United States Politics and Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Loves to Play With Fire

      by

      To be a Republican politician in the age of Trump is to live under the threat of violence from his most fanatical and aggressive followers.Senator Mitt Romney of Utah hired personal security for himself and his family at a cost of $5,000 a day to guard against threats on their lives after he voted to convict the former president and remove him from office for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. After former Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan voted to impeach President Donald Trump in the House in the same case, he purchased body armor as a precaution against the threats on his life. Republicans who voted against Representative Jim Jordan — a staunch Trump ally — for House speaker during last year’s leadership standoff received death threats targeting themselves and their families.It’s not only Republicans in Congress, either. Republican lawmakers and election officials in critical swing states like Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin have received threats on their lives for following the law and rejecting Trump’s demands to find or throw out votes in the last presidential election. And there have been more recent threats as well, leveled against those officials in the political, legal and criminal justice system who have tried to hold Trump accountable for his actions.On Sunday, an unknown provocateur filed a false report to the police of a shooting at the home of Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the Jan. 6-related criminal case against the former president. The goal of this tactic, called “swatting,” is for the police to react with force on the assumption that someone’s life might be in danger. Jack Smith, the federal special counsel who is leading multiple criminal investigations into Trump, was also the victim of swatting. So was Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state who removed the former president from the state primary ballot.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?  More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Should Trump Be Barred From the Ballot?

      by

      There’s this incredible dissonance at the center of our politics right now. On the one hand, all the polling suggests that Donald Trump is about to win Iowa Republican caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. He seems overwhelmingly likely to be his party’s nominee, and so possibly our next president. On the other hand, he could be constitutionally disqualified from taking office.Colorado and Maine concluded as much, and tossed him off their ballots. And now the Supreme Court is poised to take on this unprecedented question of whether a little-known provision of the Constitution, written in the aftermath of the Civil War, can bar Trump from running and scramble the election in 2024.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]The Times Opinion columnist David French has been on the show before, as both a guest and a guest host, to break down the criminal cases against Trump. This time, I’ve asked David back to make his case for why Trump is constitutionally disqualified. We discuss some of the biggest objections, what the Supreme Court is likely to do, and how the possible options risk destabilizing the country in different ways.Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the full interview above or by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.Ezra Klein: The legal movement right now to take Trump off the ballot, my sense is that emerged because of a law review article that, unusually, changed the world a bit. And this is a piece by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen called “The Sweep and Force of Section 3.”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?  More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      In Iowa, Two Friends Debate DeSantis vs. Trump

      by

      Rob Szypko and Rachel Quester, Paige Cowett and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicOn Monday, Iowa holds the first contest in the Republican presidential nominating process and nobody will have more on the line than Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor staked his candidacy on a victory in Iowa, a victory that now seems increasingly remote. Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for The Times, and the Daily producers Rob Szypko and Carlos Prieto explain what Mr. DeSantis’s challenge has looked like on the ground in Iowa.On today’s episodeShane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking in Cumming, Iowa, last week. He has campaigned hard in the state.Scott Morgan/ReutersBackground readingA weak night for Donald Trump? A Ron DeSantis flop? Gaming out Iowa.From December: Mr. Trump was gaining in Iowa polling, and Mr. DeSantis was holding off Nikki Haley for a distant second.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Shane Goldmacher More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Asa Hutchinson, Tilting at a Trump-Branded Windmill, Hangs On

