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      Trump Attacks Biden and Federal Law Enforcement at Fourth of July Event

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      Ahead of a holiday meant to celebrate the country’s history, the former president tore into American institutions and attacked his political opponents.Former President Donald J. Trump drew a crowd of thousands on Saturday to a quiet South Carolina town’s Independence Day event, where he assailed the integrity of major American institutions and painted a dark portrait of the country ahead of a holiday meant to celebrate its underpinnings.Speaking for nearly 90 minutes on Main Street in Pickens, S.C., with at least 20 American flags behind his back, Mr. Trump often eschewed the rhetorical flag-waving and calls for unity that have long been as central to Independence Day as hot dogs, baseball and fireworks.Instead, the twice-impeached and twice-indicted former president railed against Democrats and liberals, who he said threatened to rewrite America’s past and erase its future. He skewered federal law enforcement, which he accused without evidence of rampant corruption. And he attacked President Biden, enumerating what he saw as his character flaws and accusing him of taking bribes from foreign nations.“We want to have a respect for our country and for the office” of the presidency, Mr. Trump said. “But we really have no interest in people who are sick.”Mr. Trump’s comments were largely familiar. But the event highlighted the hold he has on his most fervent supporters — a challenge for his Republican rivals as they seek their party’s presidential nomination from far behind Mr. Trump in the polls.Despite sweltering humidity and heat, thousands of people swarmed the streets of Pickens — a town of about 3,000 in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains — beginning at dawn.Pam Nichols, who described herself as an “insurrectionist,” said that she flew from Mundelein, Ill., to proudly support Mr. Trump in person. She had last done so in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, she said, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building. She did not talk in detail about her actions that day.“I was told to lay low after,” Ms. Nichols said, adding that she had watched a number of Mr. Trump’s speeches online since. “But I felt like it’s time to come out now. I’m tired of laying low.”The event in Pickens was only Mr. Trump’s second full-scale rally since he kicked off his campaign in November. Though such rallies were a hallmark of his past two campaigns, he has so far largely taken the stage at events organized by other groups.Bryan Owens, the director of marketing for Pickens, said that a representative for the Trump campaign reached out two weeks ago to ask to come to the town for its Independence Day celebration.Mr. Trump drew thousands of supporters, who began filling the streets of Pickens at dawn.Doug Mills/The New York TimesSouth Carolina, an early nominating state, was a key victory for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primaries as he sought to unite the Republican Party behind him. In 2020, he won the state handily, drawing overwhelming support in this region, a conservative swath of 10 counties in the northwest corner known as the Upstate.Mr. Owens said that the town’s decision was easy. Though he personally would not support Mr. Trump in 2024, he said, the opportunity to bring a former president to Pickens was too good to pass up.“This is a once-in-a-lifetime event for Pickens,” Mr. Owens continued, gesturing behind him to a crowd that packed the streets and stretched for several blocks. “And people that aren’t that familiar with small towns — they’ll get that experience.”Pickens’s Independence Day festivities began with a 5K race to raise money to repair water fountains on a local nature trail. American flags lined the streets, and signs encouraged visitors to shop local, even as businesses on Main Street were closed because of Secret Service measures.With parking near the site of the rally limited, residents were charging up to $100 — cash, many were quick to clarify — to let visitors leave cars in their driveways or on their lawns. For another $20, a golf cart might shuttle you from your car toward the rally’s entrance, outside a McDonald’s at the end of Main Street.Red, white and blue were the wardrobe colors of the day, from hat to boots. Tammy Milligan, of Myrtle Beach, S.C., arrived dressed in a Wonder Woman costume, which she said she started wearing around the time of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.Even as she stood behind Mr. Trump wholeheartedly and called him a patriot, she acknowledged that much of the country felt differently — which she framed as an American ideal.“Well, everyone’s entitled to think what they want to think,” Ms. Milligan said. “That’s our country.”Mr. Trump was not so generous. He dwelled on the federal indictment that charged him with illegally retaining national security documents and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. And even as he denounced the prosecution as an egregious and politically motivated step, he vowed, as he has before, that he would reciprocate in kind if elected.Outlining a dark vision of America, Mr. Trump called his political opponents “sick people” and “degenerates” who were “running our country to the ground.” More

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      Hunter Biden’s Daughter and a Tale of Two Families

