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      A Sharp Warning About Donald Trump

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      More from our inbox:About Taylor SwiftLess Polluting TrucksUnity in Canadian Hockey Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “This Election Year Is Unlike Any Other” (editorial, Jan. 7):The editorial board deserves a monumental “thank you!” for spelling out in such detail how uniquely dangerous Donald Trump is. There was no misguided nod to both-sides-ism here. This was the full-throated condemnation of Donald Trump that the facts demand. The actions that Mr. Trump is openly pledging to carry out would create political and social disaster.Therefore, the editorial board needs to repeat this unvarnished message regularly, matching Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of his lies and provocations to violence.The editorial board must also include in future condemnations that the country cannot afford four years of climate inaction. Mr. Trump would give the fossil fuel industry a free hand and totally squander four years that are crucial to accelerate reductions in air pollution and carbon emissions, and create clean energy infrastructure across the nation.The horrendous results of a complete standstill in climate action that a Trump presidency guarantees are too horrific to imagine.Gary StewartLaguna Beach, Calif.To the Editor:Dire warnings about a second Trump term from The New York Times and other media outlets are being ignored at best and fueling the MAGA movement’s hunger to “own the libs” at worst.Many Americans are unfortunately tuned out and exhausted from politics thanks to Donald Trump’s wearing us down to a nub. The constant noise and slow-motion boil of disorder have left much of our nation cynically apathetic to the danger on the horizon.Whether this was by Mr. Trump’s design or just dumb luck is anyone’s guess. But this mix of chaos and civic ennui is his best ally.I predict that Mr. Trump will win and we all will be thrust back into the anarchy of his first term, but worse, as your paper warns.Miles KahnQueensTo the Editor:It’s time to move from opinion to action. It is not inevitable that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. We can all help to deny him the nomination by voting for whoever is polling most strongly against Mr. Trump at the time of the Republican primary.In New York, if you are not already a registered Republican, you can change your party affiliation easily.If you live elsewhere, the website PrimaryPivot has links to every state’s requirements. Some states allow any registered voter to cast a ballot in the Republican primary; others allow both Republicans and independents.We can certainly stop Mr. Trump in his tracks. Let’s do it.Helene PresskreischerNeedham, Mass.To the Editor:The no-holds-barred opinion pieces in your Jan. 7 paper — the editorial “This Election Year Is Unlike Any Other” and Maureen Dowd’s column, “Time to Conquer Hell” — acutely explicate Donald Trump’s flawed character and the potential dangers that would descend on the world if, God forbid, he is elected again to the presidency.The fact that after all the years we have endured his despicable public behavior and utterances there are still millions of Americans today who consider him appealing and fit for office, necessitating the publication of such opinion pieces, is mind-boggling and painfully demoralizing.Jim BellisKfar Vradim, IsraelAbout Taylor SwiftDuring the Eras Tour, Ms. Swift traps her past selves — including those from her “Lover” era — in glass closets.John Shearer/Getty Images for TAS Rights ManagementTo the Editor:Re “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do,” by Anna Marks (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 7):I’m deeply disappointed with this article’s interrogation of Taylor Swift’s sexuality. Though it began with useful commentary on the evolution of L.G.B.T. rights in country music, it devolved into pointless speculation the moment it mentioned Taylor Swift. Her sexuality is no one’s business but her own — full stop.As Ms. Swift writes in the prologue to “1989 (Taylor’s Version)”: “If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”Few of us would speculate so publicly about a friend’s sexuality out of respect for their privacy. I see no reason this courtesy should not be extended to celebrities, including but not limited to Taylor Swift.If Ms. Marks wants to interpret Ms. Swift’s music through a queer lens, then she should. After all, Ms. Swift’s talent lies in her ability to tell highly specific stories about her own life that we all relate to because of their universal themes. However, sharing her interpretation of Ms. Swift’s own sexuality has no intellectual value. She deserves better.Amanda WassermanNew YorkLess Polluting Trucks Jeffrey MilsteinTo the Editor:Re “Electrify All the Big, Noisy, Belching Trucks” (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 30): Andrea Marpillero-Colomina is right to emphasize the need for a national framework to reduce emissions. She is also right to highlight the impact that pollution from all sources imposes on communities like Hunts Point in the Bronx. Where she errs, however, is minimizing reasonable concerns about electric vehicle infrastructure and ignoring the significant industry progress on emissions.In New York, 90 percent of communities rely exclusively on trucks to deliver goods of all kinds, including food and medicine, the delivery of which would be delayed and more expensive without a cohesive charging infrastructure. This isn’t just an inconvenience for our nation’s truck drivers; lack of chargers and alternative fueling stations will have significant supply chain impacts, ultimately affecting consumers’ wallets.Fortunately, real progress is being made ­— and has been for some time. Since 1974, clean diesel technology has already reduced pollutants by 99 percent, and 60 trucks today equal the output of one in 1988. The trucking industry is committed to reducing the environmental impacts of moving freight and continues to invest in clean technology, including electric vehicles.In other