      by

      The former Arkansas governor, nowhere in the polls, is running on principle — and on fumes, financially speaking.Asa Hutchinson sat under the fluorescent lights of a windowless conference room just off the main convention hall at the Prairie Meadows Casino and Hotel in Altoona, Iowa, on Thursday, explaining why there was a mission to the madness of his 2024 campaign for the presidency.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey had dropped out of the race the day before, following other big names to the exits like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former Vice President Mike Pence, as well as not-so-big names like the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, and a conservative commentator, Larry Elder.But as Mr. Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, awaited his turn to speak at a summit on renewable fuels, he said he only found more motivation in those other departures.“My voice makes a difference,” he said. “I am the only one campaigning for president in Iowa that has said I’m not going to promise a pardon to Donald Trump. And if my voice is not there, then no one hears the alternative view.”“How in the world are you going to beat Donald Trump,” he added, “if somebody is not out there sounding the alarm that we can all go down in flames if we have the wrong nominee?”At a renewable fuels summit in Altoona, Iowa, on Thursday, Mr. Hutchinson addressed a crowd to much less fanfare than his competitors, who spoke earlier in the day.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMr. Hutchinson, a founding leader of the Department of Homeland Security, a former chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a former member of Congress, has one more thing to add to that bulging résumé: the Don Quixote of the 2024 Republican primaries.The windmill he has been tilting at, Mr. Trump, has taken no more interest in him than Miguel de Cervantes’s inanimate behemoths did in that other dogged knight. But Mr. Trump’s stolid march toward the Republican nomination is what keeps Mr. Hutchinson going, on long drives with his two staff members, through snowstorms that grounded other candidates, to events where only a handful of people showed up, each of whom might well caucus on Monday for Mr. Hutchinson, he believes, if he can only make his pitch.“I’m not blind to the challenges, and that this is uphill,” he said earnestly. “I know where I am today, and I know what my goals are for next Monday. Then, when it’s over with, we’re going to evaluate it.”What money he has scraped together has paid the candidate filing fees in Colorado, Michigan, Texas and Oklahoma. He is skipping South Carolina — no point competing there, he said — but he is ready to contest Florida, because by its primary on March 19, Mr. Trump may well be on trial in Washington on felony charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.“The voters are going to have a lot more information post-March 4 on the risk of a Trump candidacy,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s trial, which is scheduled to begin one day before Super Tuesday, though even Mr. Hutchinson conceded that the trial date was likely to slip.For now, Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign defines living off the land. He had raised all of $1.2 million through September and spent $924,015 of it, a pittance compared with the pocketbooks of other candidates. He cut one television ad, he said. It hasn’t aired much.Where others fly, he drives — long distances. Aides say he has been known to drive the eight-plus hours to Des Moines from Arkansas by himself in his own car. Travel is in the cheapest S.U.V.s on offer at the rental counters. Last fall, when a flight from Chicago to Des Moines was canceled, he rounded up three strangers, pooled their money to rent a car and drove to Iowa for his scheduled events.But he has a flight booked to New Hampshire on Tuesday, after what he hopes will be a better-than-expected showing in Iowa on Monday.“You’re the media, so you tell me what the expectations are for me,” he said.“One, 2 percent?” his interlocutor ventured.“OK,” he said. “So that’s the expectations I have to beat.”Mr. Hutchinson had raised just $1.2 million through September, a pittance compared with other candidates.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesFor a man determined to sound the alarm and save the republic, he has kept expectations remarkably low.Although he says his voice matters, the story he tells to illustrate the impact he has made doesn’t exactly drive home that idea: Last June, he said, he ventured to Columbus, Ga., for that state’s Republican convention, so packed with Trump-supporting delegates that Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, steered clear, still feeling the wrath of Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers who were upset at Mr. Kemp for refusing to overturn President Biden’s narrow victory there in 2020.Mr. Hutchinson tore into Mr. Trump in his quiet way, happy to brave the crowd. Then a man in a red MAGA hat rushed up to him afterward “and he said, ‘You didn’t fully persuade me, but at least I like you now,” Mr. Hutchinson recalled, smiling.With that, he left for his speech, wading through the trade show hallway, with its industry booths promoting ethanol production and carbon dioxide pipelines, candy bars in bowls to lure conventioneers, Fleetwood Mac piping through the sound system.The audience, maybe three-quarters full, listened respectfully. When he told the crowd that he was the only Republican candidate refusing to pardon Mr. Trump, a single clap rang out.That clapper, William Sherman, a retiree from the Beaverdale neighborhood of Des Moines, was more than happy to share his feeling.“What he said made sense,” Mr. Sherman said. But he would not be caucusing for Mr. Hutchinson: “I’m a Democrat.” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Did Ron DeSantis Shake His Wife’s Hand?

