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      Biden Says ‘I’m Not Sure I’d Be Running’ if Not for Trump

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      President Biden has portrayed a second term for Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy.President Biden suggested on Tuesday that he might have been content to serve only a single term if his predecessor, former President Donald J. Trump, were not attempting to recapture the White House.At a campaign fund-raiser in the Boston area, Mr. Biden presented his decision to run for re-election as driven largely by his determination to defeat Mr. Trump a second time and prevent him from returning to power. Mr. Biden has at times portrayed a second term for Mr. Trump as an existential threat to American democracy.“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running,” he told donors at the Weston, Mass., home of Alan Solomont, a longtime Democratic financial backer who served as ambassador to Spain. “But we cannot let him win.”The president’s remark came at a time when polls show that most Democrats would prefer someone other than Mr. Biden, who turned 81 last month, to represent the party in next year’s election. A survey by CNN in August found that 67 percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic wanted another nominee, and 70 percent listed Mr. Biden’s age, health, mental competence or ability to handle the job as their main concern about him.Although he described himself as “a bridge” to the next generation during his 2020 campaign, a comment that some interpreted as a hint that he would serve only one term, Mr. Biden has concluded that he is best positioned to beat Mr. Trump again, justifying a re-election campaign. He faces only long-shot challengers in the Democratic primaries in the form of Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and Marianne Williamson, the author.Mr. Trump, who is 77 and has demonstrated his own cognitive issues lately, has outpaced his rivals for the Republican nomination by double digits in the polls and appears poised to steamroller to his third general election. That is despite four criminal indictments on 91 felony counts of illegally trying to overthrow an election, endangering national security and other charges. Despite his political liabilities, surveys show he is either tied with Mr. Biden or leading slightly both nationally and in the battleground states that will decide the Electoral College.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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      Top Democratic Donor Gave $250,000 to a Nikki Haley Super PAC

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      Mr. Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has funded an array of anti-Trump candidates and causes.When Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, urged Democratic donors last week to rally behind Nikki Haley to provide Republican voters an alternative to former President Donald J. Trump, it seemed a far-fetched plea.But at least one of the Democratic Party’s biggest financiers has already done exactly that.Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor, recently gave $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has gained momentum in recent weeks in the 2024 Republican primary race. The donation, which has not been previously reported, was confirmed by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Mr. Hoffman.The pro-Haley super PAC, SFA Fund Inc., was asked specifically by Mr. Hoffman’s political team if it would take money from Mr. Hoffman, given that he is a Democrat who actively supports President Biden, Mr. Mehlhorn said. The super PAC, he added, said yes.The pro-Haley super PAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.SFA Fund Inc. has been one of the biggest players in the 2024 Republican primary race, spending more than $33 million on advertising and other expenses. Its biggest contributors in the first half of the year were Jan Koum, a co-founder of WhatsApp, who gave $5 million, and the venture capitalist Tim Draper, who gave $1.25 million. Mr. Koum has since given an additional $5 million, which Puck News first reported.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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      Inside the Secret Meeting That Cleared the Way for Tom Suozzi’s Return

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      Gov. Kathy Hochul had been toying with blocking the former congressman’s nomination for the crucial special election to replace George Santos. Then a phone call came.With his successor, George Santos, expelled from Congress, Tom Suozzi appeared to be on the brink of a full-scale comeback campaign on Monday. Then he got a worrisome request: Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted to see him. In Albany. Tonight.Mr. Suozzi knew Ms. Hochul, a bitter rival, had been toying for weeks with trying to block him from becoming the Democratic nominee in a special election to replace Mr. Santos. So he cleared his schedule, fighting through three hours of rush-hour traffic to arrive at the Governor’s Mansion after nightfall.Inside, Ms. Hochul presented Mr. Suozzi with multiple demands, according