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      Jim Jordan Doesn’t Know What Courage Is

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      It’s hard to overstate the extent to which our nation’s absurd Jim Jordan moment encapsulates the deep dysfunction of the political right in the United States.There’s of course all the chaos and incompetence of the Trumpist Republican Party, on display for the world to see. An extremist faction of the House deposed their own party’s speaker of the House without a successor, and now — in the midst of multiplying international crises — the House is rudderless. In fact, it’s worse than rudderless. As I write this newsletter it’s in a state of utter confusion.But there’s also a deeper reality at play here, one that goes well beyond simple incompetence. The Republican base admires Jordan because it thinks he is tough. It perceives him as a man of courage and strength. He is not. Instead, he is a symbol of the way in which Trumpist Republicans have corrupted the concept of courage itself.To understand what courage is supposed to be, I turn to a definition from C.S. Lewis: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.” It’s a beautiful formulation, one that encompasses both the moral and physical realms and declares that courage is inseparable from virtue.Lewis’s definition presents us with the sobering realization that we don’t truly know if we possess a virtue unless and until it is tested. We can believe we’re honest, but we won’t know we’re truly honest unless we have the courage to tell the truth when the truth will cost us something we value. We can believe we’re brave, but we don’t know if we are until we show it when we face a genuine physical risk.When I meet a virtuous person, I also know that I’m meeting a person of real courage. A lifetime of virtue is impossible absent courage. Conversely, when I see a person consumed with vice, I also know that I’m likely in the presence of a coward, a person whose commitments to virtue could not survive the tests of life.Now contrast the Lewis vision of courage with the courage or toughness lionized on the MAGA right. From the beginning of the Trump era, the entire concept of courage was divorced from virtue and completely fused with two terrible vices: groveling subservience and overt aggression.The subservience, of course, is to the demands of Donald Trump, the right-wing media or the angry Republican base. The command is clear: Do what we say. Hate who we hate. But how can anyone think that such obedience equals courage? Because in this upside-down world, aggression is equated with toughness and bullying is exalted as bravery.Few politicians personify this distortion of courage into cowardice better than Jim Jordan, and it is a sign of the decline of the Republican Party that he was even considered for the speaker’s chair, much less a few votes away from becoming the most powerful Republican elected official in the nation, second in line to the presidency.Is there anything that qualifies him for the position other than his subservience and aggression? His legislative record is extraordinarily thin. As Aaron Blake meticulously documented in The Washington Post, during Jordan’s 16 years in Congress, he hasn’t passed a single bill of his own. According to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, he’s consistently one of the least effective members of the entire Republican Party.What is Jim Jordan good at, exactly? He’s a Donald Trump apologist, a performative pugilist and a Fox News fixture. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America collected data showing that as of this month, Jordan had been on Fox 565 times since August 2017, including 268 appearances in weekday prime time. In a party that now prizes performance over policy, each of these Fox appearances builds his résumé far more than legislation ever could.But for sheer subservient aggression, nothing matches his enthusiastic participation in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The final report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol calls him a “significant player” in Trump’s scheme.As the committee records, “On Jan. 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference call in which he, President Trump and other members of Congress discussed strategies for delaying the Jan. 6 joint session.” On Jan. 5, “Jordan texted Mark Meadows, passing along advice that Vice President Pence should ‘call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’” He spoke to Trump at least twice on Jan. 6 itself and voted against certifying the election results, even after the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. In 2022 he defied a select committee subpoena.Never forget that this reckless aggression was all in service of some of the most absurd conspiracy theories and legal arguments in modern American political history. All the Republicans who voted against certifying the presidential election were the very definition of cowards. When the virtue of integrity reached its testing point, they collapsed. But bizarrely enough, they often collapsed with a swagger, casting themselves as tough even as they capitulated to the demands of a corrupt president and a frenzied mob.That MAGA aggression has spilled over to the speaker fight itself. As The Times reported on Saturday, “lawmakers and activists” close to Jordan “have taken to social media and the airwaves to blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan.”The pressure campaign includes Sean Hannity, a Fox prime-time host and wannabe Republican kingmaker. Representatives from his show sent messages to Republican holdouts transparently designed to pressure them into voting for Jordan. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that the pressure campaign even reached the wife of Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. She received personal text messages threatening Bacon’s career, including a message that said: “Your husband will not hold any political office ever again. What a disappointment and failure he is.”On Wednesday afternoon, the pressure campaign began to reach its inevitable conclusion: death threats. Steve Womack of Arkansas told The Washington Post that his staff has been “cussed out” and “threatened.” Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa issued a statement claiming that she’d received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls” after she voted against Jordan.Roughly 30 minutes after Miller-Meeks’s statement, Jordan finally condemned threats against his colleagues. By then, however, it was too late to repair the damage. Eight years into the MAGA era, Republicans should know exactly what happens when they launch a public pressure campaign. Threats follow MAGA pressure like night follows day.I’ve written a series of newsletters on the culture of MAGA America, including how it combines rage and joy to build community, how it exploits civic ignorance to denigrate its opponents, how its corruption is contagious and how it fosters and feeds a dark caricature of working-class values that warps its populist base. Even so, few elements of right-wing political culture are more toxic than the way it turns vice into virtue and derides the very idea of character in politics.But all is not lost. Just as key conservative jurists joined with their liberal counterparts to reject Trump’s absurd election challenges, key Republican leaders refused to bend the knee to the mob on Jan. 6. And it was conservative lawyers who blew the whistle on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s corruption. A remnant of courageous Republicans stood against Jim Jordan’s campaign for speaker of the House and twice rejected his bid.They did more than reject Jordan. They directly rejected the MAGA bullies Jordan unleashed. As Aaron Blake reported, several Republican members of Congress have directly condemned the tactics of the MAGA right. Representatives Steve Womack of Arkansas, Kay Granger of Texas, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Carlos Giménez of Florida and Miller-Meeks have all denounced the pressure campaign. And John Rutherford of Florida blamed Jordan directly for the threats and acts of intimidation. He told The Washington Post’s Jaqueline Alemany that Jordan’s “absolutely responsible for it” and that “nobody likes to have their arm twisted.”Their courage wasn’t wasted. On Thursday morning, The Times reported that Jordan wouldn’t immediately seek a third floor vote. Instead, he would “endorse a plan to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina” to act as a temporary speaker until Jan. 3. At the same time, however, Jordan wasn’t exactly standing down. Under his plan, he’d continue to act as “speaker designee,” which would permit him to continue whipping votes for his speaker bid, a preposterous idea that would undermine the temporary speaker every day that Jordan worked to sit in his chair.Maybe Jordan realized it was preposterous, too. By the afternoon, he was back to offering himself for a third House vote on the speakership.I’m grateful for the stand of a few stalwart Republicans. But their small number is one reason I remain profoundly concerned. We’ve watched pressure campaigns work on the right for eight long years, until the people who continue to resist dwindled to an ever-smaller minority — a minority strong enough to help block the worst excesses of the MAGA G.O.P. but far too weak to cleanse the Republican Party of its profound moral rot.The battle over the next speaker is yet another proxy fight for the soul of the American right, and the fact that a man like Jim Jordan has come so close to such extraordinary power is proof that the rot runs deep. Only a very small minority of elected Republicans have passed the test. Signs of courage remain, but as long as men like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump run the G.O.P., the bullies still reign. More

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      Supreme Court Delays Efforts to Redraw Louisiana Voting Map

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      The Louisiana dispute is one of several voting rights cases churning through the courts that challenge a state’s congressional map.The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a lower-court ruling that delays an effort to redraw Louisiana’s congressional map, prolonging a bitter clash over the representation of Black voters in the state.The order temporarily leaves in place a Republican-drawn map that a federal judge had said diluted the power of Black voters while an appeal moves through the lower courts.Civil rights groups had sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court abruptly canceled a scheduled hearing aimed at drafting a new map for Louisiana. That map was to include two districts in which Black voters represent a large enough share of the population to have the opportunity to select a candidate. The appeals court said that the state legislature should have more time to redraw its own map before a lower court stepped in.The Supreme Court’s order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications, and there were no public dissents.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a brief concurring opinion, emphasized that Louisiana should resolve the dispute in time for the 2024 election.In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, the plaintiffs had argued that delays in the case could complicate efforts to instate a new map by the next election, leaving the state with a version that lumps Black voters from different parts of the state into one voting district, diluting their power.By the time the Supreme Court issued its order on Thursday, a hearing date had passed. Another has been set for February.The consolidated cases, Galmon v. Ardoin and Robinson v. Ardoin, are part of a larger fight over redistricting. State lawmakers in the South have contested orders to refashion congressional maps and establish additional districts to bolster Black representation. The outcomes could help tilt control of the House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.Weeks earlier, the court refused a similar request by Alabama, which had asked the justices to reinstate a map with only one majority-Black district. A lower court had found that Republican lawmakers blatantly disregarded its order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”At issue in Louisiana is a voting map passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in the winter of 2022. The map carved the state into six districts, with only one majority-Black district, which joined Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the state’s two largest cities. About a third of the population in the state is Black.The case has reached the Supreme Court before.A coalition that included the N.A.A.C.P. Louisiana State Conference, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and Louisiana voters sued state officials and said the map unfairly weakened the power of Black voters.A district court, siding with the plaintiffs, temporarily blocked Louisiana from using its map in any upcoming elections. A new map, it said, should include an additional district where Black voters could choose a representative. The court gave the Legislature until June 20, 2022, to sign off on a redrawn map.Louisiana immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and a three-judge panel unanimously denied the request. The state then asked the Supreme Court to intervene.The Supreme Court paused the case until it ruled in the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, which concerned similar questions. That essentially allowed the Republican-drawn map in Louisiana to go into effect during the 2022 election.The court lifted the pause in June after a majority of the justices, in a surprise decision, found Alabama’s map had unfairly undercut the power of Black voters. The justices said the appeals court should review the case before the 2024 elections. More

