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      Democrats Are Workshopping New Tactics After Losses of 2024

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      Among the ideas being promoted: knocking on every single door in a House district and awarding cash prizes for the most effective new ways to reach voters.If there is one point of consensus in the deeply fractured Democratic Party, it’s that the old ways of doing business just aren’t cutting it.And so, many of the party’s most analytically minded strategists have begun focusing their energies on dissecting the tactical and technical decisions that led to last year’s devastating defeats, and dreaming up proposals to overhaul the machinery of progressive politics.This work is not about the big picture of what the party stands for. It is about the nuts and bolts of how to get candidates elected: which potential voters to target; whose doors to knock on, and whether door-knocking is still effective in a digital age; and when and where to advertise, whether online, on television or by mail.There is also a concern that too many of those decisions have been made by party officials on high, relying too heavily on polling to guide their choices on policy positions, messaging and advertising, and ignoring other important signals that could help influence voters.“We need to rethink things,” said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA, which was once the party’s premiere super PAC and spent $45 million, including its nonprofit arms, in the 2024 election. “The same elitism that is abundant in our party exists in the way we make decisions.”Priorities USA is spending $8 million on three pilot programs this year to explore some of the surprise findings from 2024. One such finding was that some of the Democratic group’s most effective ads turned out to be those that ran on YouTube channels favored by Republican voters who were seen as unpersuadable.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are the Courts Checking Trump — or Enabling Him?

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      A former federal judge weighs in.In this episode of “The Opinions,” the editorial director David Leonhardt talks to a conservative former federal judge, Michael McConnell, about the role of the courts in President Trump’s second term.Are the Courts Checking Trump — or Enabling Him?A former federal judge weighs in.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.David Leonhardt: I’m David Leonhardt, the director of the New York Times editorial board. Every week I’m having conversations to help shape the board’s opinions.One thing that I find useful right now is talking with President Trump’s conservative critics. They tend to be alarmed by the president’s behavior, but they also tend to be more optimistic than many progressives about whether American democracy is surviving the Trump presidency. And that combination helps me and my colleagues think about where the biggest risks to our country really are.One area I’ve been wrestling with is the federal court system. I want to understand the extent to which the courts are acting as a check on President Trump as he tries to amass more power, or whether the courts are actually helping him amass that power.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Does Trump Silence the Epstein Conspiracy Theories?

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      President Trump is finding it hard to put the Epstein files behind him.As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump loved a conspiracy theory.He started his political career by stoking the lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. By 2024, he complained, falsely, that noncitizens would vote in the November election and throw the result to Democrats. He declared on a debate stage that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. He promised to release government files on Sept. 11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and told Fox News that “I guess I would” release the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, too.As president, though, he’s finding that it’s a whole lot easier to start a conspiracy theory than it is to put one to rest.That is the challenge facing Trump now, as his political supporters stage an open revolt over his administration’s decision not to release further materials about Epstein, the convicted sex offender who hobnobbed with the global elite before he died by suicide in prison in 2019.Putting the genie back in the bottleThey could be forgiven for expecting more details. Trump installed two vocal Epstein conspiracy theorists and right-wing media personalities, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, to run the F.B.I. after both men spent years telling their audiences there really was a there there. This spring, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised big revelations about the case that have come to nothing.It turns out, though, it is a whole lot easier to be a conspiracy theorist when you’re not president, you don’t control both houses of Congress, and you haven’t handpicked the leaders of the nation’s premier investigative agencies.Trump has tried to put the genie back in the bottle. He admonished a reporter for asking about the matter at a cabinet meeting last week — “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” — and then, over the weekend, told off his followers, in a lengthy social media post.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Senate Approves First Judge of Trump’s Second Term

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      The pace of judicial confirmations is lagging compared with the president’s first stint in office, but more are in the pipeline.The Senate on Monday confirmed the first federal judge of President Trump’s second term, putting the administration on a much slower pace for filling federal court vacancies than in his first term, when a rush to install conservatives on the courts was an overarching priority.Senators voted 46 to 42 along party lines to confirm Whitney D. Hermandorfer of Tennessee to a seat on the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Her approval came more than six weeks later than the first appellate judge confirmed after Mr. Trump took office in 2017. The Senate had also confirmed a new Supreme Court justice by this point in his last term, placing Neil M. Gorsuch on the court.This time around, Mr. Trump has put more emphasis on other aspects of his administration, aggressively pushing ambassadorial nominations and devoting much of the energy of the Senate to pushing through the sweeping tax and policy legislation enacted this month.In addition, significantly fewer judicial vacancies exist today compared with 2017, when Mr. Trump inherited more than 100 court openings after Senate Republicans stalled President Barack Obama’s judicial selections when they took Senate control in 2014.“We’re not facing the number of judicial vacancies this Congress we did during Trump’s first term,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader. “There are around 50 vacancies on the federal bench. Our job is to fill those vacancies with more judges who understand the proper role of a judge, and that starts with confirming Ms. Hermandorfer.”Ms. Hermandorfer served as director of the strategic litigation unit in the Tennessee attorney general’s office, where she has argued high-profile cases, including defending the state’s abortion ban and challenging a Biden administration prohibition on discrimination against transgender students.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions Recorded With Autopen