words, big, noisy, belching trucks are already a relic of yesteryear. Americans need and deserve real plans to build on that progress — not flashy rhetoric.Kendra HemsClifton Park, N.Y.The writer is president of the Trucking Association of New York.Unity in Canadian HockeyA display outside the Vidéotron Center teaches fans about the history of the Nordiques.Renaud Philippe for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Long-Gone Hockey Team Remains Symbol of Nationalist Pride” (Quebec Dispatch, Jan. 7), about the Quebec Nordiques:I am an Anglo Canadian Torontonian with some connection to the province of Quebec. My wife is from Montreal, and we visit her family there often. I love hockey and my Toronto Maple Leafs.I loathe the Montreal Canadiens, as I do the idea of separatism and the appalling anti-English bullying and lying of the politicians who support it. But I love the province, the people, the traditions, the cities, the beautiful countryside and wild terrain.I would love to see the Nordiques back in the National Hockey League. I want to see a resurgence in French Canadian hockey. It is probably the only thing I agree with Premier François Legault of Quebec about.I see it as good for Canadian culture, not just Québécois culture. Hockey unites us as a people.Nigel SmithToronto More

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      Resistance to Trump Is Not Futile

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      The outcome of the 2016 presidential election was such a shocking event that for people of a certain cast of mind, Donald Trump is less a politician than a force of history.To this class of observer, Trump is something like the world spirit made flesh, where the “world spirit” is a global tide of reactionary populism. He may not have ushered in the furious effort to defend existing hierarchies of status and personhood, but he seems to represent its essential qualities, from the farcical incompetence that often undermines its grand intentions to the unrelenting, sometimes violent intensity that has sustained a forward march through failure back toward power.The upshot of this idea of Trump as a kind of incarnation is that resistance is futile. You can defeat him at the ballot box, you can put him at the mercy of the criminal-legal system, you can even disqualify him under the Constitution, but the spirit endures. Trump or not, goes the argument, we live in an age of grass-roots reaction. Trump is just an avatar. His followers — the forgotten, if not exactly silent, remnant of the nation’s old majority — will find another something.It is hard not to be at least a little persuaded by this assessment of the state of things, even more so if you’re inclined to the fatalism that pervades much of American life at this particular time.But let’s step back for a moment. Before we embrace this almost baroque conception of the former president, let’s take a full picture of the past eight years in American politics. Let’s grab a loupe and look at the details. What do we see? Not inexorable forces at work, but chance events and contingent choices.In other words, it is true that Trump was produced by (and took advantage of) a particular set of social forces within the Republican Party and outside it. It is true that those forces exist with or without Trump. But Trump, himself, was not inevitable.If Republican elites had coalesced around a single candidate in the early days of the 2016 presidential race, they might have derailed Trump before he had a chance to pick up steam. If Republicans had chosen, in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” videotape, to fully reject his presence in American politics, he might have flopped and floundered in the November election. If Hillary Clinton had won just a few more votes in a few more states — a combined 77,744 in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Trump would have never won the White House.It’s not that the reactionary populism that fueled Trump’s campaign would have completely dissipated. But the character of its politics might have been very different without Trump in the nation’s highest office to lead and give shape to the movement. As it stands, he had that power and stature, and there is now a reason the most MAGA-minded Republican politicians — or those with aspirations to lead Trump’s Republican Party — work tirelessly to mimic and recapitulate the former president’s cruelty, corruption and contempt for constitutional government.We saw this with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who went so far as to mimic Trump’s movements and posture, and we’re seeing it with Representative Elise Stefanik, an eager and unapologetic demagogue last seen, in a recent interview, defending Jan. 6 insurrectionists and refusing to commit to certifying a Trump election loss.If nothing else, it is difficult to imagine another Republican politician who would have inspired the same cult of personality as the one that has enveloped Trump during his years on the national stage. It’s no accident that to ensure loyalty or force compliance, followers of the former president have resorted to intimidation and death threats.If Trump is in a dynamic relationship with the social forces that produced him — if he is both product and producer — then it stands to reason that his absence from the scene, even now, would have some effect on the way those forces express themselves.Trump still leads the field for the Republican presidential nomination. But imagine if he loses. Imagine that he is, somehow, rejected by a majority of Republican voters. Does the character of American-style reactionary populism remain the same, or does it — along with the politicians who wield it — adjust to fit the new political environment? Will the next crop of Republican politicians have the force of personality to mold their supporters into a weapon to use against the constitutional order, or will they — with Trump’s persistent failure in mind — accept the basics of democratic society?One of the arguments against the effort to disqualify Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is that it won’t save American democracy