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      Trump’s Trial Dates Collide With His 2024 Campaign Calendar

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      The Republican front-runner is facing a growing tangle of criminal and civil trials that will overlap with next year’s presidential primaries.As former President Donald J. Trump campaigns for the White House while multiple criminal prosecutions against him play out, at least one thing is clear: Under the laws of physics, he cannot be in two places at once.Generally, criminal defendants must be present in the courtroom during their trials. Not only will that force Mr. Trump to step away from the campaign trail, possibly for weeks at a time, but the judges overseeing his trials must also jostle for position in sequencing dates. The collision course is raising extraordinary — and unprecedented — questions about the logistical, legal and political challenges of various trials unfolding against the backdrop of a presidential campaign.“The courts will have to decide how to balance the public interest in having expeditious trials against Trump’s interest and the public interest in his being able to campaign so that the democratic process works,” said Bruce Green, a Fordham University professor and former prosecutor. “That’s a type of complexity that courts have never had to deal with before.”More broadly, the complications make plain another reality: Mr. Trump’s troubles are entangling the campaign with the courts to a degree the nation has never experienced before and raising tensions around the ideal of keeping the justice system separate from politics.Mr. Trump and his allies have signaled that they intend to try to turn his overlapping legal woes into a referendum on the criminal justice system, by seeking to cast it as a politically weaponized tool of Democrats.Already, Mr. Trump is facing a state trial on civil fraud accusations in New York in October. Another trial on whether he defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll is set to open on Jan. 15 — the same day as the Iowa caucuses. On Jan. 29, a trial begins in yet another lawsuit, this one accusing Mr. Trump, his company and three of his children of using the family name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.Because those cases are civil, Mr. Trump could choose not to attend the trials, just as he shunned an earlier lawsuit by Ms. Carroll, in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.But he will not have that option in a criminal case on charges in New York that he falsified business records as part of covering up a sex scandal shortly before the 2016 election. The opening date for that trial, which will most likely last several weeks, is in late March, about three weeks after Super Tuesday, when over a dozen states vote on March 5.Jack Smith, the special counsel leading two federal investigations into Mr. Trump, has asked the judge overseeing the indictment in the criminal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents to set a trial date for late 2023.But on Tuesday — the same day Mr. Trump disclosed that federal prosecutors may charge him in the investigation into the events that culminated in the Capitol riot — his defense lawyers argued to Judge Aileen M. Cannon that she ought to put off any trial in the documents case until after the 2024 election. The intense publicity of the campaign calendar, they said, would impair his rights.Mr. Trump has long pursued a strategy of delay in legal matters, seeking to run out the clock. If he can push his federal trial — or trials, if he is ultimately indicted in the Jan. 6 inquiry — beyond the 2024 election, it is possible that he or another Republican would win the presidency and order the Justice Department to drop the cases.A president lacks the authority to quash state cases, but even if Mr. Trump were to be convicted, any inevitable appeals would most likely still be pending by Inauguration Day in 2025. If he is back in office by then, the Justice Department could also raise constitutional challenges to try to defer any additional legal proceedings, like a prison sentence, while he is the sitting president.In making the case for delaying the trial until after the election, Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers contended on Tuesday that Mr. Trump was effectively squaring off in court against his 2024 rival, President Biden.“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the primaries, of course, but right now, he’s the leading candidate,” said Todd Blanche, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers. “And if all things go as we expect, the person he is running against — his administration is prosecuting him.”But David Harbach, a prosector on Mr. Smith’s team, said Mr. Trump was “no different from any other busy important person who has been indicted.” He called the claim of political influence “flat-out false,” seemingly more intended for “the court of public opinion” than a court of law.“The attorney general appointed the special counsel to remove this investigation from political influence, and there has been none — none,” he said.Judge Cannon, who has not yet made a decision about the eventual trial date, indicated that in considering delay, she believed the focus should be not on the campaign but on legal issues, like the volume and complexity of classified evidence.Setting a trial date for the documents case is the first and most basic logistical issue. But the possibility of indictments from two inquiries into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election, the federal investigation led by Mr. Smith and a state investigation overseen by Fani T. Willis, a district attorney in Georgia who has signaled that charges could come in August, may soon bump up against that.There is no overriding authority that acts as an air traffic controller when multiple judges are deciding dates that could conflict. Nor are there rules that give federal or state cases precedence or that say that any case that was charged first should go to trial first.Brandon L. Van Grack, a former prosecutor who worked on the Russia investigation led by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, pointed to that inquiry as an example. Prosecutors brought charges against Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in two jurisdictions, first in the District of Columbia and then in the Eastern District of Virginia, but the trials took place in reverse order.“There was sensitivity to hearing dates, and it was incumbent on counsel to educate both judges on the scheduling and conflicts, but there wasn’t a rule that said the District of Columbia matter was charged first and therefore went to trial first,” he said. “It’s judicial discretion.”As an informal practice, Mr. Green said that judges overseeing potentially conflicting matters sometimes call each other and work out a calendar. No procedural rule authorizes such conversations, he said, but it is considered appropriate.Looming over Mr. Trump’s legal peril is an unwritten Justice Department norm known as the 60-day rule. As a primary or general election nears, prosecutors should not take overt actions that could improperly influence voting.It is not clear, however, how that principle applies to matters that are already public and so less likely to alter a candidate’s image. Notably, Raymond Hulser, a veteran prosecutor who has been consulted for years about how to apply the 60-day rule, is a member of Mr. Smith’s team.Further complicating matters, Mr. Trump has hired some of the same defense lawyers to handle multiple investigations against him, leaving them stretched for time.Christopher Kise, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, cited the former president’s crowded legal calendar at the hearing on Tuesday. Not only did Mr. Kise indicate that he would need to prepare for the fraud-related trials in October and January, but he also pointed to Mr. Blanche’s role in the criminal trial in March involving falsified business records in New York.“So these are the same lawyers dealing with the same client trying to prepare for the same sort of exercises, and so I think that’s highly relevant,” Mr. Kise said.Several legal experts said that while people have a Sixth Amendment right to choose their legal representation, it is not absolute. They noted that judges could tell defendants that, if their chosen lawyers are too busy to take on additional matters in a timely manner, they must hire others.Such an order would give Mr. Trump something more to complain about to an appeals court, said Professor Green, who added, “I think it’s probably a losing argument.”Alan Feuer More

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      How Serious is No Labels?