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      Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is escalating his battle against Republican claims that he might not have been in control of high-profile clemency decisions issued under his name at the end of his term and, more generally, that his cognitive state impaired his functioning in office.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Biden said that he had orally granted all the pardons and commutations issued at the end of his term, calling President Trump and other Republicans “liars” for claiming his aides had used an autopen to do so without his authorization.“I made every decision,” Mr. Biden said in a phone interview on Thursday, asserting that he had his staff use an autopen replicating his signature on the clemency warrants because “we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”The interview was Mr. Biden’s first about the parallel investigations begun by the Trump White House, the Justice Department and Congress into a series of clemency decisions made by Mr. Biden in his final weeks in office and his mental acuity during his term.Republicans in Congress have demanded sworn interviews with former Biden aides, prompting them to hire their own lawyers. Some lawyers are said to have warned their clients not to talk publicly and about the dangers of testifying because the Justice Department under Mr. Trump might be eager to bring perjury charges over any inconsistency, no matter how minor.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ex-Secret Service Director Denies She Failed to Send Agents to Protect Trump

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      Kimberly A. Cheatle, who resigned after Donald J. Trump was grazed by a bullet as a candidate a year ago, pushed back against findings in a Senate report released on Sunday.For the first time since she resigned in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump a year ago, Kimberly A. Cheatle, the former Secret Service director, pushed back publicly on Sunday against congressional criticism that she had denied additional security requests for a campaign event that day in Butler, Pa.“For the Butler rally, I actually did direct additional assets to be provided, particularly in the form of agency countersnipers,” Ms. Cheatle said in a statement. One of those was the sniper who shot and killed Mr. Trump’s would-be assassin. But that came after the man, Thomas Crooks, successfully evaded a search to find him, climbed onto a roof of a nearby building and fired eight shots at Mr. Trump while he was speaking. One of the bullets grazed Mr. Trump before he was moved to safety by his security detail.Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a final report early Sunday on the Senate panel’s finding that “stunning failures” by the Secret Service led to the near assassination of Mr. Trump. Several other investigations into the security failures came to the same conclusion last year.The report revealed little new information about the failures that led to a 20-year-old gunman’s ability to fire shots from a roof of a building with a direct line of sight to where Mr. Trump was speaking at a fairground.Ms. Cheatle disputed the report’s claim that she lied during congressional testimony about having denied additional security measures for the July 13, 2024, rally.“Any assertion that I provided misleading testimony is patently false and does a disservice to those men and women on the front lines who have been unfairly disciplined for a team, rather than an individual, failure,” Ms. Cheatle said.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

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      Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president of the center-left think tank Third Way, has studied the politics of transgender rights for four years. But it was only this past December that she had cause to utter the phrase “genital check” in the presence of a Democratic representative.“Now I’ve done it many times,” she said, and with many lawmakers. When she does, she added, “their faces squish up.”At the time, Ms. Erickson was meeting with Democratic lawmakers in hopes of blocking a Republican bill to enact a blanket ban on transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports. Awkward conversations, to her mind, were a necessary first step in escaping what many in and around Democratic politics had come to see as a sort of paralysis over the issue.Stuck in a widening gulf between the views of the party’s liberal voters and advocacy organizations on one side, and those of the broader American electorate on the other, many Democratic politicians had resolved to say as little as possible about the subject. In surveys, Ms. Erickson and other public-opinion researchers had found that this allowed Republicans, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads attacking Democrats on transgender rights in 2024, to define voters’ perceptions of Democratic policy positions.“What they thought, in November, was that Democrats thought there should be no rules,” Ms. Erickson said. “That’s a caricature of the position from the right. And if you are too scared to articulate what your position is, that’s what they hear.”Lanae Erickson, of the center-left think tank Third Way, says that leaving policy on transgender athletes to schools and state athletic associations will ultimately be unconvincing to voters.Tierney L. Cross/The New York TimesWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Administration Fires More DOJ Employees Who Worked for Special Counsel

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      The latest round of firings targets not just prosecutors but also support staff members who played a smaller role.The Trump administration fired another batch of nearly 10 Justice Department employees who once worked for the special counsel’s office that twice indicted President Trump, some in relatively minor roles, according to two people familiar with the matter.The dismissals on Friday were the latest sign that the administration was reaching deep into the inner workings of the Justice Department to find and expel not just people who had a direct part in investigating and prosecuting Mr. Trump during his four years out of office but also those who had played secondary roles in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith.The latest firings, which include at least two federal prosecutors, appeared to once again ignore traditional civil service protections and were said to be based on a broad assertion of presidential authority, according to two people who spoke about the moves on condition of anonymity to avoid discussing a politically sensitive subject.At least seven others who were fired had served as support staff to Mr. Smith’s office, the two people said. They helped manage the office, handling tasks like overseeing financial records, performing paralegal services or conducting information security.Since the early days of Mr. Trump’s second term, the president’s aides have repeatedly sought to fire, punish or demote the people who worked on the cases against him as well on cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.The purging from government ranks of anyone associated with these cases has been sporadic, with fresh batches of firings coming at different intervals and often without much explanation, other than the citing of Article II of the Constitution, which defines the powers of a president.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More