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      Haley Jokes That New Hampshire Primary Will ‘Correct’ the Result of the Iowa Caucuses

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      Campaigning in New Hampshire on Wednesday, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina said that voters there would “correct” the result of the Iowa caucuses — the night before she was scheduled to appear for events in Iowa.“You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it,” Ms. Haley said, prompting laughter from the crowd of New Hampshire voters. “And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home.”Local campaign surrogates for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is vying with Ms. Haley for second place in Iowa polls for the Republican presidential nomination, seized upon the remark as dismissive of the state’s first-in-the-nation balloting, scheduled for Jan. 15.Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said, “I trust Iowans to make their own decisions. No ‘corrections’ needed.” Bob Vander Plaats, the Iowa evangelical leader who has also thrown his support behind Mr. DeSantis, called Ms. Haley’s quip an “admission of getting beat in the Hawkeye State.”Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are scheduled to participate in back-to-back town halls Thursday night in Iowa. The events, to be broadcast live on CNN, will be among the few remaining opportunities for the two candidates to draw away support from former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Haley’s teasing remark also reflects her dim chances of a victory in Iowa, where Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite; he is polling around or slightly below 50 percent support. Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are polling below 20 percent in Iowa in a virtual tie for second place.In contrast, Ms. Haley has decisively risen from the pack of Mr. Trump’s rivals in New Hampshire. Recent polls there have shown her in second place far above other candidates, except for Mr. Trump.Ms. Haley’s quip also reflects the perils of campaigning across state lines in quick succession: Remarks playing to the local crowd in one state can become a liability in the next. More

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      In Tense Election Year, Public Officials Face Climate of Intimidation

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      Colorado and Maine, which blocked former President Donald J. Trump from the ballot, have grappled with the harassment of officials.The caller had tipped off the authorities in Maine on Friday night: He told them that he had broken into the home of Shenna Bellows, the state’s top election official, a Democrat who one night earlier had disqualified former President Donald J. Trump from the primary ballot because of his actions during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.No one was home when officers arrived, according to Maine State Police, who labeled the false report as a “swatting” attempt, one intended to draw a heavily armed law enforcement response.In the days since, more bogus calls and threats have rolled in across the country. On Wednesday, state capitol buildings in Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi and Montana were evacuated or placed on lockdown after the authorities said they had received bomb threats that they described as false and nonspecific. The F.B.I. said it had no information to suggest any threats were credible.The incidents intensified a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials, including those responsible for overseeing ballot access and voting. Since 2020, election officials have confronted rising threats and difficult working conditions, aggravated by rampant conspiracy theories about fraud. The episodes suggested 2024 would be another heated election year.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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      Want to Understand 2024? Look at 1948.