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      Biden’s Aid, and Pointed Advice, to Israel

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      More from our inbox:How to Unify, and Save, the CountrySadly, CBC Ends a Time-Honored TraditionOver-the-Counter MedicinesPresident Biden was greeted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his arrival in Israel on Wednesday.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Backs Israel, as Cause of Blast Remains Disputed” and “Biden Urges Caution in War on Hamas” (front page, Oct. 19):President Biden offers good advice that one hopes will be heard by all: Do not let shock, pain and rage lead to counterproductive decisions, decisions that cause unnecessary loss of innocent life and squander the world’s sympathy.Palestinians and Israelis have each been failed by their leaders. Palestinians and Israelis have each suffered unspeakable harm.We pray that Palestinians and Israelis and their respective leaders and all of the people who empathize with them will remember that in the midst of righteous anger, ill-conceived actions can make matters much, much worse for everyone.Ron BoyerEugene, Ore.To the Editor:As an American Jew, I am horrified by President Biden’s response to Hamas’s horrific murder of Israelis on Oct. 7. By providing military aid to Israel, the U.S. government is fueling the Israeli government’s vastly disproportionate response, in which it has already killed more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians were killed by Hamas.Mr. Biden may have urged the Israeli people not to be consumed by the rage they feel about the Hamas terror attacks, but that statement is completely contradicted by his sending the very weapons that the Israeli military is using to kill civilians.The U.S. can stop this immoral violence, but instead is fanning the flames by providing support for the autocratic Israeli government. I am joined by many other American Jews in condemning the Israeli government’s killing of thousands and threatening millions of innocent lives in the name of the Jewish people.Miriam ShakowNarberth, Pa.To the Editor:In this time of unbelievable misery and loss, it may be naïve to talk about international law. But some of the participants in the current fighting in Israel (and their allies) have represented that they are trying to respect the laws of war. Since many observers may not be familiar with those laws, I write simply to report two indisputable principles.First, the same rules of conduct apply to the “aggressor” and to its victims. “They started it” is no excuse for doing things that would otherwise be illegal.Second, the fact that the overall objective is permissible (like self-defense) or even laudatory does not excuse using methods that result in disproportionate harm to civilians.Applying these principles, it is a violation of the laws of war to knowingly cut off food, water, fuel and medical supplies to entire trapped localities. The harm would fall disproportionately on civilians who have even less access to whatever supplies exist than those in authority. It cannot be justified.Lea BrilmayerBranford, Conn.The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Yale University.To the Editor:As an American Israeli living in Israel with a son in the Israel Defense Forces, I feel that I must speak out.It was uplifting for Israelis to hear President Biden’s remarks after the attacks on Oct. 7. Israelis everywhere felt encouraged by the president’s unequivocal support, and the unambiguous message that the events of Oct. 7 constituted “pure, unadulterated evil” — because they truly did.It is clear to Israelis that in carrying out these atrocities, Hamas was seeking to draw Israel into precisely the actions that Israel is now engaged in. The justification for those actions could be debated endlessly, but the world must know that Israel considers itself in existential peril. And in our hour of trial, we derive incredible strength from American support.The objective of Israel’s war with Hamas is not the suffering of Gazans or Palestinians but the crippling of a murderous terrorist organization that has caused unprecedented suffering for Israelis and Palestinians alike.David GilmoreHolon, IsraelHow to Unify, and Save, the Country Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:These are unprecedented times. Democracy, national security and the world order are at stake. Our nation has never been so divided.While our young experiment in democracy faces a challenge to its very existence, our world faces heightened conflict from dangerous leaders who present existential threats, and our planet faces increased temperature extremes, violent destructive storms and devastating wildfires.Considering all that is at stake, our nation must find its way to tamp down the noise from the extreme sides of both parties, the disinformation promulgated by partisan media and the contempt for others fueled by social media.I propose a unique approach to ensure the continued success of our republic. As much as I respect and admire Vice President Kamala Harris, I would ask that for the greater good of our nation and the world, she step aside as President Biden selects a moderate Republican (such as Larry Hogan, the former Maryland governor) as his 2024 running mate.Not only would this virtually guarantee his re-election, but it would also be a giant step in uniting the country.Bradley S. FeuerWellington, Fla.Sadly, CBC Ends a Time-Honored TraditionThe “long dash,” as the CBC’s daily announcement of the official time was known to generations of Canadians, was broadcast for the final time on Oct. 9.Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “After 84 Years, Time Abruptly Runs Out on Canadian Radio Tradition” (news article, Oct. 18):CBC’s dropping of its 84-year tradition of announcing the precise time at 1 p.m. day in and day out may seem like a trivial matter in the current world environment. But find me a Canadian who cannot finish the sentence “The beginning of the long dash …” (for the non-Canadian readers: “indicates exactly 1 o’clock Eastern Standard Time”).It’s as common as eight months of winter and hockey, and always saying “I’m sorry.”It was enough of a collective jolt when the middle of the announcement (“following 10 seconds of silence”) was abandoned. We grew up counting down that 10 seconds of radio silence while at the ready to instantly adjust our watches if necessary. And now we are completely on our own.Go easy on us, world, if the lone Canadian invited to the party is now always early or late. We’re sorry.Mary E. CampbellOttawaOver-the-Counter Medicines Jackson GibbsTo the Editor:Re “We’ve Known for 20 Years This Cold Medicine Doesn’t Work,” by Randy C. Hatton and Leslie Hendeles (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 