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      Why the Right Still Embraces Ivermectin

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      Five years after the pandemic began, interest in the anti-parasitic drug is rising again as right-wing influencers promote it — and spread misinformation about it.Joe Grinsteiner is a gregarious online personality who touts the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. In a recent Facebook video, he produced a tube of veterinary-grade ivermectin paste — the kind made for deworming horses.He gave the tube a squeeze. Then he licked a slug of the stuff, and gulped.“Yum,” Mr. Grinsteiner said in the Feb. 25 video, one of a number of ivermectin-related posts he has made that have drawn millions of views on Facebook this year. “Actually, that tastes like dead cancer.”Ivermectin, a drug proven to treat certain parasitic diseases, exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid false claims that it could treat or prevent Covid-19. Now — despite a persistent message from federal health officials that its medical benefits are limited — interest in ivermectin is rising again, particularly among American conservatives who are seeing it promoted by right-wing influencers.Mr. Grinsteiner, 54, is a Trump supporter and country music performer who lives in rural Michigan. He has claimed in his videos that ivermectin cured his skin cancer, as well as his wife’s cervical cancer. In a video last month, he said a woman told him her nonverbal autistic child had become verbal after using ivermectin. In a recent phone interview, Mr. Grinsteiner said that he takes a daily dose of ivermectin to maintain his general well-being.There is no evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer or autism. Yet Mr. Grinsteiner believes that the medical and political establishments just want to keep average people from discovering the healing powers of a relatively affordable drug. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Does America Have Presidential Term Limits?

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      Congress passed the 22nd Amendment in 1947, creating a two-term limit for American presidents as a check the power of America’s chief executive. But President Trump has not ruled out seeking a third term in office even though the Constitution does not allow it. Here’s what to know about presidential term limits and why they exist.Here’s what you need to know:Has the U.S. always had term limits?Did any presidents try to break with tradition?Have any presidents won a third term?Do other countries have term limits?Has the U.S. always had term limits?Until Congress passed the 22nd Amendment, presidents had largely recognized the precedent established by the nation’s first president, George Washington. In 1796, he declined to seek a third term in office, citing the importance of peaceful transfers of power and the potential for presidential tyranny. Washington’s decision was seen at the time as a guard against the dangers of autocracy, from which the young republic had recently sought to freed itself by declaring independence from the British Empire in 1776.Did any presidents try to break with tradition?Washington’s two-term precedent didn’t stop some of his successors from trying for a third. After serving two consecutive presidential terms, from 1901 to 1909, Theodore Roosevelt returned to the campaign trail in 1912 as a third-party candidate seeking a third term. He was unsuccessful. Before that, Ulysses S. Grant, the former Civil War general, had sought a third term in 1880, but his party declined to give him the nomination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stocks Sink as Trump’s Tariff Threats Weigh on Confidence

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      Stocks in Japan tumbled nearly 4 percent as investors braced for a week of market turmoil caused by an expected announcement of more tariffs.Stocks in Asia tumbled Monday as investors braced for a week of market tumult caused by an expected announcement of more tariffs by President Trump on America’s biggest trading partners.Japan’s Nikkei 225 index fell nearly 4 percent in early trading. Stocks in South Korea and Taiwan were down more than 2 percent.Stocks in Hong Kong and mainland China were mostly unchanged, bolstered by a report signaling that China’s export-led industrial sector continues to expand despite Mr. Trump’s initial tariffs.Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the benchmark index before exchanges reopen in New York in the morning, slumped 0.5 percent on Sunday evening. On Friday, the S&P 500 dropped 2 percent on concerns about inflation and weak consumer sentiment.Since taking office a little over two months ago, Mr. Trump has kept investors and companies guessing with his haphazard rollout of what he calls an “America First” trade policy.In some cases, Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs to make imports more expensive in industries like automobiles, arguing that the trade barriers will spur investment and innovation in the United States. He has also used tariffs, and their threat, to try to extract geopolitical concessions from countries. He has further unnerved investors by saying he does not care about the fallout of his actions on markets or American consumers, who will have to pay more for many goods if import prices rise.Over the weekend, Mr. Trump ramped up the pressure, threatening so-called secondary sanctions on Russia if it does not engage in talks to bring about a cessation of fighting in Ukraine. The tactic echoes similar sanctions concerning Venezuela. He said last week that any country buying Venezuelan oil could face another 25 percent tariff on its imports to the United States. The threats over the weekend add to tariffs of 25 percent on imported cars and some car parts set to be implemented this week, barring any last minute reprieve. That’s in addition to previously delayed tariffs on Mexico and Canada, as well as the potential for further retaliatory tariffs on other countries.Adding to investors’ angst is the scheduled release on Friday of the monthly report on the health of the U.S. jobs market. It could provide another reading of how the Trump administration’s policy pursuits are weighing on the economy.Keith Bradsher More