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      GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — “I’m not afraid of losing,” Senator Joe Manchin said, with some real charm and conviction, on Monday night.He offered this in the middle of a substantive point, about honesty and political strength, but in a weird venue: the first town hall put on by No Labels, the longstanding centrist group now threatening to run a third-party presidential ticket if Joe Biden and Donald Trump are nominated. To think about losing, and not being afraid to lose, at this event went to the thing people fear about No Labels right now.The idea behind the town hall itself was to draw attention to the group’s policy agenda, titled “Common Sense.” Those words were visible at least 26 times on No Labels backdrops and placards around the room at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. Staff members wore “Common Sense” T-shirts and handed out “Common Sense” hats and “Common Sense” booklets. Inside those booklets, prospective voters find proposals on entitlements, a vow to keep artificial intelligence research rolling, some interesting ideas about changing the way credit scores work and centrist platitudes on immigration and abortion. The idea is: On this we agree.At the actual event, though, in response to a woman’s question about climate change, Mr. Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, and John Huntsman, a Republican former governor of Utah, ended up disagreeing about carbon pricing. (Mr. Huntsman brought it up, then Mr. Manchin volunteered that he’s always been against it.) Whether No Labels is for or against carbon pricing was seemingly never resolved at the event, even though it’s exactly the kind of thing two No Labels-types would agree on during a panel in Aspen or Davos. Faced with the minor disproof of concept, the event’s moderator asked the pair, “If there is a Republican and a Democrat who are in the White House, together, how would that work?”“It would work a helluva lot better than what we have today,” Mr. Huntsman cracked to laughter and so forth from the crowd. The moderator tried again: How would this actually work?“Nobody knows because we’ve never tried it,” Mr. Huntsman replied, which produced a slight hitch in the crowd, since people’s tolerance for the unknown has probably decreased over the past decade. “Well, they tried it in 1864,” Mr. Manchin, added, which produced an uneasier noise in the crowd.People talk about this thing as if it must be a dark-money plot to tip the election Donald Trump’s way. But while No Labels says it will proceed only if it thinks the unity ticket could actually win, the compelling, magnetic quality of this effort is its opaqueness. It’s really not clear what exactly No Labels is doing or why.At times, the entire enterprise seems more like an attractive market opportunity (the opportunity made possible by our national unhappiness) — like seeing a spike in electric vehicle production and buying up mineral rights to mine lithium. But even then, it’s not clear who in the No Labels universe believes what: Is threatening to run a third-party candidate a leverage thing? Against whom? Do they think that the right unity ticket could reach the ephemeral threshold of belief where enough voters think they could win to make the ticket viable?No Labels won’t say yet who’s funding it, or who its candidates will be or which party will take the presidential slot. There will be a convention, in April in Dallas, with delegates, but who are the delegates going to be? One of the Maine voters who accidentally switched their party registration to No Labels? The group rarely if ever seems to mention the circumstance where setting up the logistically challenging mechanisms for a backup candidate would make sense: for instance, if Mr. Biden withdrew late from the presidential race. If Mr. Biden weren’t president, he might even be the hypothetical candidate that Joe Lieberman, a No Labels co-chair — also present in New Hampshire — would be calling for.At least one No Labels board member has quit over the likelihood that the group could help re-elect Mr. Trump. At least one local chapter says it isn’t interested in the idea of a third-party run. On the anniversary of D-Day, Third Way (a different centrist group) convened a wide array of figures, including former Obama campaign advisers and former senators such as Heidi Heitkamp, to meet about how to stop No Labels. Dick Gephardt, a former House majority leader, is planning to establish a different group to stop No Labels.Since its beginning more than a decade ago, No Labels has taken on a dislocated, strange quality. Nine years ago, Mr. Manchin actually quit when the group endorsed Republican Cory Gardner (who is no longer in the Senate) against Democrat Mark Udall (also no longer in the Senate). In 2015, two of the three senators who were members of the group’s Problem Solvers Caucus were Republican Kelly Ayotte (who lost in 2016) and Democrat Bill Nelson (who lost in 2018). People tend to become “bipartisan problem solvers” in districts and states that routinely flip back and forth between parties. For a long time, No Labels members have been disappearing, or about to disappear or reappearing after a loss in this way.But it’s not just impermanence — there’s always been a kind of detachment from reality, too. No Labels is dedicated to bipartisanship and working together, leaning on the ways staying in Washington for decades creates the kind of personal, fruitful relationships better able to solve problems. Zoom out, though, and the entire life span of No Labels coincides with a period defined by how much voters hate Washington.In our time of No Labels, politics has taken such an apocalyptic, nihilistic turn that a mob tried to ransack the Capitol while we were midway through a once-a-century