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      In South Carolina, Biden and Harris Test Policy-Heavy Pitch to Black Voters

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      The president’s re-election campaign is looking to rekindle support among a group that was pivotal to his 2020 victory, in a state that revived his candidacy.As Democrats amplify their concerns about President Biden’s status with Black voters, South Carolina has emerged as a proving ground for his campaign: one where he can test his message to a predominantly Black electorate and use it as a largely ceremonial launchpad for his re-election.At events over the last few days, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris offered reverential, policy-heavy re-election pitches to largely Black audiences and celebrated the Black organizers and community leaders who helped deliver the White House to Democrats, starting with those in the Palmetto State.They also drew a contrast with former President Donald J. Trump and other Republican leaders, whose election denialism and efforts to “whitewash” history, they said, threaten the progress that Black Americans have spent generations fighting for.Black voters have expressed frustration with the Biden administration for falling short on key campaign promises, and have shown less enthusiasm for Mr. Biden’s re-election in polls and interviews. But in South Carolina, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris aimed to highlight the lesser-known victories their administration has notched over the last three years, and they argued that a second term would allow them to achieve even more. Black voters’ disaffection with Democrats, campaign aides and allies argue, is rooted in their lack of awareness of the White House’s accomplishments rather than in fundamental flaws with the Biden-Harris ticket.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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      For Anti-Trump Republicans, It All Might Come Down to New Hampshire

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      With the Iowa caucuses likely to be a battle for second place, the next nominating state appears to offer the best chance of an upset defeat of Donald Trump.With his usual bluntness, Chris Christie used a recent event in New Hampshire to lay out why he thought the state’s primary election was more important than the Iowa caucuses — and what he saw as its tremendous stakes.“It’s pretty clear that the caucus system is going to renominate the former president, but that’s not what happens here in New Hampshire,” Mr. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, said at a diner in Amherst, N.H. “It seems to me that the people from the Live Free or Die State would be the last people who would want to nominate someone who’s going to be a dictator.”As former President Donald J. Trump’s stranglehold on Iowa Republicans shows no sign of lessening, New Hampshire has become the most critical state for Nikki Haley, Mr. Christie and the small, increasingly desperate contingent of the Republican Party that wants to cast aside Mr. Trump.It is the only state where polling shows Ms. Haley within striking distance of the former president, and the only place where Mr. Christie has gained any sort of foothold. While Iowa’s caucuses on Monday are likely to be a slugfest for second place, New Hampshire’s primary on Jan. 23 has an outside chance of serving up an upset victory for Ms. Haley.Such an outcome would be the first sign of vulnerability for Mr. Trump and could serve as electoral rocket fuel for Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina. But a drubbing for her in New Hampshire would probably end her pitch as a viable alternative to Mr. Trump. Mr. Christie, for his part, has already said he will drop out if he does not have a strong showing there.The state has large numbers of independent-minded voters and a penchant for delivering surprises, reinvigorating the flagging bids of presidential candidates including Bill Clinton in 1992 and John McCain in 2008. Not since 1976 has a Republican contender in an open, competitive primary race won Iowa and gone on to carry New Hampshire as well.“The race will tighten in the last few weeks,” said Chris Ager, the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. “We’re one week after Iowa, so a lot of people just wait until Iowa happens. And you don’t have to decide early here,” he added, “because the candidates are going to be here.”He noted that Mr. Trump was “essentially the incumbent” in the race, but that Ms. Haley and others had strong support in the state. “You just never know what’s going to happen,” Mr. Ager said.As she tries to make the race a two-person contest, Ms. Haley has started to criticize Mr. Trump more.Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPolls in New Hampshire have offered little clarity about just how competitive the race might be. A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll released Tuesday found Mr. Trump leading Ms. Haley, 39 percent to 32 percent — but a USA Today/Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll released the same day showed him up 46 percent to 26 percent. Mr. Christie drew 12 percent support in both polls.New Hampshire’s pivotal position has resulted in a windfall of advertising dollars and a blizzard of campaigning. Nearly $55 million worth of ads has blanketed the airwaves in the past six months, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Roughly 40 percent of that has come from Ms. Haley and the super PAC backing her, SFA Fund Inc.Indeed, while Ms. Haley has recently spent most of her time in Iowa, her campaign has poured resources into New Hampshire, successfully courting two powerful new allies in the state: the popular governor, Chris Sununu, and the vast political network run by Americans for Prosperity Action, the conservative group backed by the megadonor Koch family.As she tries to make the race a two-person contest, Ms. Haley has started to criticize Mr. Trump more.