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      Book Review: ‘Landslide,’ by Michael Wolff

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      LANDSLIDEThe Final Days of the Trump White HouseBy Michael WolffForty-five years ago, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” came out, it was a different world: There was no cable news, no internet and no social media, and the political establishment offered at least the illusion of being in control. The Watergate scandal, culminating in Richard Nixon’s resignation, presented a riveting series of public events — hearings, trials and so on — but that left it open to Woodward and Bernstein to tell the story of what had been going on behind the scenes.“Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House,” Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump’s presidency, after “Fire and Fury” and “Siege,” faces a different challenge in recounting Trump’s political demise (for now). Penetrating a buttoned-up White House was not the issue, because Trump ran his administration as a public performance. Nixon spoke calmly in public and ranted and cursed to his aides. Trump put his self-pity, revenge fantasies and paranoia on full display at his rallies and in his tweets. He was indiscreet, and he surrounded himself with other indiscreet people, whom he often motivated to become especially indiscreet by humiliating or firing them. How can one lend an element of revelation to an account of the crazy, terrifying weeks between Election Day 2020 and President Biden’s inauguration?Wolff’s method is essentially the same as in “The Final Days” and many other inside stories about highest-level politics: He uses lots of detailed off-the-record interviews with aides to produce a tale told in a third-person omniscient voice, without conventional journalistic attribution. I noticed only a time or two when he seemed to have put something that somebody had told him between quotation marks, with the person’s name attached. In books like this, the author adopts his sources’ perspective — narrowly, in the sense that they are shown behaving honorably, and broadly, in the sense that their overall take on events animates the story.In an epilogue, Wolff interviews Trump himself, at Mar-a-Lago. It’s an artfully drawn scene of the king in exile, but the former president doesn’t really say anything he hasn’t said many times before — and indeed elsewhere in the book Wolff wisely chooses to quote several of Trump’s public speeches at length, because nothing else quite as fully captures his (to use Wolff’s term) “derangement.” Wolff’s main sources seem to be a group of aides at a second or third level of celebrity, people who see themselves as “political professionals.” Administration staff members like Jason Miller (communications adviser), Mark Meadows (White House chief of staff), Matthew Morgan (counsel to the re-election campaign) and Marc Short (Mike Pence’s chief of staff) appear often in Wolff’s accounts of White House meetings, usually attempting unsuccessfully to impose a measure of order and sanity. It seems safe to assume that it’s their collective point of view, and that of others like them, that we’re getting in “Landslide.”Books like this usually burst out of the gate with a few newsmaking anecdotes, and Wolff does provide some of these. Trump believed that the Democratic Party’s elders would pull Biden, sure to lose, at the last minute, and replace him with a ticket of Andrew Cuomo and Michelle Obama. He toyed with the idea of using the pandemic as a pretext for indefinitely postponing the election. The most notorious line in his speech to the incipient mob on Jan. 6 — “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” — was an ad-lib, not in the text his staff had prepared. But the strength of “Landslide” comes less from these stories and more from a coherent argument that Wolff, in partnership with his sources, makes about how we should understand the period between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20. Most quickly produced books about political events don’t do that.Trump, in these pages, is self-obsessed, delusional and administratively incompetent. He has no interest in or understanding of the workings of government. He doesn’t read or listen to briefings. He spends vast amounts of time watching conservative television networks and chatting on the phone with cronies. The pandemic puts him at a special disadvantage; many of the people around him are either sick or afraid to come to work because that would entail complying with a regime of Covid noncompliance that Trump demands. If anybody tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, he marginalizes or fires that person and finds somebody else to listen to, who may or may not hold an official position. If Fox News becomes less than completely loyal, he’ll switch to Newsmax or One America News Network. He lives in a self-curated information environment that bears only a glancing relationship to reality.Before the belief that the election was stolen had taken full control of Trump’s mind, the idea was already there — because he chose to regard all forms of expanded access to voting, which tend to favor the Democrats, as stealing. He turned down entreaties from his staff to set up a Republican get-out-the-early-vote operation, just as he also turned down entreaties to endorse masking and social distancing during the height of the pandemic: off-brand. He was utterly disorganized, with endless firings and reshufflings of the key players. And during his second impeachment trial, Trump was represented by a comically incompetent, squabbling team of lawyers whom he had barely met.In the early hours of election night, when he was running well ahead of the pre-election polls, Trump decided he had won. After it became clear to everyone but him that he hadn’t, he empowered an alternate-reality team of advisers, headed by Rudy Giuliani and including people whom even Giuliani considered to be unacceptably out-there, like Sidney Powell, the freelancing lawyer, and Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, and he embraced every available conspiracy theory and strategic fantasy about how he could change the result. To Trump, in Wolff’s telling, elections are roughly similar to the due dates for loans in his real-estate business — a place to start negotiating. Because he divides people into two categories, strong and weak, and because he has the deep cynicism of an unprincipled person, he chose to believe that he was not the first result-denying presidential candidate, only the first who was manly enough to challenge a typically corrupt outcome.Nobody holding official power in the White House or the Republican Party — in particular, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell — took Trump’s ravings seriously, so the horrifying events of Jan. 6 came as a surprise, probably even to Trump himself. The various rallies that day had been organized