to two people briefed on the previously unreported meeting. She wanted to see his battle plan; needed the Roman Catholic former congressman to agree to run as a full-throated defender of abortion rights; and sought assurances that he would not run ads damaging their party’s brand.Mr. Suozzi, 61, acceded to each request. Then he offered something else to soften the ground: an apology for aggressive personal tactics he deployed against Ms. Hochul in a 2022 primary campaign for governor, particularly for casting doubt on her family’s ethics.The meeting amounted to an unusual flex of power from a governor who has typically preferred making friends over harboring grudges. But the assurances made room for a crucial détente that has cleared the way for party leaders to formally announce Mr. Suozzi as their candidate as soon as Thursday.Governor Hochul wanted Mr. Suozzi to agree to a series of demands in exchange for her backing.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“The governor will allow his nomination to move forward,” Brian Lenzmeier, Ms. Hochul’s campaign spokesman, said in a statement confirming the broad outlines of the meeting.Mr. Suozzi thanked Ms. Hochul for “a good meeting” that he said “cleared the air.”“At a time of strong political division, I offered to be another moderate voice as the governor works to solve problems and make progress,” he said.Mr. Suozzi will now have a little more than two months to prepare for what could be one of the most important off-year House contests in decades — the battle to replace Mr. Santos, a Republican, after his historic expulsion. A Democratic victory could undermine Republicans’ paper-thin House majority and build momentum ahead of next year’s general election.Ms. Hochul declared separately on Tuesday that the special election would take place on Feb. 13.It will be no easy fight. The district, which stretches from the outskirts of Queens through the affluent northern suburbs of Nassau County, voted for President Biden by eight points in 2020 but has moved sharply rightward since amid voters’ concerns over crime and rising costs. Elections analysts rate it a tossup.Republicans were still vetting more than a dozen candidates for their own nomination on Tuesday. Two front-runners had emerged, officials said: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.Democrats nominally entertained other candidates in their own process, most notably Anna Kaplan, a state senator who had positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. She and others warned party leaders that Mr. Suozzi had real liabilities: He currently works for a lobbying firm, his 2022 primary run alienated some progressives and he has a history of losing key contests.But Mr. Suozzi long ago emerged as the ideal candidate for most party leaders. He held the seat for six years before relinquishing it to challenge Ms. Hochul, enjoys high name recognition and has a track record of bucking his party on issues like public safety and high taxes — positions that could help him win back voters who have flocked to Republicans.He also has close relationships to two of the party leaders with significant sway over their special election nominee: Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat, and Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the Nassau County and New York State Democratic Parties.Ms. Hochul was always the rub.Their mutual animosity had been well known to New York Democrats since last year’s primary for governor. Mr. Suozzi repeatedly referred to Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female leader, as an unqualified “interim governor.” He also accused her and her husband, a former federal prosecutor turned executive, of fostering a “culture of corruption” in Albany.It is unclear if she ever would have — or could have — unilaterally blocked Mr. Suozzi over Mr. Jeffries’s strong preference. But New York’s special election process granted Ms. Hochul unusual leverage to exact potential revenge. Unlike in normal contests, nominees for special elections are chosen by party leaders, not primary voters. That gave Ms. Hochul a double say, both as governor and as Mr. Jacobs’s de facto boss.On Monday night, she used it to her political advantage. After pushing Mr. Suozzi to make the case for his candidacy, including with polling and a fund-raising plan, the governor revisited two issues they clashed over as candidates.First, she said she would need Mr. Suozzi to vocally support abortion rights, including the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds for abortions. Mr. Suozzi earned top marks from Planned Parenthood in Congress, but his past comments have led abortion rights advocates to question his commitment.The governor also sought to ensure he would not run advertisements disparaging his own party. Ms. Hochul and her allies have long believed that his campaign pronouncement on the threat of crime and corruption in the 2022 primary softened the ground for Republican attacks.Mr. Suozzi agreed, but Ms. Hochul let him drive away Monday night without her blessing. She would wait until after a night’s sleep to deliver the news. More

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      Trump Unbound: An Autocrat in Waiting?

