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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      Biden to Appeal to Black Voters in Campaign Trip to Charleston, S.C.

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      The president will visit Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of one of the most horrific hate crimes of recent years, to decry racism and extremism.President Biden plans to reach out to disaffected Black supporters on Monday by taking his campaign to the site of one of the most horrific hate crimes of recent years and decrying the racism and extremism that have shaped U.S. politics.Mr. Biden will fly from Wilmington, Del., where he spent the weekend at his family home, to Charleston, S.C., to address parishioners and other guests at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where a white supremacist gunman killed the pastor and eight others in 2015.The visit will be the second part of the president’s two-stage opening campaign swing of the election year after a speech near Valley Forge, Pa., on Friday. There he condemned his likely Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, on the eve of the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. By appearing at Mother Emanuel, as the church is known, the president hopes to remind a key voting bloc of the significance of the November election.In a statement on Sunday, the Biden campaign called the church “a venue that embodies the stakes for the nation at this moment.” After the massacre in 2015, Mr. Biden, then the vice president, joined President Barack Obama in Charleston at the funeral of the pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, where Mr. Obama delivered a eulogy and sang “Amazing Grace.” Mr. Biden, then mourning his son Beau, who had died of cancer weeks earlier, returned a couple days later to pray with the congregation at the church.Mr. Biden has often attributed his decision to run for president in 2020 to Mr. Trump’s racial provocations, particularly when Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But Mr. Biden has lost support among Black supporters who could be critical to his hopes for beating Mr. Trump in a rematch this year.Twenty-two percent of Black voters in six battleground states told pollsters from The New York Times and Siena College last fall that they would vote for Mr. Trump, while the president was drawing 71 percent. Such support indicates a surge for Mr. Trump, who won 6 percent of Black voters nationally in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020.Black Democrats in South Carolina helped save Mr. Biden’s flagging campaign for the party’s nomination in 2020 after weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. The president has since orchestrated South Carolina’s ascendance as the first primary state for 2024. To shore up support, Democrats have flooded the state in recent weeks with money, staff and surrogates before the Feb. 3 primary.After his appearance in Charleston on Monday, Mr. Biden is scheduled to fly to Dallas for a wake for former Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a pioneering Black member of Congress for three decades who died at 89 last week. More

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      Donald Trump Is Connecting With a Different Type of Evangelical Voter

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      They are not just the churchgoing, conservative activists who once dominated the G.O.P.Karen Johnson went to her Lutheran church so regularly as a child that she won a perfect attendance award. As an adult, she taught Sunday school. But these days, Ms. Johnson, a 67-year-old counter attendant at a slot-machine parlor, no longer goes to church.She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. “I have my own little thing with the Lord,” she says.Ms. Johnson’s thing includes frequent prayer, she said, as well as podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics and “what’s going on in the world” from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview. No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.“Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Ms. Johnson said recently as she waited outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear the former president speak.Karen Johnson went to church regularly as a child and taught Sunday school as an adult, but, despite identifying as an evangelical Christian, she does not attend church anymore.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWhite evangelical Christian voters have lined up behind Republican candidates for decades, driving conservative cultural issues into the heart of the party’s politics and making nominees and presidents of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Liz Cheney Implores Republicans to Reject Trump

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      She endorsed efforts to remove him from the ballot and said, “Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation.”In a flurry of appearances and commentary, former Representative Liz Cheney has stepped up her denunciations of former President Donald J. Trump in a last-ditch effort to persuade Republicans not to nominate him again.“Tell the world who we are with your vote. Tell them that we are a good and a great nation,” Ms. Cheney told primary voters in New Hampshire on Friday, in a speech at Dartmouth College’s Democracy Summit. “Show the world that we will defeat the plague of cowardice sweeping through the Republican Party.”A day later, she blasted Mr. Trump’s suggestion on the campaign trail that the Civil War could have been prevented if President Abraham Lincoln had “negotiated.”“Which part of the Civil War ‘could have been negotiated’? The slavery part? The secession part? Whether Lincoln should have preserved the Union?” she wrote on X. “Question for members of the G.O.P. — the party of Lincoln — who have endorsed Donald Trump: How can you possibly defend this?”And in an interview on Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS News, she denounced Mr. Trump’s attempts to end or delay his criminal trials by arguing that he had immunity against charges related to anything he did in office. She endorsed efforts to remove him from ballots under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.“I certainly believe that Donald Trump’s behavior rose to that level,” she said, referring to Section 3’s disqualification of people who engaged in insurrection against the Constitution after taking an oath to support it. (She made a similar comment at Dartmouth, saying, “There’s no question in my mind that his actions clearly constituted an offense that is within the language of the 14th Amendment.”)“I think that there’s no basis for an assertion that the president of the United States is completely immune from criminal prosecution for acts in office,” she added of Mr. Trump’s appeals on that front. “He’s trying to delay his trial because he doesn’t want people to see the witnesses who will testify against him,” she continued.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said on Sunday: “Liz Cheney is a loser who is now lying in order to sell a book that either belongs in the discount bargain bin in the fiction section of the bookstore or should be repurposed as toilet paper.”Ms. Cheney turned against Mr. Trump in response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. As a member of the House, she was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him and one of two who served on the committee that investigated the attack. She lost her Republican primary overwhelmingly in 2022.Of all the states holding early primaries and caucuses, New Hampshire — where Ms. Cheney spoke on Friday — is the most fertile ground for Trump opponents, thanks to its voters’ moderate tendencies and the fact that independents can vote in the Republican race. Mr. Trump leads his nearest challenger there, Nikki Haley, by about 13 percentage points — a large margin, but substantially smaller than the roughly 30 points by which he leads Ron DeSantis in Iowa and Ms. Haley in South Carolina.Voting will begin in just one week, when Iowa Republicans hold their caucuses on Jan. 15. The New Hampshire primary comes next, on Jan. 23, followed by Nevada and South Carolina in February.Ms. Cheney told the audience at Dartmouth that her own plans depended on whether Republican voters heeded her call.As she has done on several occasions, she left open the possibility of running as a third-party candidate if they nominate Mr. Trump. But at the same time, she indicated a preference for President Biden over Mr. Trump, saying that while she disagreed with Mr. Biden on policy matters, “Our nation can survive and recover from policy mistakes. We cannot recover from a president willing to torch the Constitution.”“I’m going to do whatever the most effective thing is to ensure that Donald Trump is not elected,” she added. “I’ll make a decision about what that is in the coming months as we see what happens in the Republican primaries.”A spokesman for Ms. Cheney did not respond to a message asking whether she planned to make an endorsement in the primaries. More

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      Trump Doesn’t Actually Speak for the Silent Majority

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      I can’t fit everything that I think into a single piece, especially when I’m writing on deadline. My column this week, for example, was on the effort to disqualify Trump from the 2024 ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Although the piece is not exactly brief, it’s by no means exhaustive of my thoughts on the matter.There was one point in particular that I couldn’t quite fit into the flow. It concerns an assumption that, in my view, undergirds much of the discourse around Trump and his voters.It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More