      by

      In a campaign full of strained social interactions and clumsy pantomimes of warmth, Ron DeSantis’s encounter with his wife at the presidential primary debate in Des Moines on Wednesday night was one of the more curious.During the second commercial break, Mr. DeSantis, the governor of Florida, strode to the edge of the stage and reached down to shake hands with Gov. Kim Reynolds, Republican of Iowa, and her husband. Then, with a businesslike rigor, he grasped the outstretched palm of Casey DeSantis, Florida’s first lady.Did he just shake his wife’s hand? Onlookers in the room were bewildered.Interactions with spouses on the campaign trail can be fraught, even for the most adept politicians and for the warmest of marriages. To be fair, Mr. DeSantis was standing on an elevated stage, on a tight timetable, making an embrace impractical. Too much affection runs its own political risks.And who knows? Maybe The Handshake was some sort of inside joke, or an effort to create a signature routine, like Barack and Michelle Obama’s coy fist bump (which was weaponized by Mr. Obama’s political foes as a “terrorist fist jab”).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?  More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Campaign to Send Top Allies to Iowa to Spread Democrats’ Message

      by

      Iowa is dominated by Republicans right now. The events by presidential candidates are for Republicans, the voters who come to see them are Republicans and the main event, Monday’s caucuses, will feature Republicans.But Democrats will try to get in on the action on Monday, when President Biden’s campaign is expected to dispatch some of its biggest surrogates to Iowa to make the party’s case in the hours before Republicans gather to vote.These allies include Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and a co-chairman of Mr. Biden’s campaign; Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who is a member of the campaign’s national advisory board; and Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota. They are planning to appear at a news conference in downtown Des Moines on Monday afternoon shortly before the caucuses begin, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s scheduling.Mr. Katzenberg is a longtime Democratic megadonor who has taken on his largest political role to date with the Biden campaign, serving as a conduit to big donors while assuming a role of publicly calming worries about Mr. Biden’s fund-raising, staffing and political vulnerabilities.Mr. Pritzker, America’s wealthiest elected official, is organizing this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ms. Smith, who represents a neighboring state, is in her first full term as senator.“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans’ all-out assault on democracy and Americans’ personal freedoms will be front and center as Iowans begin to caucus Monday,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “The Biden campaign will be on the ground, talking directly to voters and reminding everyone that President Biden is fighting to ensure MAGA Republicans’ extreme, out-of-touch agenda continues to lose at the ballot box.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      A Convicted Criminal as the Nominee? Trump’s Rivals Avoid Even Raising It