1):Nonprescription, over-the-counter (O.T.C.) medicines are a cornerstone of our nation’s health care system, yet your essay draws sweeping conclusions and disregards decades of regulatory oversight, scientific review, and real-world evidence supporting their safety and efficacy.Phenylephrine, the only O.T.C. oral decongestant available without purchase restrictions, has decades of use as a safe and effective option for temporary nasal congestion relief. The Food and Drug Administration has twice determined phenylephrine to be “generally recognized as safe and effective,” the regulatory standard for O.T.C. medicines.However, the authors’ assessment discounts this history, and other evidence, while elevating their own limited research. No medicine works equally for everyone, and every medicine has unique considerations for therapeutic selection. Providing Americans with options that offer freedom of choice for personal health care needs is a core attribute of our health care system.Consumers can have confidence in their O.T.C. medicines, and the regulatory framework that oversees them.Scott MelvilleWashingtonThe writer is president and C.E.O. of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association. More

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      Biden’s Response to Israel-Hamas War Meets Centrist Praise and Liberal Anger

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      A prime-time address to the nation on Thursday will be the president’s third major speech on the Mideast conflict as his Democratic coalition strains over his handling of the violence.When President Biden delivers a prime-time Oval Office address on Thursday about the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it will be his third major speech on the Mideast conflict as he grapples with a fragile Democratic coalition that is closely watching how he handles the outbreak of violence.In his remarks last week and again on Wednesday in Tel Aviv, Mr. Biden sought to put no daylight between the United States and Israel — though in his second speech, he warned the Israelis not to “be consumed” by their rage about the Hamas attack this month that killed more than 1,400 people. He pleaded with the Israelis not to overreact, as he said the United States did after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.The centrist Democrats who make up the core of Mr. Biden’s political base were nearly unanimous in their praise.“I am grateful to have @POTUS thoughtful leadership in this moment,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri wrote on social media. “As we continue working save the lives of hostages and hold Hamas accountable, I encourage him to continue using his platform to call for restraint and the protection of innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike.”Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Mr. Biden “speaks for me and speaks for all of America” on Israel. And Richard Haass, the former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, called the Wednesday speech “nothing less than masterful.”And while Biden campaign officials insist they aren’t planning to use the Israel trip as campaign fodder, Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts forecast what could become the sort of contrast the president’s aides and allies make with former President Donald J. Trump should he win the Republican presidential nomination.“Joe Biden flew into a war zone to stand with Israel,” Mr. Auchincloss said late Wednesday. “Trump wouldn’t even visit a cemetery of American war dead.” (Mr. Trump, in 2018, canceled a planned trip to a French cemetery, and his aides cited the rainy weather.)Liberal Democrats who have been critical of how Mr. Biden has tethered the White House to Israel as the Israelis carry out attacks on the Gaza Strip focused their attention Wednesday on amplifying attention on antiwar demonstrators who marched around the Capitol and renewed their calls for a cease-fire.“We cannot bomb our way to peace,” wrote Representative Cori Bush of Missouri. “We need a cease-fire,” said Representative André Carson of Indiana. And several left-wing members of Congress reposted a message from Pope Francis in which he called the situation in Gaza “desperate” and pleaded that “the weapons be silenced; let the cry for peace be heard from the poor, from the people, from the children!”Some used especially heated language: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, speaking outside the Capitol, said, “We are literally watching people commit genocide and killing a vast majority, just like this, and we still stand by and say nothing.”Some Democrats began attacking their party colleagues who are skeptical of the Israeli war effort. Representative Jerry Nadler of New York condemned the organization behind the Capitol protest, and Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida told Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota that “you have been training your outrage on the wrong party” after Ms. Omar reiterated her call for Mr. Biden to seek a cease-fire.Progressive activists circulated a video of Dilawar Syed, a deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration, being booed while speaking at a vigil for Wadea Al-Fayoume, the 6-year-old Palestinian boy from the Chicago suburbs who was killed in what prosecutors said was an attack motivated by hate for Muslims amid the fighting in Israel and Gaza.Another meme circulating on left-wing social media showed a stylized Mr. Biden behind the wheel of a convertible with the caption “Genocidin’ with Biden.”And Josh Paul, a career State Department official, announced his resignation because of the Biden administration’s “blind support for one side,” which he said was leading to policy decisions that were “shortsighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values we publicly espouse.” More

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      Book Review: ‘Romney,’ by McKay Coppins