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      More from our inbox:The Inhumanity of HomelessnessViolence Against InmatesCommunity CompostingThe extreme policy plans and ideas of Donald J. Trump and his advisers would have a greater prospect of becoming reality if he were to win a second term.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Second Term Could Unleash Darker Trump” (front page, Dec. 5):As the basic parameters of a second Trump presidency come into focus, I find myself growing increasingly fearful. As the article presents in detail, Donald Trump, if re-elected, could transform the American government into something close to a dictatorship.Because I am an old white guy, it seems unlikely that I would be targeted and jailed or condemned to one of his camps. But if you are a high-profile Democrat, a person of color, an undocumented immigrant or someone who has spoken out against him, he may very well have his sights on you.Mr. Trump must not be underestimated, and his goals should be taken both literally and seriously. The election in 2024 may very well be our last chance to stop him.Richard WinchellSt. Charles, Ill.To the Editor:A second Trump presidency not only would be more radical, but also seems inevitable. Donald Trump and his handlers have learned to exploit every weakness in our democratic system of government.Our founders must have assumed that those who gravitate to government service would essentially be people of good faith, and the rotten apples would be winnowed by our system of checks and balances. But here we are less than a year away from the election, and while Mr. Trump’s transgressions have drawn 91 criminal charges, there has been no justice yet.He has proved to have a serpentine instinct to capitalize on weak links ranging from the Electoral College to our justice system, gathering strength every time he flouts the rule of law.Robert HagelsteinPalm Beach Gardens, Fla.To the Editor:Re “Trump Wants Voters to See Biden as a Threat” (news article, Dec. 4):While former President Donald Trump is notorious for ascribing to others deficiencies that he himself manifests constantly, his latest exercise in projection — calling President Biden “the destroyer of American democracy” — should be dismissed as ludicrous if the issue were not so crucial to the future direction of our country.The list of Mr. Trump’s actions that subvert basic democratic norms makes it clear that he is the potential threat to democracy if he is elected to a second term.One can only hope that the more thoughtful of his devoted followers will finally understand the danger of electing someone to lead the country who either misunderstands the concept of democracy or is willing to undermine it to further his own ambitions.Patricia FlahertyDuxbury, Mass.To the Editor:Re “Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State,’” by Donald P. Moynihan (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 2):Reading Professor Moynihan’s essay reinforced a fear that I have had since the Jan. 6 insurrection.Donald Trump just might win the next presidential election. But although I worry about what he would do to our government and our society while in office, there is another fear that haunts me.What would happen when his term ends? I believe that he would not step down. He would claim that he is entitled to stay on as president regardless of the results of the next election. I think he would assert his right to be in power for the rest of his life. And he has enough supporters that his coup might work.Judy HochbergStoughton, Mass.The Inhumanity of HomelessnessKhena Minor, who works for Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, talks to Joe Cavazos, who has been homeless for six months.To the Editor:Re “Houston Shows How to Tackle Homelessness,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, “How America Heals” series, Nov. 26):Mr. Kristof’s column was both sobering and encouraging. As an I.C.U. nurse working during the cold winter months, I regularly see the inhumanity of relegating our most vulnerable citizens to the dangers and indignities of life on the streets.For those who don’t see this side of life, here are some examples of patients I’ve cared for: a patient found outside near death whose body temperature was 71 degrees, patients whose feet or hands are black and necrotic from frostbite, patients with severe burns all over their body because their makeshift heater ignited their tent, or patients with carbon monoxide poisoning from a camp stove used in their tent to try to keep warm.To the political and social leaders of Oregon, enough hand-wringing and placing blame on drugs, alcohol or mental health alone. Mr. Kristof’s statistics on Oregon’s failure to effectively organize and follow through on housing help are pretty damning.Let’s move past good intentions and follow Houston’s example of what works. I dream of a day when I won’t see patients come into my care frostbitten, burned or poisoned as they try to survive on the streets.Grace LownsberyWilsonville, Ore.Violence Against InmatesThe Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Ariz., where Derek Chauvin was stabbed.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Stabbing of Chauvin Is the Latest Failure to Protect High-Profile Inmates” (news article, Nov. 26):You link the stabbing of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, to the special dangers that certain inmates face by virtue of their notoriety.The truth is that violence against prison inmates, no matter their level of fame, is a standard feature of the American mass incarceration system. Studies over an 18-year span show that deaths in state and federal prisons increased by 42 percent, even as absolute numbers of people imprisoned fell (a decarceration trend that was reversed in 2022). By the studies’ final year, deaths caused by homicide or suicide were at their highest levels ever recorded.The most callous among us might conclude that prison is a punishment and therefore rightfully harsh by design. But even the most staunch supporters might reconsider when faced with an often overlooked reality. In the federal prison system, almost 70 percent of defendants in cases from 2022 were held in pretrial detention — innocent until proven guilty, and already condemned to levels of violence that don’t distinguish by levels of fame.Anthony EnriquezNew YorkThe writer is vice president, U.S. advocacy and litigation, at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.Community CompostingSandy Nurse, a city councilwoman who chairs the Sanitation Committee, says that if the cuts go forward, 198 out of 266 food-scrap drop-off sites will close.  