      by

      The former president’s legal jeopardy offers an obvious line of attack for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, but fearing voter blowback, that cudgel remains largely unused.It is an obvious line of attack that has been creeping into the arsenal of rivals trying to stop former President Donald J. Trump ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday — if nominated to be the Republican Party’s White House standard-bearer, the former president could very well be a convicted criminal by Election Day.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida inched toward that cudgel at a debate on Wednesday night, warning that a “stacked left-wing D.C. jury” is likely to sit in judgment of Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and asking, “What are the odds that he’s going to get through that?”Then, he added, “what are we going to do as Republicans in terms of who we nominate for president? If Trump is the nominee, it’s going to be about Jan. 6, legal issues, criminal trials.”Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has been far more reluctant to broach his legal troubles, speaking almost daily of Mr. Trump as an agent of “chaos” and “disarray” without explicitly mentioning the 91 felony counts looming against him.But perhaps taking their cues from voters leery of attacks on the former president, Mr. Trump’s closest rivals continue to avoid one ominous word: conviction.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, left, and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina have continued to avoid using one word: conviction.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesFor the Republican Party, the reality of Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy is inescapable, and was underscored on Tuesday when he left the Iowa campaign trail to attend courthouse arguments on whether he can claim absolute legal immunity for any actions taken as president. Regardless of how voters feel about his indictments for subverting the 2020 election, mishandling highly classified documents and falsifying business records to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign, one of those cases could go to trial before the election.And a conviction by a jury of his peers after a widely publicized trial could land differently than the indictments themselves, which were dismissed by Mr. Trump and most of his rivals as political efforts by Democrats to interfere with the presidential election.“I actually still believe they will have a trial, and he will be convicted of at least one felony count,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Arkansas governor and federal prosecutor still pursuing his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. “That puts the Republican Party in jeopardy: a flawed nominee, a historical precedent of a nominee convicted of a felony, and then a loss” in the general election.That might sound like a potent argument for Mr. Trump’s more prominent foes, but many Republican voters don’t want to hear it. On Tuesday morning, at an Irish pub in Waukee, Iowa, Nick and Kadee Miller of Adel, Iowa, were awaiting Ms. Haley when both expressed doubts about the charges facing Mr. Trump. They supported the decisions of Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis to steer clear.“I really do believe if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Ms. Miller, a 49-year-old political independent who remains undecided about her choice of candidates.Voters waited for Ms. Haley to speak at Mikey’s Irish Pub in Waukee, Iowa, on Thursday. Polling shows that a growing number of Mr. Trump’s supporters would not want him to be the Republican nominee if he were convicted of a crime.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesSteph Herold, a 62-year-old retiree from West Des Moines, said such negativity spent on Mr. Trump would waste Ms. Haley’s time.“What I love about Nikki is she speaks in facts and truth,” she said. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, “we all reverted back to the middle school playground, beating people up and being bullies. We don’t need more of that.”Bruce Norquist, a 60-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Urbandale, Iowa, was certain a conviction would only bolster Mr. Trump’s support, as the indictments did last year.But that is not what polling shows. Nearly a quarter of Mr. Trump’s own supporters told New York Times/Siena College pollsters in December that he should not be the Republican Party’s nominee if he is found guilty of a crime. Some 20 percent of those who identified themselves as Trump supporters said he should go to prison if convicted of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, and 23 percent of his supporters said in December that they believed he had committed “serious federal crimes,” up from 11 percent in July.“When you put it that way, a convicted felon, no, I don’t want to vote for a convicted felon,” Ms. Miller said, breaking with her husband, who said he would “absolutely” vote for a convicted Mr. Trump “if he could beat Biden.”On Wednesday, at a snow-covered vineyard in Indianola, Iowa, Laura Leszczynski, a 57-year-old security and information technology business owner from St. Mary’s, Iowa, was awaiting the entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Still undecided, she conceded she was not well-versed in the cases arrayed against Mr. Trump, but she was not willing to dismiss them.“It just seems like there’s a lot there,” she said. “I’m not a lawyer. I haven’t studied up, but I am worried.”Still, it is perhaps no coincidence that the two Republican candidates who were most ready to raise the prospect of conviction — Mr. Hutchinson and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey — were seeing single digits or worse in national polling of Republican primary voters before Mr. Christie dropped out of the race on Wednesday.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey suspended his candidacy for president during an event in Windham, N.H., on Thursday.Sophie Park for The New York TimesIn his farewell speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Christie returned to the moment in the August Republican primary debate when almost all the candidates on the stage raised their hand when asked if they would vote for Mr. Trump even if he were a convicted criminal.“I want you to imagine for a second if Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Washington were frankly sitting here tonight,” he said. “Do you think they could imagine that the country they risked their lives to create would actually be having a conversation about whether a convicted criminal should be president of the United States?”Yet that conversation continues.In an interview on Friday with The Des Moines Register and NBC News, Ms. Haley danced around the prospects of a conviction for nearly three minutes: “He’s innocent until he’s proven guilty,” she said. “He’ll have to figure that out. I don’t have to deal with those court cases.”Mr. DeSantis has been nudging toward acknowledging the danger. In an interview last month with the conservative radio personality Hugh Hewitt, he blamed Mr. Trump’s legal jeopardy on liberals out to get him: “I think it’s very difficult for a Republican, much less Donald Trump, to get a fair shake in front of a D.C. jury,” he said.But as he has made his case against Mr. Trump more aggressively ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Mr. DeSantis has adjusted that argument.“We’re taking a huge risk by empowering a jury of, probably an all-Democrat jury in the nation’s capital, the most Democrat area in the country, to pass a judgment,” he said in the NBC News interview, “because obviously if they rule against him, if they have a verdict against him, that’s going to hurt us in the election.”Nicholas Nehamas More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Winners and Losers From the Fifth Republican Debate in Iowa

      by

      Welcome to Opinion’s commentary for the fifth Republican presidential debate, held in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday night. In this special feature, Times Opinion writers and contributors rate the candidates on a scale of 0 to 10: 0 means the candidate didn’t belong on the stage and should have dropped out before the debate even […] More