pandemic. It’s hard to believe sometimes that when robots can think and it’s 120 degrees in Arizona, No Labels is throwing out PoliSci seminar ideas about rejiggering how speakers of the House are chosen. The “Common Sense” booklet mentions, in a section on how expensive health care is, how Congress hasn’t tackled tort reform. Whose fault was that?No Labels’s dissociation from the problems it identifies comes through in weirder, more absurd, more hostile ways at times. At the event this week, a reporter asked Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, whether he’d endorse a No Labels candidate, to which he immediately replied, “I’m a Republican!” while what sounded like Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” played over the loudspeakers.In May, when a Problem Solvers Caucus member, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, said he wasn’t into this idea of a third-party ticket, No Labels sent this insane text to voters: “We were alarmed to learn that your U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider recently attacked the notion that you should have more choices in the 2024 presidential election.”On Monday night, when the moderator asked about the widely shared concern that No Labels would throw the election in Mr. Trump’s direction, Mr. Huntsman said this was “the latest talking point” and then actually compared No Labels critics to Russian and Chinese authoritarians. “So if you live in a place like China or Russia — and I’ve lived in both, running both U.S. embassies — they don’t allow any choice,” he said. “There’s no participation. They’re complete, pure authoritarian systems. So when I start hearing people here say, ‘That’s not a good thing. You shouldn’t do things to expand and enhance our participation in the system. It might result in A, B or C losing,’ I say, ‘I’ve heard that before — but not in this country.’”Alongside the group’s strangeness, there’s also been an earnestness that in the end, people still want the kinds of things they wanted before, in the 1990s and 2000s in particular. No Labels is this last refuge, a resting place inside and outside the two parties and a half-finished Washington dreamscape. In New Hampshire, the Manchin-Huntsman event drew a crowd that on the surface looked like a Republican event of 20 years ago — collared shirts in shades of blue. That kind of voter, in New Hampshire or suburban Atlanta or Colorado, can feel the Republican Party falling away from them in real time.And the country can feel like it’s in fading, chaotic straits more often than anyone would like. Voters do not want what they seem likely to get in a Biden-Trump rematch. This fact is the firm but vibrating floor beneath the No Labels project and the panic it has produced — the recognition that we’re approaching a 2024 election that will make American voters unhappy. But how unhappy? Unhappy enough to resume voting for protest candidates? Unhappy enough to vote for a mystery unity ticket, only on the principle of their unhappiness?I don’t know that the electoral effects of No Labels are as clear as people say. It’s possible that running Mr. Manchin and Larry Hogan, a former governor of Maryland, would peel off those old-school suburban Republicans who voted for Mr. Biden, or that those voters might be the ones who would otherwise stay home or return to the Republican fold, or that few people would risk a third-party vote anyway. What is real, though, in a deep and human way, is that plenty of people fear a second Trump term and are dissatisfied with how life is in America. And No Labels is here to take advantage of that sadness with a half-finished idea.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden Attacks Trump and MAGA but Avoids Indictment Talk

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      The president has taken swipes at Republicans, including a video playfully featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene as a narrator, but he and his allies are avoiding one target: his predecessor’s legal woes.For months, President Biden has appeared to delight in needling Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, trying at every turn to make MAGA and ultra-MAGA a shorthand for the entire party.This week, Mr. Biden cheekily highlighted a video in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia derisively ticks through his first-term accomplishments and likens him — not positively — to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I approve this message,” the president commented on the video, which was viewed more than 43 million times in 24 hours.Mr. Biden recently did a victory lap when Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama promoted local spending in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which Mr. Tuberville had voted against.And his campaign took a shot at Mr. Trump for not visiting Wisconsin during his current presidential bid, accusing him of a “failure to deliver on his promised American manufacturing boom.”But when it comes to the topic dominating the presidential race this week, Mr. Biden and his top allies are treating Mr. Trump’s legal troubles like Voldemort — avoiding, at all costs, any mention of the indictments that must not be named.This moment comes after weeks of polling, both public and private, that suggests Mr. Trump, who is comfortably the front-runner in the Republican primary race, would be a weaker general-election opponent next year than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida or other G.O.P. candidates.The White House and the Biden campaign have not sent explicit instructions to surrogates and supporters telling them to steer clear of Mr. Trump’s legal issues, but plenty of those on Team Biden have gotten the message loud and clear: Don’t talk about the Trump indictments.