Trump, Donald J

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      Donald Trump Wins Arizona, Reversing the State’s Blue Trend

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      The victory added to the list of battleground states that Mr. Trump lost in 2020 and flipped back four years later.President-elect Donald J. Trump has won Arizona and its 11 electoral votes, The Associated Press said on Saturday night, flipping yet another swing state and bringing his final Electoral College tally to 312. With his victory in Arizona, Mr. Trump has now won all seven of this year’s battleground states.Mr. Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona is a reversion to the state’s traditionally conservative status: It has voted for a Democrat only twice since the 1940s, including in 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. eked out a win over Mr. Trump by just over 10,000 votes.But this year, Democrats appeared to be fighting an uphill battle from the start in Arizona, a border state where voters expressed fury over the migrant crisis and deep economic concerns over the cost of housing and the high prices of everyday goods, like groceries and gasoline.Near a polling location in Guadalupe, Ariz., on Tuesday.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesRepublicans outnumber Democrats in the state, so Ms. Harris needed to persuade the significant number of Arizona independents and moderate Republicans to vote for her. And there were signs she might have been able to do so: Independents, especially white women in the Phoenix suburbs, had been drifting left, and Democrats hoped they would be motivated by protecting reproductive rights and denying Mr. Trump another term.Instead, it was Mr. Trump who put together a winning coalition, keeping enough of the state’s Republicans in line while also securing the votes of enough independents. Polls had also long suggested he was cutting into the Latino vote, a fast-growing and crucial voting bloc in Arizona that Democrats had been relying on as part of their coalition.Ms. Harris appeared to have the superior ground game in Arizona, with her campaign and allied groups, like unions, working efficiently to knock on doors and turn out voters. Mr. Trump’s operation, meanwhile, relied heavily on outside committees to do that work, an untested strategy for Republicans.Still, conservative groups like Turning Point seemed well-prepared, knocking on doors throughout the summer and fall and urging lower-propensity conservative voters to return their ballots early — a shift from 2020, when Mr. Trump was more adamant in maligning early voting. Republicans were encouraged by the early vote numbers in Arizona this year, hoping they would be enough to forestall a late surge from Democrats. More

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      Trump Won’t Have Haley or Pompeo in New Administration

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump ruled out roles for Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, who served in his previous administration.President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he would not invite Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the United Nations, or Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, to join his incoming administration.Mr. Trump’s announcement on Truth Social, his social media platform, was an early indication of the decision-making process of the president-elect as he navigates the ideologic differences within the Republican Party.Days after his election win over Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s team has already started his first formal transition meetings and ramped up the process for building his new cabinet.By ruling out Mr. Pompeo and Ms. Haley, Mr. Trump was rejecting two Republicans who had backed U.S. support for Ukraine at a time when Mr. Trump and many of his allies have pushed to curtail American aid for allies and military involvement overseas.“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation,” Mr. Trump said in the post. “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country.”Mr. Trump was also turning away two top officials in his first administration who in recent years had shared criticism of him.Many in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including David Sacks, a major Trump donor, viewed Mr. Pompeo as being too eager to use the military overseas. Mr. Trump also likely did not forget that, in 2023, Mr. Pompeo warned during the Conservative Political Action Conference that Republicans should not follow “celebrity leaders with their own brand of identity politics — those with fragile egos who refuse to acknowledge reality.”Days later, during an interview with Fox News, Mr. Pompeo claimed he was not talking about Mr. Trump, while also criticizing his former boss’s fiscal policy.Mr. Pompeo in 2022 also criticized Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after the F.B.I. raided his home in Mar-a-Lago.“No one gets to keep classified information outside of a place classified information should be. That is certainly true,” Mr. Pompeo said, while also denouncing the Justice Department for its handling of the case.Ms. Haley was also Mr. Trump’s last rival to drop out of the race for the Republican nomination. Just days before the election, Ms. Haley said the Trump campaign’s rhetoric was driving away women and minorities, citing the racist and misogynistic remarks by speakers at a Trump rally held at Madison Square Garden in October.“This bromance and this masculinity stuff, it borders on edgy to the point that it’s going to make women uncomfortable,” Ms. Haley said. Despite repeated offers to provide advice to the campaign, Mr. Trump mostly kept her at a distance during his presidential run. Mr. Trump’s gamble to mobilize men, despite them historically voting less than women, would end up paying off.Both Mr. Pompeo and Ms. Haley did eventually vocally support Mr. Trump and endorse his nomination. More