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      ROMNEY: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins“For most of his life, he has nursed a morbid fascination with his own death, suspecting that it might assert itself one day suddenly and violently.” One doesn’t expect these opening words from an authorized biography of a handsome, wealthy, happily married and instinctively moderate man, but this is how McKay Coppins’s “Romney” begins. Perhaps Mitt Romney fears his severance from so many blessings, but as Coppins’s revealing new book demonstrates, this businessman-politician has often wondered if he deserved such an abundance of good fortune at all.Coppins conducted 45 interviews with Romney over two years and had access to hundreds of pages in private journals that the now 76-year-old senator has kept since 2011. “Romney” presents a man given to cycles of rationalization and guilt, to sometimes near-O.C.D. levels of repetitive thinking and self-recrimination. The biographer pronounces his “defining trait” to be a “meld of moral obligation and personal hubris.”Romney has, in fact, had two brushes with sudden death, the first in a terrible automobile accident in 1968 when he was a 21-year-old Mormon missionary in France. The second came a half-century later on a January afternoon in the besieged Senate chamber of the U.S. Capitol, to which the better angels of Romney’s conscience had led him after a long up-and-down political life.His father, George, was a progressive Republican governor of Michigan in the 1960s, marching with civil rights activists even as his own church banned Black members from the priesthood. His 1968 run for the presidency collapsed after he referred to the military cheerleading for the Vietnam War as “brainwashing.”Mitt grew up with predictable comforts but nothing like a sense of direction until, during his Mormon mission, sick with diarrhea, he knocked on doors in the French port city of Le Havre that might as well have been brick walls. It eventually “struck him with the force of something divine” that, however futile they seemed, his sacrifices were accepted by God.Once back home he was on his way, along a path both faithful and lucrative, into the expanding worlds of business consulting and private equity in the 1970s and ’80s. Straining to make time for both his church and the five sons he and his wife were raising in suburban Boston, Romney achieved big success at Bain Capital, the investment firm he helped found that guided the office-supply chain Staples toward explosive growth and cut jobs at Ampad, one of the stationery manufacturers that stocked Staples’ shelves.Romney was moving fast, and Coppins himself is a bit headlong in the book’s early going, which includes Romney’s ill-fated 1994 Senate run against Ted Kennedy. Romney’s later repair of Utah’s shambolic preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics propelled him to a single term as governor of Massachusetts, during which he enacted the health-insurance plan that came to be seen as a state-level precursor of Obamacare. The governor was logical and naïve enough to believe that the program’s success might get him the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But after running into Iowans’ suspicions of Mormonism, he limped toward an early withdrawal from the race.Four years later, he somehow succeeded with Republican primary voters newly jazzed by tea-partying and birtherism and not particularly craving a candidate who had to spend time convincing them that Romneycare was actually quite different from Obamacare. To overcome Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and the two Ricks (Perry and Santorum), Romney needed to dial his rationalization settings high enough to endure mad conversation with the conservative provocateur Glenn Beck.Securing the nomination proved only a prelude to what Coppins, with some justice, calls “one of the pettiest, most forgettable presidential elections in modern history” — no matter that it’s been all downhill since then. Romney was demagogued by Vice President Joe Biden, who told Black voters in one audience that the Republican candidate hoped to “put y’all back in chains,” and mocked by Obama for having observed that Russia would be our most dangerous long-term adversary. But he lost the election mostly on his own, with a gaffe worse than his father’s old brainwashing one: Romney was caught on tape dissing the “47 percent” of voters “dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.”Few moments of that year’s campaign will be more cringe-inducing to a reader than Romney’s acceptance of Donald Trump’s endorsement, in Las Vegas, for the Republican nomination. Throughout Coppins’s narrative Trump, the supposed billionaire, morphs from comic relief into devouring nemesis. As late as May 2012, Romney was confiding this description of Trump to his journal: “No veneer, the real deal. Got to love him. Makes me laugh and makes me feel good, both.” Four years later, having come to his senses, Romney refused Trump his own endorsement, earning the candidate’s fury.Romney also sent a blistering email to Chris Christie after the New Jersey governor came out for Trump: “He is unquestionably mentally unstable, and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic, xenophobic.” Even so, after Trump’s victory, thinking he could perhaps be a force for restraint, Romney allowed himself to be humiliated by Trump’s prolonged public dangling of the secretary of state job.It took two more years for him to arrive at his finest — and final — hours in politics. In 2018, as a handful of anti-Trump Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake left Congress, Romney jumped in. His becoming a freshman senator from Utah was made possible by his own humility and the Mormon state’s temperamental aversion to the president’s personality, which had helped depress Trump’s 2016 margin of victory in the state.Setting up shop in a lousy basement office, Romney abandoned his plan “to fight Trumpism while ignoring Trump,” at last realizing he had to face the man head-on. While should-have-known-better Republican colleagues waffled (Ben Sasse) or submissively swooned (Lindsey Graham), Romney kept his head above the fetid waters, eventually developing a particular contempt for J.D. Vance, the once anti-Trump hillbilly elegist who reached the Senate via what Romney’s father might have called self-brainwashing. Resistance to Trump’s election-fraud claims left Romney to be jeered by fellow passengers on a flight from Salt Lake City to Washington on Jan. 5, 2021. Even before his vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment, private security for his large family was costing him $5,000 a day.“Romney: A Reckoning” is in many ways a straightforward biography, but it has the intimacy of a small subgenre of political confessions: One remembers Monica Crowley’s “Nixon Off the Record” (1996) and Thomas M. DeFrank’s “Write It When I’m Gone” (2007), a collection of opinions that Gerald Ford wanted to make public, though not too soon.Romney has not waited until he’s dead to unleash his candor and surrender his journals, but he has announced his retirement from electoral politics, on the sensible grounds that it is already too geriatric an arena. Even so, a second Senate term was hardly guaranteed to him. Whatever remains of Mormon distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and meanness, 2024 will be a meaner year than 2018; in a poll taken in the spring, more than half of Utah’s Republicans did not want Romney to run again.Coppins, a fellow Mormon, is generally as polite as his subject, though the characterization of Romney’s “late-in-life attempt at political repentance” seems a bit stark. As this able book shows, Romney almost certainly has less to repent of than the average politician. Indeed, one believes Coppins when he says that “watching Trump complete his conquest of the G.O.P. was even more devastating to Romney than losing his own election in 2012.”The depicted “reckoning” is actually lifelong and, more important, something that has always been made from within. Romney’s moral vitality, for all its fitfulness and ambivalence, has kept him a free man. Only a morally dead one, whose self-worth comes entirely from without, will find that stone walls do indeed a prison make.ROMNEY: A Reckoning | By McKay Coppins | 403 pp. | Scribner | $32.50 More