“Chaos follows him,” she said last week in the coastal town of Rye. “And we can’t be a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos, because we won’t survive it. You don’t fix Democrat chaos with Republican chaos.”Americans for Prosperity Action, which says it has never before endorsed a candidate in a presidential primary race, has dispatched dozens of canvassers and spent millions on ads and mailers for Ms. Haley in the state. Greg Moore, the group’s New Hampshire state director, said he expected more than 100 staff members to fly into New Hampshire after the Iowa caucuses for an all-out blitz.Mr. Moore said that Ms. Haley’s argument about being the most electable Republican — several polls show her beating President Biden in a general election — resonated particularly in New Hampshire, which Mr. Trump lost in both the 2016 and 2020 general elections.That pitch was evident as the group fanned out across the state this week. On Monday morning, Justin Wilson, one of the organization’s grass-roots engagement directors, plodded through more than a foot of fresh snow in the upscale neighborhoods of north Manchester to knock on doors in support of Ms. Haley.One voter, who would give his name only as Kevin, paused while shoveling his driveway and explained why he was torn between Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump.“It’s about electability when it comes to the general election,” Kevin said, saying he wanted a candidate who could beat Mr. Biden. Mr. Wilson agreed, trying to nudge him toward Ms. Haley by noting that she was “less controversial” than Mr. Trump.Mr. Moore said his group’s internal polling had found that a little more than a third of the people who say they are supporting Mr. Trump are open to considering another candidate.“Particularly as we’re talking about people who are less and less engaged, in some cases they’re supporting President Trump because that’s the guy they know,” Mr. Moore said. “And it’s up to these other campaigns to build that momentum and that name ID that really helps them change voters’ minds.”Internal polling from Americans for Prosperity Action, conducted last month, found Mr. Trump with a lead of 12 percentage points over Ms. Haley and the rest of the field. But in a two-person, head-to-head matchup, the poll showed them statistically tied.Calls for Mr. Christie to drop out of the race began to intensify in December, mostly from Republicans hoping to stop Mr. Trump. On New Year’s Eve, Mr. Sununu said the Christie campaign was “at an absolute dead end” and suggested that he should drop out.Mr. Christie has defiantly rejected that idea, and has begun drawing starker contrasts with Ms. Haley. In Amherst, he criticized her for saying that she would pardon Mr. Trump if he were convicted of a crime and that she would still vote for him if he were the nominee. In Keene, he accused her of changing her stance on issues like abortion to keep her future options open.“She doesn’t want to offend people who are willing to vote for Trump, and not even that she thinks those people will vote for her this time,” Mr. Christie said. “She’s worried about next time.”Mr. Christie has held more than 60 events so far in New Hampshire, with 150 volunteers working on his long-shot effort.Mr. Christie has rejected calls to drop out of the race, and has stepped up his criticisms of Ms. Haley.Sophie Park for The New York TimesThe Trump campaign, believing that landslide victories in both Iowa and New Hampshire would essentially wrap up the nomination, has shifted to almost exclusively attacking Ms. Haley in New Hampshire.This month, the Trump campaign released an ad attacking Ms. Haley for criticizing his 2015 plan to ban immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries. (As a member of the Trump administration, she defended the policy when it was enacted.)MAGA Inc., a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, has attacked Ms. Haley over her support for raising the gas tax when she was governor of South Carolina in 2015, though she also called for a corresponding income tax cut. The group has spent more than $2.5 million on the ad, running it exclusively in New Hampshire. Another ad from the group focuses on immigration. An official from the super PAC said that, in total, it would spend $1.3 million weekly through Primary Day.The negative advertising appears to be reaching some voters. Pete McGuire, 54, drove about 30 minutes to see Mr. Christie at the diner in Amherst. He said he was actively looking for a Trump alternative and was considering Mr. Christie over Ms. Haley.“You see all these commercials about her vote for the gas tax, saying, We’re never doing the gas tax, never! And then the next one she’s saying, Let’s do the gas tax,” Mr. McGuire said. “So she kind of shot herself in the foot.”From a headquarters in downtown Manchester far larger than the Trump campaign’s 2016 operation, the former president’s team has recruited more than 200 city or town captains and gathered more than 60 endorsements in the state. On Sunday, volunteers traipsed through the snowstorm to knock on doors.At his event in Amherst, Mr. Christie nodded to what seem to be the feelings of many American voters in 2024.“If you’re looking for the perfect candidate, believe me,” he said, “you’re going to be looking forever.”Jonathan Swan More

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      A Sharp Warning About Donald Trump