to remove him from the ballot. That’s true enough — the problems with American democracy run deeper than one man — but it’s also beside the point.If the character of a political movement is forged through contingency — the circumstances of its birth, the context of its growth, the personalities of its leadership — then it matters who sits at the top.The point, then, is that it would be better to face the challenges to American democracy without a constitutional arsonist at the helm of one of our two major political parties. A world in which Trump cannot hold office is not necessarily a normal one, but it is one where the danger is a little less acute.Trump, of course, will not be removed from the ballot. No Supreme Court, and certainly not ours, would allow this effort to get that far. The only way to move past Trump will be, once again, to beat him at the ballot box.Nonetheless, it is still worth the effort to say what is true: that our constitutional system, however flawed, is worth defending; that Trump is a clear and present threat to that system; and that we should use every legitimate tool at our disposal to keep him away from — and out of — power.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      To Win Iowa, Trump Turns to Allies Like Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      With the former president busy defending himself in court from 91 felony charges, his campaign has deployed high-profile conservatives to help fill the gaps in Iowa.Less than a week before Iowans decide whether to slingshot Donald J. Trump toward another presidential nomination, his schedule looks like this: Go to Washington for an appeals court hearing on Tuesday. Pop into Iowa for a Fox News town-hall event on Wednesday — and then make an expected return to court on Thursday, this time in New York.He is not scheduled to hold another rally in Iowa until Saturday, two days before the caucuses.As Mr. Trump flits between the presidential trail and the courtroom, his campaign has deployed a web of high-profile conservative allies to help fill the gaps and make his case across the state, a strategy that the former president may be more likely to turn to this year as his legal issues keep him occupied.Over the last months, Mr. Trump’s campaign has set up smaller rallies with Republican luminaries who, among the president’s right-wing base, have achieved a kind of political celebrity.To start its efforts in January, the campaign last week held events with Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Eric Trump, one of Mr. Trump’s sons. This week, Ben Carson, Mr. Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, is scheduled for two appearances in eastern Iowa.Before a winter storm hit Iowa and disrupted travel, the campaign had also planned to hold events on Monday and Tuesday with Roseanne Barr, the actress and outspoken Trump supporter; Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Mr. Trump’s former press secretary; and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008.Mr. Trump’s use of campaign surrogates is a notable example of an old campaign tactic. Political candidates have long leaned on prominent allies to help them, given the logistical challenges of making pitches to voters in early-voting states that hold closely scheduled contests.“It’s a way to draw interest from caucusgoers and give them the opportunity to hear from other people,” said Jimmy Centers, a Republican strategist in Iowa who is unaligned in the race. “And it can be a draw in some cases to maybe get people out.”On Monday, while Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Florida attending to his day job, his wife, Casey, and Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a hard-right lawmaker, were traveling through southeastern Iowa at events held by Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting the DeSantis campaign.Other candidates were bringing well-known figures who have endorsed them to stump at their events. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, appeared over the weekend with Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire. The biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is expected to campaign later in the week with the right-wing commentator Candace Owens and the YouTube star and boxer Jake Paul.But as a former president who enjoys broad support, Mr. Trump is able to draw on a far deeper roster of conservative stars. Mr. Centers said Mr. Trump’s slate of surrogates tended to be people who were “more top of mind” for likely Republican caucusgoers.Many of Mr. Trump’s surrogates are eager to align themselves with his supporters or to display their loyalty to Mr. Trump. In some cases, they may be positioning themselves for potential positions in a future Trump cabinet. (Ms. Noem has said she would consider being Mr. Trump’s running mate.)And surrogates like Ms. Noem, Ms. Greene and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who held an event in Cedar Rapids last month, are themselves big draws for audiences.Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose state borders Iowa, has also been promoting Mr. Trump’s candidacy before the caucuses.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesBrian Duckett, 59, who attended Mr. Gaetz’s event, said he had been moved by the push from the campaign and the Florida congressman for Mr. Trump’s supporters to play a more active role in the caucuses.“I’ve never done that before, and I want to do it this time,” Mr. Duckett said.Last Wednesday, Ms. Noem drew hundreds of people to a 30-minute speech in Sioux City, just across the border from her home state. The same day, Mr. DeSantis himself held events nearby that were attended by just dozens.Mr. Trump’s surrogates are often able to help him appeal to specific segments of voters, speaking more directly to their concerns in a different way from Mr. Trump. The campaign hopes that this can help drive turnout and deliver Mr. Trump a decisive victory in the caucuses.Ms. Noem drew on being a wife, mother and grandmother as she shared personal stories to encourage the audience to caucus for Mr. Trump. And she mentioned her state’s proximity to Iowa to portray herself as someone who understood residents’ concerns about the prices of groceries and gasoline.