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      Republicans Use Israel Attack to Stoke Fears About U.S.-Mexico Border

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      G.O.P. lawmakers and candidates regularly invoke record-high border crossings to address a range of issues, including crime and jobs.Crime in American cities. The national opioid crisis. Election integrity. And now a terror attack considered the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history.Not long after Hamas terrorists killed and kidnapped hundreds of Israelis this month, a wave of Republicans — on the presidential campaign trail, in state and congressional races and in the far-right corners of conservative media — reached for a familiar playbook: tying the issue to the nation’s southern border.“What happened to Israel could happen to America because our country has been invaded by millions of people from over 160 different countries,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said on Fox News more than 24 hours after the attack.“We know that there’s an open border, and I know that the biggest national security threat is if those terrorists come into America, and we have another 9/11,” Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador under former President Donald J. Trump, told reporters last week in Concord, N.H.“You cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border,” Mr. Trump said on Monday, a baseless claim that was met with applause at a campaign event in Clive, Iowa, a Des Moines suburb.While Republicans are otherwise reckoning with deep divisions, the remarkable unity on this front underscores the degree to which the 2,000-mile dividing line between the United States and Mexico remains a potent political symbol for the party. Since Mr. Trump paved his way to power on a nativist and hard-line approach to immigration, Republicans have invoked fortifying the border to address nearly every issue, in increasingly militant terms and often exaggerating the facts.There are some indications that message is resonating. A national NBC News poll taken in September suggests that voters overwhelming trust Republicans over Democrats when it comes to handling the economy and crime — as well as immigration — heading into the 2024 election.Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and a former adviser to Senator Marco Rubio, said the aggressive turns toward the border could be particularly effective now as the Biden administration grapples with two very real humanitarian crises: record numbers of migrants trying to cross the border and a fight against fentanyl that has become an urgent public health problem.“The border is something that concerns a majority of Americans, especially when you can tie it to problems they see in their own neighborhoods,” he said.After Donald J. Trump won the presidency on a hard-line approach to immigration, Republicans have tied border policies to countless other issues.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHomeland Security officials have said they have found no specific or credible threat to the United States tied to Hamas. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, responded to Republicans in part by saying there is “strict national security vetting to determine whether individuals coming from anywhere in the world have ties to terrorist organizations.” Immigration experts said that the government cannot screen people who enter undetected but that the large numbers of migrants turning themselves in at the border are subjected to screening processes.Since the southern border was drawn, American politicians have sought to wring political advantage by tapping into xenophobic fears, at times aimed at Chinese laborers, or young German men believed to be spies, or Jews and Catholics, historians and political analysts said.Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a government professor at George Mason University in Virginia and who tracked the rise of the Mexican criminal organization Los Zetas, said the latest Republican rhetoric took cues from three distinct moments in U.S. history: the migration of Mexican laborers who became the economic engine of the Southwest, the government’s war on drugs that began in the 1970s, and the 9/11 terror attack and the so-called war on terror. All resulted in an increased military presence at the border, the building of physical barriers and an expansion of the U.S. deportation system.Ms. Correa-Cabrera said that, much like now, those earliest border enforcement measures were mostly based on political arguments, not data that migrants increased crime or posed a greater threat to public safety. Many studies have shown this is not the case. “It had to do with prejudice,” she said.Attempts by politicians to link Mideast terror groups and Mexican criminal organizations have at times gained traction over the past two decades, but no substantial evidence has surfaced to support the claim, counterterrorism and insurgency experts said. The two kinds of groups have vastly different objectives and operate in cultural and economic borderland regions that do not share remotely similar dynamics.With apprehensions at the southern border up overall, U.S. officials this year have recorded an increase in apprehensions of people whose identities match those on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list — 160 migrants in the 2023 fiscal year as of July, up from 100 the fiscal year before, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Such rolls constitute a small fraction of the millions of people seeking to cross the southern border and do not significantly measure the terror threat against the United States, terrorism and insurgency experts said. The uptick may be owing in part to the broad nature of the lists, they added, ensnaring people wanted for terrorist activities against their home countries but not aimed at the United States, as well as relatives or associates not accused of wrongdoing. Although experts do not completely rule out the threat of a terror attack launched from the southern border, they described it as unlikely.If Mideast terror organizations ever did plan an attack, “the northern border may even be more vulnerable,” said Bruce Hoffman, professor and director of the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University who specializes in terrorism studies. And such a plot would not necessarily be