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      Americans were angry with Truman because of high prices in the aftermath of World War II, even as other economic signals looked promising.President Truman and his wife, Bess, during his 1948 whistle-stop campaign.Associated PressIn the era of modern consumer confidence data, there has never been an economy quite like this recent one — with prices rising so high and unemployment staying so low.But just a few years before the consumer sentiment survey index became widely available in 1952, there was a period of economic unrest that bears a striking resemblance to today: the aftermath of World War II, when Americans were near great prosperity yet found themselves frustrated by the economy and their president.If there’s a time that might make sense of today’s political moment, postwar America might just be it. Many analysts today have been perplexed by public dissatisfaction with the economy, as unemployment and gross domestic product have remained strong and as inflation has slowed significantly after a steep rise. To some, public opinion and economic reality are so discordant that it requires a noneconomic explanation, sometimes called “vibes,” like the effect of social media or a pandemic hangover on the national mood.But in the era of modern economic data, Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.The source of postwar inflation was fundamentally similar to post-pandemic inflation. The end of wartime rationing unleashed years of pent-up consumer demand in an economy that hadn’t fully transitioned back to producing butter instead of guns. A year after the war, wartime price controls ended and inflation skyrocketed. A great housing crisis gripped the nation’s cities as millions of troops returned from overseas after 15 years of limited housing construction. Labor unrest roiled the nation and exacerbated production shortages. The most severe inflation of the last 100 years wasn’t in the 1970s, but in 1947, reaching around 20 percent.According to the historian James T. Patterson, “no domestic issue of these years did Truman more damage than the highly contentious question of what to do about wartime restraints on prices.”Mr. Truman’s popularity collapsed. By spring in 1948, an election year, his approval rating had fallen to 36 percent, down from over 90 percent at the end of World War II. He fell behind the Republican Thomas Dewey in the early head-to-head polling. He was seen as in over his head. The New Republic ran a front-page editorial titled: “As a candidate for president, Harry Truman should quit.”Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis and later a vice president and Democratic presidential nominee, spoke before a Senate committee on anti-inflation controls in 1948.Associated PressIn retrospect, it’s hard to believe voters were so frustrated. Historians generally now consider Mr. Truman one of the great presidents, and the postwar period was the beginning of the greatest economic boom in American history. By any conceivable measure, Americans were unimaginably better off than during the Great Depression a decade earlier. Unemployment remained low by any standard, and consumers kept spending. The sales of seemingly every item — appliances, cars and so on — were an order of magnitude higher than before the war.Yet Americans were plainly dissatisfied. Incomes in 1948 were twice what they were in 1941, but statistically their dissatisfaction is probably best explained by the decline in real incomes in 1947, just as real incomes declined in 2021-22. The polling in the run-up to the 1948 election — archived at the Roper Center — bears the hallmarks of voter dissatisfaction:Despite the extraordinarily positive developments of the last decade, voters were pessimistic about the future. They believed a depression was likely in the next few years. As late as summer 1948, they were likelier to think things in America would get worse in the years ahead than to get better. They expected prices to keep rising.In November 1947, Gallup found that more than two-thirds of Americans said they were finding it harder to make ends meet than the year before, while almost no one said it was easier.In polling throughout 1947 and 1948, a majority supported reinstating wartime rationing and price controls.In December 1947, more than 70 percent of adults said they would want their own wages to decline in order to bring prices down.Prices seemed to weigh heavily on Americans heading into the election. Voters said that if they got a chance to talk with Mr. Truman about anything, it would be the cost of living and getting the economy back to normal. Ahead of the conventions, voters said a plan to address high prices was the No. 1 priority they wanted in a party platform. More voters said they wanted prices to be addressed over the next four years than any other issue.A rally for equal rights outside the 1948 Democratic convention in Philadelphia.Bettman/Getty ImagesThe Dixiecrats, a breakaway segregationist party, held a convention of their own in Birmingham, Ala.