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      The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who has not yet met her father or her grandfather, is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright.There is a 4-year-old girl in rural Arkansas who is learning to ride a camouflage-patterned four-wheeler alongside her cousins. Some days, she wears a bow in her hair, and on other days, she threads her long blond ponytail through the back of a baseball cap. When she is old enough, she will learn to hunt, just like her mother did when she was young.The girl is aware that her father is Hunter Biden and that her paternal grandfather is the president of the United States. She speaks about both of them often, but she has not met them. Her maternal grandfather, Rob Roberts, described her as whip-smart and funny.“I may not be the POTUS,” Mr. Roberts said in a text message, using an acronym for the president, but he said he would do anything for his granddaughter. He said she “needs for nothing and never will.”The story surrounding the president’s grandchild in Arkansas, who is not named in court papers, is a tale of two families, one of them powerful, one of them not. But at its core, the story is about money, corrosive politics and what it means to have the Biden birthright.Her parents ended a yearslong court battle over child support on Thursday, agreeing that Mr. Biden, who has embarked on a second career as a painter whose pieces have been offered for as much as $500,000 each, would turn over a number of his paintings to his daughter in addition to providing a monthly support payment. The little girl will select the paintings from Mr. Biden, according to court documents.“We worked it out amongst ourselves,” Lunden Roberts, the girl’s mother, said in an interview with The New York Times. “It was settled” in a discussion with Mr. Biden, she said.Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment for this article.Hunter Biden remains close to his father and often appears at White House events.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesMs. Roberts said she dropped a request to have the girl’s last name changed from Roberts to Biden. (Mr. Biden had fought against giving their daughter the Biden surname.) Ms. Roberts would only say that the decision to drop the request was mutual. “We both want what is best for our daughter, and that is our only focus,” she said.Though a trial planned for mid-July has been averted, people on both sides fear that the political toxicity surrounding the case will remain. Already, it has been extensively covered in conservative media, from Breitbart to Fox News, and conservative commentators assailed the Biden family after news of the settlement.Both Hunter Biden, the privileged and troubled son of a president, and Ms. Roberts, the daughter of a rural gun maker, have allies whose actions have made the situation more politicized. There is no evidence the White House is involved in those actions.Clint Lancaster, Ms. Roberts’s attorney, has represented the Trump campaign. He also called Garrett Ziegler, an activist and former Trump White House aide who has cataloged and published messages from a cache of Hunter Biden’s files that appear to have come from a laptop he left at a repair shop, to serve as an expert witness in the child support case. In the other corner, allies of Democratic groups dedicated to helping the Biden family have disseminated information about Mr. Ziegler and the Roberts family, seeking to highlight their Trump ties.And then there is President Biden.His public image is centered around his devotion to his family — including to Hunter, his only surviving son. In strategy meetings in recent years, aides have been told that the Bidens have six, not seven, grandchildren, according to two people familiar with the discussions.The White House did not respond to questions about the case, in keeping with how officials have answered questions about the Biden family before.Several of the president’s allies fear that the case could damage his re-election prospects by bringing more attention to a son whom some Democrats see as a liability. Others say the far right has focused on Hunter Biden, a private citizen, but ignored any moral and ethical failings of the former president, Donald J. Trump.“He’s under more indictments than two Super Bowl teams’ worth of players,” the author and political strategist Stuart Stevens, who left the Republican Party in 2016, said of Mr. Trump. “But that doesn’t matter: You have Hunter Biden. It’s just anger in search of an argument.”‘People Have an Image of Me’Lunden Roberts, 32, comes from a clan as tight-knit as the Bidens. Her father is a red-state gun manufacturer whose hunting buddies have included Donald Trump Jr., and who taught her at a young age how to hunt turkeys and alligators. She works for the family business, which sits on a winding country road dotted with pastures on the outskirts of Batesville.The pride of her family, the 5-foot-8 Ms. Roberts graduated with honors from Southside High School in Batesville and played basketball for Arkansas State University, where a team biography said she enjoyed hunting and skeet shooting. After graduating, she moved to Washington to study forensic investigation at George Washington University. She never completed the program. Photos from that time show her attending baseball games at Nationals Park and attending Drake and Kanye West concerts.Lunden Roberts arriving for a hearing in the paternity case in Batesville, Ark., in May. Ms. Roberts and Mr. Biden settled the case on Thursday.Karen Pulfer Focht/ReutersAlong the way, she met the son of a future president who was sliding into addiction and visiting Washington strip clubs.In mid-2018, Ms. Roberts was working as a personal assistant to Mr. Biden, according to a person close to her and messages from a cache of Mr. Biden’s files. Their daughter was born later that year, but by then, Mr. Biden had stopped responding to Ms. Roberts’s messages, including one informing him of the child’s birth date. Shortly after their daughter was born in November 2018, he removed Ms. Roberts and the child from his health insurance, which led Ms. Roberts to contact Mr. Lancaster.She filed a lawsuit in May 2019, and DNA testing that year established that Mr. Biden was the father of the child. In a motion for custody filing in December 2019, Ms. Roberts said that he had never met their child and “could not identify the child out of a photo lineup.”Ms. Roberts said in an interview that she had grown used to the onslaught of scrutiny around the case: “I read things about myself that I have no clue about,” she said. But one thing she said she can’t stand is being called a bad mother. “People can call me whatever they want, but they can’t call me that,” she said.Her public Instagram account tells its own story: “I hope one day when you look back you find yourself proud of who you are, where you come from, and most importantly, who raised you,” she captioned a photo of the two of them at the beach earlier this year. In another photo, shared to her account in April 2022, her daughter wore an Air Force One baseball cap and stood in front of the Jefferson Memorial.“People have an image of me, but few get the picture,” Ms. Roberts wrote on another photo in July 2022.Ms. Roberts posted a photo of herself and her daughter in Washington last year. Seen through one prism, the photos are a powerful public testament of love from a mother to her daughter. Seen through another, they are exploitative, certainly from the perspective of Biden allies, who fear the images — and the child — are being weaponized against the Biden family.For her part, Ms. Roberts said she did not bring her daughter to Washington to punish the Bidens. She said she brought her to Washington because not many little girls get to say that their grandfather is the president.