United States Politics and Government

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Fact-Checking Trump and Others’ Sparring Over Social Security and Medicare

      by

      The top presidential candidates are vowing to protect the entitlement programs for current seniors, though some have floated changes for younger generations. But they’ve muddied each other’s current positions.Top contenders for the 2024 presidential election in recent weeks have accused each other of jeopardizing Social Security and Medicare, key entitlement programs for seniors.The future of the programs has been fodder for endless political debate — and distortions — because of the long-term financial challenges they face.Social Security’s main trust fund is currently projected to be depleted in 2033, meaning the program would then be able to pay only about three-quarters of total scheduled benefits. Medicare, for its part, is at risk of not having enough money to fully pay hospitals by 2031.President Biden, former President Donald J. Trump, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida are among the candidates zeroing in on those vulnerabilities, often by referring to one another’s previous positions.Here’s a fact-check.WHAT WAS SAID“Trump in 2020: We will be cutting Social Security and Medicare”— Biden campaign in a December social media post that includes a clip of Mr. TrumpThis is misleading. The Biden campaign has repeatedly claimed that cutting the programs is one of Mr. Trump’s policies. But while Mr. Trump has in the past suggested he might entertain trims to entitlements, he has repeatedly vowed during his campaign to protect the programs.In this case, the Biden campaign shared a short clip of Mr. Trump during a Fox News town hall in March 2020 and ignored his clarification at the time.The clip shows a Fox News host, Martha MacCallum, telling Mr. Trump, “If you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”“Oh, we’ll be cutting, but we’re also going to have growth like you’ve never had before,” Mr. Trump responded.The Trump administration immediately walked back his comments and said he was referring to cutting deficits. “I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past 3 years,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post a day later.During his time in office, Mr. Trump did propose some cuts to Medicare — though experts said the cost reductions would not have significantly affected benefits — and to Social Security’s programs for people with disabilities. They were not enacted by Congress.Like other candidates, including Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has shifted his positions over time. In a 2000 book, Mr. Trump suggested, for people under 40, raising the age for receiving full Social Security retirement benefits to 70. Before that, he said he was open to the idea of privatizing the program, even if he did not like the concept. He no longer advances those positions.Former President Donald J. Trump suggested that the government could avert Social Security changes by expanding drilling, but experts say that would not be enough revenue.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLast January, the former president said in a video that “under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” But he has not outlined a clear plan for keeping the programs solvent. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Trump suggested last month that the government could avert any Social Security changes by expanding drilling in the United States, but experts say that is not feasible.“Dedicating current oil and gas leasing revenues to Social Security would cover less than 4 percent of its shortfall, and it would be impossible to fix Social Security even if all federal land were opened to drilling operations,” according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.WHAT WAS SAID“And unlike Ron DeSanctimonious, we will always protect Social Security and Medicare for our great seniors. He wanted to knock the hell out of Social Security and Medicare.”— Mr. Trump during a campaign rally in mid-DecemberThis is misleading. While in Congress, Mr. DeSantis supported budget frameworks that proposed raising the full Social Security retirement age to 70, but leaving the early retirement age the same. As a presidential candidate, he has said he would not cut Social Security for seniors but has at times expressed openness to changes for younger people without specifying what those are.Currently, workers are eligible for their full benefits at their full retirement age, which varies from 66 to 67 depending on year of birth. But recipients can qualify for reduced benefits as early as age 62.As a Florida congressman, Mr. DeSantis did vote for Republican budget proposals — which would not have changed the law on their own — that supported gradually raising the full retirement age for Social Security to 70. The proposals did not call for changing the early retirement age.Gov. Ron DeSantis has not made clear his plans for Medicare as he runs for president.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesThe proposals also called for changes to Medicare, including by eventually increasing its retirement age to 67 or 70, from 65, and transitioning the program to “premium support,” in which the government would provide payments for seniors to shop for various health care plans.Mr. DeSantis has not made clear his plans for Medicare as he runs for president, but he has often rejected the idea of changing Social Security. “We’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans, I think that that’s pretty clear,” he said in March.That said, he has signaled openness to adjusting the program for younger people. In a July interview on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis said, “Talking about making changes for people in their 30s or 40s, so that the program’s viable, you know, that’s a much different thing, and that’s something that I think there’s going to need to be discussions on.”The DeSantis campaign did not respond to a request for comment.WHAT WAS SAID“Nikki Haley, she has claimed that the retirement age is way, way, way too low. That’s what she said. So you’ve got a lot of people that have worked hard their whole life. Life expectancy is declining in this country. It’s tragic, but it’s true. So to look at those demographic trends and say that you would jack it up so that people are not going to be able to have benefits. I mean, I don’t know why she’s saying that.”— Mr. DeSantis on CNN last monthThis needs context. Life expectancy in the United States dropped during the coronavirus pandemic, but it is inching back up. And Ms. Haley has only called for changes to Social Security for younger people — not unlike what Mr. DeSantis himself has entertained.“The way we deal with it is, we don’t touch anyone’s retirement or anyone who’s been promised in, but we go to people, like my kids in their 20s, when they’re coming into the system, and we say, ‘The rules have changed,’” Ms. Haley said in an August interview with Bloomberg. “We change retirement age to reflect life expectancy.”Ms. Haley did not specify what the new retirement age should be. “What we do know is 65 is way too low, and we need to increase that,” she said when pressed. “We need to do it according to life expectancy.”Nikki Haley has suggested changing the Social Security retirement age for younger generations.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMs. Haley also called for determining benefit adjustments based on inflation, rather than the current cost-of-living calculation, and limiting benefits for the wealthy.On Medicare, Ms. Haley has proposed expanding Medicare Advantage, under which private companies provide plans and are paid by the government to cover the beneficiary.Yet for 2023, the government was projected to spend $27 billion more for Medicare Advantage plans than if those enrollees were in traditional Medicare. Experts note that expanding Medicare Advantage while achieving overall savings would require structural changes that would be politically challenging to implement.“It would require a change in payment policy that would likely run into fierce opposition,” said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president at the health nonprofit KFF and executive director for its program on Medicare policy.Curious about the accuracy of a claim? Email factcheck@nytimes.com. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court to Decide Whether Trump Is Eligible for Colorado Ballot