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe importance of the economic issue faced stiff competition from the rising Cold War, the enactment of the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the formation of Israel and the subsequent First Arab-Israeli War, Mr. Truman’s decision to desegregate the military and the rise of the Dixiecrats.The Cold War, civil rights, Israel and other domestic issues combined to put extraordinary political pressure on an increasingly fractured Democratic coalition. On the left, the former vice president Henry Wallace ran against Mr. Truman as a Progressive; he also ran as someone who was unequivocally pro-Israel, threatening to deny Mr. Truman the support of Jewish voters who had voted all but unanimously for Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the right, the segregationist South defected from the Democrats at the convention over the party’s civil rights plank, again threatening to deny him the support of an overwhelmingly Democratic voting bloc.Truman and the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, in August 1948. Dewey led in the polls.Nat Fein/The New York TimesHe won, actually.Frank Cancellare/United Press InternationalIn the end, Mr. Truman won in perhaps the most celebrated comeback in American electoral history, including the iconic “Dewey Beats Truman” headline and photograph. He had barnstormed the country with an economically populist campaign that argued Democrats were on the side of working people while reminding voters of the Great Depression. You might well remember from your U.S. history classes that he blamed the famous “Do Nothing Congress” for not enacting his agenda.What you might not have learned in history class is that Mr. Truman attacked the “Do Nothing Congress“ first and foremost for failing to do anything about prices. The text of his speech at the Democratic convention does not quite do justice to his impassioned attack on Republicans for failing to extend price controls in 1946, and for their platform on prices. Finally, he called for a special session of Congress to act on prices and housing shortages (the links correspond to the YouTube video of those parts of his convention speech, for those interested). In short, congressional failure to act on prices was central to his critique of Republicans.In this respect, Mr. Truman was probably in a stronger position than Mr. Biden. Mr. Truman could blame Republicans for inflation; he could argue he had a solution for inflation; and he could link his position on inflation to his broader message about the Democrats as a party for working people. Polling at the time suggested that voters supported price controls, supported his special session, and did not necessarily blame Mr. Truman for inflation. In fact, more voters blamed Congress, business and labor than the president himself.Where Mr. Biden can still hope to match Mr. Truman is in economic reality, as inflation today is falling just as it was in the run-up to the 1948 election.In January 1948, inflation was 10 percent; by the end of October, it had fallen by half, and would reach one percent by January 1949. At election time, only 18 percent of voters expected prices would be higher in six months; just a few months earlier in June, a majority did so. It seems reasonable to wonder whether Mr. Truman might have lost the election had it been held a few months earlier.Despite those excellent conditions for a comeback, Mr. Truman’s electoral weakness was still stark. He had a powerful message and an improving economy, but he won by just 4.5 percentage points. The third-party candidates Mr. Wallace and Strom Thurmond succeeded in denying Mr. Truman key elements of the Democratic base that the party might have imagined it could take for granted just a few years earlier. He lost much of the Deep South without the support of the Dixiecrats and even lost New York, thanks to considerable defections on the left and among Jewish voters. No Democratic presidential would ever again reassemble the so-called New Deal coalition.But if 1948 is a mixed precedent for Mr. Biden, it’s a good precedent for today’s sour economic mood. It might betray a simple fact about public opinion: Voters hate inflation so much that they won’t ever like the economy if prices go up. There is no precedent in the era of consumer sentiment data for voters to have an above-average view of the economy once inflation cracks 5 percent — the recent high was 9 percent in June 2022 — even when unemployment is extremely low. It may just be that simple; indeed, consumer sentiment has begun to tick up over the last year, as inflation has declined to 3 percent.Alternately, 1948 and this era may suggest a more complex lesson about public opinion in the wake of pandemic or war, as high postwar and post-pandemic expectations quickly get dashed by the reality that the world isn’t returning to “normal” quite so quickly. Not only are high hopes dashed, but they also yield many kinds of economic dysfunction beyond high prices, from supply chain problems and housing shortages to “help wanted” signs and rising interest rates.Indeed, the famous “return to normalcy” election in 1920 — the largest popular vote landslide in American history — followed World War I and the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, which brought a recession and even higher inflation than in the 1940s.Normalcy did not come fast enough to save the party in power in 1920, the Democrats, but in retrospect it wasn’t too far off. The Roaring Twenties were just around the corner. And normalcy was just beginning to arrive in 1948, when Mr. Truman won re-election. The country was at the dawn of the prosperous, idealized 1950s “Leave It to Beaver” era that still lingers in the public imagination.If something similar is almost at hand, it can’t come soon enough for Mr. Biden. More