“She’s very proud of who her grandfather is and who her dad is,” Ms. Roberts said. “That is something that I would never allow her to think otherwise.”A Troubled SonHunter Biden, 53, is recovering from crack cocaine addiction and is the last surviving son of the president, who lost his eldest, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. The younger Mr. Biden has five children, and has said that he fathered his fourth at a low point in his life.“I had no recollection of our encounter,” Mr. Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir. “That’s how little connection I had with anyone. I was a mess, but a mess I’ve taken responsibility for.”Before Thursday’s settlement, Mr. Biden had paid Ms. Roberts upward of $750,000, according to his attorneys, and had sought to reduce his $20,000-a-month child support payment on the grounds that he did not have the money. The new amount is lower than what had been originally ordered by the court, according to a person familiar with the case.“I’m very proud of my son,” President Biden told reporters recently.Al Drago for The New York TimesTrial or no trial, Mr. Biden will remain one of his father’s political vulnerabilities. Since his addiction spiraled out of control and his dealings with foreign governments caught the attention of conservatives, the younger Mr. Biden’s choices have become grist for memes, conservative cable news panels and Republican fund-raising. The most recent round kicked off after he struck a deal with the Justice Department to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge.On top of that, Mr. Biden has been the subject of multiple congressional investigations, and the contents of the laptop he left at a repair shop have been pored over and disseminated by activists, who say his private communications show criminal wrongdoing.In the White House, matters involving Hunter are so sensitive that only the president’s most senior advisers talk to him about his son, according to people familiar with the arrangement.Through it all, the president has been staunchly supportive. Rather than distance himself, Mr. Biden has included Hunter on official trips, traveled with him aboard Marine One, and ensured that he is on the guest list at state dinners.“I’m very proud of my son,” the president told reporters recently.‘Life’s Greatest Blessing’President Biden has worked over the past half-century to make his last name synonymous with family values and loyalty. The strength of his political persona, which emphasizes decency, family and duty, was enough to defeat Mr. Trump the first time around, and he would need to keep it intact if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee in 2024.On a proclamation issued on Father’s Day, Mr. Biden said that his father had “taught me that, above all, family is the beginning, middle and end — a lesson I have passed down to my children and grandchildren.” He added that “family is life’s greatest blessing and responsibility.”President Biden; Jill Biden, the first lady; and their children and grandchildren watching fireworks from the White House after Mr. Biden’s inauguration in 2021.Doug Mills/The New York TimesSince they entered the White House, President Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, have centered their family lives around their grandchildren, and have given them the benefits that come with living in close contact with the White House.Naomi Biden, 29, is Hunter’s eldest child, from his first marriage, to Kathleen Buhle, which ended in 2017. Ms. Biden was married on the South Lawn of the White House last year in a Ralph Lauren dress that she called the product of her “American(a) dreams.” She and her sisters have taken trips around the world with the president and first lady. Hunter married Melissa Cohen in 2019. His youngest child, who is named for Beau and was born in 2020, is photographed frequently with his grandparents.In April, President Biden told a group of children that he had “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.”Hunter Biden’s youngest son, Beau, is frequently seen traveling and attending events with his grandparents.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesBut the president has not yet met or publicly mentioned his other grandchild. His White House has not answered questions about whether he will publicly acknowledge her now that the child support case is settled.Still, Mr. Stevens, the political strategist, said that Mr. Biden’s support of his son, even against an onslaught of Republican criticism and ugly scandals, has only emphasized his unconditional love for his family.“The net positive of this has gone to Biden, by the way,” Mr. Stevens said of the president. “He stuck by him.”Political ConcernsFew involved think the particulars of this case, even though it has been settled, will stay at a simmer, especially given its ubiquity in right-wing media.“In yet another sweetheart deal, Hunter Biden got off easy in his child support case,” wrote the editorial board of The New York Post, which has followed the proceedings closely.Aside from the news coverage and commentary, allies of the Biden family are privately worried that the involvement of right-wing operatives in the matter has made any engagement harder for the family.Mr. Ziegler, who was named as an expert witness in the case, had a footnote role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results: In December 2020, Mr. Ziegler escorted Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the attorney Sidney Powell into the Oval Office, where a group discussed with Mr. Trump a plan to seize control of voting machines in key states. Mr. Ziegler’s White House guest privileges were later revoked.Mr. Ziegler declined to confirm his involvement in the child support case.Ms. Roberts’s attorney, Mr. Lancaster, also has a background in conservative activism. He is vocal on social media about his support for Mr. Trump, often retweeting criticism from conservative outlets and Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter. He also worked as an attorney for the Trump campaign during an electoral vote recount in Wisconsin after the 2020 election.Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in 2020. Allies of the Biden family are concerned that the paternity case will be used against President Biden in the 2024 campaign.Al Drago for The New York TimesOn the other side, people affiliated with left-leaning organizations, including Facts First USA, an advocacy group run by David Brock, are wary of what the team surrounding Ms. Roberts may do as the 2024 campaign gets underway.Members of the group, which operates independently of the White House and has taken a more adversarial approach to critics than the Biden administration does, have circulated a photo of Ms. Roberts’s father posing with Donald Trump Jr. Mr. Roberts said in a text message that he has gone hunting with Mr. Trump but that he did not recall when they had first met.The Republican pollster Frank Luntz said it was “a waste of time” for activists to focus on attacking the president’s family because voters do not care about Hunter Biden as much as they care about other issues, including Ukraine and inflation.“You have the responsibility to hold people accountable, but I want to be clear: It will not change a single vote,” he said of Hunter Biden’s legal and personal problems.If the Roberts family is taking political advice — outside of any that might come from the family attorney — they aren’t saying. In Batesville, the girl’s maternal grandmother, Kimberly Roberts, said in a brief telephone interview that she would not comment on the case.She did have one thing to say, though.“My granddaughter is happy, healthy, and very loved,” Ms. Roberts said, before hanging up.Kenneth P. Vogel More