by independent right-wing political entrepreneurs with businesses to promote, not by the White House, and it wasn’t yet clear to most Republicans in Washington how fully Trump’s followers had accepted his insistence that the election had been stolen. Almost nobody in the White House was actively trying to persuade members of Congress to vote for the election challenges that were before them on Jan. 6.One obvious question all this raises is: If Trump was so unrelievedly awful, not to mention dangerous, why were Wolff’s sources working for him? “In insider political circles,” Wolff writes, “almost all politicians are seen as difficult and even damaged people, necessarily tolerated in some civics class inversion because they were elected.” Over time the realization dawned that Trump was in a specially appalling category. After that, “You took it and put up with it and tried to make the best of it, not in spite of everything, but because this was what you did; this was the job you had.” Or you thought you could help by “keeping it from being so much worse than it otherwise might be.” Or you persuaded yourself that you were serving a larger cause, as in the case of Marc Short: “He detested the president but saw a tight-lipped tolerance, however painful, as the way to use Trump’s popularity to realize the conservative grail of remaking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy.”More than all this, though, the quality of Trump’s that best explains what happened is that he commands a vast, enthusiastically loyal following that may represent as much as a quarter of the voting public, or even more, and a majority of the people who vote in Republican primaries. Nobody holding an appointed position has this, and very few elected officials do either. Wolff says the people around Trump believed he had “magical properties,” based on “a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience.” Everyone knew from firsthand observation how incompetent a chief executive he was: “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Therefore they assumed that his postelection lunacy would have no consequences, and that it was safe to avoid any public argument with the president that might arouse the Republican base. Essentially the only nefarious misdeed he was capable of pulling off was the one he did pull off, not entirely wittingly: the power to incite a violent, democracy-subverting mob of his devotees.Trump’s election, his term in office and the manner of his departure have reawakened a dormant debate about the essential health of the American political system. Are there too many barriers in the way of voting? Is the public misinformed? Do billionaires and other elites control the system? Do the Electoral College and the way congressional representation is apportioned overempower underpopulated rural areas? Wolff raises a more fundamental and frightening possibility: that the lesson of Trump is that in a democratic society, a malign and dangerous “crazy person,” especially one with a deep instinctive understanding of public opinion and the media, can become genuinely popular. Millions of Americans love Trump. As Wolff points out, after Jan. 6, his standing in the polls went up.This is not an abstract or theoretical concern. Wolff doesn’t make a direct prediction. But he leaves us with the strong impression that Trump will be running for president again in 2024. More

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      As Republicans Take Aim at Voting, Democrats Search for a Response

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      A speech by President Biden on Tuesday could be a signal of how hard the Democrats will fight to protect voting rights. WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party pledged millions for it last week, grass-roots groups are campaigning for it nationwide and, as recently as Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said the fight for it had only begun.But behind the brave words are rising concerns among voting-rights advocates and Democrats that the counterattack against the aggressive push by Republicans to restrict ballot access is faltering, and at a potentially pivotal moment.President Biden is expected to put his political muscle behind the issue in a speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday. But in Congress, Democratic senators have been unable to move voting and election bills that would address what many of them call a fundamental attack on American democracy that could lock in a new era of Republican minority rule. And in the courts, attacks on voting restrictions face an increasingly hostile judiciary and narrowing legal options.Texas seems poised, absent another walkout by Democratic legislators, to become the latest Republican-controlled state to pass a sweeping legislative agenda placing new barriers to the ability to cast a ballot. That comes on the heels of a major Supreme Court ruling this month further weakening the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court nullified its major provision in 2012. The decision arrived as advocacy groups were pressing lawsuits against restrictive voting laws enacted in roughly a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures.“One more arrow has been taken out of the quiver of voting-rights plaintiffs to strike down these new laws passed since the 2020 election,” said Nathaniel Persily, an election-law scholar at Stanford. “And it’s not like they had all that many arrows in the quiver to begin with.”Roughly a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this past spring restricting voting or significantly changing election rules, ostensibly in response to President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him the November election. Many made it harder to vote early or by mail, banned or restricted drop boxes, shortened early or absentee voting periods or gave more leeway to partisan poll watchers. Some laws made it easier to replace local election officials with partisans, something voting rights advocates say might make it possible even to invalidate or sway election results. Atop that, Republican filibuster threats have bottled up the flagship effort by congressional Democrats to counter such restrictions — a sweeping overhaul of federal election laws and a beefed-up revision of the Voting Rights Act. Despite controlling the Senate, Democrats have failed to unite behind a change in filibuster rules that would allow them to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote. That is a painful reversal for Democrats, who had labeled the bills their top priority, and for Mr. Biden, who said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House. It also has far-reaching ramifications: The election-overhaul bill would set minimum standards for ballot access, potentially undoing some provisions of the newly enacted laws, and ban gerrymandering just as states begin drawing new boundaries for House seats and local political districts.Democrats worry that failing to act will empower states led by Republicans to impose more restrictions before the 2024 presidential election — a genuine concern, they say, given that Mr. Biden carried the Electoral College by fewer than 43,000 votes in three key states, despite outpolling Mr. Trump by seven million votes nationwide. President Biden said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesAnd some worry that a Republican Party that still refuses to accept the legitimacy of the last presidential vote sets the stage for a constitutional crisis should red states, or even a Republican-led House of Representatives, contest the next close election. “There’s not a caucus meeting that goes by that our leadership doesn’t talk about S. 1 and how our democracy is on the verge of disappearing,” U.S. Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who has spent 14 years in the House, said in an interview, using shorthand for voting legislation stalled in the Senate. “There’s plenty to be scared about.”Republicans argue that it’s Democrats who are the threat to democracy. “The Democratic Party wants to rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said at a hearing on the bill to overhaul voting laws, called the For the People Act. “It’s hard to imagine anything that would erode public confidence in our democracy more drastically.”Mr. McConnell has called the proposal “a craven political calculation” that shows “disdain for the American people.”In the states, Republican legislators have frequently taken a similar tack, charging that Democrats oppose tightening voting rules because they benefit from voter fraud.More common among voting experts, though, is a view that Republicans, facing unfavorable demographic tides, see their future linked to limiting Democratic turnout. “They’re going to do everything they can to hold on to power, and one essential of that is limiting the Democratic vote,” said Larry J. Sabato, a veteran political analyst and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Voting-rights advocates and the Biden administration are not without weapons. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has already sued to block voting legislation enacted by the Georgia General Assembly this past spring, and more lawsuits are likely.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the Democratic National Committee planned to spend $25 million before the 2022 midterms to organize and educate voters.And a number of voting rights advocates said they believed that the breadth and the audacity of Republican voting restrictions was igniting a backlash that would power a grass-roots voting movement and increase Democratic turnout in the midterms.“It could well have a significant pushback,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at Harvard. “The extra motivation of ‘You’re not going to take away my vote’ could end up with very, very heavy turnout come 2022 and 2024.”But voting issues could be a motivator for both parties and, in a highly polarized electorate, the moral high ground can be hard to establish. “I think a lot of this from the other side is political theater,” Representative Briscoe Cain, the Republican House Elections Committee chairman in Texas said in a phone interview on Sunday night. The goal, he said, is to “win elections and make Republicans look bad.”Advocacy groups and Democrats also are in the courts. In Georgia alone, eight lawsuits are challenging Republican election laws enacted in the spring. Marc Elias, a longtime lawyer for Democratic Party interests, is opposing new election laws in seven Republican-dominated states.How badly the Supreme Court ruling will hinder such efforts is unclear. The 6-to-3 decision, covering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, made it much harder to attack a voting restriction based principally on its lopsided impact on a minority group.Mr. Elias called the ruling “a terrible decision,” but added that most election lawsuits claim violations of the Constitution, not the Voting Rights Act.Richard L. Hasen, a leading election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, was less sanguine, arguing that one part of the ruling has given states wide latitude to defend restrictions as necessary to prevent fraud — even if there is no evidence of fraud. Stopping fraud is by far the leading reason cited by Republican legislators sponsoring curbs on voting.“There’s no question that the road is much tougher for voting rights plaintiffs in federal courts,” he said. “These battles will have to be fought within each state, mustering coalitions among business groups, civil leaders and voters from all parties who care about the sanctity of the right to vote.”Legal options also exist outside the federal judiciary. Mr. Elias recently won a suit claiming discrimination against college-age voters in the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is challenging North Carolina’s voter ID requirements in that state’s Supreme Court. Demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., in June to protest for equal voting rights.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesAnd Alison Riggs, a voting-rights lawyer and co-executive director of the coalition, noted that Congress could easily address concerns with the court’s ruling in any revision of the Voting Rights Act.Mr. Biden’s speech on Tuesday may signal whether he intends to become involved in pushing that legislation and the overhaul of voting laws to passage. Mr. Biden made voting issues a priority in his campaign, but as president he has emphasized bread-and-butter issues like infrastructure spending and coronavirus relief. He was largely absent in June when Democrats in the Senate tried and failed to bring up the For the People Act for debate — in part, perhaps, because even Democrats realized that it must be stripped down to a more basic bill to have a chance of passing.The president is unlikely to have that option again. Over the weekend, a close ally, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, told Politico that Mr. Biden must push to modify the filibuster so both voting bills could pass.So did civil rights leaders in a meeting with the president on Thursday. “We will not be able to litigate our way out of this threat to Black citizenship, voting and political participation,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said later. “We need legislation to be passed in Congress.”The consequences of doing that — or not — could be profound, said Dr. Sabato. “If there was ever a moment to act, it would be now, because Republican legislatures with Republican governors are going to go even further as we move into the future,” he said.“For years, Democrats will point to this as a missed moment. And they’ll be right.”David Montgomery contributed reporting. More

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      The Nation Needs a Reality-Based G.O.P. Only the Kook Caucus Is Stepping Up.