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      The Case for Disqualifying Trump Is Strong

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      It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which Trump asked on Wednesday to overturn the ruling — the former president is off the Republican primary ballot in Colorado.I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose consequences for those transgressions, Trump’s defenders and critics alike caution that the consequences will be “dangerous” or “destabilizing.”There is already a “surge in violent threats” against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.” Ian Bassin, a Protect Democracy co-founder, has suggested — and I agree — that even legal analysis of the 14th Amendment “is being colored by the analyst’s fear of how Trump and his supporters would react” to an adverse ruling.This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice.To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language:“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’t need to know a special “legal” version of the English language. Just apply the words on the page.Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion or to due process. The Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment, further expanded constitutional protections against majoritarian encroachment. Majorities can’t reimpose slavery, for example, nor can they take away your right to equal protection under the law.So when a person critiques Section 3 as “undemocratic” or “undermining democracy,” your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American electorate was wise enough not to vote for insurrectionists, they never would have drafted Section 3.Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1868. It was not until the Amnesty Act of 1872 that most former Confederates were permitted to serve in office again.Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told them to march to the Capitol and enlisted them to “fight like hell.” (At the same event, Rudy Giuliani urged “trial by combat.”) When the attack on the Capitol was underway, he inflamed the crowd in real time by tweeting that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”Yes, he also asked to the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.”What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for purposes of Section 3 would encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country.”I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It represented an effort to change the government of the United States. I was open to Jonathan Chait’s argument that the term “insurrection” is not the “most precise” way to describe Jan. 6, but he lost me with this distinction: “Trump was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic.”It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to “seize and hold” far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, something the Confederate Army could never accomplish.There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to toll takers.” He calls the text “ambiguous.”But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the Senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.’”Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office except the most powerful? One should not read constitutional provisions in a way that reaches facially absurd results.Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two of the most respected conservative legal minds in the United States.So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000, the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential election at the finish line, ending Al Gore’s bid in a narrow decision that was criticized by some as partisan in nature.Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its back on the plain text of the Constitution — especially when we are now facing the very crisis the amendment was intended to combat.Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Al Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation will be told to brace for violence. That’s what seditionists do.Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The Party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the Party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and sedition of the new. More

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      Trump’s January: Court Dates and Election Nights