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      DeSantis Uses L.G.B.T.Q Issues to Attack Trump in Twitter Video

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      The Florida governor sought to contrast his record opposing gay and transgender rights in a video highlighting comments made by the former president during the 2016 campaign — but has gotten some pushback.Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign shared a provocative video on Friday attacking the record of former President Donald J. Trump regarding L.G.B.T.Q. people that was widely condemned as homophobic, including by a prominent group representing gay and lesbian Republicans.The video, posted on Twitter by the “DeSantis War Room” account, opens by showing Mr. Trump proclaiming, “I will do everything in my power to protect our L.G.B.T.Q. citizens.” Mr. Trump made those remarks at the Republican National Convention in July 2016, after invoking the horror of the Pulse nightclub shooting the previous month. The massacre, at a popular gay nightclub in Orlando, in Mr. DeSantis’s home state of Florida, left 49 people dead.The video goes on to show Mr. Trump expressing support for transgender people using the bathrooms of their choice. It then attempts to contrast Mr. Trump’s position with the hard-line stance of Mr. DeSantis, abruptly transitioning into a jarring series of images of Mr. DeSantis (including one with lasers shooting out of his eyes) that are interspersed with right-wing internet memes (the smiling, heavily muscled man known online as “GigaChad”), news headlines (“Pride event in St. Cloud canceled after DeSantis signs ‘Protection of Children Act’ into law”) and pop culture references (among them shots of the titular character from the film version of the serial killer narrative “American Psycho”).The DeSantis team shared the video the same day that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Christian web designer who refused to create wedding websites for same-sex couples, putting the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people on shaky legal footing.Mr. DeSantis has frequently cast himself as a lightning rod for unfair criticism by liberals and has used such attacks to rally support from his political base. The video, compiled by another Twitter user, seemed intended, in part, to attract more liberal outrage at a time when he is struggling to gain traction in polls against Mr. Trump.It was the type of move — devised to provoke a reaction — that Mr. Trump often deployed from his Twitter account during the 2016 campaign.Earlier in his career, as a congressman, Mr. DeSantis did not seem consumed by combating the L.G.B.T.Q. community. At the time, he privately told a counterpart he didn’t care about people’s sexuality.And when he first ran for governor five years ago, Mr. DeSantis suggested he would take a more moderate approach on some L.G.B.T.Q. rights issues, saying that Republicans needed to move beyond debating which bathrooms transgender people should use. “Getting into bathroom wars, I don’t think that’s a good use of our time,” he said at a Republican candidate forum in 2018.But in this campaign for the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis has sought to highlight — and expand — his ultraconservative credentials in an effort to position himself to the right of his chief rival.The new video drew criticism not only from Democrats but also from some in his own party, including the Log Cabin Republicans, which describes itself as the nation’s largest organization for “L.G.B.T. conservatives and allies.” The group, which endorsed Mr. Trump in 2019 and has used his Mar-a-Lago club for events, called the video “divisive and desperate” and said it “ventured into homophobic territory.”Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican political strategist, wrote on Twitter: “The consultants who think this kind of ‘running to Trump’s right’ is going to be effective should be sacked.” And Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman and Trump critic, said, “Outrage after outrage is the only way these guys know how to campaign.”Mr. DeSantis’s campaign shared the video on Twitter with the text: “To wrap up ‘Pride Month,’ let’s hear from the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate it,” referring to Mr. Trump.Former President Donald J. Trump, who spoke this week at an event in New Hampshire, is well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in national polls.John Tully for The New York TimesMr. Trump, who grew up in liberal New York and was a businessman for decades, was seen during his 2016 campaign by some Republicans as more open to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But he also chose Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana and a staunch conservative who had signed into a law a religious freedom act that was seen as hostile to L.G.B.T.Q. people, as his running mate. As president, Mr. Trump systematically dismantled L.G.B.T.Q. protections put into effect by President Barack Obama, particularly those concerning transgender people. The video shared by the DeSantis campaign reflects a race to the right on a number of issues in the primary. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has signed bills restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, punishing businesses that admit minors to “adult live performances” such as drag shows and making it a misdemeanor trespassing offense for people to use bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond to their sex at birth.And with its barrage of references to obscure right-wing memes, the video also shows how heavily Mr. DeSantis’s campaign has leaned into the brash and provocative parlance of fringe online conservatives. The Florida governor, who is running well behind Mr. Trump in national polls, signaled from the beginning of his campaign that he hoped to connect with right-wing voters online, including by announcing his candidacy in a glitchy livestream event on Twitter with Elon Musk.But by openly courting such insular conservative communities, Mr. DeSantis, who has told donors that he is the only Republican who can beat President Biden, may risk alienating the more moderate voters he will most likely need in a general election.The video also risks putting off some Republican donors, some of whom are more moderate on issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights and are watching to see how Mr. DeSantis progresses before committing to his candidacy.In addition to implicitly comparing Mr. DeSantis to Christian Bale’s homicidal character in “American Psycho,” who in the book is a mega-fan of then-businessman Donald J. Trump, the video — set to a thrumming bass — without much explanation also highlights Leonardo DiCaprio’s role as a hedonistic, drug-addicted financial fraudster in the film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” as well as Brad Pitt’s depiction of Achilles in “Troy.” (Achilles, the hero of “The Iliad,” was often portrayed in later Classical Greek literature as the lover of his male companion, Patroclus.)For his part, Mr. Trump noted last month, sounding pleased, that the issue of limiting rights for transgender people had become a major animating force for conservative Republican voters.“It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that,” Mr. Trump said during a speech in North Carolina in June. “I talk about transgender, everybody goes crazy. Five years ago, you didn’t know what the hell it was.” More