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      More from our inbox:About Taylor SwiftLess Polluting TrucksUnity in Canadian Hockey Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “This Election Year Is Unlike Any Other” (editorial, Jan. 7):The editorial board deserves a monumental “thank you!” for spelling out in such detail how uniquely dangerous Donald Trump is. There was no misguided nod to both-sides-ism here. This was the full-throated condemnation of Donald Trump that the facts demand. The actions that Mr. Trump is openly pledging to carry out would create political and social disaster.Therefore, the editorial board needs to repeat this unvarnished message regularly, matching Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of his lies and provocations to violence.The editorial board must also include in future condemnations that the country cannot afford four years of climate inaction. Mr. Trump would give the fossil fuel industry a free hand and totally squander four years that are crucial to accelerate reductions in air pollution and carbon emissions, and create clean energy infrastructure across the nation.The horrendous results of a complete standstill in climate action that a Trump presidency guarantees are too horrific to imagine.Gary StewartLaguna Beach, Calif.To the Editor:Dire warnings about a second Trump term from The New York Times and other media outlets are being ignored at best and fueling the MAGA movement’s hunger to “own the libs” at worst.Many Americans are unfortunately tuned out and exhausted from politics thanks to Donald Trump’s wearing us down to a nub. The constant noise and slow-motion boil of disorder have left much of our nation cynically apathetic to the danger on the horizon.Whether this was by Mr. Trump’s design or just dumb luck is anyone’s guess. But this mix of chaos and civic ennui is his best ally.I predict that Mr. Trump will win and we all will be thrust back into the anarchy of his first term, but worse, as your paper warns.Miles KahnQueensTo the Editor:It’s time to move from opinion to action. It is not inevitable that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. We can all help to deny him the nomination by voting for whoever is polling most strongly against Mr. Trump at the time of the Republican primary.In New York, if you are not already a registered Republican, you can change your party affiliation easily.If you live elsewhere, the website PrimaryPivot has links to every state’s requirements. Some states allow any registered voter to cast a ballot in the Republican primary; others allow both Republicans and independents.We can certainly stop Mr. Trump in his tracks. Let’s do it.Helene PresskreischerNeedham, Mass.To the Editor:The no-holds-barred opinion pieces in your Jan. 7 paper — the editorial “This Election Year Is Unlike Any Other” and Maureen Dowd’s column, “Time to Conquer Hell” — acutely explicate Donald Trump’s flawed character and the potential dangers that would descend on the world if, God forbid, he is elected again to the presidency.The fact that after all the years we have endured his despicable public behavior and utterances there are still millions of Americans today who consider him appealing and fit for office, necessitating the publication of such opinion pieces, is mind-boggling and painfully demoralizing.Jim BellisKfar Vradim, IsraelAbout Taylor SwiftDuring the Eras Tour, Ms. Swift traps her past selves — including those from her “Lover” era — in glass closets.John Shearer/Getty Images for TAS Rights ManagementTo the Editor:Re “Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do,” by Anna Marks (Opinion guest essay, Jan. 7):I’m deeply disappointed with this article’s interrogation of Taylor Swift’s sexuality. Though it began with useful commentary on the evolution of L.G.B.T. rights in country music, it devolved into pointless speculation the moment it mentioned Taylor Swift. Her sexuality is no one’s business but her own — full stop.As Ms. Swift writes in the prologue to “1989 (Taylor’s Version)”: “If I only hung out with my female friends, people couldn’t sensationalize or sexualize that — right? I would learn later on that people could and people would.”Few of us would speculate so publicly about a friend’s sexuality out of respect for their privacy. I see no reason this courtesy should not be extended to celebrities, including but not limited to Taylor Swift.If Ms. Marks wants to interpret Ms. Swift’s music through a queer lens, then she should. After all, Ms. Swift’s talent lies in her ability to tell highly specific stories about her own life that we all relate to because of their universal themes. However, sharing her interpretation of Ms. Swift’s own sexuality has no intellectual value. She deserves better.Amanda WassermanNew YorkLess Polluting Trucks Jeffrey MilsteinTo the Editor:Re “Electrify All the Big, Noisy, Belching Trucks” (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Dec. 30): Andrea Marpillero-Colomina is right to emphasize the need for a national framework to reduce emissions. She is also right to highlight the impact that pollution from all sources imposes on communities like Hunts Point in the Bronx. Where she errs, however, is minimizing reasonable concerns about electric vehicle infrastructure and ignoring the significant industry progress on emissions.In New York, 90 percent of communities rely exclusively on trucks to deliver goods of all kinds, including food and medicine, the delivery of which would be delayed and more expensive without a cohesive charging infrastructure. This isn’t just an inconvenience for our nation’s truck drivers; lack of chargers and alternative fueling