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      Brace yourself, America. Next year’s midterms have the potential to stock the Republican Party at all levels with rabble-rousers that make the Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Partiers of 2010 look like RINO squishes.Call it the Kook Caucus.Elections tend to reflect the political zeitgeist. Some coalesce around a hot policy topic: health care, immigration, jobs, crime. Others are fueled by bigger, broader themes: reforming democracy, reining in Big Government, healing partisan divisions, reviving the American dream.But under Donald Trump, the Republican Party set aside policy and principles to become a cult of personality. The driving concern of today’s candidates, with precious few exceptions, is to stay in the good graces of their exiled but still dangerous and vindictive leader. This requires embracing the fiction that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that MAGA loyalists are duty-bound to fight to right this wrong.That lie has spread like a rash across the Republican base, with a big boost from the conservative media. Half to two-thirds of the party’s voters believe that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate. Over half believe that election audits will “probably” or “definitely” reverse the outcome, according to a Morning Consult poll from mid-June. (Spoiler alert: They won’t.) And a poll from early June found that 29 percent of Republicans consider it at least somewhat likely that Mr. Trump will be reinstated as president this year. (Not. Gonna. Happen.)Republican leaders are expected, at minimum, to play along with this toxic rubbish. Those who don’t are courting electoral grief. Big Lie promoters are leaping into races at all levels — from state legislator to governor, state attorney general to the U.S. Senate — and making the 2020 fraud myth Topic A.“Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat,” according to The Washington Post. This includes 136 incumbents who voted against certifying the election results on Jan. 6.Incumbents, insurgents, swing districts, safe districts — there is no escape. “Election integrity” has become the magic catchphrase for Republicans looking to juice the MAGA faithful.It’s not just those who have clashed one-on-one with Mr. Trump being targeted, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. (Though it bears noting that at least a half-dozen challengers are aiming to unseat Ms. Cheney for what they see as her betrayal of Mr. Trump.) Senator James Lankford, a solid Oklahoma conservative and Baptist minister, is being challenged by Jackson Lahmeyer, a Tulsa pastor outraged that, following the sacking of the Capitol, Mr. Lankford opted not to oppose the 2020 outcome.“I saw fear all over him on Jan. 6.,” Mr. Lahmeyer charged at the March event announcing his candidacy, at which he was joined by Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s disgraced national security adviser. “He caved in like an absolute coward, and that let me know he is not the man to represent our state in the fight our country is in right now.”More humiliating: Mr. Lahmeyer is being personally supported by the head of the Oklahoma Republican Party, John Bennett, who also regards Mr. Lankford as weak on 2020. A state party chairman working against one of his own incumbents, Mr. Lankford has noted, is an uncommon — and unsettling — development.The early tremors of this election trend are already being felt. Last month, a longtime Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates was unseated in his primary by a political newbie who had worked on the failed Trump legal effort to overturn the election results in Wisconsin. The challenger, Wren Williams, slammed the incumbent for failing to fight the good fight.“He wasn’t doing anything — squat, diddly,” Mr. Williams told The Washington Post. “He wasn’t taking election integrity seriously. I’m sitting here fighting for election integrity in the courts, and he’s my elected representative who can legislate and he’s not.”Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist and MAGA guru, has declared 2020 denialism a “litmus test” for Republican office seekers. “There will not be a Republican that wins a primary for 2022 — not one — that doesn’t take the pledge to get to the bottom of Nov. 3,” he predicted to NBC in May.Certainly, not all the Kook Caucus aspirants will triumph — especially in purplish districts where their baseless fraud talk may not play so well in the generals. But every advance they make is a loss, not only for their constituents but for the nation.Ominously, this election cycle is not about moving the Republican Party in a more conservative or more moderate direction or about reshaping its policy views. It is about packing the party with conspiracy theorists and liars and people itching to advance Mr. Trump’s belligerent, apocalyptic, reality-resistant brand of politics. Some three dozen QAnon-friendly Republican congressional candidates are in the mix, according to Media Matters’s latest count.Already, there are far too many Republican officials willing, either cynically or genuinely, to advance Mr. Trump’s Big Lie. An election that installs more of them up and down the ticket could easily turn the acute reality crisis of the past few months into a lingering condition.A healthy democracy requires a functional, stable, sane opposition party. Right now, the Republican bandwagon appears to be speeding in precisely the opposite direction.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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      In Michigan, Pro-Impeachment Republicans Face Voters’ Wrath

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      Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump, seeks “decency and humility” in Western Michigan, but has found anger, fear and misinformation.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Representative Peter Meijer cites Gerald R. Ford as his inspiration these days, not because the former president held his House seat for 24 years or because his name is all over this city — from its airport to its freeway to its arena — but because in Mr. Ford, the freshman congressman sees virtues lost to his political party.Ford took control after a president resigned rather than be impeached for abusing his power in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of an election.“It was a period of turmoil,” said Mr. Meijer, who was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ford’s greatest asset, he added, was “offering — this word is becoming too loaded of late — a sense of morals, moral leadership, a sense of value and centering decency and humility.”