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      Trump Should Not Let Putin Claim Victory in Ukraine, Says NATO Official

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      Adm. Rob Bauer warned against any peace deal that was too favorable to Russia, arguing that it could undermine American interests.A senior NATO military official suggested on Saturday that any peace deal negotiated by President-elect Donald J. Trump that allowed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to claim victory in Ukraine would undermine the interests of the United States.In a wide-ranging interview on the sidelines of a European defense summit in Prague, Adm. Rob Bauer, the Dutch chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, said: “If you allow a nation like Russia to win, to come out of this as the victor, then what does it mean for other autocratic states in the world where the U.S. has also interests?”He added: “It’s important enough to talk about Ukraine on its own, but there is more at stake than just Ukraine.”Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that he could end the war in Ukraine in a day, without saying how. A settlement outlined by Vice President-elect JD Vance in September echoes what people close to the Kremlin say Mr. Putin wants: allowing Russia to keep the territory it has captured and guaranteeing that Ukraine will not join NATO.A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s transition team, Karoline Leavitt, said he was re-elected because the American people “trust him to lead our country and restore peace through strength around the world.”“When he returns to the White House, he will take the necessary actions to do just that,” Ms. Leavitt said on Saturday.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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      Trump Is About to Face the Choice That Dooms Many Presidencies

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      As happens every time a new president is elected, Donald Trump is experiencing a sudden role reversal. His campaign to earn support from voters has ended abruptly and a new one has begun among donors and activists to earn his support for their priorities. The election was about tax cuts, or maybe cryptocurrency, the arguments go. What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net.This is the first moment when presidencies go wrong. Rather than prepare to govern on behalf of the electorate that put them in power — especially the independent swing voters who by definition provide the margin of victory in a two-party system — new presidents, themselves typically members of the donor and activist communities, convince themselves that their personal preferences are the people’s as well. Two years later, their political capital expended and their agendas in shambles, their parties often suffer crushing defeats in midterm elections.As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes, huddle with his supporters at Mar-a-Lago and then see how much of their agenda he can advance before his popularity falls too far to effect further change. That is the formula that has left a nation seemingly resigned to the loss of both common purpose and institutional competence. It is not a formula for a successful presidency, let alone for making America great again.He has another option. He is an iconoclastic leader with a uniquely unfiltered relationship to the American people and a disdain for the chattering class of consultants. He is also the first president since Grover Cleveland to get a second shot at a first term. He has already experienced the bruising tax fight that helped bring his approval rating down to 36 percent a year after his inauguration, the failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the loss of more than 40 House seats and control of the chamber in a midterm election. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he made a promise to “every citizen” that he would “fight for you, for your family and your future” and that “this will truly be the golden age of America.” Achieving that will require focusing on the challenges and respecting the values broadly shared by not only his voters, but also many others who might come to support him.Take immigration. A promise to secure the border has long been a central aspect of Mr. Trump’s appeal, and Democrats are now clambering to get on his side of the issue. A Trump administration serving American voters would stanch the flow of migrants with tough border enforcement and asylum restrictions, reverse the Biden administration’s lawlessness by removing recent arrivals and protect American workers and businesses by mandating that employers use the E-Verify program to confirm the legal status of the people who work for them. That program, which strikes at the harm that illegal immigration does to American workers, is wildly popular. A recent survey of 2,000 adults conducted by my organization, American Compass, in partnership with YouGov, found 78 percent support overall and 68 percent support even among Democrats. Law-abiding businesses tend to like it, too — they’re tired of getting undercut by competitors that get away with breaking the rules.That’s the path to solving the problem. Mr. Trump will hear a lot of counterarguments from the affluent and influential class that builds its business model on underpaid, undocumented labor, especially in industries such as construction and hospitality, where he has personal experience, as well as in agriculture. Those voices are likely to suggest that instead he condescend to the masses with border theater and hostile rhetoric, while expanding temporary worker programs. To this end, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who opposes the E-Verify program on libertarian grounds, has already been mentioned as a potential candidate for secretary of agriculture. Moves like that will keep the guests at Mr. Trump’s golf clubs happy but ensure growing frustration and disillusion elsewhere.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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      Howard Lutnick Is Scouting Trump’s Nominees. Some Will Oversee His Interests.