      by

      The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last month that the former president could not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection.The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is eligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot, thrusting the justices into a pivotal role that could alter the course of this year’s presidential election.The sweep of the court’s ruling is likely to be broad. It will probably resolve not only whether Mr. Trump may appear on the Colorado primary ballot after the state’s top court declared that he had engaged in insurrection in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, but it will most likely also determine his eligibility to run in the general election and to hold office at all.Not since Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, has the Supreme Court taken such a central role in an election for the nation’s highest office.The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly. The Colorado Republican Party had urged the justices to rule by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.The number of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility across the country can only have added pressure on the court to hear the Colorado case, as they underscored the need for a nationwide resolution of the question.The case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the court’s docket or on the horizon. An appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, and the losing side is all but certain to appeal. And the court has already said that it will rule on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case in a decision expected by June.Mr. Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene after Colorado’s top court disqualified him from the ballot last month. That decision is on hold while the justices consider the matter.Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, pressed the Supreme Court to act fast.“Coloradans, and the American people, deserve clarity on whether someone who engaged in insurrection may run for the country’s highest office,” she said in a statement.Mr. Trump acknowledged the court’s decision to hear the case at a rally Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa, saying he hoped the justices would fairly interpret the law. “All I want is fair; I fought really hard to get three very, very good people in,” he said, referring to his appointees. He added, “And I just hope that they’re going to be fair because, you know, the other side plays the ref.”The case turns on the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.Though Section 3 addressed the aftermath of the Civil War, it was written in general terms and, most scholars say, continues to have force. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Biden Condemns Trump In Re-Election Speech: ‘Your Freedom Is on the Ballot’