Jade Doskow for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Composting’s Community of ‘True Believers’ Jilted as a Curbside Program Grows” (news article, Dec. 2) describes how devastating Mayor Eric Adams’s budget cuts will be to community compost organizations. But it also perpetuates the idea that community-scale composting is unnecessary with the rollout of the city’s curbside collection program.With the lack of trust in recycling, we need solutions that create many more true believers, such as those at the New York City Housing Authority, where residents drop off food scraps in return for fresh healthy vegetables.The city also needs good-quality compost to properly maintain the millions of dollars of green infrastructure that it has recently installed. When compost is applied to street trees, rain gardens, parks and community gardens, it makes the soil and plants healthier, reduces flooding and air pollution, provides summer cooling, and makes the city greener and cleaner.Instead of cutting community-scale composting, the city should be trying to increase the number of small-scale compost sites to enable a substantial percentage of our food scraps and yard waste to be transformed into a valuable neighborhood resource.Clare MiflinBrooklynThe writer is executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. More

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      Patrick McHenry, Former Interim Speaker, Will Leave Congress

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      The North Carolina congressman, who leads the House Financial Services Committee, said he would join the growing ranks of lawmakers exiting Congress amid intense dysfunction.Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, who made history as the first interim speaker of the House after Republicans ousted their own speaker and struggled for weeks to agree on a successor, said on Tuesday that he would leave Congress at the end of his term.The announcement by Mr. McHenry, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, added him to the growing ranks of lawmakers who have announced that they will depart the House and the Senate, many of them citing the historic dysfunction of Capitol Hill.“This is not a decision I come to lightly,” Mr. McHenry said in a statement. “But I believe there is a season for everything and — for me — this season has come to an end.”The bow-tied and bespectacled Mr. McHenry, 48, arrived in Congress as an unruly bomb thrower in 2005 and has matured into one of the more sober-minded leaders in a Republican conference whose actions are more often driven by the attention seekers. He was named speaker pro tempore after Republicans deposed Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is Mr. McHenry’s close ally.Mr. McCarthy is also expected to announce in the coming days that he will not seek re-election, and many of his colleagues do not expect him to finish out his term after he has discovered the life of a rank-and-file member to be a painful existence.Mr. McCarthy’s brutal ouster prompted the House’s first invocation of a post-9/11 crisis succession plan that requires the speaker to secretly designate an interim stand-in should the post become unexpectedly vacant. Those plans never envisioned that the crisis that would lead to a vacancy would be that members of the party controlling the House would choose to overthrow their own speaker.As Republicans struggled for three weeks to coalesce around any candidate to replace Mr. McCarthy and the House remained paralyzed, Mr. McHenry was under intense pressure to take on more power and interpret his role more broadly.But he steadfastly refused, even as members asked him to bring to the floor an uncontroversial resolution in support of Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and hundreds taken hostage. And when Republicans floated a plan to hold a formal vote to allow Mr. McHenry to preside over legislative business, he let it be known he was against it.Mr. McHenry argued that interpreting his role as anything more than simply convening the House to take a vote for a new speaker would only create more incentive for the Republican feuding to drag on and even grow worse. He made it clear that he harbored no ambition of becoming the speaker himself, and in fact was actively hostile to the idea.Mr. McHenry had chosen not to run for any leadership position during this Congress, in part because he believed that the most effective way to wield power in the House was to not allow anyone to have leverage over him. But Mr. McCarthy had a way of roping him back in.During Mr. McCarthy’s tenure as speaker, he cut out the official leadership structure, whose members he distrusted, and relied heavily on Mr. McHenry as his handpicked adviser to help handle debt ceiling negotiations with the White House and avert a government shutdown.Mr. McHenry’s departure from a seat in a solidly Republican district was not expected to have much impact on the race for control of the House, where his successor was all but certain to be another Republican.His decision not to seek re-election may have had as much to do with his own future prospects in the House as it did with overall dysfunction. Mr. McHenry will be term-limited out of his chairmanship at the end of next year.In announcing his decision not to seek another term, Mr. McHenry tried to play down any narrative that the spate of retirements and exits was due to the House becoming ungovernable.“There has been a great deal of hand-wringing and ink spilled about the future of this institution because some — like me — have decided to leave,” he said. “Those concerns are exaggerated. I’ve seen a lot of change over 20 years. I truly feel this institution is on the verge of the next great turn.”He added: “Evolutions are often lumpy and disjointed but at each stage, new leaders emerge. There are many smart and capable members who remain, and others are on their way. I’m confident the House is in good hands.” More

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      Is Liz Cheney Really Thinking About Running for President in 2024?