connected to illegal immigration, he added.The 9/11 hijackers entered the United States on tourist, business and student visas. The last man to physically cross the border with materials for an explosive — Ahmed Ressam — was arrested in 1999 after he came in from Canada.Still, the southern border remains a powerful symbol, for politicians and voters. When Mr. Trump adopted his “America First” slogan during his 2016 presidential campaign, he used it to harness grievance, xenophobia and fears about threats from abroad, economic competition from China on trade, and the potential economic and social consequences of increases in new immigrants.On Monday, Mr. Trump, under fire for his criticism of Israel and for calling Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist organization, “very smart,” invoked the deadly Hamas attacks on the Jewish state to stoke fears of terrorism at home. Returning to some of his most inflammatory themes on illegal immigration, he also took aim at legal pathways by pledging to reinstitute the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries and expand the freeze on refugees he enacted during his presidency.“We aren’t bringing anyone from Gaza,” he said at his rally in Clive.Mr. Trump is not alone. Republican candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida often steer conversations with voters back to immigration. At a town hall in Iowa in August, when he was asked two questions in quick succession on unrelated issues, Mr. DeSantis managed to hit on the border. On the issue of eminent domain, he said he would support it “for the border wall down south.” Asked about the war in Ukraine, he said that as president, his “first obligation” would be “to protect the American people and to protect our border.”In mailers, television ads and remarks, Republicans in state and congressional races regularly fault border enforcement. They cast blame on Mexican criminal organizations and undocumented immigrants for the fentanyl crisis — but not the American pharmaceutical companies that fueled the legal market for the drugs or the U.S. citizens who law enforcement officials say typically bring the harder narcotics across the border. They have claimed without basis that unauthorized immigrants are gaining access to the ballot box, while claims that widespread numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting have been consistently discredited.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene quickly invoked the U.S.-Mexico border after the attack in Israel.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesHistorians and political analysts warned that much of the heated language on immigration plays into far right and sometimes explicitly racist tropes that fuel fear with the potential for violence.Two white supremacist shooting suspects in the last five years, Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh and Patrick Crusius in El Paso, Texas, cited “invaders” and a “Hispanic invasion” in the lead-up to their crimes.On Saturday, the authorities in suburban Chicago said, Joseph Czuba, 71, fatally stabbed a 6-year-old boy and seriously wounded the child’s mother because of their Palestinian background. Officials tied the attack to what Mr. Czuba was hearing on conservative talk radio about the fighting overseas.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      How the G.O.P. Speaker Mess Has Divided N.Y. House Republicans

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      In the fight over Representative Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker, moderate Republicans are racing to outrun the chaos their party unleashed.If there is one thing Representative Mike Lawler of New York wants his constituents to know these days, it is that his political party is an absolute mess.“Stuck on stupid,” he branded a band of hard-right Republicans who pulled Congress to the brink of a government shutdown. He said their ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy “undermined the will of the American people.” As for the fight over a replacement that has ground the House to a halt for two weeks and counting?“This is the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen politically, in terms of self-sabotage,” Mr. Lawler said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, just minutes after he joined 21 other Republicans and every Democrat to torpedo Representative Jim Jordan, a hard-right Ohioan, the latest candidate for speaker.His mounting frustration, voiced in interviews with reporters in the Capitol and on networks like CNN that are typically reviled on the right, is not merely an unusual display of bluntness. It is a risky gambit by one of the House’s most endangered Republicans to insulate himself from his own party as it careens, leaderless, toward another possible shutdown.Mr. Lawler’s outspokenness is perhaps the most glaring example of the balancing acts that anxious frontline Republicans are trying to pull off across the country — acrobatics that could determine the trajectory of the House this fall and beyond.The stakes are especially clear in New York, where Mr. Lawler and five fellow Republicans almost single-handedly helped deliver their party’s narrow House majority by flipping suburban districts from Long Island to the Hudson Valley.In almost every case, they won on hostile turf last year by assembling fragile coalitions comprising traditional conservatives and centrist Democrats attracted by the promise of a moderate counterbalance in Washington. Now, a push started by a small band of far-right agitators and a potential Jordan speakership threaten to shred those bonds and jeopardize Republicans’ standing with crucial swing voters ahead of 2024.Representatives Nick LaLota, left, and Anthony D’Esposito, who both represent Long Island districts won by President Biden, joined Mr. Lawler in voting against Mr. Jordan.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesNow, as they face intense pressure from their left and right flanks, a group of New York moderate Republicans that has mostly navigated key decisions as a bloc has increasingly begun to splinter, with four bucking their party and voting against Mr. Jordan.Representatives Anthony D’Esposito and Nick LaLota, who both represent Long Island districts won by President Biden, joined Mr. Lawler in voting against Mr. Jordan and have condemned those who took out Mr. McCarthy. So did Andrew Garbarino, another Long Islander who represents a district that Mr. Biden lost narrowly.All three voted for Lee Zeldin, their former colleague and onetime Republican candidate for governor in New York, even though Mr. Zeldin is no longer in office. They also issued near-identical statements outlining bipartisan priorities that they believed would falter under Mr. Jordan, the leader of the party’s rebellious right wing who has long been labeled a “legislative terrorist.”