“The American people want the judicial process to play out without interference from politicians,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “President Biden has his pulse on the sentiments of the American public by talking about what matters to them.”Mr. Biden has said he won’t comment on investigations into and charges against Mr. Trump — a reflection of his clear desire not to be seen as intruding on Justice Department independence, as well as the political imperative of deflecting Republicans’ relentless, evidence-free accusations that he is the hidden hand behind the prosecutions.The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have repeatedly declined to comment or answer questions about Mr. Trump’s indictments. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has dodged numerous questions about Mr. Trump’s legal travails in recent weeks.“I’m just not going to respond to any hypotheticals that’s currently, you know, out there in the world,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said Tuesday after Mr. Trump revealed he had received a so-called target letter from federal investigators, a sign that he could soon be indicted in the investigation into the events that culminated in the Capitol riot. “Just not going to comment from here.”The Biden world’s approach to Mr. Trump’s indictments echoes how Democrats handled Mr. Trump, then the president, during the 2018 midterm elections.Scores of resistance-fueled Democrats ran for and won House seats by focusing on health care policy without placing Mr. Trump at the center of their campaigns. They didn’t have to talk Trump then, the thinking went, because voters had already made up their minds about him.“He is omnipresent and the voters who are motivated to vote against him and his party already know what they need to know,” said Meredith Kelly, a strategist who worked for the House Democrats’ campaign arm in 2018. “This allowed congressional candidates to talk about real kitchen-table issues impacting families and continues to be the case this cycle as he looms large over the battlefield in 2024.”There’s also little question that polling shows Mr. Biden is stronger against Mr. Trump than Mr. DeSantis or others, giving the president little incentive to do anything to hurt Mr. Trump’s standing among Republican primary voters.A Michigan poll conducted last week by a Republican-leaning polling firm found Mr. Biden up by a percentage point against Mr. Trump but down by two to Mr. DeSantis. The same firm’s poll of Nevada showed Mr. Biden up by four against Mr. Trump and trailing Mr. DeSantis by two. And in Wisconsin, a poll last month from Marquette University Law School found Mr. Biden with a nine-point lead over Mr. Trump but a two-point lead over Mr. DeSantis.According to the Marquette pollster, Charles Franklin, both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis hold support from hard-core Republicans in a matchup against Mr. Biden, but among Republican-leaning independents, Mr. Trump’s support drops while Mr. DeSantis’s does not.The public polling aligns with the White House’s own polling of battleground states.One person who is more than happy to amplify discussions about the investigations and indictments is Mr. Trump himself. It was the former president, of course, who revealed that he had received the target letter.“Crooked Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department to go after his top political opponent, President Trump, who is the overwhelming front-runner to take back the White House,” said Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman. “Biden wants to meddle in the election because he knows he stands no chance against President Trump.”Mr. Biden’s campaign on Wednesday referred to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene as an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe Biden campaign’s video of Ms. Greene served to tweak and elevate one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest far-right supporters and promote Mr. Biden’s own record without getting into the legal cases against Mr. Trump. Polling conducted for the White House last year found that Ms. Greene was known and disliked by a large portion of voters and that independent voters associated her with Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement.Mr. Biden’s campaign referred to her on Wednesday as an “unintentional campaign” spokeswoman.“Joe Biden had the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs that is actually finishing what F.D.R. started, that L.B.J. expanded on, and Joe Biden is attempting to complete,” Ms. Greene said at the Turning Point Action conference over the weekend, in the video clipped by the Biden campaign.The result is a crisp 35-second video, distributed on Mr. Biden’s Twitter feed with the introduction, “I approve this message.”The clip was similar to the moment last month when Mr. Biden highlighted unusual and unexpected support from another Trump-centric Republican, Senator Tuberville, who praised spending in Alabama from the infrastructure law, which Mr. Biden signed and the senator had voted against.In that instance, Mr. Biden played up Mr. Tuberville’s support during a Chicago speech, theatrically drawing the sign of the cross on his chest as if the senator had undergone a political conversion.The president has previously sought to draw attention to Ms. Greene, who is already a leading social media and fund-raising star in the Republican Party. During a speech this month in South Carolina, he said that he would soon make a visit to her northwest Georgia district to celebrate the beginning of construction of a solar power manufacturing plant there.The crowd laughed. Mr. Biden has not yet scheduled a trip to the groundbreaking. More

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      Are We Doomed to Witness the Trump-Biden Rematch Nobody Wants?