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      Trump, Crossing Paths With DeSantis, Tries to Outflank Him

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      At a gathering of right-wing activists, Donald Trump vowed to target federal diversity programs and to use the Justice Department to investigate schools and corporations over supposed racial discrimination.Former President Donald J. Trump moved on Friday to outflank Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as they wrestled for conservative loyalties at a gathering of right-wing activists in Philadelphia, pushing a shared agenda of forcing the federal government to the right, restricting transgender rights and limiting how race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues are taught.Speaking hours after Mr. DeSantis’s address, Mr. Trump aimed to one-up his top rival by vowing to target federal diversity programs and to wield the power of the Justice Department against schools and corporations that are supposedly engaged in “unlawful racial discrimination.”Mr. Trump said that, to “rigorously enforce” the Supreme Court’s ruling a day earlier rejecting affirmative action at the nation’s colleges and universities, he would “eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the entire federal government.”He added that he would direct the Justice Department “to pursue civil rights claims against any school, corporation, or university that engages in unlawful racial discrimination.”A representative for Mr. Trump declined to directly answer a question about which races the former president thought were being subjected to discrimination.Since entering the race just over a month ago, Mr. DeSantis has repeatedly sought to position himself to the right of Mr. Trump, hitting his record on crime, the coronavirus and immigration. Nevertheless, the former president leads Mr. DeSantis by a wide margin in the polls.The rare convergence of the two leading Republicans on the campaign trail came at a convention of the newest powerhouse in social conservative politics, Moms for Liberty, which began as a small group of far-right suburban mothers but has quickly gained national influence.A third presidential contender, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, also spoke on Friday, with two others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson, slated to appear on Saturday.Mr. DeSantis went first, headlining the opening breakfast event in a nod to the group’s founding in his home state in 2021. Its national rise — it says it now has 275 chapters in 45 states — has coincided with the Florida governor’s ascension in right-wing circles as he has pushed legislation to restrict discussions of so-called critical race theory, sexuality and gender in public schools.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said at the event that “what we’ve seen across this country in recent years has awakened the most powerful political force in this country: mama bears.” Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times“What we’ve seen across this country in recent years has awakened the most powerful political force in this country: mama bears,” Mr. DeSantis told the crowd of hundreds, to roars of applause. “We’ve done so much on these issues in Florida, and I will do all this as the next president.”Shortly after he spoke, the Supreme Court gave the conservative movement more victories with two rulings, one striking down President Biden’s program to relieve student loan debt and the other backing a web designer who refused to provide services for same-sex marriages.Mr. DeSantis’s pitch to social conservatives centers on the idea that he, not Mr. Trump, is the most likely to turn their priorities into legislation. In his 20-minute speech, Mr. DeSantis highlighted legislation he championed in Florida banning gender transition care for minors, preventing teachers from asking students for their preferred pronouns and prohibiting transgender girls from competing in girls’ sports.Not all attendees were persuaded. Alexis Spiegelman, who leads the Moms for Liberty chapter in Sarasota, Fla., and is backing Mr. Trump for president, said she had not seen her governor’s policies translate into change at schools near her. She was critical of his presidential bid.“I just don’t know why we would want a knockoff when we have the real, authentic Trump,” she said.Pro-L.G.B.T.Q. demonstrators gathered on Thursday outside the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, where some of the Moms for Liberty events were being held.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMs. Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador in Mr. Trump’s administration, struck a different tone later Friday morning. Lacking the kind of recent legislative record that Mr. DeSantis can point to, she instead drew on her experiences as a mother: She directly called herself a “mom for liberty” and often invoked her children.“Moms care about a lot of things — it’s not just schools,” Ms. Haley said. “We care about the debt, we care about crime, we care about national security, we care about the border. Moms care about everything.”Calling itself a “parental rights group,” Moms for Liberty has built its platform on a host of contentious issues centering on children — a focus that many on the right believe could help unite the Republican Party’s split factions in 2024.The group has railed against public health mandates related to the coronavirus and against school materials on L.G.B.T.Q. and race-related subjects. Its members regularly protest at meetings of school boards and have sought to take them over. Along the way, Moms for Liberty has drawn a backlash. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning civil rights organization, calls it an extremist group, saying that it “commonly propagates conspiracy theories about public schools attempting to indoctrinate and sexualize children with a progressive Marxist curriculum.” Moms for Liberty leaders rejected the label in remarks on Friday.Tina Descovich, left, and Tiffany Justice, two of the founders of Moms for Liberty, which was created in 2021. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesBefore the group’s conference in Philadelphia, a half-dozen scholarly groups criticized the Museum of the American Revolution for allowing Moms for Liberty to hold some of its events there, including the opening reception.Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, a Democrat, said on Thursday that “as a welcoming and inclusive city, we find this group’s beliefs and values problematic.”Protesters gathered outside the conference venues beginning Thursday night, and demonstrations stretched into Friday evening.The schedule for Saturday included a session led by KrisAnne Hall, a former prosecutor and conservative public speaker with past ties to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia that helped orchestrate the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.Sessions at the event bridged a wide range of subjects, including exploration of “dark money’s infiltration in education” and discussions about the Federalist Papers. But the presidential candidates were the main draw.Tina Descovich, one of the organization’s founders, said in an interview that Moms for Liberty had invited every presidential candidate — including Mr. Biden — to speak at the event.“Our issue of parental rights and our concerns about public education in America are rising to the level of presidential candidates,” Ms. Descovich said, “which means for the 2024 election, that we are working to make this the No. 1 domestic policy issue.” More

