thinking about how Trump would take on a candidate like Trump. I don’t think he’d do it with passive-aggressive sniping, like when DeSantis, while attacking the New York district attorney Alvin Bragg for indicting Trump, worked in a dig about the ex-president paying “hush money to a porn star.” Trump, faced with an opponent who had Trump’s own flaws, would just blast away at them all until he found something that stuck.Trump’s approach to DeSantis’s war on Disney is instructive. Until approximately five minutes ago, DeSantis’s willingness to do battle with ostensibly “woke” corporations — even a giant of Florida tourism like Disney — was part of his appeal. But Trump didn’t try to show that he’d be even harder on Disney than DeSantis has been. Instead, he trolled DeSantis by taking Disney’s side, taunting the governor for getting “destroyed” by Disney and speculating that the company would stop investing in Florida. There is, so far, little sign that this is hurting Trump, even though the right has spent months demonizing Disney, a company Tucker Carlson compared to a “sex offender.” Consistent displays of dominance matter more to Republicans than consistent displays of principle.This doesn’t mean that Republican candidates should try to copy Trump’s insult comic act; they’ll almost certainly fail if they do. But they need to be, to use a Trumpish word, tough. As House speaker, Nancy Pelosi managed to repeatedly emasculate Trump not because she imitated him, but because she treated him like a petulant child. Most of Trump’s would-be Republican rivals, on the other hand, are treating him like an unstable father, fantasizing about supplanting him even as they cower in fear of his wrath.An exception is the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who understands that you can’t beat Trump without fighting him. “I don’t believe that Republican voters penalize people who criticize Trump,” he told Politico, adding, “If you think you’re a better person to be president than Donald Trump, then you better make that case.” Whether Christie can make it is hard to say, given that he’s already abased himself before Trump more than once. But he’s right that no one’s going to defeat Trump until they stop acting scared of him.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