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      Elon Musk Says ‘Destiny of Humanity’ Rests on Wisconsin Judicial Race

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      Elon Musk framed Tuesday’s election for Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court in nothing less than apocalyptic terms, telling a crowd on Sunday night in Green Bay that the vote could ultimately swing control of Congress — meaning it could effectively “affect the entire destiny of humanity.”Mr. Musk revels in provocative, inflammatory rhetoric. But his remarks — and the visit itself, 36 hours before polls open for Election Day — reflected his extraordinary push to bolster Judge Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate for the State Supreme Court. The election, he said, is not “some kind of judicial thing that is not that important.”“What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives. That is why it is so significant,” Mr. Musk said, referring to the key role that judges could play in congressional redistricting. “And whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”The billionaire Mr. Musk, a close adviser to President Trump, dispensed two giant $1 million checks onstage to Wisconsin voters, following through with a well-worn gimmick despite an unsuccessful, last-minute lawsuit from Democrats that tried to put a stop to it.Mr. Musk and allied groups have spent over $20 million to help the conservative candidate, and he said on Sunday that he considered Judge Schimel an underdog. “We’ve got to pull a rabbit out of the hat — next level. We actually have to have a steady stream of rabbits out of the hat, like it’s an arc of rabbits flying through the air, and then landing in a voting booth.”Mr. Musk took the stage wearing his own headgear — a cheesehead hat popular with Packers fans, before signing it and tossing it into the crowd. More

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      Trump Says He ‘Couldn’t Care Less’ if Auto Tariffs Raise Car Prices in the U.S.

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      President Trump has said that “tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented.” For someone who once called himself a “tariff man,” tariffs are the solutions to many economic problems.He has argued that imposing tariffs would protect American factories, spur manufacturing, create new jobs and bend uncooperative governments to his will. Since his inauguration, while imposing and then suspending and then imposing tariffs again, Mr. Trump has upended the global trading system.But over that time Mr. Trump has also begun conceding that tariffs could cause financial discomfort for Americans. That possibility came up in stark terms in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” from Saturday, when Mr. Trump said that he “couldn’t care less” about the prospect of higher car prices.The president repeated the sentiment twice when asked about the 25 percent tariffs on imported cars and auto parts that he has promised will go into effect on Thursday. He told the NBC News host Kristen Welker that the tariffs were permanent, and that he would encourage auto companies and their suppliers to move to the United States.In one exchange, Ms. Welker asked Mr. Trump if he was at all concerned with the effect of tariffs on car prices, which experts have said could go up by thousands of dollars. “No, I couldn’t care less,” he said, “because if the prices on foreign cars go up, they’re going to buy American cars.”After the interview, an aide to the president told NBC that Mr. Trump was referring to the increase in foreign car prices.While the White House sought to emphasize foreign-made vehicles, the tariffs will affect American companies like Ford Motor and General Motors, which build many of their vehicles in Canada and Mexico. Nearly half of the vehicles sold in the United States are imported, according to S&P Global Mobility data, and almost 60 percent of auto parts in cars assembled in the country.A study by the Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, forecast that tariffs would cause vehicle prices to increase by an average of 13.5 percent — an additional $6,400 to the price of an average new 2024 car.On Sunday, Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, said that the tariffs were indeed a “motivator” for carmakers to bring jobs back to the United States. But, he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” they were not an “end-all solution” to help American auto workers. If jobs are being brought back to the United States, Mr. Fain said, they need to be “good paying union jobs that set standards.”Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser to Mr. Trump, defended the tariffs and said they would raise about $100 billion, which would translate to tax credits for people who buy American cars. He, too, told Americans not to worry about the effects of the tariffs.Instead, he said on Sunday, they should “trust in Trump.” More

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      White House Takes Highly Unusual Step of Directly Firing Line Prosecutors