“Sometimes when you’re surrounded by cacophony, it helps to have someone sitting there who isn’t adding another screaming voice onto the pile,” Mr. Meijer added.Six months after the Capitol attack and 53 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, on John Parish’s farm in the hamlet of Vermontville, Mr. Meijer’s problems sat on folding chairs on the Fourth of July. They ate hot dogs, listened to bellicose speakers and espoused their own beliefs that reflected how, even at age 33, Mr. Meijer may represent the Republican Party’s past more than its future.The stars of the “Festival of Truth” on Sunday were adding their screaming voices onto the pile, and the 100 or so West Michiganders in the audience were enthusiastically soaking it up. Many of them inhabited an alternative reality in which Mr. Trump was re-elected, their votes were stolen, the deadly Jan. 6 mob was peaceful, coronavirus vaccines were dangerous and conservatives were oppressed.“God is forgiving, and — I don’t know — we’re forgiving people,” Geri Nichols, 79, of nearby Hastings, said as she spoke of her disappointment in Mr. Meijer. “But he did wrong. He didn’t support our president like he should have.”Under an unseasonably warm sun, her boyfriend, Gary Munson, 80, shook his head, agreeing: “He doesn’t appear to be what he says he is.”Representative Peter Meijer, a freshman member of Congress, was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFor all its political eccentricities, Michigan is not unique. Dozens of congressional candidates planning challenges next year are promoting the false claims of election fraud pressed by Mr. Trump. But Western Michigan does have one distinction: It is home to 20 percent of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump — that is, two of 10.The other one, Representative Fred Upton, 68, took office in an adjacent district west and south of here the year before Mr. Meijer was born, 1987. But the two find themselves in similar political straits. Both will face multiple primary challengers next year who accuse them of disloyalty — or worse, treason — for holding Mr. Trump responsible for the riot that raged as they met to formalize the election results for the victor, President Biden.Both men followed their impeachment votes with votes to create a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot, two of 35 House Republicans to do so. Both face a backlash from Republican voters who are enraged by what they allege are an effort by the F.B.I. to hunt down peaceful protesters, a news media silencing conservative voices, a governor who has taken away their livelihoods with overzealous pandemic restrictions and a Democratic secretary of state who has stolen their votes.Many of their grievances have less to do with Mr. Trump himself than the false claims that he promoted, which have taken root with voters who now look past him.“People think people who support Trump are like ‘Trump is our God,’” said Audra Johnson, one of Mr. Meijer’s Republican challengers, explaining why she refuses to get inoculated against the coronavirus with a vaccine the Trump administration helped create. “No, he’s not.”Audra Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, is one of many challengers to Mr. Meijer in the Republican primary next year.Emily Elconin for The New York Times“People are terrified,” Ms. Johnson added over grilled cheese and tomato soup at Crow’s Nest Restaurant in Kalamazoo. She added, “We’re heading toward a civil war, if we’re not already in a cold civil war.”In June, a Republican-led State Senate inquiry into Michigan’s 2020 vote count affirmed Mr. Biden’s Michigan victory by more than 154,000 votes, nearly 3 percentage points, and found “no evidence” of “either significant acts of fraud” or “an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity.”“The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain,” it concluded.The Meijer name graces grocery stores that are a regional staple — founded in 1934 by the congressman’s great-grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, a Dutch immigrant — and a popular botanical garden and sculpture park, established by his grandfather, Frederik, that is one of Grand Rapids’ biggest attractions. His father, Hank, and his uncle, Doug, took over the Meijer chain in 1990 as Forbes-listed billionaires.Peter Meijer’s pedigree is matched by his résumé: a year at West Point, a degree from Columbia University, eight years in the Army Reserve, including a deployment to Iraq as an intelligence adviser, and an M.B.A. from New York University.But these days in some circles, “Meijer” is less synonymous with groceries, gardens and prestige than with the impeachment of Mr. Trump.“Last time, the problem was we were running against Peter Meijer,” said Tom Norton, who lost to Mr. Meijer in the 2020 primary and is challenging him again in 2022. “The advantage this time is we’re running against Peter Meijer. It’s a complete flip.”In his Capitol Hill office, Mr. Meijer said that in one-on-one discussions with some of his constituents, he could make headway explaining his votes and how dangerous the lies of a stolen presidential election had become for the future of American democracy.“The challenge is if you believe that Nov. 3 was a landslide victory for Donald Trump that was stolen, and Jan. 6 was the day to stop that steal,” he said. “I can’t come to an understanding with somebody when we’re dealing with completely separate sets of facts and realities.”At a recent event, he said, a woman informed Mr. Meijer that he would shortly be arrested for treason and hauled before a military tribunal, presumably to be shot.“People are willing to kill and die over these alternative realities,” he said.Representative Fred Upton, another Republican impeachment voter, has been in office since 1987.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesYet at least one of his primary challengers is amplifying that alternative reality. Ms. Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, splashed onto the scene in 2019 as the “MAGA bride,” when she appeared at her wedding reception over the July 4 weekend in a Make America Great Again dress.She helped organize armed protests of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions at the State Capitol in Lansing and traveled with a convoy of buses to Washington for Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 protest against election certification.While she said she did not enter the Capitol that day, she said she knew people who knew people who did — peacefully, she insists.“Honestly, they’re terrified that the F.B.I. is going to come knock on their door,” Ms. Johnson said.Mr. Norton, who jousted with Mr. Meijer at the Northview Fourth of July parade in a middle-class Grand Rapids neighborhood, said afterward that he was sure there was election fraud in 2020 and was pushing for an Arizona-style “forensic audit” that would go even deeper than the audit already conducted.One of Mr. Upton’s challengers, state Representative Steve Carra, has introduced legislation to force such an audit in Michigan, even though he conceded that he had only skimmed the June report, which not only concluded that there was no fraud but called for those making such false claims to be referred for prosecution.“To say that there’s no evidence of widespread fraud I think is wrong,” said Mr. Carra, who was elected to his first term in November, at age 32.He sees a golden opportunity to finally unseat Mr. Upton, who has been in Congress since before Mr. Carra was born. Redistricting could bring a new cache of voters from neighboring Battle Creek who have not spent decades pulling the lever for the incumbent. Mr. Upton’s challengers are bringing his moderate voting record to primary voters’ attention.But above all, there is Mr. Upton’s impeachment vote.