      by

      President Biden on Friday delivered a ferocious condemnation of Donald J. Trump, his likely 2024 opponent, warning in searing language that the former president had directed an insurrection and would aim to undo the nation’s bedrock democracy if he returned to power.On the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Biden framed the coming election as a choice between a candidate devoted to upholding America’s centuries-old ideals and a chaos agent willing to discard them for his personal benefit.“There’s no confusion about who Trump is or what he intends to do,” Mr. Biden warned in a speech at a community college not far from Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War. Exhorting supporters to prepare to vote this fall, he said: “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question is: Who are we?”In an intensely personal address that at one point nearly led Mr. Biden to curse Mr. Trump by name, the president compared his rival to foreign autocrats who rule by fiat and lies. He said Mr. Trump had failed the basic test of American leaders, to trust the people to choose their elected officials and abide by their decisions.“We must be clear,” Mr. Biden said. “Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.”The harshness of Mr. Biden’s attack on his rival illustrated both what his campaign believes to be the stakes of the 2024 election and his perilous political standing. Confronted with low approval ratings, bad head-to-head polling against Mr. Trump, worries about his age and lingering unease with the economy, Mr. Biden is turning increasingly to the figure who has proved to be Democrats’ single best motivator.Mr. Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Iowa soon after Mr. Biden’s appearance, quickly lashed back, calling the president’s comments “pathetic fearmongering” and accusing him of “abusing George Washington’s legacy.”Mr. Biden’s remarks carried echoes of the 2020 campaign, when he presented himself as the caretaker of “the soul of America” against a Trump presidency that he and Democratic supporters argued was on the verge of causing permanent damage to the country.The 31-minute speech was Mr. Biden’s first public campaign event since he announced in April that he would seek re-election and was, in tone and content, arguably his most forceful public denunciation of Mr. Trump since the two men became political rivals in 2019.Mr. Biden’s appearance, meant as a kickoff to help define the 2024 campaign, was an early effort to revive the politically sprawling anti-Trump coalition that propelled Democrats to key victories in recent elections. Mr. Biden’s task now is to persuade those voters to view the 2024 contest as the same kind of national emergency that they sensed in 2018, 2020 and 2022.President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, participated in a wreath ceremony at the Valley Forge National Arch before his speech on Friday. Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe began with an extensive recounting of Mr. Trump’s actions before, during and after the Jan. 6 attack. The country, Mr. Biden said, cannot afford to allow Mr. Trump and his supporters to present a whitewashed version of that day and spread falsehoods about the violent outcome of their effort to undo the 2020 election results. Upholding the nation’s democracy, Mr. Biden said, is “the central cause of my presidency.”Mr. Biden said that, by contrast, Mr. Trump “refuses to denounce political violence,” asserting, “You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American.”Mr. Trump and his allies have spent the three years since the Capitol riot denying and deflecting his responsibility, downplaying the seriousness of the bloodshed and going so far as to suggest it was all a plot by Mr. Biden’s allies deep within the federal government to make Mr. Trump look bad.“Trump is trying to steal history, the same way he tried to steal the election,” Mr. Biden said. “It was on television. We saw it with our own eyes.”Mr. Biden made no mention of the 91 felony charges the former president faces in four jurisdictions, sticking to a vow to steer clear of his rival’s legal problems and focusing squarely on Mr. Trump’s actions rather than any potential criminal consequences for them.“Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to him to overturn the 2020 election. The legal path took him back to the truth, that I won the election and he was a loser,” Mr. Biden said. “He had one act left, one desperate act available to him, the violence of Jan. 6.”For a president who has faced intense scrutiny over his vigor in public appearances, the speech was a deftly delivered, focused argument about this year’s stakes. It was Mr. Biden’s latest attempt to build his political identity around the ideas of restoring national unity and upholding fairness, democracy and collective patriotism.He has come back to those themes many times, during his brief push for voting rights legislation in early 2022, then as the midterm elections approached and most recently in September, during a speech in Arizona honoring former Senator John McCain.On Friday, Mr. Biden sought to frame Mr. Trump as the leader of a cult of personality, and his Republican allies as sycophants. The president mentioned the recent $148 million judgment against Rudolph W. Giuliani for his lies about Georgia election workers, as well as the $787.5 million that Fox News was ordered to pay to settle a defamation case about its role in spreading election lies.Mr. Biden lamented that Fox News hosts and Republican officials who condemned Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 behavior in the moment had since changed their tune and repeated his falsehoods.“Politics, fear and money all intervened, and now these MAGA voices who know the truth about Jan. 6 have abandoned democracy,” Mr. Biden said.But what remains unclear is how much Mr. Biden’s democracy pitch will resonate with voters who remain nervous about an improving economy, and wary of re-electing an 81-year-old who is already the oldest president in U.S. history.Even some who have expressed deep fears about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian impulses are skeptical that the subject will be a winning message in 2024.“As a Biden campaign theme, I think the threat to democracy pitch is a bust,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah wrote in a text message to a New York Times reporter. “Jan. 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another. Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”Mr. Biden and his campaign have often sought to remind voters of the violence of Jan. 6, 2021. Jason Andrew for The New York TimesDemocrats have found that while ideas of democracy can motivate the party’s most engaged voters, it can be more of a struggle to connect lofty ideals to voters who are more focused on economic issues like high prices and interest rates. In the 2022 midterm elections, months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, far more Democratic candidates made abortion rights central to their messaging as opposed to threats to democracy.Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who convened planning sessions in 2020 to prepare for ways the Trump administration could disrupt that year’s election, said she was worried that “we’re in the nothing-matters phase of American politics.” Mr. Trump’s supporters, she lamented, become only more loyal each time he does something that in a previous era would have been instantly disqualifying.“It’s not clear to me that anything Biden does could fundamentally change any of that,” Ms. Brooks said. “So I’m actually quite depressed.”The Democratic governor of the state Mr. Biden was visiting, Josh Shapiro, who won office in 2022 against an election denier who chartered buses to Washington on Jan. 6, said before Mr. Biden’s speech that the key for the president and fellow Democrats would be connecting the idea of democracy with bread-and-butter issues like health care and the economy. A return to power by Mr. Trump, he said, would “create chaos” across a spectrum of issues that would affect people.“He brought real chaos to this country, and we should not allow that to come back,” Mr. Shapiro said.Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was more succinct. “I see ’24 as good versus evil,” he said.Mr. Biden threaded his speech with warnings that Mr. Trump and Republicans would threaten not only democracy but also major Democratic priorities — abortion rights, voting rights and economic and environmental justice.Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit dedicated to combating authoritarianism, said he had stressed to Mr. Biden’s aides that the president needed to connect democracy to voters’ personal experiences on other issues, in the same way Mr. Trump repeats to his supporters that prosecutions of him are persecutions of them.“Democracy is not just a way of structuring elections for order in our government,” Mr. Bassin said. “It’s a set of values about the kind of communities we want to live in and the way that we want to live as neighbors.”Mr. Biden warned in his speech that Mr. Trump was not being shy about what he would do in a second term.“Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future,” Mr. Biden said. “He’s not hiding the ball.”Mr. Biden then recounted, in exacting detail, how a Trump campaign rally last year began with a choir of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 singing the national anthem while a video of the damage played on a big screen. Mr. Trump had watched with approval.The scene, Mr. Biden suggested, would be the nation’s fate if Mr. Trump and his allies returned to power.“This is like something out of a fairy tale,” Mr. Biden said. “A bad fairy tale.”Kellen Browning More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?