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      Two longtime career prosecutors have been suddenly fired by the White House, in what current and former Justice Department officials called an unusual and alarming exercise of presidential power.In recent days, the prosecutors, in Los Angeles and Memphis, were dismissed abruptly, notified by a terse one-sentence email stating no reason for the move other than that it was on behalf of the president himself.The ousters reflected a more aggressive effort by the White House to reach deep inside U.S. attorney offices across the country in a stark departure from decades of practice. While it is commonplace and accepted for senior political appointees at the Justice Department to change from administration to administration, no department veteran could recall any similar removal of assistant U.S. attorneys.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.Asked about the ousters and whether others had been let go in a similar fashion, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said, “The White House, in coordination with the Department of Justice, has dismissed more than 50 U.S. attorneys and deputies in the past few weeks.”She added, “The American people deserve a judicial branch full of honest arbiters of the law who want to protect democracy, not subvert it,” offering no explanation for how either of the two fired prosecutors might have done that. Prosecutors are part of the executive, not judicial, branch of government.During his campaign, Mr. Trump vowed to drastically reshape the ranks of career Justice Department officials, aggrieved by the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia in his first term and the four criminal indictments between his presidencies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Where Oligarchy and Populism Meet

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      More from our inbox:The Cruelties of Cash BailThalassa Raasch for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “It’s About Ideology, Not Oligarchy,” by Ross Douthat (column, March 23):Ross Douthat asks the right questions in this column: Why have Elon Musk and the other Silicon Valley hotshots swung hard behind President Trump? Why are they pouring money and energy into the MAGA movement? And why is Mr. Trump giving them free rein? But Mr. Douthat provides the wrong answer. It is not credible to think, as he suggests, that Mr. Musk has suddenly committed his life to lowering the deficit or shrinking the government.We know quite well what Mr. Musk and his tech-bro pals want: to translate their tremendous wealth into power, and use that power to remake the United States into a vehicle for the endless growth of technology and, not incidentally, of their own wealth and glory. There is ideology here, an Ayn Randian glorification of the noble creators. It is an ideology that amounts to oligarchy.Mr. Trump is seen as the vehicle for this transformation. His interests and those of the tech elite overlap, for now. Both want to fatally weaken the government and leave it open to a takeover. Mr. Trump sees himself as the new owner, while Mr. Musk and others want it run by the enlightened few. They will clash, but whoever wins, the American people will be the losers.Adam WassermanSanta Fe, N.M.To the Editor:Ross Douthat should take his cue on oligarchy from countries where it thrives. The central characteristic of these governments is rule of (a few) men rather than rule of law. The concentration of political and economic power is typically maintained not by a coherent ideology or by policies that explicitly favor the superrich, but by identity politics that divide people into “us” and “them.”In parts of Eastern Europe, oligarchs rely on a mixture of jingoism and ethnic nationalism fueled by external grievances and anti-immigrant and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiment. These narratives justify the power of the oligarchs and maintain the system.Across the board, the rule of law unravels because it constrains the power of the oligarchs. Is America headed in that direction?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For God’s Sake, Fellow Lawyers, Stand Up to Trump

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      President Trump this month issued an executive order clearly intended to destroy the venerable law firm Perkins Coie, a firm that has zealously represented clients large and small for more than a century.The order left no doubt that Perkins Coie’s primary offense was representing Hillary Clinton in 2016 and standing up for other causes Mr. Trump views unfavorably. It could not have been more blatantly unconstitutional than if a legal scholar had been asked to draft a template for an unlawful executive order: It violates the First Amendment, contravenes fundamental due process rights and imperils the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.On March 11, the courageous and skillful law firm Williams & Connolly filed a lawsuit on Perkins Coie’s behalf, seeking to enjoin the president’s order on constitutional grounds. At a hearing the next day, Judge Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington issued an order temporarily barring enforcement of most of the order. The Justice Department responded by moving to disqualify Judge Howell, a motion she rejected in a withering opinion on Wednesday.Our firm stands with Perkins Coie and all firms and lawyers who fight against this president’s lawless executive actions. That’s why we’ve called on other firms to join us in submitting a friend of the court brief in support of Perkins Coie.If lawyers and law firms won’t stand up for the rule of law, who will?Beyond the Perkins Coie executive order, Mr. Trump has issued similar, and equally unlawful, executive orders directed at other law firms that have represented causes or people he doesn’t like, including because they have sued him, investigated him or contributed in some way to civil and criminal legal matters brought against him. That includes executive orders in recent days targeting the firms WilmerHale and Jenner & Block. He also issued a memorandum directed across the board at lawyers and law firms that have taken on causes he disfavors, including the pro bono representation of political asylum seekers.We applaud Jenner & Block’s and WilmerHale’s lawsuits, filed Friday, challenging the administration’s executive orders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More