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      In the political world, Donald J. Trump is on the cusp of something that eluded him in 2016: a clear victory in the Iowa caucuses this month. His advisers hope it will be the first in a series of early state victories that propel him to collect enough delegates to be the presumptive Republican presidential nominee by late March.In the legal world, however, the former president is at the same time facing two trials this month that hit on a deeply personal level. One is the wrap-up of the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against him and his company and an expected decision from the judge on the penalties he must pay. The other is the damages trial for defaming E. Jean Carroll, a New York writer who said he raped her in a New York department store in the 1990s. A jury last year said he had sexually abused her.It is a juxtaposition that Mr. Trump has so far managed to his advantage on the campaign trail, casting himself as the victim of political and legal persecution by a Democratic establishment out to silence him and his supporters. In both trials, he could face substantial financial penalties and a significant change in how — or if, in a worst-case scenario for him — he continues to control his business.If Mr. Trump has helped himself in court with his methods, it has been hard to discern so far, given how the judges have engaged with him and his arguments. Yet, in the face of this political-legal collision, he considers himself his own best defender and communicator, and in 2024, what the court of Republican public opinion will tolerate is different from what a court of law will allow.Mr. Trump is among the most disciplined undisciplined political figures in modern U.S. history: For all his self-inflicted wounds in his public comments and erratic social media posts, he is fairly rigid in delivering a repetitive message of grievance and victimization to his followers. He is aiming to turn undesirable circumstances that he’s furious about into a kind of high-stakes drama that he can direct as he and his campaign navigate a thicket of legal proceedings in the coming months.Mr. Trump, who attended much of the civil fraud trial, said on Tuesday that he planned to attend that trial’s final stage as well as the Carroll trial.That will have him flying back and forth from New York to Iowa and New Hampshire to juggle days of planned campaign events. He is also making plans to attend next week’s federal appeals court arguments in Washington on his claims that he should have presidential immunity in his federal election fraud trial, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.It’s a court appearance that promises to be a unique media spectacle in the nation’s capital, and will fall just days after the anniversary of Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob swarmed the Capitol building during certification of his 2020 election loss.While Mr. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions, the case in which he and his company have been found to have committed decades-long fraud is taking place more immediately, and cuts to the heart of his business brand. That case, overseen by Justice Arthur Engoron, and the one brought by Ms. Carroll have enraged him for months, according to people who have spoken with him.Mr. Trump entering a courtroom after a break in his civil fraud trial at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan last December.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesMr. Trump, who contacted The New York Times after learning an article was being written about the legal actions unfolding in January alongside the first rounds of voting, described the cases in a phone interview as “unfair.”He criticized the judges in both trials, describing Judge Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who is overseeing the Carroll case, as “more radical” than Justice Engoron, who issued a partial summary judgment against Mr. Trump before the trial began, leaving just a half-dozen claims left to be ruled on, along with penalties. Mr. Trump again highlighted comments the attorney general made targeting him during her 2018 campaign for her post.He also said there was a case scheduled just before “every election.” The federal trial he faces on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States is set to start on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday, although it is widely expected to be delayed.The former president said he planned to attend the remaining day of closing arguments in the case before Justice Engoron, and said he wanted to testify in the Carroll case — something he didn’t do during the first trial, and which he made clear in the brief interview that he regretted. He said he had been talked out of it last time.“I’m going to testify,” Mr. Trump said, something that his advisers are not uniformly behind.The Iowa caucuses are on Jan. 15. His team is set to leave straight for New Hampshire from Iowa on Jan. 16, the same day the Carroll case begins, and it remains to be seen if that changes.Last year, a jury in a civil trial in a separate case brought by Ms. Carroll found that he had sexually abused her and defamed her in a Truth Social post in late 2022. Mr. Trump continues to rail against the case, which a federal appeals court declined to delay in a decision last week. He has insisted that Justice Engoron has been biased, and has attacked him and his law clerk.The Trump team sees the civil and criminal cases against him as part of a vast conspiracy led by President Biden to thwart his camp, without offering evidence for their claims. They are suspicious of the timing of the Carroll trial, falling the day after the Iowa caucuses in a Manhattan federal courthouse and seven days before the New Hampshire primary. They repeatedly note that Ms. Carroll’s earlier suit was helped financially by the Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.“This is unequivocally a concerted effort to attack President Trump during the height of his political campaign,” said Alina Habba, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in both cases.A spokeswoman for Ms. Carroll said that “regardless of whether Donald Trump shows up at the trial in two weeks, E. Jean Carroll looks forward to presenting her case to a jury whose only job will be to determine how much in additional damages she will be entitled to receive.”David Kochel, a Republican strategist who has been opposed to Mr. Trump, said that mixing his court appearances with his campaign has been, in the Republican primary, successful for him so far, and it’s not surprising he would seek to make the most politically of a problematic month.“It keeps him in the center of the spotlight,” Mr. Kochel said. “It builds into his argument that he is a victim, that he’s constantly being targeted, that this is election interference and all that, so it makes sense to me to be going back and forth because the legal stuff is part of his campaign strategy now, and fund-raising. It’s worked for him throughout this entire process.”It will also keep him in the news — and potentially deprive his Republican primary rivals of oxygen — at a time when the voting is beginning, Mr. Kochel said, adding, “He’s the executive producer of all of this.”But the short-term victories around the civil trials do not necessarily add up to longer-term gains in a general election, said Dan Pfeiffer, a Democratic strategist and former top adviser to former President Barack Obama.“Trump is always a ‘deal with the challenges right in front of him right now and then deal with the consequences later’” person, Mr. Pfeiffer said. “This has a cost to him, because — and all the polling shows this — most Americans have paid almost no attention to all of Trump’s cases and they will start to pay more attention.”He added, “Shining a spotlight on his greatest general election vulnerabilities just as the general election electorate wakes up is a high-risk strategy.” More

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      Biden’s 2024 Playbook

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicYesterday, we went inside Donald Trump’s campaign for president, to understand how he’s trying to turn a mountain of legal trouble into a political advantage. Today, we turn to the re-election campaign of President Biden.Reid Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, explains why what looks on paper like a record of accomplishment is proving to be difficult to campaign on.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a politics correspondent for The New York Times.The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesBackground readingIn South Carolina, Democrats see a test of Biden’s appeal to Black voters.Political Memo: Should Biden really run again? He prolongs an awkward conversation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Biden Plans 2 Campaign Speeches to Underscore Contrasts With Trump