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      Have you met anyone truly excited about Joe Biden running for re-election? And by that, I mean downright Obama-circa-2008 energized — brimming with enthusiasm about what four more years of Biden would bring to our body politic, our economy, our national mood, our culture?Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a quiet “Yay!”? And no, we’re not counting the guy who sounds like he’s performing elaborate mental dance moves to persuade himself nor anyone who is paid to say so. According to a recent report in The Times, Biden’s fund-raising thus far doesn’t exactly reveal a groundswell of grass roots excitement.Instead, most Democrats seem to view what looks like an inexorable rematch between Biden and Donald Trump with a sense of impending doom. My personal metaphor comes from Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia,” in which a rogue planet makes its way through space toward an inevitable collision with Earth. In that film, the looming disaster symbolized the all-encompassing nature of depression; here, the feel is more dispiritedness and terror, as if we’re barreling toward either certain catastrophe or possibly-not-a-catastrophe. Or it’s barreling toward us.A Biden-Trump rematch would mean a choice between two candidates who, for very different reasons, don’t seem 100 percent there or necessarily likely to be there — physically, mentally and/or not in prison — for the duration of another four-year term.To take, momentarily, a slightly more optimistic view, here is the best case for Biden: His presidency has thus far meant a re-establishment of norms, a return to government function and the restoration of long-held international alliances. He has presided over a slow-churning economy that has turned roughly in his favor. He’s been decent.But really, wasn’t the bar for all these things set abysmally low during the Trump administration (if we can even use that word given its relentless mismanagement)? We continue to have a deeply divided Congress and electorate, a good chunk of which is still maniacally in Trump’s corner. American faith in institutions continues to erode, not helped by Biden’s mutter about the Supreme Court’s most recent term, “This is not a normal court.” The 2020 protests led to few meaningfully changed policies favoring the poor or disempowered.A Biden-Trump rematch feels like a concession, as if we couldn’t do any better or have given up trying. It wasn’t as though there was huge passion for Biden the first time around. The 2020 election should have been much more of a blowout victory for Democrats. Yet compared with his election in 2016, Trump in 2020 made inroads with nearly every major demographic group, including Blacks, Latinos and women, except for white men. The sentiment most Democrats seemed to muster in Biden’s favor while he was running was that he was inoffensive. The animating sentiment once he scraped by into office was relief.This time, we don’t even have the luxury of relief. In the two other branches of government, Democrats have been shown the perils of holding people in positions of power for too long — Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the judiciary and Dianne Feinstein in the legislature. Democrats and the media seem to have become more vocal in pointing out the hazards of Biden’s advancing age. In an April poll, of the 70 percent of Americans who said Biden shouldn’t run again, 69 percent said it’s because of his old age.That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel. Several weeks ago, he appeared to actually wander off a set on MSNBC after figuratively wandering through 20 minutes of the host Nicolle Wallace’s gentle questions. In another recent interview, with Fareed Zakaria, when asked specific questions about U.S.-China policy, Biden waded into a muddle of vague bromides and personal anecdotes about his travels as vice president with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. When asked point blank whether it’s time for him to step aside, Biden said, almost tangentially, “I just want to finish the job.”But what if he can’t? Kamala Harris, briefly a promising figure during the previous primary season, has proved lackluster at best in office. Like Biden, she seems at perpetual war with words, grasping to articulate whatever loose thought might be struggling to get out. The thought of her in the Oval Office is far from encouraging.One clear sign of America’s deepening hopelessness is the weird welcoming of loony-tune candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr., who has polled as high as a disturbing 20 percent among Democratic voters. Among never-Trumpian Republicans, there is an unseemly enthusiasm for bridge troll Chris Christie, despite his early capitulation to Trump, for the sole reason that among Republican primary candidates, he’s the one who most vociferously denounces his former leader. And a Washington nonprofit, No Labels, is gearing up for a third-party run with a platform that threatens to leach support from a Democratic candidate who is saddled with a favorable rating of a limp 41 percent.Trump, of course, remains the formidable threat underlying our malaise. Though he blundered into office in 2016 without a whit of past experience or the faintest clue about the future, this time he and his team of madmen are far better equipped to inflict their agenda. As a recent editorial in The Economist put it, “a professional corps of America First populists are dedicating themselves to ensuring that Trump Two will be disciplined and focused on getting things done.” The idea that Trump — and worse, a competent Trump — might win a second term makes our passive embrace of Biden even more nerve-racking. Will we look back and have only ourselves to blame?It is hard to imagine Democrats, or most Americans, eager to relive any aspect of the annus horribilis that was 2020. Yet it’s as if we’re collectively paralyzed, less complacent than utterly bewildered, waiting for “something” to happen — say, a health crisis or an arrest or a supernatural event — before 2024. While we wait, we lurch ever closer to something of a historical re-enactment, our actual history hanging perilously in the balance.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Joe Manchin Has a Lot of Explaining to Do