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      The former congresswoman is working to ensure that Donald Trump never returns to the Oval Office. She is also keeping her own door wide open.Liz Cheney was widely seen as a Republican superstar in the making, perhaps even a future president, before she was elected to Congress in 2016. Ms. Cheney never discouraged the talk, but Donald J. Trump shattered her glittering future after she voted to impeach him in 2021 and became a pariah in the G.O.P.Now, while vowing to do “everything I can” to ensure that Mr. Trump never returns to the White House, Ms. Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming, has suggested that she has not abandoned her own presidential ambitions. In interviews with The Washington Post and USA Today ahead of the publication on Tuesday of her new book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” Ms. Cheney broached the possibility of a third-party challenge to Mr. Trump’s candidacy.“Several years ago, I would not have contemplated a third-party run,” Ms. Cheney told Maeve Reston of The Post. But, she said, “democracy is at risk” in the United States as well as overseas. Ms. Cheney said she would make a final decision in the next few months.Her comments were in keeping with the answer she gave in October to Jake Tapper of CNN about whether she was ruling out a presidential run. “No, I’m not,” she said.Ms. Cheney declined to comment to The New York Times.Despite her remarks, there is no evidence that Ms. Cheney has taken any steps toward running beyond keeping her options open while maximizing her relevancy during a book-promotion tour.She has not hired any campaign staff members. Close associates of hers say they are unaware of any polling, signature-gathering or related efforts associated with mounting a third-party campaign. Her political action committee, the Great Task, has stalled in activity since the 2022 midterms, when Ms. Cheney backed efforts by some Democratic candidates against Republicans who had claimed the 2020 election was stolen.In the meantime, time is running short. Filing deadlines to appear on ballots as a third-party candidate in 2024 begin as early as March in some states. Though she expressed an openness to USA Today to “setting up a new party” that might supplant a Trump-centric G.O.P., such an effort would require the kind of money, personnel and legal maneuvering that would take months if not years to produce.A Cheney presidential run is also likely to undermine her mission of thwarting Mr. Trump’s 2024 ambitions, said one close friend, because her candidacy could siphon some votes away from President Biden. According to the friend, Ms. Cheney’s comment to The Post that she would not have contemplated a third-party run until recently seemed more about her long allegiance to the G.O.P. and less about a new appetite for running as an independent.Among Beltway conservatives, including lobbyists and military hawks, Ms. Cheney remains a popular figure and a woman of presidential timber. Lawmakers and staff members who served with Ms. Cheney on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol privately wondered whether the vice chairwoman was prioritizing her ambitions over a comprehensive investigation of the Capitol riot. To Mr. Trump’s allies, of course, the question answered itself.If the current moment suggests anything beyond the desire to sell books, it is a reminder that Liz Cheney, like her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, has long understood the importance of political leverage in furthering her core beliefs. For now, she holds no office and has no place in either major party. But she has her voice. More

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      Nikki Haley’s Path From Trump Critic to Defender and Back

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      When Nikki Haley was governor of South Carolina in 2016, she said she was appalled by Donald J. Trump’s threat to ban all Muslims from entering the United States should he become president. Ms. Haley, herself the child of Indian immigrants, called the pledge “absolutely un-American,” and part of a pattern of “unacceptable” comments and acts.Just two days after she joined Mr. Trump’s new administration in January 2017 as ambassador to the United Nations, she had to confront the issue anew. Mr. Trump barred travelers and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for 90 days.At a hastily called White House meeting, other senior administration officials objected, saying the prohibition would endanger refugees already en route to the United States and would hurt families of Iraqis who had long worked closely with the American military in that nation.“I don’t remember Nikki Haley saying anything,” said Kristie Kenney, then a top State Department official, who sat in on meeting. Six weeks later, in one of her first interviews as ambassador, Ms. Haley defended the ban, saying it was directed against countries with terrorist activity, not against Muslims.Now, as she tries to persuade Republican voters to cast Mr. Trump aside and hand her the mantle, Ms. Haley is reverting to her role as Trump critic. As her bid for the White House has picked up steam, she has warned voters that “we cannot have four years of chaos, vendettas and drama,” an obvious reference to his White House years. “America needs a captain who will steady the ship, not capsize it,” she added. Unlike Mr. Trump, she has said, she would not praise dictators and would “have the backs of our allies.”But when Ms. Haley had a chance to influence Mr. Trump, she chose her battles carefully. In interviews with more than a dozen former senior administration officials, most said that while Ms. Haley at times expressed her views frankly, they rarely witnessed her going to the mat, as some other senior aides did, to try to head off or moderate what they saw as Mr. Trump’s rash moves.Ms. Haley made herself a reliable defender of the president to the outside world, often trying to soften the edges of his most abrasive decisions. Privately, she carefully guarded what she later called her “amazingly good relationship” with Mr. Trump and avoided some of the internal fights that would have pitted her against him.