stations will have significant supply chain impacts, ultimately affecting consumers’ wallets.Fortunately, real progress is being made ­— and has been for some time. Since 1974, clean diesel technology has already reduced pollutants by 99 percent, and 60 trucks today equal the output of one in 1988. The trucking industry is committed to reducing the environmental impacts of moving freight and continues to invest in clean technology, including electric vehicles.In other words, big, noisy, belching trucks are already a relic of yesteryear. Americans need and deserve real plans to build on that progress — not flashy rhetoric.Kendra HemsClifton Park, N.Y.The writer is president of the Trucking Association of New York.Unity in Canadian HockeyA display outside the Vidéotron Center teaches fans about the history of the Nordiques.Renaud Philippe for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Long-Gone Hockey Team Remains Symbol of Nationalist Pride” (Quebec Dispatch, Jan. 7), about the Quebec Nordiques:I am an Anglo Canadian Torontonian with some connection to the province of Quebec. My wife is from Montreal, and we visit her family there often. I love hockey and my Toronto Maple Leafs.I loathe the Montreal Canadiens, as I do the idea of separatism and the appalling anti-English bullying and lying of the politicians who support it. But I love the province, the people, the traditions, the cities, the beautiful countryside and wild terrain.I would love to see the Nordiques back in the National Hockey League. I want to see a resurgence in French Canadian hockey. It is probably the only thing I agree with Premier François Legault of Quebec about.I see it as good for Canadian culture, not just Québécois culture. Hockey unites us as a people.Nigel SmithToronto More

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      Resistance to Trump Is Not Futile

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      The outcome of the 2016 presidential election was such a shocking event that for people of a certain cast of mind, Donald Trump is less a politician than a force of history.To this class of observer, Trump is something like the world spirit made flesh, where the “world spirit” is a global tide of reactionary populism. He may not have ushered in the furious effort to defend existing hierarchies of status and personhood, but he seems to represent its essential qualities, from the farcical incompetence that often undermines its grand intentions to the unrelenting, sometimes violent intensity that has sustained a forward march through failure back toward power.The upshot of this idea of Trump as a kind of incarnation is that resistance is futile. You can defeat him at the ballot box, you can put him at the mercy of the criminal-legal system, you can even disqualify him under the Constitution, but the spirit endures. Trump or not, goes the argument, we live in an age of grass-roots reaction. Trump is just an avatar. His followers — the forgotten, if not exactly silent, remnant of the nation’s old majority — will find another something.It is hard not to be at least a little persuaded by this assessment of the state of things, even more so if you’re inclined to the fatalism that pervades much of American life at this particular time.But let’s step back for a moment. Before we embrace this almost baroque conception of the former president, let’s take a full picture of the past eight years in American politics. Let’s grab a loupe and look at the details. What do we see? Not inexorable forces at work, but chance events and contingent choices.In other words, it is true that Trump was produced by (and took advantage of) a particular set of social forces within the Republican Party and outside it. It is true that those forces exist with or without Trump. But Trump, himself, was not inevitable.If Republican elites had coalesced around a single candidate in the early days of the 2016 presidential race, they might have derailed Trump before he had a chance to pick up steam. If Republicans had chosen, in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” videotape, to fully reject his presence in American politics, he might have flopped and floundered in the November election. If Hillary Clinton had won just a few more votes in a few more states — a combined 77,744 in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Trump would have never won the White House.It’s not that the reactionary populism that fueled Trump’s campaign would have completely dissipated. But the character of its politics might have been very different without Trump in the nation’s highest office to lead and give shape to the movement. As it stands, he had that power and stature, and there is now a reason the most MAGA-minded Republican politicians — or those with aspirations to lead Trump’s Republican Party — work tirelessly to mimic and recapitulate the former president’s cruelty, corruption and contempt for constitutional government.We saw this with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who went so far as to mimic Trump’s movements and posture, and we’re seeing it with Representative Elise Stefanik, an eager and unapologetic demagogue last seen, in a recent interview, defending Jan. 6 insurrectionists and refusing to commit to certifying a Trump election loss.If nothing else, it is difficult to imagine another Republican politician who would have inspired the same cult of personality as the one that has enveloped Trump during his years on the national stage. It’s no accident that to ensure loyalty or force compliance, followers of the former president have resorted to intimidation and death threats.If Trump is in a dynamic relationship with the social forces that produced