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      Senator Joe Manchin, behave.Perhaps you’ve heard the rumor that Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who made his name by driving his party crazy on close votes, is now possibly running for president. Sort of.“If I get in a race, I’m going to win,” he predicted at an appearance in New Hampshire this week. “With that being said, I haven’t made a decision.”A crowd had packed the auditorium, straining to hear his every word. Really. A lot of them were undoubtedly drawn not so much by the promise of thrilling rhetoric as by rumors Manchin might announce he was going to be a third-party candidate in 2024.Didn’t happen. Although Manchin was certainly dropping hints. He appeared onstage with Jon Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah. The hosts included Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2000. In order to stay on topic, we’ll refrain from digressing into a description of how Lieberman contributed to Al Gore’s very narrow defeat with a stupendously bad debate performance against … Dick Cheney.Lieberman is now one of the public faces of No Labels, a new would-be political party that’s all about being, um, against political parties. No Labels is busy qualifying for the presidential ballot in as many states as possible, and people are wondering if the party’s honchos are planning a Manchin-Huntsman ticket.“Most Americans still believe in the American promise … the political parties have not delivered,” Manchin said. Frankly, that was about as exciting as his New Hampshire moment got.So, OK, Manchin is not a hot orator. He wants you to think of him as a bipartisan voice of moderation, although most of his national fame comes from his willingness to demand favors in return for his vote on the Senate floor. Of course, there are approximately 100 senators who attempt to make deals like that, but Manchin is sort of special in the way he goes after major bills with very big, very public proposed trades. For a while, he put the brakes on Joe Biden’s biggest achievement, the Inflation Reduction Act, withholding his critical tiebreaking vote until he got an energy deal on the side.Now he’s threatened to vote with Republicans to repeal that whole package unless Biden cuts back on support for electric vehicles. When it comes to energy, Manchin really wants us to think coal. After all, he’s from West Virginia, which has become seriously Republican, and he could be up for a very tough re-election race next year.Pop quiz: Manchin not only represents a state that’s big for coal, he built his own considerable fortune on a very profitable coal business. What do you think was key to his success?A. A long history of getting up at dawn to go work in the mines.B. A Ph.D. thesis on energy efficiency.C. Trading political favors for business advantages.I know I’m supposed to tell you the answer here, but if you couldn’t figure it out, there’s really no point in our going on together.Manchin’s current political talents are all about working within the system, even when he’s threatening to take the system down. Does he really believe he could win election to the highest-profile political office on the globe?You’d like to think no — it’s always kind of depressing when politicians have a self-image totally out of sync with reality. (Recalling your career again here, Joe Lieberman.)But even if the whole effort was hopeless, as a third-party candidate Manchin would get a heck of a lot of attention. And running a losing campaign for president would certainly be a lot more exciting than running a losing campaign for re-election to the Senate.According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, 47 percent of registered voters would consider voting for a third-party candidate. That’s a huge number, although most of them would presumably change their minds when it actually came time to make a choice. They’re just expressing their dissatisfaction. Still, given the nutty way our electoral system is set up, a well-publicized third option might affect the results just enough in a few crucial states to change the outcome. The winner of a presidential race, remember, does not have to be the person who got the most votes. Just ask Hillary Clinton.That spoiler scenario is what’s driving Democrats crazy.If Manchin just wants to campaign and complain about his big issues, like deficit spending, why doesn’t he run in a Democratic primary? Could it possibly be because taking on the party’s sitting president would be so completely, obviously hopeless it’d just make him seem delusional? The biggest Democratic complaint about Joe Biden, after all, is the fact that he’s 80. Is that going to send voters racing over to 75-year-old Joe Manchin?Not gonna work. So he’s playing into the hands of Lieberman and the No Labels crowd instead. There he was at their event, dripping with both-sides-ism, claiming the current miserable state of American politics is coming from “the growing divide in our political parties and the toxic political rhetoric from our elected leaders.”Let’s stop here for a second and contemplate whether one particular party is actually responsible for this toxicity explosion.But either way, there are only three possible ways to fight it.A. Choose a party and work within it to nominate good candidates.B. Refuse to vote while whining about how terrible the choices are.C. Rally around a third party and feel quite principled, while helping to draw votes away from the candidate who’s the best real option.Yeah, Manchin seems to be flirting with C. Which could lead to Donald Trump’s return to the White House. And give the senator from West Virginia a label I can’t mention in a family newspaper.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Potential Trump Jan. 6 Charges Include a Civil Rights Law Violation

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      A target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies.A Justice Department spokesman declined to discuss the target letter and Mr. Smith’s theory for bringing the Section 241 statute into the Jan. 6 investigation. But the modern usage of the law raised the possibility that Mr. Trump, who baselessly declared the election he lost to have been rigged, could face prosecution on accusations of trying to rig the election himself.A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.