“When Fred Upton voted to impeach President Trump, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” Mr. Carra said, sitting on a park bench in Three Rivers, Mich.Jon Rocha, another of Mr. Upton’s challengers, spoke in measured tones to a reporter about his rival’s vote to impeach. Mr. Upton had been acting out of emotion, said the former Marine, who is Mexican American and a political newcomer, and had failed to consider Mr. Trump’s due process or take the time to investigate.But onstage in front of the crowd at the Festival of Truth, Mr. Rocha’s tone darkened.“This country is under attack,” he thundered. “Our children are being indoctrinated to hate the color of their skin, to hate this country and to believe this country is systemically racist and meant to oppress anybody with a different skin pigment. I can attest to you, as an American Mexican, that is not the case.”Jon Rocha, who spoke at the festival in Vermontville, is challenging Mr. Upton in the Republican primary.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesOppression is a theme: Ms. Johnson said she understood — though, she hastened to add, did not condone — violence by beleaguered conservatives. Mr. Norton suggested that transgender women were driven by mental illness to lop off body parts, and yet it was only those who objected who were ridiculed. Larry Eberly, the organizer of the Festival of Truth, warned the crowd that “we’re being manipulated” into accepting coronavirus vaccines, bellowing to cheers, “I will die first before they shove that needle into my arm.”In the end, none of this may matter to the composition of Congress. The anti-incumbent vote may be badly split, allowing Representatives Meijer and Upton to survive their primaries and sail to re-election.Mr. Meijer’s district had been held for a decade by Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning iconoclast who was fiercely critical of Mr. Trump and was the first House Republican to call for his impeachment. Amid the backlash, Mr. Amash left the Republican Party in 2019 to try to run as a libertarian. Then, when Mr. Amash found no quarter, he retired.But Mr. Meijer will have his name, the support of the Republican apparatus and a formidable money advantage.The question vexing him is not so much his own future, but his party’s. That is where he looks wistfully to Ford.“Was he necessarily the leader on moving the Republican Party in a direction? I can’t speak to what his internal conversations were,” Mr. Meijer said. “But in terms of giving confidence to the country that Republican leadership could be ethical and honest and sincere, I think he hit it out of the park.” More

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      Trump’s Cult of Animosity Shows No Sign of Letting Up

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      In 2016, Donald Trump recruited voters with the highest levels of animosity toward African Americans, assembling a “schadenfreude” electorate — voters who take pleasure in making the opposition suffer — that continues to dominate the Republican Party, even in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.With all his histrionics and theatrics, Trump brought the dark side of American politics to the fore: the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony. The segregationist segment of the electorate has been a permanent fixture of American politics, shifting between the two major parties.For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have written about the growing partisan antipathy and polarization that have turned America into two warring camps, politically speaking.Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case via Twitter that Trump has “served as a lightning rod for lots of regular people who hold white Christian supremacist beliefs.” The solidification of their control over the Republican Party “makes it seem like a partisan issue. But this faction has been around longer than our current partisan divide.” In fact, “they are not loyal to a party — they are loyal to white Christian domination.”Trump’s success in transforming the party has radically changed the path to the Republican presidential nomination: the traditional elitist route through state and national party leaders, the Washington lobbying and interest group community and top fund-raisers across the country no longer ensures success, and may, instead, prove a liability.For those seeking to emulate Trump — Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, for example — the basic question is whether Trump’s trajectory is replicable or whether there are unexplored avenues to victory at the 2024 Republican National Convention.When Trump got into the 2016 primary race, “he did not have a clear coalition, nor did he have the things candidates normally have when running for president: political experience, governing experience, or a track record supporting party issues and ideologies,” Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, wrote in an email. Lacking these traditional credentials, Trump sought out “the underserved market within the Republican electorate by giving those voters what they might have wanted, but weren’t getting from the other mainstream selections.”The objectives of the Trump wing of the Republican Party stand out in other respects, especially in the strength of its hostility to key Democratic minority constituencies.Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi — a co-author, with Mason and John Kane of N.Y.U., of a just published paper, “Activating Animus: The Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support” — put it this way in reply to my emailed query:The Trump coalition is motivated by animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims and L.G.B.T. This animosity has no bearing on support for any of the other G.O.P. elites or the party itself. Warmth toward whites and Christians equally predict support for Trump, other G.O.P. elites, and the party itself. The only area where Trump support is different than other G.O.P. support is in regards to harnessing this out-group animus.For as long as Trump remains the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, Wronski continued, “this animosity coalition will define the party.”Animosity toward these four Democratic-aligned minority groups is not limited to Republican voters. Mason, Wronski and Kane created an “animus to Democrat groups” scale, ranked from zero at the least hostile to 1.0 at the most. Kane wrote me thatapproximately 18 percent of Democrats have scores above the midpoint of the scale (which would mean negative feelings/animus). For Independents, this percentage grows to 33 percent. For Republicans, it jumps substantially to 45 percent.The accompanying demographic demonstrates Kane’s point.Trump Support Rises With AnimusA study found that animus towards marginalized, Democratic-linked groups was a good predictor of future support for Trump, regardless of party. More

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      Why New York’s Election Debacle Is Likely to Fuel Conspiracy Theories