      by

      Last month the states of Colorado and Maine moved to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In response, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the Colorado case and he has appealed Maine’s decision.There is a real question of whether this attempt to protect American democracy — by removing a would-be authoritarian from the ballot — is itself a threat to American democracy. Will proponents and supporters of the 14th Amendment option effectively destroy the village in order to save it?It may seem obvious, but we should remember that Trump is not an ordinary political figure. And try as some commentators might, there is no amount of smoke one could create — through strained counterfactuals, dire warnings of a slippery slope or outright dismissal of the events that make the Trump of 2024 a figure very different from the Trump of 2020 — that can obscure or occlude this basic fact.In 2020, President Trump went to the voting public of the United States and asked for another four years in office. By 51 percent to 47 percent, the voting public of the United States said no. More important, Trump lost the Electoral College, 306 to 232, meaning there were enough of those voters in just the right states to deny him a second term.The people decided. And Trump said, in so many words, that he didn’t care. What followed, according to the final report of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, was an effort to overturn the results of the election.Trump, the committee wrote, “unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.” He “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.” He “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6,” the day Congress was slated to certify the election results, and “instructed them to march to the Capitol” so that they could “‘take back’ their country.’” He even sent a message on Twitter attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, knowing full well that “a violent attack on the Capitol was underway.”In the face of this violence, Trump “refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.” He did not deploy the National Guard, nor did he “instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist.”Trump sought and actively tried to subvert constitutional government and overturn the results of the presidential election. And what he could not do through the arcane rules and procedures of the Electoral College, he tried to do through the threat of brute force, carried out by an actual mob.Looked at this way, the case for disqualifying Trump through the 14th Amendment is straightforward. Section 3 states that “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”As the legal scholar Mark A. Graber writes in an amicus brief submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court, “American jurists understood an insurrection against the United States to be an attempt by two or more persons for public reasons to obstruct by force or intimidation the implementation of federal law.” There was also a legal consensus at the time of the amendment’s drafting and ratification that an individual “engaged in insurrection whenever they knowingly incited, assisted or otherwise participated in an insurrection.”We also know that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not aim or intend to exclude the president of the United States from its terms. In 1870, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, the former Confederate governor of North Carolina. It strains credulity to think that the same Republicans would have sat silent if the Democratic Party had, in 1872, nominated a former Confederate leader for the presidency.Under a plain reading of Section 3 — and given the evidence uncovered by the Jan. 6 committee — Trump cannot stand for the presidency of the United States or any other federal office, for that matter.The real issue with disqualifying Trump is less constitutional than political. Disqualification, goes the argument, would bring American democracy to the breaking point.In this line of thinking, to deny Americans their choice of presidential candidate would destroy any remaining confidence in the American political system. It would also invite Trump’s allies in the Republican Party to do the same to Democrats, weaponizing Section 3 and disqualifying candidates for any number of reasons. Disqualification would also give far more power to the courts, when the only appropriate venue for the question of Trump is the voting booth.But these objections rest on a poor foundation. They treat Trump as an ordinary candidate and Jan. 6 as a variation on ordinary politics. But as the House select committee established, Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it were nothing of the sort. And while many Americans still contest the meaning of the attack on the Capitol, many Americans also contested, in the wake of the Civil War, the meaning of secession and rebellion. That those Americans viewed Confederate military and political leaders as heroes did not somehow delegitimize the Republican effort to keep them, as much as possible, out of formal political life.What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election.Trump is not simply a candidate who does not believe in the norms, values and institutions we call American democracy — although that is troubling enough. Trump is all that and a former president who used the power of his office to try to overturn constitutional government in the United States.Is it antidemocratic to disqualify Trump for office and deny him a place on the ballot? Does it violate the spirit of democratic life to deny voters the choice of a onetime officeholder who tried, under threat of violence, to deny them their right to choose? Does it threaten the constitutional order to use the clear text of the Constitution to hold a former constitutional officer accountable for his efforts to overturn that order?The answer is no, of course not. There is no rule that says democracies must give endless and unlimited grace to those who used the public trust to conspire, for all the world to see, against them. Voters are free to choose a Republican candidate for president; they are free to choose a Republican with Trump’s politics. But if we take the Constitution seriously, then Trump, by dint of his own actions, should be off the board.Not that he will be. The best odds are that the Supreme Court of the United States will punt the issue of Section 3 in a way that allows Trump to run on every ballot in every state. And while it will be tempting to attribute this outcome to the ideological composition of the court — as well as the fact that Trump appointed three of its nine members — I think it will, if it happens, have as much to do with the zone of exception that exists around the former president.If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place.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

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Harry Dunn, Who Defended Capitol on Jan. 6, Will Run for Congress