“I don’t pick up the phone and say, ‘What are you doing?’” she said in an interview in March 2017, acknowledging that she was at times taken back by some of his public statements. “I just know that’s who he is.”Ms. Haley’s former colleagues could not recall her in the forefront of fights to keep Mr. Trump from imposing trade tariffs on American allies, or rushing into an unprecedented summit with North Korea’s dictator, or canceling America’s longstanding military exercises with South Korea, or banning Iraqis from entering the country. It fell mainly to others to defend NATO from Mr. Trump’s attacks, they said. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe internal deliberations.“I think that Haley understood, in an almost visceral way, the importance of maintaining a good relationship with the president,” said Thomas A. Shannon Jr., who served as under secretary of state for political affairs for the first half of Ms. Haley’s tenure. “She did not take on this job to do battle with the president.”Not everyone agrees that she held her fire. “Nikki Haley never pulled any punches with Donald Trump or with anybody,” said H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser from early 2017 to early 2018 and a key ally of Ms. Haley. “Oftentimes, she told him what he didn’t want to hear.”That is the impression Ms. Haley is trying to make with voters, as she casts herself as no-nonsense, no-drama alternative to Mr. Trump, who leads in polls in Iowa by some 30 percentage points. “If he was doing something wrong, I showed up in his office or I picked up the phone and said you cannot do this,” she said last week in Wolfeboro, N.H.Both Mr. McMaster and Ms. Haley point to her stance on Russia as evidence that she stood up to Trump. In her 2019 memoir on her U.N. tenure, Ms. Haley said she phoned the president directly to complain that he was overly deferential to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in a July 2018 meeting, telling him: “The Russians aren’t our friends.”Asked to point to other examples, her campaign did not respond. Nor did her aides answer questions about whether and how she used her influence with the president on a variety of issues that galvanized other senior administration officials.There were clear dividends to keeping Mr. Trump’s favor. The ambassadorship allowed Ms. Haley, who had never held office outside of South Carolina, to gain valuable foreign policy experience and to build the political brand that she now hopes will carry her to the White House.She also achieved a rare graceful exit from the administration, escaping the public insults the president rained on so many of his top aides. Instead, he praised her as “fantastic.”Staying on Trump’s Good SideMs. Haley has looked to cast herself as a no-drama alternative to Mr. Trump.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesMs. Haley’s position gave her the luxury of distance from some scorching White House debates. Other senior administration officials recalled sprinting to the Oval Office to try to forestall some of Mr. Trump’s orders. Stationed in New York, answering to a president who cared little about the United Nations, Ms. Haley was to some degree on the periphery.Nonetheless, she had unusually good access to the president. Mr. Trump had granted her wish to be seated on the National Security Council, over the objections of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to whom she ostensibly reported. And he took her calls, which former Trump aides described as frequent.Because the Trump White House operated in an unconventional fashion, often without the customary briefing papers and deliberate discussions, senior administration officials created unusual and shifting alliances in hopes of influencing the president. They tried to rope in like-minded officials, even on issues outside their portfolio.Several former senior administration officials said they did not view Ms. Haley as a useful ally in countering Mr. Trump because they thought she was unlikely to challenge the president directly. That was the case, they said, in the effort to keep Mr. Trump from imposing steel and aluminum tariffs against American allies like Canada. Gary D. Cohn, the White House economic adviser, led that fight, backed by a group that included Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Mr. McMaster, but not Ms. Haley.Nor was she central to the endeavor by other senior foreign policy advisers to take Iraq off the list of seven Muslim-majority nations covered by Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Mr. McMaster, Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Mattis and John F. Kelly, then head of homeland security, argued that the ban would punish Iraqis who for over a decade worked with the U.S. government to fight extremists.In a series of heated White House meetings, ending up in the Oval Office, they faced off against the White House advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, finally swaying the president to their side. While Mr. McMaster said Ms. Haley agreed Iraq should be dropped from the list, others who described those meetings make no mention of her.Guy Snodgrass, Mr. Mattis’s former chief speechwriter, said he knew of conversations in which the defense secretary and other senior officials discussed how best to influence the president. But he was not aware, he said, of any interaction with Ms. Haley or her staff.Ms. Haley was viewed as having shrewd political instincts — and also clear aspirations beyond the United Nations. Mr. Trump was wary of her ambitions, according to people familiar with his views. Some thought she tended carefully to her relationship with the president partly to safeguard them.