him — if he is both product and producer — then it stands to reason that his absence from the scene, even now, would have some effect on the way those forces express themselves.Trump still leads the field for the Republican presidential nomination. But imagine if he loses. Imagine that he is, somehow, rejected by a majority of Republican voters. Does the character of American-style reactionary populism remain the same, or does it — along with the politicians who wield it — adjust to fit the new political environment? Will the next crop of Republican politicians have the force of personality to mold their supporters into a weapon to use against the constitutional order, or will they — with Trump’s persistent failure in mind — accept the basics of democratic society?One of the arguments against the effort to disqualify Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is that it won’t save American democracy to remove him from the ballot. That’s true enough — the problems with American democracy run deeper than one man — but it’s also beside the point.If the character of a political movement is forged through contingency — the circumstances of its birth, the context of its growth, the personalities of its leadership — then it matters who sits at the top.The point, then, is that it would be better to face the challenges to American democracy without a constitutional arsonist at the helm of one of our two major political parties. A world in which Trump cannot hold office is not necessarily a normal one, but it is one where the danger is a little less acute.Trump, of course, will not be removed from the ballot. No Supreme Court, and certainly not ours, would allow this effort to get that far. The only way to move past Trump will be, once again, to beat him at the ballot box.Nonetheless, it is still worth the effort to say what is true: that our constitutional system, however flawed, is worth defending; that Trump is a clear and present threat to that system; and that we should use every legitimate tool at our disposal to keep him away from — and out of — power.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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      To Win Iowa, Trump Turns to Allies Like Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      With the former president busy defending himself in court from 91 felony charges, his campaign has deployed high-profile conservatives to help fill the gaps in Iowa.Less than a week before Iowans decide whether to slingshot Donald J. Trump toward another presidential nomination, his schedule looks like this: Go to Washington for an appeals court hearing on Tuesday. Pop into Iowa for a Fox News town-hall event on Wednesday — and then make an expected return to court on Thursday, this time in New York.He is not scheduled to hold another rally in Iowa until Saturday, two days before the caucuses.As Mr. Trump flits between the presidential trail and the courtroom, his campaign has deployed a web of high-profile conservative allies to help fill the gaps and make his case across the state, a strategy that the former president may be more likely to turn to this year as his legal issues keep him occupied.Over the last months, Mr. Trump’s campaign has set up smaller rallies with Republican luminaries who, among the president’s right-wing base, have achieved a kind of political celebrity.To start its efforts in January, the campaign last week held events with Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Eric Trump, one of Mr. Trump’s sons. This week, Ben Carson, Mr. Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, is scheduled for two appearances in eastern Iowa.Before a winter storm hit Iowa and disrupted travel, the campaign had also planned to hold events on Monday and Tuesday with Roseanne Barr, the actress and outspoken Trump supporter; Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, Mr. Trump’s former press secretary; and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008.Mr. Trump’s use of campaign surrogates is a notable example of an old campaign tactic. Political candidates have long leaned on prominent allies to help them, given the logistical challenges of making pitches to voters in early-voting states that hold closely scheduled contests.“It’s a way to draw interest from caucusgoers and give them the opportunity to hear from other people,” said Jimmy Centers, a Republican strategist in Iowa who is unaligned in the race. “And it can be a draw in some cases to maybe get people out.”On Monday, while Gov. Ron DeSantis was in Florida attending to his day job, his wife, Casey, and Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a hard-right lawmaker, were traveling through southeastern Iowa at events held by Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting the DeSantis campaign.Other candidates were bringing well-known figures who have endorsed them to stump at their events. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, appeared over the weekend with Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire. The biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is expected to campaign later in the week with the right-wing commentator Candace Owens and the YouTube star and boxer Jake Paul.But as a former president who enjoys broad support, Mr. Trump is able to draw on a far deeper roster of conservative stars. Mr. Centers said Mr. Trump’s slate of surrogates tended to be people who were “more top of mind” for likely Republican caucusgoers.Many of Mr. Trump’s surrogates are eager to align themselves with his supporters or to display their loyalty to Mr. Trump. In some cases, they may be positioning themselves for potential positions in a future Trump cabinet. (Ms. Noem has said she would consider being Mr. Trump’s running mate.)And surrogates like Ms. Noem, Ms. Greene and Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who held an event in Cedar Rapids last month, are themselves big draws for audiences.Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose state borders Iowa, has also been promoting Mr. Trump’s candidacy before the caucuses.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesBrian Duckett, 59, who attended Mr. Gaetz’s event, said he had been moved by the push from the campaign and the Florida congressman for Mr. Trump’s supporters to play a more active role in the caucuses.“I’ve never done that before, and I want to do it this time,” Mr. Duckett said.Last Wednesday, Ms. Noem drew hundreds of people to a 30-minute speech in Sioux City, just across the border from her home state. The same day, Mr. DeSantis himself held events nearby that were attended by just dozens.Mr. Trump’s surrogates are often able to help him appeal to specific segments of voters, speaking more directly to their concerns in a different way from Mr. Trump. The campaign hopes that this can help drive turnout and deliver Mr. Trump a decisive victory in the caucuses.Ms. Noem drew on being a wife, mother and grandmother as she shared personal stories to encourage the audience to caucus for Mr. Trump. And she mentioned her state’s proximity to Iowa to portray herself as someone who understood residents’ concerns about the prices of groceries and gasoline.“It’s dramatic for a state like Iowa,” Ms. Noem said of gas prices. “It’s dramatic for a state like my state of South Dakota, where it’s a long ways to drive anywhere.”Ms. Greene, an ultraconservative congresswoman who rose to power as a firebrand in Mr. Trump’s mold, was well positioned to address their party’s far-right flank.Speaking in Keokuk, a city at Iowa’s southeastern tip, Ms. Greene on Thursday proudly called herself a “MAGA extremist,” then railed against establishment Republicans, saying she had been “pretty let down” by them during Mr. Trump’s first term.“We were, too,” a man called out in response.“A common thing,” she agreed.The same day, Eric Trump worked a crowd of more than 150 people in Ankeny, in suburban Des Moines. He rattled off his father’s accomplishments. Then he, too, drew on his own particular advantages.“Should we call Donald Trump and see if he picks up the phone?” the younger Mr. Trump asked the audience. Moments later, the former president’s voice filled the room as his son held his phone up to the microphone.“I just want to say, I look forward to seeing you on Friday, we love you all, and I hope my son is doing a great job,” the elder Mr. Trump said.Max Anderson, 23, said at the Ankeny event that Mr. Trump’s steady stream of surrogates gave the former president’s pitch more credibility. He added that he thought the phone call reflected well on Mr. Trump’s character.“It shows that he takes care and loves his people — especially his kids,” Mr. Anderson said.Leah McBride Mensching More

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      Defying Trump, G.O.P. Congressmen Hit the Trail in Iowa for DeSantis

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      A pair of idiosyncratic, ultraconservative House Republicans are risking the ire of the former president and his supporters to try to bolster the Florida governor.Most House Republicans operate under an unspoken but ironclad rule: Do whatever you can to avoid provoking the wrath of former President Donald J. Trump.But on a recent weekend here in Iowa, just days before the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest, two of Congress’s staunchest conservatives were doing just that as they crisscrossed the state with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to make the case for a different party standard-bearer.At stop after stop on a string of frigid, gray days, Representatives Chip Roy of Texas and Thomas Massie of Kentucky packed into crowded sports bars and coffee shops, casting Mr. DeSantis as a leader with a proven track record of conservative victories. In doing so, they issued a surprisingly blunt review of what they argued were a string of policy failures by the former president — including his inability to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, to complete a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and to rein in the skyrocketing national debt — and an implicit critique of his character.“The primary reason that I’m supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis for president is that I want my son and my daughter to be able to look up to the occupant of the Oval Office,” Mr. Roy told a packed room of caucusgoers at a sports bar in Ankeny. “Someone they can emulate. Someone that you would be proud to have them follow and look to as a leader.”Mr. Roy and Mr. Massie have always cut singular figures in Congress. Mr. Roy, a former chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has emerged as arguably the most influential conservative voice on policy in the House G.O.P. conference. Mr. Massie, a libertarian who is by turns thoughtful and mischievous, forced Congress to return to Washington to take a recorded vote on the $2 trillion stimulus measure at the height of the pandemic.But their commitment to break with a vast majority of their colleagues — including the entire House Republican leadership — and campaign for Mr. DeSantis even as he lags badly in polling behind Mr. Trump is perhaps one of their most fraught political moves yet.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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      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