“It seems like under 241 there’s at least a right to an honest counting of the votes,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “Submitting an alternate electoral certificate to Congress (as opposed to casting false votes or counting wrong) is a novel scenario, but it seems like it would violate this right.”The prospect of charging Mr. Trump under the other two statutes cited in the target letter is less novel, if not without hurdles. Among other things, in its final report last year, the House committee that investigated the events that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol had recommended that the Justice Department charge the former president under both of them.One, Section 371 of Title 18, makes it a crime to conspire to defraud the United States. The other, Section 1512, includes a provision that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding.A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined requests to clarify what was in the letter.Citing the statutes in the letter, which Mr. Trump has said he received on Sunday, does not necessarily mean that any charges brought by Mr. Smith would have to be based on them. But the letter’s contents provide a road map to investigators’ thinking.The conspiracy to defraud the United States statute, if used, raises the question of who Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators would be.Some of those who worked most closely with Mr. Trump in promoting the lie that Mr. Trump had been robbed of a victory by widespread fraud, including lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman, had not received target letters, their lawyers said on Tuesday.The corrupt obstruction of a proceeding charge has been used against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters and has served as the Justice Department’s go-to count in describing the central event that day: the disruption of the Electoral College certification process that was taking place inside the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.The law was originally passed as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a measure meant to curb corporate malfeasance. Defense lawyers for several rioters have challenged its use against their client, saying it was meant to stop crimes like witness tampering or document destruction and had been unfairly stretched to include the chaos at the Capitol.But in April, a federal appeals court upheld the viability of applying that charge to participants in the Capitol attack. Still, unlike ordinary rioters, Mr. Trump did not physically participate in the storming of the Capitol, although he had summoned supporters to Washington that day and railed about the unwillingness of Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the proceedings in Congress, to stop them.A second attempt to invalidate the obstruction count in the federal appeals court in Washington has focused specifically on a provision of the law dictating that defendants must act “corruptly” in committing the obstructive act.Defense lawyers have argued that this provision does not apply to many ordinary Jan. 6 rioters who did not act corruptly because they stood to gain nothing personally by entering the Capitol. It could, however, be applied more easily to Mr. Trump, who stood to gain an election victory by obstructing the certification process.William K. Rashbaum More

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      Chris Sununu Won’t Run for Re-Election as Governor of New Hampshire

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      The decision by Mr. Sununu, a moderate Republican, sets up a competitive race next year to lead a battleground state, and Democrats will be eager to take advantage.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican, said on Wednesday that he would not run for re-election in 2024, opening up a seat in a battleground state that Democrats will be eager to take.Mr. Sununu made the announcement in an email to supporters.“This was no easy decision as I truly love serving as governor,” he wrote. “Public service should never be a career, and the time is right for another Republican to lead our great state.”Almost immediately, Chuck Morse, a Republican who served as president of the New Hampshire Senate and lost a primary for U.S. Senate last year, announced that he would run for the Republican nomination to fill the seat — praising Mr. Sununu’s economic policies and saying he was running “to build on those successes.” Another Republican, former Senator Kelly Ayotte, also hinted that she might jump into the race.Two Democrats — Cinde Warmington, a member of the New Hampshire Executive Council, and Joyce Craig, the mayor of Manchester — had already begun campaigns before Mr. Sununu bowed out.The vacancy will be a big opportunity for the Democratic Party, which has won the last five presidential elections in New Hampshire and holds both of the state’s Senate seats.Like some other Northeastern states, New Hampshire has often voted for Republicans for state offices despite leaning blue in national elections. But Democrats flipped two such governorships last year — in Maryland and Massachusetts — after popular, moderate Republicans in the same mold as Mr. Sununu retired.“No matter which MAGA candidate becomes the nominee, the D.G.A. is eager to hold them accountable to flip this seat and elect a new Democratic governor who will at long last fix the biggest issues impacting working families,” the Democratic Governors Association said in a statement.Mr. Sununu, 48, is serving his fourth two-year term as governor, having been re-elected last year by more than 15 percentage points. He recently decided against two opportunities to run for higher office: He declined to run in last year’s Senate race, and for president in 2024. His next steps are unclear. More

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      Republicans Shrug at New Possible Trump Indictment

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      News of a possible indictment related to Jan. 6 brought a muddled response from some of Donald Trump’s 2024 rivals, and familiar attacks on President Biden from his allies in Congress.The indictments of Donald J. Trump — past and pending — are becoming the background music of the 2024 presidential campaign: always there, shaping the mood, yet not fully the focus.Like so much of the Trump presidency itself, the extraordinary has become so flattened that Mr. Trump’s warning on Tuesday that he was facing a possible third indictment this year, this time over his involvement in the events that led to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, drew shrugs from some quarters of his party and a muddled response from his rivals.At one Republican congressional fund-raising lunch on Tuesday in Washington, the news of a likely third Trump indictment went entirely unmentioned, an attendee said. Some opposing campaigns’ strategists all but ignored the development. And on Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’s allies quickly resumed their now-customary defensive positions.Two and half years ago, the deadly riot that left the nation’s seat of government defiled had threatened to forever tarnish Mr. Trump’s political legacy. His supporters had stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of his defeat, stoked by their leader who had urged them to “fight like hell.” Even long-loyal Republicans broke with him as shattered glass littered the Capitol complex.Yet today, Mr. Trump is the undisputed front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. And the threatened charges relating to Jan. 6 against Mr. Trump were instead turned into attacks on his successor by his Republican defenders on Tuesday.