“It’s dramatic for a state like Iowa,” Ms. Noem said of gas prices. “It’s dramatic for a state like my state of South Dakota, where it’s a long ways to drive anywhere.”Ms. Greene, an ultraconservative congresswoman who rose to power as a firebrand in Mr. Trump’s mold, was well positioned to address their party’s far-right flank.Speaking in Keokuk, a city at Iowa’s southeastern tip, Ms. Greene on Thursday proudly called herself a “MAGA extremist,” then railed against establishment Republicans, saying she had been “pretty let down” by them during Mr. Trump’s first term.“We were, too,” a man called out in response.“A common thing,” she agreed.The same day, Eric Trump worked a crowd of more than 150 people in Ankeny, in suburban Des Moines. He rattled off his father’s accomplishments. Then he, too, drew on his own particular advantages.“Should we call Donald Trump and see if he picks up the phone?” the younger Mr. Trump asked the audience. Moments later, the former president’s voice filled the room as his son held his phone up to the microphone.“I just want to say, I look forward to seeing you on Friday, we love you all, and I hope my son is doing a great job,” the elder Mr. Trump said.Max Anderson, 23, said at the Ankeny event that Mr. Trump’s steady stream of surrogates gave the former president’s pitch more credibility. He added that he thought the phone call reflected well on Mr. Trump’s character.“It shows that he takes care and loves his people — especially his kids,” Mr. Anderson said.Leah McBride Mensching More

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      Defying Trump, G.O.P. Congressmen Hit the Trail in Iowa for DeSantis

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      A pair of idiosyncratic, ultraconservative House Republicans are risking the ire of the former president and his supporters to try to bolster the Florida governor.Most House Republicans operate under an unspoken but ironclad rule: Do whatever you can to avoid provoking the wrath of former President Donald J. Trump.But on a recent weekend here in Iowa, just days before the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest, two of Congress’s staunchest conservatives were doing just that as they crisscrossed the state with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to make the case for a different party standard-bearer.At stop after stop on a string of frigid, gray days, Representatives Chip Roy of Texas and Thomas Massie of Kentucky packed into crowded sports bars and coffee shops, casting Mr. DeSantis as a leader with a proven track record of conservative victories. In doing so, they issued a surprisingly blunt review of what they argued were a string of policy failures by the former president — including his inability to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, to complete a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and to rein in the skyrocketing national debt — and an implicit critique of his character.“The primary reason that I’m supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis for president is that I want my son and my daughter to be able to look up to the occupant of the Oval Office,” Mr. Roy told a packed room of caucusgoers at a sports bar in Ankeny. “Someone they can emulate. Someone that you would be proud to have them follow and look to as a leader.”Mr. Roy and Mr. Massie have always cut singular figures in Congress. Mr. Roy, a former chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has emerged as arguably the most influential conservative voice on policy in the House G.O.P. conference. Mr. Massie, a libertarian who is by turns thoughtful and mischievous, forced Congress to return to Washington to take a recorded vote on the $2 trillion stimulus measure at the height of the pandemic.But their commitment to break with a vast majority of their colleagues — including the entire House Republican leadership — and campaign for Mr. DeSantis even as he lags badly in polling behind Mr. Trump is perhaps one of their most fraught political moves yet.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

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      Challenged on Policy Views in Town-Hall Event, Haley Doesn’t Budge

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      Nikki Haley was repeatedly challenged over policy views that veer away from her more conservative rivals during an hourlong town-hall event on Fox News on Monday, but she stood her ground — and called Donald J. Trump an agent of chaos and Ron DeSantis a liar.With the Iowa caucuses one week away, Ms. Haley has much ground to make up against the front-runner and former president, Mr. Trump, but a second-place finish ahead of Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, could propel her into New Hampshire, which hosts the first primary of 2024.Ms. Haley has consistently attacked Mr. DeSantis, but on Monday evening, she took some swipes at Mr. Trump as well, saying he “copped out” on the United States’ international alliances, lied about her record and brought turmoil with his presidency.“Chaos follows him, and we cannot be a country in disarray,” she said before a live audience in Des Moines that greeted the jab with applause.Ms. Haley took pointed questions from Iowans and Fox News hosts on her promise to negotiate a compromise on abortion, to bolster U.S. support for Ukraine and to raise the retirement age to stave off insolvency for Social Security and Medicare. All of those positions break with her two main rivals.On abortion, she repeated her point that any national rules on terminating pregnancy would need to clear a 60-vote threshold in the Senate. She jabbed at Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the issue, quipping, “The fellas just don’t know how to talk about it.”On Social Security and Medicare, she stood by what used to be the standard Republican position before the rise of Mr. Trump: that those at or nearing retirement would get their full benefits, but that benefits need to be curtailed for younger workers and the affluent.And she remained firm on an internationalist approach to foreign policy, despite the rising tide of isolationism in her party. “You’ve got to be a friend to get a friend,” she said.Ms. Haley also responded to an ad blitz by a Trump super PAC in New Hampshire that has been attacking her as “too weak” and “too liberal” on illegal immigration, pointing to her passage of some of the toughest immigration laws in the country during her tenure as governor of South Carolina.