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      DeSantis Financial Disclosure Puts Him in the Millionaires Club

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      The Florida governor, who has spent almost his entire career in public service, made more than $1 million from his best-selling memoir.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who often speaks of his blue-collar roots, is now a millionaire, thanks to a $1.25 million book deal that he signed with HarperCollins in anticipation of his run for president.Mr. DeSantis saw his net worth skyrocket to $1.17 million by the end of 2022, up from roughly $319,000 in 2021, according to a financial disclosure filed on Friday with the Florida Commission on Ethics. The governor’s memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” was published in late February as a prelude to the presidential campaign he announced in May. It became a New York Times nonfiction best seller, with more than 94,000 copies sold in its first week. (Literary reviews were less kind.)Before declaring that he would run for president, Mr. DeSantis took a series of trips around the country to meet local Republicans and promote his book. “And so my book, I think it’s out there, just so you know, No. 1 book in America for nonfiction,” a smiling Mr. DeSantis said at one such stop in Iowa this spring. “There’s a lot of people that aren’t happy about that, I can tell you.”Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, had seen his personal wealth hold relatively steady in the years since he was first elected governor in 2018. At the end of that year, he reported his net worth at around $284,000.As governor, Mr. DeSantis received an annual salary of $141,400.20 last year. Besides his salary and the book deal, he reported receiving no other income in 2022, according to his state financial disclosure. His assets included a USAA bank account with slightly more than $1 million, as well as a federal Thrift Savings Plan and a state retirement account. Mr. DeSantis, a Navy veteran, has spent almost all of his career in government service. His only liability is listed as nearly $19,000 in student loan debt.Mr. DeSantis’s straightforward finances offer a contrast to the sprawling commercial empire of his main rival for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump, who is well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in national polls. Mr. Trump, whose father was a successful real estate developer, grew up wealthy.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis highlights his far humbler roots.“I was a blue-collar kid growing up. My parents were working class,” he told a crowd in North Carolina this month, adding that he had worked low-wage jobs to put himself through school.“And I only did that because I believe in America,” Mr. DeSantis continued. “You work hard and you make the most of your God-given ability, you’re going to have the chance to do big things. And I wonder how many people believe that nowadays.” More

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      Republican Presidential Candidates Celebrate Student Loan Ruling

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      Much of the Republican field of presidential candidates was unanimous in praising the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to reject President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.Former President Donald J. Trump praised the ruling during an address to attendees at the Moms For Liberty conference in Philadelphia.“Today the Supreme Court also ruled that President Biden cannot wipe out hundred of billions, perhaps trillions of dollars in student loan debt, which would have been very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence, very unfair,” he said. He called Mr. Biden a “corrupt president” and lamented that the plan was “a way to buy votes.”Senator Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence were among the first of the 2024 contenders to signal their alignment with the six conservative justices in supporting the decision.“The U.S. Supreme Court was right to end the illegal and immoral effort by the Biden Administration to transfer student debt to taxpayers,” Mr. Scott wrote on Twitter. “If you take out a loan, you pay it back.”He called on colleges and universities to “act to lower tuition and improve the quality of their programs” and vowed that as president, he would take action to make education more affordable and to expand access to vocational training.Mr. Pence sought credit for having “played a role in appointing three of the Justices that ensured today’s welcomed decision” — though he did not mention former President Donald J. Trump even as he highlighted one of the Trump administration’s signature achievements.“Joe Biden’s massive trillion-dollar student loan bailout subsidizes the education of elites on the backs of hardworking Americans,” Mr. Pence wrote on Twitter, “and it was an egregious violation of the Constitution for him to attempt to do so unilaterally with the stroke of the executive pen.”Ms. Haley was similarly critical, painting the president’s plan as unfair.“A president cannot just wave his hand and eliminate loans for students he favors, while leaving out all those who worked hard to pay back their loans or made other career choices,” Ms. Haley wrote on Twitter.In a speech Friday morning in Philadelphia, she heaped praise on the court: “Can I just say God bless the Supreme Court? They are righting a lot of wrongs.”Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchinson soon joined in as well, and while Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has not released an official statement, his campaign used the moment to highlight his higher education policies in Florida.In a video published by his campaign’s account on Twitter, Mr. DeSantis is seen on the campaign trail in South Carolina, promoting Florida’s rules on state school tuition rates and saying that colleges and universities “should be responsible for defaulted student loan debt.”“If you produce somebody that can’t pay it back,” he continues, “that’s on you.”Mr. Ramaswamy posted a two-and-a-half minute video to Twitter extolling the decision, citing its legal underpinnings as a “powerful precedent” that could target “most of the regulations of the administrative state.”Mr. Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, also commended the decision, stating that the “ruling reaffirms the importance of upholding our legal framework and preserving the checks and balances that ensure the proper functioning of our government.” He also called for finding a legislative solution to the student loan debt crisis.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota added his voice to the chorus of praise for the decision later Friday afternoon: “Erasing the debt of high-paid, college-educated workers at the expense of blue-collar Americans is wrong, and would have exacerbated inflation significantly,” he said in a statement, adding that “the Constitution clearly states that spending originates in Congress.”Another Republican candidate, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, has not publicly commented on the decision.Anjali Huynh More

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      Biden Now Faces Student Borrowers Asking: What Now?