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      Republicans have seized on the botched release of results from the mayor’s race — but the overall effect on public trust goes deeper.It has been one week since the New York City Board of Elections botched the release of preliminary ranked-choice tabulations from the city’s mayoral race, counting 135,000 dummy ballots that employees had used to test a computer system and then failed to delete.It was a stunning display of carelessness even from an agency long known for its dysfunction, and the reverberations will continue long after Tuesday evening, when Eric Adams was declared the winner of the Democratic primary race by The Associated Press. (You can follow the latest news here.) That’s because, while the mistake was discovered within hours and corrected by the next day, it provided purveyors of right-wing disinformation with ammunition as powerful as anything they could have invented.Some supporters of former President Donald J. Trump quickly suggested that the results of the 2020 election might also have been miscounted. (Exhaustive investigations have made it very clear that they weren’t.) Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, called ranked-choice voting “a corrupt scam” — even though problems at the Board of Elections far predate it — and tweeted: “How can anyone trust that a voter’s fourth-place choice was accurately tabulated on the eighth round of ranking? Look at the debacle in New York City right now.” Mr. Trump himself suggested falsely that the true results would never be known.“We had an election where we did much better than we did the first time, and amazingly, we lost,” Mr. Trump said at an event in Texas on Wednesday. “Check out the New York election today, by the way. They just realized it’s a disaster. They’re unable to count the votes. Did you see it? It just came out. They’re missing 135,000 votes. They put 135,000 make-believe votes in. Our elections are a disaster.”The disinformation fueled by New York’s mistake may not end up being compelling to Americans who haven’t already bought into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. But it is very likely, especially among New Yorkers, to undermine overall trust in public institutions — and that sort of distrust creates fertile ground for disinformation to grow.“The average New York City Democrat probably doesn’t look to Donald Trump or Tom Cotton as a validator, but it does fit into that general narrative that’s been pushed into the ether for months,” said Melissa Ryan, the chief executive of CARD Strategies, a consulting firm that helps organizations combat disinformation and online extremism. “Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and whenever something like this happens, folks who aren’t necessarily right-wing hard-liners or believers in conspiracies generally — it’s going to erode their trust with another institution.”That’s significant, Ms. Ryan said, given that “people are susceptible to disinformation in part because they don’t trust institutions already, so they’re more inclined to believe the worst possible version.”There is some irony to the possibility that the Board of Elections’ error will undermine trust in election results, because it in fact revealed how quickly an actual miscount becomes apparent.The error should never have happened, but once it did, it “was detected less than hours after it was displayed,” said David J. Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “And yet we are now eight months past the November election, and the losing presidential candidate still can’t present any evidence of any systematic fraud anywhere in the country. They’ve had eight months, and the New York City problem was detected in probably eight minutes.”More to the point, because there is a paper trail, “we will get the right winner, just like we got the right winner in 2020,” Mr. Becker said. “If we can look at the facts of what happened and say, ‘Here’s where the structure failed, here’s where personnel failed, here’s where the process failed,’ and try to reform that, that would be a very, very positive outcome. But even with those mistakes, we’re going to get the correct answer.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Trump Is Gone, Sort of. The Fireworks Are Still Going Off.

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. Hope you had a nice Fourth of July. Politically speaking, most of the fireworks seemed to be coming from the Supreme Court. Any thoughts on how the term ended?Gail Collins: Bret, I’ve never been too romantic about Independence Day. I guess in my youth I learned to regard a successful Fourth as one in which nobody got a finger blown off.Bret: Where I grew up, Independence Day was on Sept. 16, though festivities began the night before with a famous shout. Anyone who knows the country to which I’m referring without help from Google gets a salted margarita.Gail: Well, Sept. 16 is Mexican Independence Day — you know, we haven’t had nearly enough talks about your life south of the border. Putting that down for a summer diversion.I admit I did have to look up the famous shout, which I assume is the Cry of Dolores, calling for freedom from Spain, equality and land redistribution.Bret: Mexico was always progressive, though more in theory than practice. And if you really want to nerd out, next month marks the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Córdoba, when Mexico gained its formal independence.Gail: And Sept. 16 is also the day the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower. We need to set aside a fall conversation about history.But right now we’re going to talk about the Supreme Court’s performance. Given its current makeup, I tend to see success in any get-together that concludes without total disaster. (The Affordable Care Act survives!) But I’m very worried about the way the majority is siding with the bad guys on voting rights issues.How about you?Bret: Not that it will surprise you, but I was with the bad guys on that Arizona voting case. It isn’t at all tough for anyone to vote in the Grand Canyon State, in person or, for a full 27 days before an election, by mail. I don’t think it violates the Voting Rights Act to require people to vote in their precinct, or to ban ballot harvesting, which is susceptible to fraud.Gail: One person’s ballot harvesting is another person’s helping their homebound neighbors vote. But I’m not as concerned about what the court’s done so far as where it will take us. We’ve got Republican states eagerly dismantling many procedures that make it easier for poor folks — read Democratic folks — to vote. And some have also been very protective of political leaders’ right to squish their voters into districts that are most favorable to their interests, even if some of them look like two-headed iguanas.Bret: There’s a perception that ballot harvesting mainly helps Democrats. Maybe that’s true, though there are plenty of poor Republicans. But the most notorious example of ballot harvesting being used to steal an election was in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018, where the fraudster was working for the Republican. But I’m with you on those two-headed iguanas. Democracy would be much better off if we could find our way out of the partisan gerrymanders.Gail: Very tricky, since both parties tend to be in favor of creative district-drawing when their folks get the advantage.Bret: On the whole, though, I think the court had a pretty good term considering the fears people had about a 6-3 conservative-liberal split. Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts voted with the court’s liberals to uphold a federal moratorium on evictions. Amy Coney Barrett voted to uphold Obamacare. And every justice except Clarence Thomas upheld a cheerleader’s right to use a certain four-letter epithet in connection to the words “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything” that we’re usually not allowed to write in this newspaper.Gail: Yeah, we’ve moved into a world in which, for teenagers, posting that word on Snapchat or Instagram is getting to be as common as … buying sneakers or Googling the answers to a take-home quiz. If every student who did it got punished, we might have to replace all after-school activities with detention.Bret: I think the culture crossed the curse-word Rubicon a long time ago. Like, around the time of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” monologue in 1972.Gail: Although I do have to admit it’d be nicer if the cool kids were the ones who thought of the most creative non-four-letter ways to express their dissatisfaction with life.Maybe bird metaphors? (“Family reunion? I’d rather hang out with a flock of starlings!”) Or … well, let this be an ongoing project.Bret: Flocked if I know how that’ll ever happen.Gail: Let’s talk about something cheerful — the Trump indictments. Or rather, the indictment of the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization for failure to pay taxes on about $1.76 million worth of perks.Have to admit, the part I liked best was the family, particularly Eric, treating perks like a luxury apartment and car and $359,000 in private school tuition as normal life. I mean, if your neighbor brought you over a plate of cookies, would you have to pay taxes on that?Do you think this is going to lead to something bigger? The chief financial officer in question, Allen Weisselberg, is a longtime Trump loyalist. Of course, he’s also 73 …Bret: You know that I hold the Trump Organization in the same high regard in which I hold toxic sludge, K.G.B. poisoned underpants or James Patterson novels. But I’m a little dubious about this prosecution. After all this investigating, this is the worst they can come up with? I’m not excusing it, assuming the charges stick. But it seems like the sort of sneaky and unethical corporate self-dealing that usually results in heavy civil penalties but not criminal charges.Gail: There’s been so much anticipation of an indictment of Donald Trump himself, for overvaluing his properties at sale time, and undervaluing them for tax assessments. Instead, we’ve got a guy nobody’s ever heard of getting a tax-free Mercedes. You’re right — it is kind of a downer.Presumably this is just an early step. Remember there’s that grand jury in Manhattan that’s committed to spending six months looking into possible Trump misdeeds. And they’ve hardly begun.Bret: The larger point is that it has more of the feel of a political prosecution, of the sort that Trump was always threatening against his political opponents, starting with Hillary Clinton. It’s a game at which two can play.Gail: The challenge for the prosecutors is to come up with something bad enough to shock New Yorkers. Or something so very likely to lead to jail time that Trump will come around and make the kind of deal that would freeze him out of politics forever.Bret: My general theory of Trump is that the best thing we can do is starve him of the things he most craves, which is publicity (doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad), plus the opportunity to play the martyr.As for something that could shock New Yorkers — either he skins cats for pleasure or he’s a fan of the owners of the Knicks.Gail: Hey, give the Knicks a break. And let’s change the subject. Give me a snappy summary of your feelings about the never-ending negotiations over Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan.Bret: The result is going to be good, I think. And popular, too. We need a program that’s ambitious and forward-looking, that allows for projects like the George Washington and Golden Gate bridges — projects that will last for centuries — to be built, except this time with greater environmental sensitivity.Gail: Readers, please get out your Twitters and quote this.Bret: I’d also love to see the Biden administration resurrect some of the more inspiring programs of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works of Art Project. I don’t just mean creating programs as employment schemes, but also as a way of channeling civic energies toward active, participatory environmental stewardship and aesthetic creation. I also think the art project should be open to foreigners, so that future Diego Riveras can leave their imprint on American buildings and parks and boulevards.Gail: We are in total agreement. But — just checking — are you equally enthusiastic about the other side of Biden’s plan, which would shore up and expand critical social infrastructure like early childhood education and community colleges?Bret: Sure. Why not? You’ve worn me into submission — I mean, agreement!Gail: Pardon me one more time while I pour a glass of champagne. Are you listening, moderate Republicans?Bret: Final topic, Gail. July 4 was supposed to mark the date when Americans could finally mark their independence from the Covid pandemic. Do you finally feel free of it?Gail: Pretty much, Bret. I guess for most people it depends on the things they liked to do that weren’t doable during the shutdown. For me a lot of the loss was not being able to go with my husband to crowded public places like theaters or jazz clubs and not seeing the friends who weren’t real comfortable interacting outside their families.Bret: And I missed the foreign travel.Gail: Now pretty much everything we like is back. The one thing I still really miss is being at work in the real physical office. The work gets done digitally but it really isn’t the same. As much as I love hanging out with you in these conversations, I’d like it better if I could walk over to your desk and make fun of Mitch McConnell.Bret: That, and putting the office’s fancy coffee machines to regular use.Gail: But soon, right? See you in September!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 America’s Politics Are Stubbornly Fixed, Despite Momentous Changes

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      The country is recovering from a pandemic and an economic crisis, and its former president is in legal and financial peril. But no political realignment appears to be at hand.In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”Supporters cheered former President Donald J. Trump during a rally in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAmerican voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.” More