“Look, just because President Trump says something doesn’t make it true,” she said. She also said, “I appreciate all the attention President Trump is giving me. It is quite sweet and thoughtful of him. But he is lying about it.”Meanwhile, the Trump campaign kept up the barrage meant to slow her momentum. As she spoke, the campaign sent out a flurry of emails, with titles like “Nikki Haley Revives Bush Amnesty Policies,” “Nikki Haley Loves China” and “Nikki Haley Will Raise Your Taxes.” More

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      Joe Biden Is Trying to Jolt Us Out of Learned Helplessness About Trump

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      After Joe Biden’s speech on Friday marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection and laying out the democratic stakes of the next election, Mitt Romney pronounced himself unimpressed. “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the ‘threat to democracy’ pitch is a bust,” the Utah Republican told a New York Times reporter. “Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”If he is right, it’s as much an indictment of America — including the American media — as of the Biden campaign. It would mean that Donald Trump has already broken us, so frying America’s circuits that we can no longer process the authoritarian peril right in front of us.Whether or not it was savvy for Biden to center his first campaign speech of the year on the danger Trump poses to democracy, his words had the virtue of being true. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past,” Biden said in the speech. “It’s what he’s promising for the future. He’s being straightforward. He’s not hiding the ball.”Romney almost certainly shares Biden’s sense of foreboding; as his biographer McKay Coppins wrote, after Jan. 6, Romney became obsessed with the fall of great civilizations throughout history. “This is a very fragile thing,” he said of America’s democratic experiment. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”That’s fundamentally what the 2024 election is about. But even though Romney appears to agree with Biden about the existential danger of another Trump presidency, he, like many others, seems worried that when it comes to the future of American self-government, a cynical and exhausted populace can’t be made to care.This fear could easily become self-fulfilling, as commentators treat Trump’s plot against America as a given instead of a major, still-unfolding story. On Saturday, CNN’s Chris Wallace analyzed Biden’s speech, in which the president noted, correctly, that Trump’s rhetoric about migrants echoed “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Wallace asked one of his panelists, “Is Biden smart to go this hard at Trump?” Surely the more important question is whether Biden’s alarming warning about his predecessor is accurate. The #Resistance-era warning against “normalizing” Trump might now seem hokey, but it’s still apt. The alternative is to let Trump redefine our sense of what is shocking and aberrant in American politics.There was a line in the Biden speech that puzzled me: Trump “proudly posts on social media the words that best describe his 2024 campaign, quote, ‘revenge’; quote, ‘power’; and, quote, ‘dictatorship.’” I follow politics closely but didn’t know what Biden was talking about. It turns out that the day after Christmas, when I was on vacation and only briefly glancing at headlines, Trump posted to his Truth Social account a word cloud illustrating the terms voters in a survey most often associated with his political goals. In the center, in large, red-orange letters, are “power,” “dictatorship” and, most prominently of all, “revenge.” But Trump’s implicit boast about his authoritarian image was just a blip; by the time I got back online on Dec. 29, it had disappeared from the news cycle, much as the memories of so many other Trumpian outrages against the civic fabric have disappeared. All this forgetting is a result of Trump’s singular talent, which is to transgress at such speed and scale that the human mind can’t keep up.Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s exhausting provocations. This is not, despite the fatalism of people like Romney, a doomed project. Congress’s Jan. 6 hearings demonstrated that a sustained focus on Trump’s wrongdoing can move at least some fraction of the public. Right now, the ex-president benefits from being largely out of the spotlight — his ejection from Twitter has, ironically, been a great boon to him — but the more Trump is in people’s faces, the less they like him. (That’s why his Covid news conferences were so disastrous for him.) It’s thus incumbent on Biden to try to make people pay attention to a man many of us would rather never think about again.On Monday, Biden gave his second campaign speech of the year, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., site of a racist mass murder in 2015. It was ostensibly about white supremacy, but its real theme was truth, and the way historical fictions from the Lost Cause of the Confederate South to Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election license tyranny and oppression.“The truth is under assault in America,” said Biden. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country, because without the truth, there’s no light. Without light there’s no path from this darkness.”We won’t know until November whether this approach works, but given where we are, it’s hard to imagine a better one. I’d love to have a candidate who makes voters feel inspired, giving them something to vote for instead of against. But after three years in office, Biden probably won’t be able to talk Americans into feeling excited about him, and the pro-Palestinian demonstrators who interrupted him are a reminder of how disillusioned many progressives are by his Israel policy.To be sure, Biden’s presidency has been full of serious accomplishments; he spoke about some of them on Monday, including lowering the cost of insulin and canceling student debt for more than 3.6 million people. But ultimately, the best reason to vote for Biden is to stave off the calamity of an encore Trump administration, in which a lawless would-be dictator, proclaiming his own immunity from prosecution and lionizing the violent mob that tried to keep him in power, enacts an orgy of retribution against small-d democrats. If hammering away at this reality is an ineffective campaign strategy, we’re already lost.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Many Have Preached Politics From This Pulpit, but Biden Is the First President