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      President Biden accused Supreme Court justices of having “misinterpreted the Constitution” and vowed on Friday to seek new ways to relieve the crushing weight of student debt after the court’s conservative majority rejected his $400 billion plan to forgive federal loans.Speaking from the White House after the court issued its 6-to-3 decision, Mr. Biden lashed out at Republicans who challenged his plan, saying they were willing to forgive loans for business owners during the pandemic, but not for Americans struggling with college debt.“The hypocrisy is stunning,” he said.The president suggested that the court had been influenced by “Republican elected officials and special interests” who opposed his plan, which would have forgiven up to $20,000 in debt for as many as 40 million people.“They said no, no,” Mr. Biden said of the justices, “literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars in debt relief that was about to change their lives.”The court’s finding that Mr. Biden’s loan plan exceeded his authority under the HEROES Act unraveled one of the president’s signature policy efforts and ratcheted up the pressure on him to find a new way to make good on a promise to a key constituency as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway.Mr. Biden said he had directed his secretary of education to use a different law, the Higher Education Act of 1965, to provide some debt relief. But it was unclear whether that law could be used to provide widespread debt relief. And education officials said it would take months, at least, before regulations could be put in place to begin providing debt relief.Officials expressed confidence that the Higher Education Act provides authority for the secretary to broadly “settle and compromise” student loan debts.Chief Justice John Roberts, the author of Friday’s ruling, appeared to undercut that argument in his opinion, suggesting that the ability to relieve debt under the Higher Education Act was limited to the disabled, people who are bankrupt or who have been defrauded.But Mr. Biden said his administration will try anyway.“In my view, it’s the best path that remains,” Mr. Biden insisted.Mr. Biden said he had directed the Education Department not to report borrowers who miss student loan payments to credit rating agencies for 12 months. Payments are set to begin in the fall after being paused since the beginning of the pandemic.The department also has proposed changes to benefit borrowers on an income-based repayment plan. A draft of the changes released in January said they could reduce payments on undergraduate loans to 5 percent of discretionary income, limit the accumulation of unpaid interest and allow more low-income workers to qualify for zero-dollar payments.Mr. Biden spoke about student loan forgiveness in October in Dover, Del.Al Drago for The New York TimesThe ruling in the student loan lawsuit was the culmination of Republican efforts assailing a centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s broader agenda, as the president and his allies try to make the case to Americans for a second term in the White House.In nearly two and a half years, the president has faced significant opposition in Congress and the courts to promises he made as a candidate. He dropped efforts for free community college and preschool. He abandoned taxpayer funding for child care. The courts have blocked some of his most ambitious climate policies and delayed his efforts to control the border.Student debt relief was among the most costly relief programs Mr. Biden proposed in the wake of the pandemic. But unlike his successes in seeking congressional approval for infrastructure spending and chip manufacturing subsidies, the president used his own authority to forgive $400 billion in student loan debt. On Friday, the court said he went too far.More broadly, the court’s decision was the latest blow to presidential power, with the justices putting new limits on how much leeway the executive branch has when interpreting congressional statutes.That could have far-reaching implications. With Congress in political paralysis, recent presidents — including Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump — have increasingly turned to executive actions and orders to advance their policy goals.Courts have responded by delaying or overturning some of those actions. Mr. Obama’s efforts to provide protection from deportation for the parents of some immigrants never went into effect. Many of Mr. Trump’s executive actions were deemed excessive by judges.In the student loan case, the court said that Mr. Biden had stretched the law beyond reason.Unlike his successes in seeking congressional approval for infrastructure spending and chip manufacturing subsidies, the president used his own authority in seeking to forgive student debt. T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Biden announced last summer that his government would forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt, student advocacy groups and many progressives cheered the move.“People can start finally to climb out from under that mountain of debt,” Mr. Biden said.His plan, which came after months of agonizing about whom it would benefit and whether it was too costly, would have been a centerpiece of his argument to voters that his economic agenda is designed to help low- and middle-income Americans blaze a path to greater prosperity.Instead, a majority of the justices agreed with critics who said the president’s debt relief plan went beyond the president’s authority under congressional legislation that allows changes to student loans during a public emergency.Within moments of the court ruling on Friday, it was clear that Mr. Biden would be under immense pressure from the left wing of the Democratic Party to respond swiftly and aggressively.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senate leader who had pushed hard for student debt relief, demanded that Mr. Biden not give up.“I call upon the administration to do everything in its power to deliver for millions of working- and middle-class Americans struggling with student loan debt,” Mr. Schumer said.Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, went even further.“The president has the clear authority under the Higher Education Act of 1965 to cancel student debt,” Mr. Sanders wrote in a statement. “He must use this authority immediately.”For much of the last year, administration officials had refused to say whether they were working on a “Plan B” in the event the Supreme Court rejected the president’s plan.Even after several justices expressed deep skepticism during oral arguments earlier this year, Mr. Biden and his aides continued to insist that they had confidence in the legality of the debt relief plan and would not say whether they were working on an alternative.Millions of people with federal student loans are about to get another financial shock this fall, when the yearslong pause on repayment of existing loans ends.The federal government, under former President Donald J. Trump, imposed the pause on repayments at the beginning of the pandemic, as businesses closed and millions of people lost their jobs. Mr. Biden renewed the pause several times since taking office, but has said it will not be renewed again now that the pandemic has largely ended.Payments are set to resume in October, putting pressure on the debt holders that Mr. Biden’s forgiveness plan was designed to help.One question for Mr. Biden is whether those who are disappointed will blame him or the Supreme Court when they go to the ballot box next year.Mary-Pat Hector, the chief executive of Rise, a student advocacy organization that has pushed for student debt relief and college affordability, said many young Americans will blame Mr. Biden if he cannot deliver significant debt relief.“Many young people, particularly Gen Z, don’t like things that seem performative, and they believe in holding people accountable,” she said. “I think that we are going to see that reaction from a lot of people.” More