“I want a speaker who understands Long Island’s unique needs,” said Mr. D’Esposito, who represents a district where voters favored Mr. Biden by 14 points in 2020. He listed support for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack and lifting a cap on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted on taxpayers’ federal return.But Representative Marc Molinaro, a moderate who narrowly flipped a Biden district in the Hudson Valley on promises of bipartisanship, appeared to have reached a very different conclusion: that the damage of elongating the House’s paralysis would be worse than electing a right-wing speaker whose policies and style could scarcely be more different than his.“Most of people I represent wouldn’t know the speaker of the House if they backed over them with a pickup truck,” he said before voting for Mr. Jordan.Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican from the Syracuse area who voted for Mr. Jordan, has evidently chosen not to give voice to the issue at all.As for Representative George Santos’s concerns, they appear to be far more personal. Under federal indictment on 23 counts and with virtually no path to re-election, he is facing a push by his fellow New York Republicans to expel him from Congress. Whoever emerges as the next speaker will be likely to determine how quickly such a vote takes place.“We need to rally behind one man, and that man has largely now been identified as Jim Jordan,” he said on Monday in a video posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.Republican lawmakers caution that there is still time to put the House back in order, and moderates appeared to be coalescing late Wednesday around trying to empower a respected House veteran, Patrick T. McHenry, to serve as a temporary speaker until Congress can reach a deal to fund the government and address the war breaking out in Israel and Gaza.Some moderates want Representative Patrick McHenry to serve as temporary speaker.Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesBut many fear damage is already being done. Democrats have deployed aggressive tactics to try to lock in the dysfunction with potential voters, as they eye the handful of seats they need to retake the House next year.The House Majority PAC, House Democrats’ primary super PAC, placed thousands of robocalls in Mr. Lawler’s district on Monday asking voters to pressure him not to support Mr. Jordan for speaker, given Mr. Jordan’s vote to overturn the 2020 election and “an extreme agenda to ban abortion nationwide.”Mr. Lawler did not vote for Mr. Jordan; Democrats hit him anyway. “Mike Lawler is an unserious legislator whose wasted vote today is blocking critical work getting done on behalf of Lower Hudson Valley families,” Ellie Dougherty, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an email blast.She issued similar quotes about Mr. D’Esposito and Mr. LaLota, while writing in another that Mr. Molinaro’s vote proved that he “embraces the far-right wing of his party.”At the same time, though, Republicans pushing too hard against their own party run the risk of sharp backlash from a right flank enamored of Mr. Jordan and eager to jump-start the House’s presidential impeachment inquiry and to fund new weapons for Israel’s battle against Hamas. In Mr. Lawler’s case, they played a key role in helping him topple Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic campaign committee at the time, in one of the nation’s biggest upsets.Jack Chatham, a conservative talk radio host based in Albany, said on air on Tuesday that Mr. Lawler was “tempting fate,” particularly given the large number of retired law enforcement officers in his district, by opposing Mr. Jordan.Mr. Lawler, 37, said he could not get behind Mr. Jordan’s brand of politics and believed House Republicans — including their speaker candidate — had yet to reach a consensus that would allow them to govern.“So far this year, you have a group of people who have sought to undermine the majority, vote against the rules, vote against the speaker, move to vacate the speaker,” Mr. Lawler said. “That has been a challenge, and it hasn’t really been addressed.”He insisted Democrats, who refused to rescue Mr. McCarthy, should also share some blame politically. “Obviously, the longer this drags on, the worse it is,” added Mr. Lawler, a former political operative.For now, though, there are signs voters are cutting him some slack. Al Samuels, the head of the nonpartisan chamber of commerce in Rockland County, said Mr. Lawler needs to “protect how he is viewed” amid a national “embarrassment.”“I’m an old guy,” he said. “I believe in centrism and I believe we’re at our best as a nation when we reject the extremes, either right or left.” More

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      Trump Endorses Gov. Jim Justice in West Virginia Senate Race

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      The endorsement is a blow to the governor’s rival for the Republican nomination as the Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III, weighs whether to seek re-election.Former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia for senator, in a race that is widely viewed as a prime pickup opportunity as Republicans seek to reclaim control of the Senate.Mr. Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday evening, praised Mr. Justice’s stances on issues including the southern border, energy policy and the economy. “Big Jim will be a Great UNITED STATES SENATOR, and has my Complete & Total Endorsement. HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!!!” Mr. Trump wrote.The endorsement was a blow to Representative Alex Mooney, another Republican running for the seat, whom Mr. Trump endorsed in his congressional race last year.Mr. Justice, a popular two-term governor, announced his bid in April for the seat held by Senator Joe Manchin III, who is seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats facing re-election in 2024 as Democrats hold the chamber by a tight 51-49 margin. Mr. Trump won West Virginia in the 2020 election by nearly 40 percentage points.Mr. Manchin has not yet announced if he will seek re-election, and the race is marked as a tossup by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.Shortly after the endorsement, Mr. Justice shared a screenshot of the Truth Social post on X, formerly known as Twitter, along with a fund-raising link, writing: “I’m endorsed by @realDonaldTrump. I’m the only American First Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in West Virginia.”As Mr. Trump mounts his presidential bid, he has made few endorsements in the 2024 election cycle — a departure from the 2022 midterm cycle, when he endorsed several losing candidates in important swing states.In addition to supporting Mr. Justice, he has endorsed Kari Lake — who unsuccessfully ran for governor of Arizona with his endorsement last year — in her race for the seat held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema. More