“I thought she went out of the way not to take Trump on. Her objective, I thought, was to stay on his good side,” said John R. Bolton, who succeeded Mr. McMaster as national security adviser in March 2018.In her memoir, Ms. Haley recounted one instance, apparently in late 2017, when Mr. Tillerson and Mr. Kelly, then White House chief of staff, tried to enlist her support in holding the president in check. While they claimed that they needed to band together for the good of the country, she wrote, she saw them as disloyal.Ms. Haley later told Fox News that she reported the conversation to Mr. Trump and Mr. McMaster. Mr. McMaster said in an interview that she understood the importance of duty.Mr. Tillerson has denied ever trying to undermine the president. Mr. Kelly has said that he gave the president the best advice he could.Dealing With DictatorsMs. Haley called Mr. Trump to criticize his 2018 meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Haley has written that she agreed with most of Mr. Trump’s major policies, including his decisions to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and abandon the Paris climate accord. His posture toward Russia, however, was a steady source of friction.One former senior official said that the only times the president would become angry with Ms. Haley were when she criticized Mr. Putin in public, and that he would order his chief of staff to tell her to stop.Still, she called Mr. Trump to complain about his 2018 summit in Helsinki, where the president had ignited a bipartisan uproar by suggesting he believed Mr. Putin’s denials of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections over the assertions of U.S. intelligence agencies. “You made it sound like we were beholden to them,” she said she told him.Later that year, she persuaded the president to toughen up the administration’s talking points after Russian forces seized three Ukrainian naval ships and threatened to turn the Sea of Azov into a Russian lake, according to Mr. Bolton’s memoir.But even as she objected to Mr. Trump’s approach toward Mr. Putin, she has excused it. In her book, she wrote that she understood why he seemed to let Mr. Putin off the hook in Helsinki. “He was trying to keep communication open with Putin, just as he had with Kim Jong-un and Chinese President Xi Jinping,” she wrote, then went on to extol his ability to disarm people.Similarly, Ms. Haley suggested that Mr. Trump meant well when he praised Mr. Kim as a “talented” leader who “loves his people” and that he just didn’t understand how his words would be received.Since starting her campaign, Ms. Haley has said Mr. Trump “was too friendly” with Mr. Kim, “a thug and a tyrant” who has been “terrible to his people.” (One of Ms. Haley’s biggest accomplishments as ambassador was garnering support from Russia and China for a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted a battery of missile tests.)Mr. Trump himself has noticed her frequent oscillations: “Every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,” he told Vanity Fair in late 2021. “I guess she gets the base,” referring to his popularity with Republican voters she is now courting.‘We Shouldn’t Have Followed Him’Ms. Haley had promised in early 2021 not to run against Mr. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesIn trying to explain why she is so much more critical of him now than before, Ms. Haley has said it is Mr. Trump who has changed, not her.As late as December 2020, after Mr. Trump lost the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Haley still took a forgiving stance toward him. She told Politico that although she spoke with Mr. Trump after the election, she did not urge him to concede because he sincerely believed he had won and couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It was a version of the “that’s who he is” argument she had made when she first joined his administration.Then, after his supporters ransacked the Capitol in January 2021, she told Politico there were no excuses for his behavior. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him,” she said.After she announced this February that she would run against him for the presidential nomination — after promising not to in early 2021 — a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign characterized her as an opportunist, “only in it for herself.”Ms. Haley addressed that kind of criticism in an essay in The Wall Street Journal in 2021. She wrote that Mr. Trump had been a good president but had gone astray, and said she could not “defend the indefensible.”“If that means I want to have it ‘both ways,’” she added, “so be it.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Primaries Are Not the Most Democratic Way to Choose a Presidential Nominee

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      Is the Democratic Party making a mistake by renominating President Biden to face the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in 2024? A nontrivial number of voices in and outside the party seem to think so.But it’s already a mostly moot point. The system Americans use to nominate presidential candidates is not well equipped to make swift strategic adjustments. Voters choose candidates in a sequence of state-level primaries and caucuses. Those contests select delegates and instruct them on how to vote at a nominating convention. It’s an ungainly and convoluted process, and politicians begin positioning themselves a year in advance to succeed in it.It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Political parties in most democracies have the power to choose their leaders without going through a monthslong gantlet.The best way for a party to choose its leader is for that party to convene, confer and compromise on a candidate who serves its agenda and appeals to voters. The conventions of the mid-20th century, deeply flawed as they were, were designed for that purpose. If those flaws were fixed, they would be far better than what we use today.Should Mr. Biden run again or step aside? On the one hand, he has stubbornly low approval ratings, and a number of polls show him trailing Mr. Trump. On the other hand, polling a year out is often misleading, and so are job approval ratings in a polarized age. Mr. Biden is old, but so is Mr. Trump, and Mr. Biden defeated him last time.Replacing an incumbent president with another nominee is very rare and probably should be. But a convention could do it if necessary. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson stepped down at the beginning of the year, and Democrats could realistically expect to find a nominee before Election Day.The system was different then. When Mr. Johnson decided not to run for re-election, he declared, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”The “and I will not accept” matters. Mr. Johnson was acknowledging that the party might nominate him even if he didn’t run. In 1968, when the decision was made at the national convention, the party could do that. That’s not something it can easily do today.Only a small fraction of states held primaries that year, and most of those didn’t commit delegates. Primaries were a tool to gauge public support, not make the final decision. Hubert Humphrey, the eventual nominee, won no primaries or caucuses. Instead, he won with support of unpledged delegates selected through state conventions — delegates who represented an older, more establishment part of the party.The apparent injustice of Mr. Humphrey winning the nomination without winning primaries was a big part of how we got to our current system. Many members of the Democratic Party felt that their perspectives weren’t well represented by those establishment delegates; their voices were being heard in the primaries and caucuses.The party set out to create a national convention that was more representative of the party, but what evolved was something else, the system we use today — the one that has all but locked us into a candidate almost a year out from Election Day.Early states winnow the field. The next states largely determine who the nominee is. States that vote late in the process often have little effect. Success depends on the ability to stand up a campaign in state after state in the first few months of the year, which in turn depends on the ability to raise money and attract media attention. It’s a process, not a simple decision.This system could produce a candidate who is battle tested by the primaries and otherwise broadly popular. It might also select a candidate who appeals narrowly to a group of dedicated followers, especially in early states, where a close victory can be leveraged into later success. (Think of Mr. Trump in 2016.)In no way does it let party leaders take stock of an awkward situation, such as what Democrats face now (low approval ratings for an incumbent) or, for that matter, what Republicans face (a front-runner facing multiple indictments).Party leaders are not completely helpless. In “The Party Decides,” the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol and John Zaller and I argued that party activists and leaders could exert a lot of influence on their party’s choice — so much so that they typically get their way. When they can agree on a satisfactory candidate, they can help direct resources to that candidate and help that person stay in the race if he or she stumbles. (Think of Mr. Biden in 2020.)But that takes time. It is, at best, a blunt instrument (hence its failure among Republicans in 2016). The nomination is still won in the primaries, and an incumbent is especially hard to replace.Most democracies give far less power than that to a single political leader, even an incumbent or influential former leader. Healthy parties can limit their leaders.Empowering the Democrats to replace Mr. Biden or the Republicans to move on from Mr. Trump would come with costs. A party that could persuade a sitting president to stand down would also have the power to persuade outsiders, like Bernie Sanders and Mr. Trump, to not run at all.For some, giving party leaders this kind of influence is unsettling. It shouldn’t be. The job of choosing a nominee is complicated. It involves the strategic trade-off between what kind of candidate can win in November and what kind of candidate represents what the party wants in a leader.Letting the party make these decisions is not inherently undemocratic. Just as voters select members of Congress, who then gain expertise, forge compromises and bargain to make policy, so too could voters select party delegates, who would then choose nominees and shape their party’s platform.Polling and even primaries could continue to play a role. In many years, the voice of the party’s voters might speak loudly, and party leaders would simply heed it. In other years, such as for Democrats in 2008, voter preferences might be more mixed. It’s worth noting that in 2008, Democratic superdelegates (those not bound by the results of any primary) switched their support from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama after seeing his appeal in the primaries. If all of the delegates had been free to switch, would the outcome have been the same? We don’t know, but in a representative democracy, elected representatives do often listen to voters.In other words, the development of a more active, empowered party convention would not have to be a return to the past. The nomination of Mr. Humphrey in 1968 was a problem, but it wasn’t because the decision was made at a convention. It was because the delegates at that convention didn’t represent the party’s voters.Moving the decision back to the convention would not be a trivial matter. Even if voters and politicians could adjust to the change — a big if — each party would need to select representative and competent delegates. Our experience with representative democracy should tell us that this is possible but far from inevitable.But such a convention would still be superior to the current system, in which a small number of voters in a handful of states choose from a pool of self-selected candidates who have been tested mostly by their ability to raise money and get attention in debates.Both of these systems have a claim to being democratic. But only the first would give the party the kind of agency implied by claims that it is making a mistake by renominating the incumbent.Hans Noel, an associate professor of government at Georgetown, is the author of “Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America” and a co-author of “Political Parties” and “The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform.”Source images by Drew Angerer, Rost-9D, and ajt/Getty ImagesThe 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