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      What Frederick Douglass Knew That Trump and DeSantis Don’t

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      There was a moment during the Trump administration when the president and his most ideologically committed advisers searched for a way to end birthright citizenship.Enshrined in the first sentence of the first section of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, birthright citizenship means that anyone and everyone born on American soil is an American citizen. Written to secure the social transformations wrought by the Civil War, it is a cornerstone of the United States as a multiracial democracy.President Donald Trump would end it, he decided, by executive order. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” he said when announcing the effort in 2018, falsely asserting, “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States — with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”Fortunately, Trump was wrong. There is no way, short of a constitutional amendment, to nullify the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Nor was there any question of its meaning and intent. After fierce pushback from legal scholars on both the left and the right, Trump dropped the issue.But he didn’t forget about it. Earlier this year, Trump announced that if he were elected president again, he would ban birthright citizenship through executive order. Not to be outdone in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, said that he, too, would end birthright citizenship if elected president.“Stop the invasion,” said DeSantis’s blueprint for immigration policy. “No excuses.” He is pledging to “take action to end the idea that the children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.” He also contends, “Dangling the prize of citizenship to the future offspring of illegal immigrants is a major driver of illegal migration,” adding that “it is also inconsistent with the original understanding of the 14th Amendment.”The main reason DeSantis has followed Trump down this path is that he appears to be running to be the understudy to the former president. If Trump is forced out of the race because his legal troubles push him out of presidential politics, then DeSantis will take the standard for the MAGA faithful. Or so he hopes.At the same time, it’s clear that DeSantis’s position is as much about ideology as it is about opportunism. His attack on birthright citizenship is consistent with his crusade to purge “wokeness” from schools and classrooms in the state of Florida, where officials have banned books and suppressed instruction on, among other subjects, the history of American racism.The attack on birthright citizenship is an attempt to stigmatize and remove from society an entire class of people. And the attack on so-called wokeness is an attempt to delegitimize and remove from society an entire way of understanding the world. Together, the attacks form an assault on two of the pillars of the egalitarian ideal.Here, it is worth taking a brief tour of the history of birthright citizenship in the United States. Before the 14th Amendment, the boundaries around citizenship were ill defined. Although the idea of birthright citizenship was present in English common law at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the Constitution as ratified said nothing about acquiring citizenship by either birth or naturalization.In 1790, Congress limited citizenship by naturalization to “free White persons … of good character,” but was silent on the question of citizenship by birth. As the 18th century came to a close and the 19th century progressed, one prominent view was that there was no citizenship in the United States as such; there was only citizenship in a state, which conferred national citizenship by virtue of the state’s place in the Union. To the extent that citizenship came with rights, the scope of those rights was a question of state laws and state constitutions.But there were always proponents of a broader, more expansive and rights-bearing birthright citizenship. They were free Black Americans, who needed to anchor themselves in a world where their freedom was tenuous and uncertain.“We are Americans, having a birthright citizenship,” wrote Martin Delany, the free Black journalist and antislavery orator, in his 1852 pamphlet “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.” Delany, as the historian Martha S. Jones noted in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” called on Black Americans to leave the United States. And yet, he still claimed the country as his own.“Our common country is the United States,” Delany wrote. “Here were we born, here raised and educated; here are the scenes of childhood; the pleasant associations of our school going days; the loved enjoyments of our domestic and fireside relations, and the sacred graves of our departed fathers and mothers, and from here will we not be driven by any policy that may be schemed against us.”Against legislative efforts to make their lives in America impossible to live, free Blacks asserted that, in Delany’s words, “the rights of the colored man in this country to citizenship are fixed,” attached not just to the states, but to the United States.Jones noted that even those opposed to emigration, like the men of the 1853 Colored National Convention in Rochester, N.Y., mirrored Delany’s thinking. “We are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans,” declared the group. “We address you not as aliens nor as exiles, humbly asking to be permitted to dwell among you in peace; but we address you as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil.”With his 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, however, Chief Justice Roger Taney foreclosed the constitutional recognition of Black citizenship and defined the United States, in true Jacksonian form, as a white man’s country. Black people, he wrote, “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” They had no rights, he added, “which the white man was bound to respect.”The birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, based on similar language found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was a direct response to and a rebuke of Taney’s reasoning. Having won the argument on the battlefield, the United States would amend its Constitution to establish an inclusive and, in theory, egalitarian national citizenship.The authors of the 14th Amendment knew exactly what they were doing. In a country that had already seen successive waves of mass immigration, they knew that birthright citizenship would extend beyond Black and white Americans to people of other hues and backgrounds. That was the point.Asked by an opponent if the clause would “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country,” Senator Lyman Trumbull, who helped draft the language of birthright citizenship in the Civil Rights Act, replied “Undoubtedly.” Senator John Conness of California said outright that he was “ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”In 1867, around the time Congress was debating and formulating the 14th Amendment, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Boston where he outlined his vision of a “composite nationality,” an America that stood as a beacon for all peoples, built on the foundation of an egalitarian republic. “I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said. “The outspread wings of the American Eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”If birthright citizenship is the constitutional provision that makes a multiracial democracy of equals possible, then it is no wonder that it now lies in the cross hairs of men who lead a movement devoted to unraveling that particular vision of the American republic.Embedded in birthright citizenship, in other words, is the potential for a freer, more equal America. For Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, that appears to be the problem.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