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      President Biden is intensifying his campaign efforts as he looks toward November, planning a series of speeches that aides said on Wednesday would cast the stakes of the coming election as the endurance of American democracy itself.Even before a single vote is cast in the Republican Party’s nominating race, Mr. Biden and his team are treating former President Donald J. Trump as their de facto opponent in the general election. They’re seeking to frame the contest not as a traditional referendum on the incumbent president and his governance of the nation, but as an existential battle to save the country from a dangerous opponent.With the calendar flipped to 2024, Mr. Biden is making a notable escalation of his re-election campaign with an address planned at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania on Saturday, the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob.The location, where George Washington commanded troops during the Revolutionary War, is intended to draw a sharp contrast between Washington, who voluntarily ceded power after serving as the nation’s first president, and Mr. Trump, who refuses to accept the results of the 2020 race. On Monday, Mr. Biden will appear in Charleston, S.C., at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church where a white supremacist killed nine parishioners in 2015. The venue embodies the country’s current fight against political violence and white supremacy, his campaign said.The two speeches are part of an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and remind Democratic and independent voters of the alternative to his re-election. In recent weeks, campaign aides have seized on Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric and potentially radical plans for a second term.“The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since,” said Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager. “Our message is clear and it is simple. We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it. Because it does.”Mr. Biden has held only one public event for his 2024 campaign, though in many official White House appearances he has drawn contrasts between his leadership and that of Mr. Trump and other Republicans. He has focused instead on wooing donors in private fund-raising events.Mr. Biden’s appearances will also provide voters with the first side-by-side contrast between himself and his predecessor this election cycle. Mr. Trump is scheduled to hold two campaign rallies on Saturday in Iowa, where he leads the nomination contest by a double-digit margin.For months, Democrats have issued public and private warnings about the need for Mr. Biden’s campaign to engage more aggressively in the 2024 efforts. Polls suggest a neck-and-neck race, with Mr. Biden struggling to energize key constituencies of the Democratic coalition, including young, Black and Latino voters.Biden aides said the campaign planned to hire organizing teams in every battleground state, eventually employing thousands of staff members across the country. A new round of campaign ads is planned later this week.They also plan to dispatch Vice President Kamala Harris on a national tour, focused on abortion rights, that will begin in Wisconsin on Jan. 22, the 51st anniversary of the landmark abortion-rights decision in Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court struck down that ruling in 2022 with the support of three Trump-appointed justices. More

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      Ramaswamy Is Still Sprinting Across Iowa, While His Polling Barely Moves