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      Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the president-elect’s transition team and a Wall Street financier, is leading the search for appointees while still running his businesses.The financier Howard Lutnick has been given a high-profile assignment from President-elect Donald J. Trump, one that raises questions about the Wall Street executive’s dual role and what he might gain from it.As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise.But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.Given his sprawling business interests, it’s not known how Mr. Lutnick might keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics, which echo federal conflict-of-interest guidelines for transition team members. The Trump transition guidelines say that individuals who work on the team must disqualify themselves from matters that may directly conflict with their own financial interests or those of an organization with which they do business.It is not clear whether Mr. Lutnick, who gained national attention when many of his employees died in the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, has signed the code of ethics or whether he has recused himself from providing lists of possible nominees for any specific agencies that have oversight of his businesses.Mr. Lutnick declined an interview request from The New York Times. People who work with Mr. Lutnick say that he is careful about separating his private business from his transition work.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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      Democrats and the Case of Mistaken Identity Politics

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      Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”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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      The Elites Had It Coming

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      Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution or the war on Christmas.This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump.My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.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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      This Is All Joe Biden’s Fault

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      Kamala Harris lost the election this week, but I mostly don’t blame her. At least, I don’t blame her because of anything she did recently. Since she became the unofficial nominee in July, she played a difficult hand about as well as she could have, running a disciplined campaign that sought to reassure Americans about the economic issues that trouble them most, in a political environment that was very rough for Democrats and for incumbent parties around the world.But where did that bad hand come from? It was dealt to her by two people: President Biden, who produced a governing record she could not effectively defend or run away from; and herself, with all the toxic position-taking she did in 2019, generating endless attack ad fodder for Donald Trump. And Mr. Biden even bears blame for Ms. Harris’s pre-2020 baggage, since he put her on the ticket in full awareness that she was carrying it.In his own campaign rhetoric, Mr. Biden focused on the idea that democracy itself was on the ballot this year. But if democracy was on the ballot, his actions should have matched his rhetoric at every turn to ensure Democrats would win the election. Instead, he prioritized his own ego and profile.His electoral instincts weren’t always so misguided. During the 2020 primary campaign, Mr. Biden seemed to understand that the left-wing fever dreams that drove that Democratic cycle were electorally hazardous. So, unlike Ms. Harris, he never pledged to ban fracking or abolish private health insurance. He never even filled out the A.C.L.U. questionnaire that prompted Ms. Harris to support federally funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners and detained immigrants.After winning the nomination, Mr. Biden made his first big mistake that would set Democrats on a path with no route to win the 2024 election: He selected Ms. Harris as his running mate.Perversely, Ms. Harris’s apparent weakness as a potential presidential candidate was an asset to Mr. Biden. It helped insulate him from calls to step aside. The case for him running again was simple, and I even made it myself, before June’s disastrous debate: Ms. Harris had run a terrible campaign in 2019, and at the time she regularly polled worse than he did; if Mr. Biden did not seek re-election, it was highly likely that she would end up as the nominee; therefore, he had better run again.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