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      Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, will forever be associated with former President Barack Obama because of his memorable — and melodic — eulogy for the nine victims of a racist massacre in its fellowship hall in June 2015.But it is Joseph R. Biden Jr. who will become the first sitting president to speak at the storied church, when he delivers a campaign address there Monday about threats to American democracy, including those posed by political and hate-fueled violence.Mr. Obama made his contemplative remarks about race, and warbled his way through “Amazing Grace,” not at the site on Calhoun Street that the congregation bought in 1865, but around the corner at a college arena. Now, Mr. Biden will speak as president in the creaky old sanctuary itself, backed by towering stained glass one floor above the scene of the blood bath, a setting that conveys a mosaic of messages as he seeks to re-energize his African American base.Mr. Biden is far from the first to make a political case from Emanuel’s pulpit. His predecessors include Booker T. Washington in 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois in 1922 and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962.The church’s founding pastor, the Rev. Richard Harvey Cain, used it as a springboard to Congress during Reconstruction. Its civil rights-era pastor, the Rev. Benjamin J. Glover, simultaneously led the local N.A.A.C.P. and staged anti-discrimination marches from its steps. The Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor who welcomed 21-year-old Dylann Roof into Bible study and was first shot by him, also was a long-tenured state senator, the youngest African American elected to South Carolina’s Legislature.The Biden campaign’s choice of Emanuel intends to show common cause with Black voters, who polls suggest have lost a measure of enthusiasm for the president. South Carolina, where African Americans make up about 60 percent of the Democratic electorate, hosts the party’s first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 3.Before the shootings in 2015, Emanuel stood as an exemplar of two centuries of Black resistance to enslavement, oppression and discrimination. Its long history highlighted the essential role played by the Black church in freedom movements across the 19th and 20th centuries.A Sunday service at Mother Emanuel in October 2016. Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesThe congregation began to form in 1817 in the commercial heart of the slave trade after a bold breakaway by free and enslaved Black people from white-controlled churches. Its first home on Charleston’s East Side was ordered destroyed by city officials in 1822 after they concluded that a foiled slave insurrection had incubated within the “African Church.” The accused ringleader, a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey, was hanged along with 34 others, many of them church members.The congregation reconstituted as Emanuel immediately after the Civil War, when A.M.E. missionaries followed Union troops into a bombed-out Charleston. It soon seeded other churches across the Lowcountry, earning the nickname “Mother Emanuel.”After the murderous rampage by Mr. Roof — who sits on death row in a federal penitentiary — Emanuel evolved into a different kind of symbol, of the persistence of racial violence in a post-civil rights age. And when family members of five of the victims showed up at Mr. Roof’s bond hearing and expressed forgiveness for the unrepentant white supremacist, the church came to embody their breathtaking expression of Christian grace.Those families and survivors of the shootings have been invited to visit with Mr. Biden in the sanctuary after the speech. He also is expected to meet with ministers in the fellowship hall, which is little changed from the night of the attack.By setting his speech at Mother Emanuel, Mr. Biden “emphasizes that there is still work to be done, a reminder that even though we’re in the 21st century we still have some 19th century minds in America,” said the Rev. Joseph A. Darby, a prominent A.M.E. minister in Charleston and longtime Biden supporter.Like many Americans, Mr. Biden was deeply affected by the events of June 2015. Seventeen days before the shootings, he had lost his elder son, Beau, to brain cancer. As vice president, he and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, attended the memorial service that featured the Obama eulogy. They had happened to be vacationing nearby on Kiawah Island, and Mr. Biden returned to Charleston two days later to worship with Emanuel’s congregants. He made clear that his own mourning had melded with theirs. He had come to show the administration’s solidarity, he said, but also “to draw some strength from all of you.”Mr. Biden recounted that experience at a key juncture in the 2020 campaign, shortly before the crucial South Carolina primary, in a poignant televised exchange with the Rev. Anthony Thompson, the widower of one of the Emanuel victims. He characterized the forgiveness expressed by Mr. Thompson and others as “the ultimate act of Christian charity.”A church school class at Mother Emanuel in late 2015. A framed picture with portraits of the nine people who were killed there is hanging on the wall.Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s victory in South Carolina, owing largely to Black voters, righted his listing campaign after losses in earlier contests. Although he did not visit Emanuel during that race, eight of his Democratic challengers did.Emanuel has become totemic in debates over combating hate crimes and gun violence, with the Rev. Eric S.C. Manning and survivors of the attacks keeping high profiles. One of those five survivors, 79-year-old Polly Sheppard, said of Mr. Biden’s visit that “it’s an honor that the victims and survivors are remembered by the president and people across the nation.”More than eight years after Emanuel was thrust into an unwanted spotlight, the congregation remains in recovery. Church leaders now juggle weddings and funerals with the burdens of administering what has become an international shrine. Tour buses arrive during the week; visitors, many of them white, nearly outnumber members in the pews some Sundays.The congregation, already shrinking thanks to an aging membership and the gentrification of downtown Charleston, numbers only 576, down from more than 2,000 in the 1950s. The Covid pandemic converted many into Sunday-morning streamers. A fourth of the roughly 100 worshipers at this week’s service were visitors.Pastor Manning has led a multiyear effort to raise millions to repair severe termite damage in the trusses and start other renovations. The first phase, finished last year, made it safe to reoccupy the choir loft, but left the church $870,000 in debt. Separately, a foundation has been raising $25 million to build a memorial to the Emanuel shooting victims, designed by the architect Michael Arad, best known for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Ground was broken recently in the church parking lot.The memorial’s purpose, and Mother Emanuel’s story, dovetail with Mr. Biden’s political message, said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an A.M.E. member whose district includes the church.“The act of violent extremism that took the lives of nine innocent worshipers at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church could have torn this community and the country apart,” Mr. Clyburn said. “Instead, the victims and impacted families brought the Charleston community together in a moment of darkness and responded with hope and resilience. There are lessons to be learned from the tragedy that took place on this holy ground.” More

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      The Election No One Seems to Want Is Coming Right at Us

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      Gail Collins: Hey, Bret, it really is 2024 now. Happy new year. And the race is on! Next week, the Iowa caucuses. After Iowa …Bret Stephens: Le déluge.Gail: OK, I want to hear your thoughts. Any chance Donald Trump won’t be the Republican nominee? Do you have a Nikki Haley scenario?Bret: Gail, my feelings about the G.O.P. primary contest are like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. After the 2022 midterms, when Trump’s favored candidates were more or less trounced and he looked like a total loser, I was in complete denial that he could win. Then, as his standing in the party failed to evaporate as I had predicted, I was angry: “Lock him up,” I wrote. Next came bargaining: I said he might be stopped if only Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie and every other Republican dropped out of the race to endorse Haley.Gail: Stage four?Bret: Now I’m just depressed. After he takes back the White House in November, I guess acceptance will have to follow. Is there a stage six? Does eternal damnation come next?Gail: I don’t accept acceptance! Come on: I know Joe Biden isn’t the most electric candidate in history. We’re all obsessed with his age. But he isn’t under multitudinous indictments, charged with trying to overthrow the democratic process or in a stupendous personal financial collapse.We may wind up going through this every week for the next 10 months, but I’m sticking with my Biden re-election prediction.Bret: Saying Biden can win is like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the revolver instead of the traditional one. You might be right. Or we end up like Christopher Walken at the end of “The Deer Hunter.”Gail: Ewww.Bret: It isn’t just that Trump is running ahead of Biden now in the overall race, according to RealClearPolitics’ average of polls. It’s that he’s running ahead of him in the states that matter: Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin. I don’t quite understand all of these Democrats who say Trump is an existential threat to decency, democracy and maybe life on the planet and then insist they’re sticking with Biden instead of another candidate. It’s like refusing to seek better medical care for a desperately sick child because the family doctor is a nice old man whose feelings might get hurt if you left his practice.At a minimum, can we please replace Kamala Harris on the ticket with someone more, er, confidence-inspiring? Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan? Or Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland? Come on, why not?Gail: Real-world answer is that Harris hasn’t done anything wrong. You don’t dump a hard-working, loyal veep who also happens to be a woman and a minority just because you think there might be somebody better out there somewhere.Bret: Saying Harris hasn’t done anything wrong leaves out two more salient questions: What has she done well? And does she add to or detract from the ticket’s electability?Gail: Let’s go back to Biden. We all know the problems. But he’s done a good job. The economic recovery is going well. And did you hear his speech on Friday? I know he’s not a great orator, but he made it clear that he’s going to campaign against Trump very, very, very hard.Bret: Well, let’s hope it doesn’t kill him. In the meantime, your thoughts about Trump potentially being disqualified from running in Maine and Colorado?Gail: While I love the idea of his role in Jan. 6 making him an insurrectionist who’s