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      Vivek Ramaswamy tore across eastern Iowa on Tuesday at the breakneck pace that has come to define his long-shot presidential campaign.He stopped just long enough at most of the six restaurants and bars on his itinerary to remind voters he’s still in the race, lingering longer at his final stop of the day. He drew praise for his straightforward, bombastic style. And he made humorous quips, promising to finish Donald J. Trump’s mission of draining the bureaucratic swamp in Washington by “bringing the pesticide” to anything that crawls out.But the day mostly served as a stark reminder of how deeply Mr. Ramaswamy remains mired in a kind of swamp of his own, trailing far behind his rivals for the Republican nomination and stuck in fourth place in most state polls. In Dubuque, a few minutes before Mr. Ramaswamy arrived at a cozy cocktail bar where he was scheduled to speak, one of his campaign’s surrogates asked the 50 attendees how many planned to caucus for him. Only about five raised their hands.Some voters at his six Iowa events Tuesday wondered aloud whether he was simply burnishing his credentials for a 2028 presidential run or for a position in Mr. Trump’s cabinet if the former president were to win back the White House.“I think he’s got a really good chance of that,” said Matt Casey, 49, of a possible role for Mr. Ramaswamy in a Trump administration. “He could probably be the vice president real easy.”Mr. Ramaswamy, who has largely financed his presidential bid with the money he earned from his shrewd pitches to investors in his biotechnology business, can probably afford to remain in the contest as long as he desires. And he has maintained that he will outperform expectations and pull off an underdog victory on caucus night on Jan. 15. He has argued that many of his supporters are young people and other first-time caucusgoers not being counted in the polls.“I think we’re going to deliver a major surprise,” Mr. Ramaswamy told reporters on Tuesday.His tactic of hewing close to Mr. Trump’s policies and heaping praise on the former president has won him accolades and respect from Iowa Republicans. But with under two weeks until the caucuses, voters’ support for Mr. Trump seems as ironclad as ever, leaving Mr. Ramaswamy simply as the second-favorite for many.“I’d like to see a Ramaswamy presidency, but I think he’s got a steep hill to climb,” said Jeremy Nelson, 46, who worried that voting for Mr. Ramaswamy instead of Mr. Trump could help Nikki Haley, who is trying to emerge as the main alternative to the former president. “I don’t want a vote for Vivek in the primary to be a vote for Nikki Haley,” he added.Still, Mr. Ramaswamy’s pointed rhetoric impressed many on Tuesday, and changed at least a few minds. At the dimly lit bar in Dubuque, he eschewed his typical stump speech and launched straight into a question-and-answer session as his wife, Apoorva Ramaswamy, a surgeon and cancer researcher, looked on.Mr. Ramaswamy painted himself as a more sophisticated version of Mr. Trump, quoting former President John Quincy Adams one moment and telling a voter that Democrats were “selling us the rope today they will use to hang us tomorrow” the next.He drew applause when he said that unlike Mr. Trump, he would not be led astray by political advisers who stopped the former president from dissolving various federal agencies, ending birthright citizenship or using local law enforcement to aid in the capture of undocumented immigrants.Sandy Kapparos, 75, said she was “very impressed” with Mr. Ramaswamy’s wide grasp of various issues.“He brought up everything,” she said. “He just seemed to know so much about all of it. I was leaning toward Nikki Haley, but now I’m not sure.”Ben Dickinson, a 32-year-old libertarian from Davenport, who visited a Bettendorf event on Tuesday night with his partner and two children, is planning to caucus for Mr. Ramaswamy. He said he thought the candidate had set himself up well should something happen with Mr. Trump’s candidacy. “If Trump were to drop out, then Vivek would most likely get a lot of Trump’s followers because he hasn’t said anything negative against Trump.”Mr. Ramaswamy is hardly the first presidential long-shot candidate who has lingered in a primary far longer than expected, and staying in a race can increase name recognition and pay other dividends. Some also-rans, like former Representative Ron Paul of Texas, built fervent fan bases even as their presidential chances dwindled to near zero.“I think he’ll get his name out there,” Tom Priebe, 75, said of Mr. Ramaswamy’s goal on caucus night. “I don’t know if he’ll do well this time, but maybe next time.”As his hopes of winning the nomination have faded, Mr. Ramaswamy has resorted to a host of tactics, some of them signaling desperation. He rented an apartment in Des Moines, campaigned through Thanksgiving and has packed so many events into his schedule that he frequently shows up late. His campaign said on Tuesday that he had become the first candidate in history to complete the so-called Full Grassley — a tour through each of Iowa’s 99 counties, so named for the trip the state’s longtime senator Chuck Grassley takes each year — two different times.Mr. Ramaswamy has also delved into the fringes of the far right, promoting conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement theory” — the racist idea that Western elites are trying to replace white Americans with minorities. On Tuesday, he trumpeted a new endorsement from Steve King, the former Iowa congressman who was pushed out of office by a primary challenger after his history of racist comments prompted the Republican Party to strip him of his committee assignments in Congress.On Tuesday morning, Robert Johanningmeier showed up to Mr. Ramaswamy’s event at a bar in Waukon, in northeastern Iowa, with a plan. He had a brown “Vivek 2024” hat cued up in the Amazon cart on his phone. Assuming he liked what he heard, he planned on clicking “buy.”But after hearing Mr. Ramaswamy speak, Mr. Johanningmeier still wasn’t sold, although he said he was wavering. He decided to keep wearing the same hat he had walked in with — a camouflage “Trump 2024” cap. The Ramaswamy hat, though, stayed in his cart. More