“We have yet again another example of Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice targeting his top political opponent, Donald Trump,” Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 4 House Republican, told reporters on Capitol Hill.When Mr. Trump and Ms. Stefanik spoke by phone on Tuesday, the former president lingered on the line as they discussed ways to use the Republican-led House committees to try to attack the investigations. Mr. Trump also spoke with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who accused the Biden administration of trying to “weaponize government to go after their No. 1 opponent.”Their comments reprised a role that Republicans in Congress played for Mr. Trump twice before when he was impeached, and twice again when he was indicted earlier this year. The first indictment came in March, by the district attorney in Manhattan in connection with hush money payments to a porn star. The second was in June, when he was indicted on charges of keeping top-secret classified documents and obstructing efforts to get them back.Republicans and Mr. Trump’s extended orbit have established a rhythm of how to respond. Yet on the campaign trail, Mr. Trump’s leading rivals continue to struggle to even articulate a response.Chief among them is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s top-polling rival. At a stop in South Carolina, Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday said that Mr. Trump “should have come out more forcefully” against the protesters who stormed the Capitol that day.But after that line was picked up by Trump surrogates to attack Mr. DeSantis, his usually forceful DeSantis War Room Twitter account was anything but warring, accusing those surrogates of taking the governor out of context. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said Mr. Trump “should have come out more forcefully” against the Jan. 6 protesters. Sean Rayford/Associated Press“I hope he doesn’t get charged,” Mr. DeSantis said of Mr. Trump in an interview broadcast later on CNN.The CNN interview was supposed to be an important moment for a candidate who had previously avoided any sit-downs that might legitimize the “corporate media” that he regularly denounces. Instead, the network interrupted its own exclusive recorded DeSantis interview with live updates from outside a courthouse in Florida on one Mr. Trump’s coming trials. The sequence seemed to capture the state of the race that Mr. Trump is dominating.Justin Clark, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign manager in 2020 and whose firm, National Public Affairs, has conducted polling of the primary race, said the challenge for his rivals is the voters themselves. Data from Mr. Clark’s firm shows that Republicans view an attack on Mr. Trump “as an attack on them,” he said.“That loyalty is not something that is easy to beat in a campaign,” he added. “His opponents see this, too, and that is why they tread very carefully. It’s hard to see how another Republican breaks out when primary voters are rallying around their most recent president and any challengers have to hold their fire.”Mr. Trump on Tuesday revealed that he had received a “target letter” from the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, who is investigating his role in the lead-up to the violence of Jan. 6.“Almost always means arrest and indictment,” Mr. Trump wrote of the target letter on Truth Social.Mr. Smith’s office already indicted Mr. Trump in federal court in June, saying he had possessed reams of national defense material and obstructed the investigation. In the coming weeks, he faces possible indictment in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state.Alyssa Farah Griffin, who had served as Mr. Trump’s communications director before resigning in late 2020 and publicly breaking with her former boss, said, “The most striking thing to me is that most of Trump’s G.O.P. opponents, who are polling double digits behind him, still will not seize this opportunity to denounce his unfit actions.”One reason is that Mr. Trump, and Republican primary voters, have so thoroughly rewritten the history of Jan. 6, 2021. The mere mention of the day is no longer an overwhelmingly clear political loser for the former president, at least in a Republican primary. Mr. Trump, two months after the attack, declared the violence a “love-fest,” and has continued to do so.Indeed, at a rally this year in Texas, Mr. Trump placed his hand on his heart and listened to the song “Justice for All” that featured his voice and those of some Jan. 6 prisoners.“I believe that history will hold him to account for his actions that day,” former Vice President Mike Pence said. Doug Mills/The New York TimesFew prominent elected officials were as directly affected on Jan. 6 as former Vice President Mike Pence. But even he declined to suggest that Mr. Trump should be prosecuted and said the election should be how the matter is arbitrated.“I believe that history will hold him to account for his actions that day,” Mr. Pence said Tuesday on NewsNation. But of an indictment, he said, “I hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m not convinced that the president acting on bad advice of a group of crank lawyers that came into the White House in the days before Jan. 6 is actually criminal.”There were some exceptions.The low-polling former governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, said in a statement that “Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again.”And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey wrote on Twitter that he wants to see the indictment itself before offering his opinion, but added that Mr. Trump’s “conduct on January 6th proves he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.”However, the details laid out in the first federal indictment against Mr. Trump — allegations that he waved material he described as secret government documents in front of people without security clearances at two of his private clubs — barely dented his support. Several Republican elected officials instinctively leaped to support him, and his poll numbers remained high or even rose.Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist in California who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential race, says he believes it will eventually all become too much freight for Mr. Trump to carry to win the nomination.“There’s been the question of electability and as these indictments pile up and details emerge, I don’t think we know yet if voters will stick with him if there appears to be viable competitive alternatives,” Mr. Stutzman said.Mr. Trump’s team has capitalized on his past indictments to raise huge sums of campaign cash. But in Iowa on Tuesday, at a town hall-style interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Mr. Trump dismissed the friendly host’s suggestion that he was able to slough off his latest legal entanglement.“No,” Mr. Trump said, “it bothers me.”Maya King More