      by

      Harry Dunn, who endured racist slurs as he fought off a pro-Trump mob and gained fame with his emotional testimony before the Jan. 6 committee, is joining a crowded Democratic primary.Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer who rose to prominence for his defense of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and for his emotional public testimony describing the attack, announced on Friday that he was running for Congress in Maryland’s third district.“On Jan. 6, 2021, I did my duty as a police officer and as an American and defended our nation’s Capitol from violent insurrectionists,” Mr. Dunn said in a statement. “Today, I’m running for Congress because the forces that spurred that violent attack are still at work, and as a patriotic American, it is my duty to defend our democracy.”Mr. Dunn, 40, will enter a crowded Democratic primary field to replace Representative John Sarbanes, the retiring 17-year incumbent. Five state lawmakers have already announced their campaigns to represent the central Maryland district, which snakes between Washington and Baltimore. Whoever emerges from the primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic district is almost certain to win the general election.Mr. Dunn, a member of the Capitol Police for 15 years, was one of four officers who testified at the first public hearing of the House committee that investigated the attack by the pro-Trump mob on the Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. He described how fellow officers bloodied in the battle and how rioters used racist slurs against him.“I sat down on a bench with a friend of mine who is also a Black Capitol Police officer and told him about the racial slurs I had endured,” Mr. Dunn recalled during a memorable portion of the testimony. He added that he “became very emotional,” asking how such a thing could happen and yelling, “‘Is this America?’”“I began sobbing, and officers came over to console me,” he said.In 2023, President Biden awarded Mr. Dunn the Presidential Citizens Medal in recognition for his role in protecting the Capitol.Mr. Dunn grew up in the Washington suburbs of Prince George’s County, Md., and graduated from James Madison University in Virginia, where he played football and helped lead the team to its first national title.He has written a book called “Standing My Ground.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Biden to Set Stakes for 2024 Election in Pennsylvania Speech

      by

      President Biden is returning to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Friday to try to define the 2024 presidential election as an urgent and intensifying fight for American democracy.Mr. Biden is expected to use a location near the famous Revolutionary War encampment of Valley Forge and the looming anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to cast preserving democracy as a foundational issue to the 2024 campaign, according to a senior Biden aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the remarks.The address, which builds on previous speeches about safeguarding American institutions and combating political violence, represents a bet that many Americans remain shaken by the Jan. 6 attack and Donald J. Trump’s role in it.Leaning on a phrase used by America’s first president, George Washington, around the time he commanded troops at Valley Forge, Mr. Biden is expected to suggest that the 2024 election is a test of whether democracy is still a “sacred cause” in the nation, the aide said.Mr. Biden is fond of using sites of historical significance to underscore speeches that he and his team see as important moments. He traveled to Independence Hall in Philadelphia before the midterm elections and to Gettysburg, Pa., during the 2020 presidential campaign.His campaign views the events of Jan. 6 — when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent culmination of his election denialism — as critical to understanding how the 2024 campaign will unfold. His team notes that Mr. Trump and Republicans have tried to rewrite the history of that day but argues that images of the Capitol riot remain seared in the minds of voters.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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Launches Most Forceful Trump Attacks, Just Days Before Iowa Caucuses