constitutionally not permitted to run for president, I have to admit the whole thing makes me very nervous.You don’t take care of the Trump problem by evicting him from the ballot. He has to be defeated or it’ll be a rallying cry for his many crazy supporters that could split the country in two.Am I being too much of a downer here?Bret: Couldn’t agree with you more. The decisions are wrong, pernicious, misjudged, arrogant and guaranteed to backfire.Gail: Great string of adjectives there. Go on.Bret: If Eugene Debs could run for president in 1920 from prison after he was convicted of sedition, why shouldn’t Trump be able to run for president without having been convicted of anything? If Trump can be kicked off the ballot in blue states on account of a highly debatable finding of “insurrection,” then what’s to stop red state judges or other officials kicking Biden off on their own flimsy findings? And on what basis can liberals continue to argue that Trump or Republicans represent a threat to democracy when they are the ones engaged in an attempt to deny tens of millions of voters their choice for president?Gail: Speaking for liberals, I agree. But I also commend Biden for trying to make Trump’s outrageous, dangerous behavior on Jan. 6 a campaign issue.Bret: The Supreme Court should overturn the Colorado court, swiftly and unanimously, and let voters choose the next president. Maybe at Harvard, too, while we’re at it.Gail: Hmm, do I detect an issue that’s really on your mind? Have to admit Claudine Gay’s problems at Harvard haven’t been at the top of my obsession list. But are you ready to rant?Bret: Yes, particularly about a tweet that The Associated Press sent out the other day that seems to capture a particular kind of inanity. It read: “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism.” Maybe this “weapon” wouldn’t have been so injurious to Gay if she hadn’t violated a cardinal academic rule more than three dozen times or been at the top of an institution that is supposed to uphold strict intellectual integrity.I also think the episode is a good opportunity for universities to try to rethink what their core mission ought to be. For starters, they should reread the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report and get out of the business of making political statements of any kind. They should foster more intellectual diversity in their faculties and student bodies. And they need to downsize and restrain their administrative side, particularly the thought police in their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office.Gail: Let me pick out a sliver of agreement here. This country has long had a crippling system of higher education in which kids could get very expensive loans very easily. Sometimes from smarmy private lenders who needed to be shut down and sometimes well-intentioned government-backed ones. But either way, ambitious young people were encouraged to borrow tons of money, and then left with hopeless piles of debt.And all that cash flowing in allowed universities to grow way too much, particularly in areas like administration.Bret: If we keep agreeing this much, the world might end.Gail: University heads have a lot of roles. Representing inclusivity is a worthy one. We’re moving into an era when schools can no longer consider race as its own factor in admissions. But they have to keep finding ways to make sure their student bodies aren’t totally dominated by well-heeled white kids. One strategy is having high-profile administrators and professors who represent a good mix of race, background, special interests, etc.Bret: Sure.Gail: Claudine Gay was an attractive choice on that front. Her performance at that hearing on antisemitism was a disaster, I think in part because she was used to appearing in very different contexts, and didn’t expect her generalizations about inclusivity to be so sharply attacked. Her mistake.Bret: Part of the problem here is that diversity, equity and inclusion went from being a set of worthy aspirations to a bureaucratic and self-serving apparatus with a highly ideological, polarizing and often exclusionary concept of its own mission.Gail: Think you’re leaving me behind here. But go on.Bret: Another part of the problem is that, while diversity is a fine goal, it needs to be in service to the university’s central mission of intellectual challenge and excellence, not at cross-purposes with it. My biggest problem with Gay wasn’t her plagiarism or even her disastrous testimony to Congress. It was her thin academic record: 11 published papers and not a single book in 26 years. I hope her successor is a model of scholarship, irrespective of race or gender.But getting back to politics, Gail, give me your advice on how Biden should run his campaign.Gail: Did you hear his Jan. 6 speech, the one I mentioned earlier? I thought it was pretty good. Best way for him to get past the age issue is to be feisty, take Trump head on. Make the Donald mad — because when he gets mad, he tends to sound more demented than Biden at his worst.Bret: The “Give ’Em Hell, Harry” approach. I like it.Gail: Our president should remind the country of all the good stuff that’s happened under his administration. Including the large economic improvement. And the country’s struggle against that huge jump in the national debt created by Trump’s tax breaks for the rich.Bret: Biden needs an ad campaign in the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s “There Is a Bear in the Woods.” In one ad, people would constantly wake up to a jackhammer, a chain saw or a car alarm, to remind them of what it was like to wake up to whatever Trump had tweeted at 2 in the morning. In another, parents have to deal with a petulant and boastful 12-year-old boy who’s constantly lying to them. A third would just be footage of Trump lavishing praise on Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, not to mention Hezbollah.At the end of each ad, a voice that sounds like Tommy Lee Jones’s would ask the question: “Some people want four more years of this — do you?”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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More