      by

      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is finally taking the fight to the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump.After months of being pressed by voters to go harder, Mr. DeSantis accused Mr. Trump of not being “pro-life” during a nationally broadcast CNN town hall in Des Moines Thursday night. He pointed out that Mr. Trump had deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Barack Obama did in his presidency. And Mr. DeSantis suggested that Iowans, who will conduct the first voting in the Republican Party’s presidential nominating contest on Jan. 15, would do well to contrast his behavior with that of Mr. Trump.“You’re not going to have to worry about my conduct,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience. “I’ll conduct myself in a way you can be proud of. I’ll conduct myself in a way you can tell your kids: ‘That’s somebody you should emulate.’”Immediately after Mr. DeSantis’s hourlong town hall finished, another began for former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, also broadcast on CNN. For her, the evening seemed to go less smoothly. She was consistently placed on her back foot, defending herself over a string of recent gaffes and even receiving boos because of a joke she made a day earlier about the Iowa caucuses. At one point, she used an oft-derided cliché when talking about race, saying that she had “Black friends growing up.”The dueling town halls signaled the start of a sprint to the finish for the Republican candidates still standing in Iowa. For Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, however, that sprint means a race for second place. Polls show they are both trailing Mr. Trump in the state by roughly 30 points. They are set to meet next week in a one-on-one debate — Mr. Trump, confident in his lead, has skipped the debates — and will also appear in separate Fox News town halls.Behind Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is in a distant fourth, despite campaigning vigorously. And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, the field’s anti-Trump standard-bearer, is not even campaigning in Iowa, preferring to focus on New Hampshire, which votes on Jan. 23.DeSantis speaking during a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, on Wednesday.Scott Morgan/ReutersMr. DeSantis was seen for much of the year as the strongest challenger to Mr. Trump. But Ms. Haley’s more moderate image has appealed to wealthy donors and independent voters, lifting her standing in the race. She is now virtually tied with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, where he had been favored, and beating him badly in New Hampshire.Although they and their allies have attacked one another for weeks, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley barely mentioned each other on Thursday. Instead, Mr. DeSantis trained most of his fire on Mr. Trump, particularly on abortion, an issue Mr. DeSantis is hoping to use to woo Iowa’s influential evangelical voters.“I mean, when you’re saying that pro-life protections are a terrible thing, by definition you are not pro-life,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to criticisms Mr. Trump had made of six-week abortion bans. He added: “How do you flip-flop on something like the sanctity of life?”Ms. Haley continued to characterize the former president as a force of chaos, criticizing him for raising the national debt, and asserting that, although some of the cases against him are “political in nature” and without basis, “he’s going to have to answer.”“I used to tell him he’s his own worst enemy,” said Ms. Haley, who served as Mr. Trump’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.For Mr. DeSantis, a confident performance in front of a national audience was a welcome change. He has largely underwhelmed in the G.O.P. debates. Mr. Trump has mocked him mercilessly, including over his sometimes awkward mannerisms and choice of footwear. Chaos in Mr. DeSantis’s campaign and an allied super PAC have often overshadowed his attempts to catch up to Mr. Trump and to fend off Ms. Haley.But Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has argued for weeks that Ms. Haley would stumble as the news media and her rivals focused more attention on her.Indeed, from the moment she took the stage on Thursday, Ms. Haley appeared slightly uncomfortable and on the defensive. Her anecdotes were at times difficult to follow, and she largely relied on canned remarks from her stump speeches, which hardly seemed to make for TV-ready answers.Haley greets people at a Lady Hawkeyes tailgate campaign event in Coralville, Iowa, last week.Rachel Mummey/ReutersMs. Haley has had a series of recent missteps on the campaign trail. Just hours before her CNN town hall, she drew fire from Mr. DeSantis’s campaign surrogates in Iowa for her comments at a New Hampshire town hall, in which she suggested that the state’s voters would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses. Last month, she flubbed the name of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ star basketball player Caitlin Clark and failed to mention slavery as the cause of the Civil War.“I should have said slavery right off the bat,” Ms. Haley said on Thursday when asked to respond to criticism of her Civil War response, before contending that she had “Black friends growing up” and that slavery was “a very talked about thing” in her state. “I was thinking past slavery and talking about the lesson that we would learn going forward — I shouldn’t have done that.”She seemed to regain some footing as she spoke about her foreign policy stances, her experiences as a mother and her brushes with racism and prejudice in South Carolina as the daughter of the only Indian immigrant family in a small rural town.“We weren’t white enough to be considered white,” she said, deploying a line she often uses. “We weren’t Black enough to be considered Black. They didn’t know who we were, what we were and why we were there.”For once, both candidates largely stuck to their contention that they were running to beat Mr. Trump, not each other.Mr. DeSantis mentioned Ms. Haley most directly in a line that was fast becoming his campaign’s catchphrase: “Donald Trump is running for his issues. Nikki Haley is running for her donors’ issues. I’m running for your issues.”Ms. Haley hardly mentioned Mr. DeSantis by name, even after being directly asked about his policies. When the CNN moderator Erin Burnett asked if Ms. Haley supported the efforts of Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to transport migrants from the Southern border to more liberal areas of the country, she demurred.“Well, I’ll talk about Governor Abbott,” Ms. Haley said. “Because I think he was courageous. He was the first one to do it.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Should Trump Be on the Ballot? And Other 2024 Sticky Wickets

      by

      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIs Donald Trump an insurrectionist who should be barred from the ballot? On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss who should get to decide if the former president can try to return to the White House. Plus, the hosts lay out what other stories are on their 2024 political bingo cards.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Hill Street Studios/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:“The Antidemocratic Quest to Save Democracy From Trump,” by Ross Douthat in The New York TimesDecember 2023 Times/Siena poll“The 2023 High School Yearbook of American Politics,” by Michelle Cottle in The Times“Trump’s 2024 Playbook,” episode of “The Daily” from The Times“The World Should Fear 2024,” by Aris Roussinos in UnHerdThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero and Pat McCusker. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More