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      Gov. Spencer Cox Holds Off Challenger From Right in Utah’s G.O.P. Primary

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      Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah fended off a challenge from the right in his primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, defeating State Representative Phil Lyman, who had the endorsement of the state Republican Party.Mr. Cox, a relative moderate, faced opposition from Mr. Lyman and G.O.P. colleagues who considered him not conservative enough. Mr. Cox has been openly critical of former President Donald J. Trump, and has not endorsed him as he runs for president for a third time.At the state G.O.P. convention in Salt Lake City in the spring, Mr. Cox, who is in his first four-year term after having served as lieutenant governor, failed to secure the party’s endorsement for his re-election bid. At the event, the crowd booed Mr. Cox, who was forced to be on the defensive about his Republican credentials.Despite party frictions, Mr. Cox was widely popular among Utahns in his first term, and his nomination makes a second term all the more likely. Republicans have controlled the Utah governorship since 1985.Mr. Cox will face the Democrats’ nominee, State Representative Brian King, a former minority leader of the State House, in the November election.Mr. Lyman, a former county commissioner, is known for an illegal ATV ride that he staged in 2014 to protest a federal decision banning motor vehicle use in a local canyon. Mr. Lyman and his supporters viewed the protest as an act of civil disobedience, and Mr. Trump pardoned him in 2020.Though Mr. Trump did not weigh in on the governor’s race, Mr. Lyman emphasized his support for the former president throughout his campaign. More

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      John Curtis, a Moderate House Republican, Wins Utah’s Senate Primary

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      Representative John Curtis, a centrist Republican, won his party’s primary for U.S. Senate in Utah on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, beating a more conservative candidate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Curtis, who has held a House seat in eastern Utah since 2017, has portrayed himself as a moderate workhorse in the image of the senator whose seat he is vying to fill: Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate who said he was retiring to make way for a “new generation of leaders.”Mr. Curtis, 64, is perhaps not the fresh-faced successor Mr. Romney, 77, had imagined. But Mr. Curtis, a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and a leader of Republican efforts to address climate change in Congress, is a clear heir apparent to Mr. Romney’s centrist style of politics.Unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Curtis is not a vocal critic of Mr. Trump. Mr. Romney, who voted twice to remove Mr. Trump from office during the former president’s two impeachment trials in the Senate, had pleaded with his fellow Republicans to unite behind an alternative to the former president for 2024.While Mr. Curtis declined to support Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, he largely backed his agenda once he was elected to Congress. But he refused to support Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In the midst of this year’s Senate primary race, and seeking to polish his conservative bona fides, Mr. Curtis defended the former president’s vow to prosecute his political enemies if elected president.“I think it’s just human nature to feel the way that President Trump has expressed himself,” Mr. Curtis said during a debate ahead of the primary.Still, he faced attacks from his main primary opponent, Trent Staggs, the mayor of Riverton, Utah, for not being sufficiently supportive of the former president. Mr. Trump had endorsed Mr. Staggs, describing him in a video last weekend as “a little bit of a long shot” but “MAGA all the way.” For months, polls showed Mr. Curtis leading the race by a wide margin.Mr. Curtis began his political career as a Democrat. He unsuccessfully ran for the Utah State Senate in 2000, and then served for a year as the chair of the Democratic Party in Utah County. He ran for mayor of Provo as a Republican in 2009, and served in that position until 2017.That year, when Representative Jason Chaffetz, the influential chair of the House Oversight Committee, abruptly retired from his House seat in eastern Utah, Mr. Curtis jumped into the race, winning the Republican primary with 40 percent of the vote and defeating his Democratic opponent in the special election in a landslide. Mr. Curtis has since cruised to re-election to three full terms in the House. More

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      Rep. Bob Good Seeks Funds for Virginia Primary Recount

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      The Republican primary between Representative Bob Good of Virginia, the chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, and his Trump-backed challenger was still up in the air on Monday almost a week after the balloting, as the two election deniers settled in for a lengthy and ugly fight over who was the true victor.John J. McGuire, a little-known state senator and former Navy SEAL who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, held a razor-thin lead of just under 375 votes out of the nearly 63,000 votes cast, according to The Associated Press. He declared victory last Tuesday night before all the votes were counted, and on Monday, former President Donald J. Trump, who endorsed him, declared Mr. McGuire the winner in a social media post.But The A.P. said on Monday that the contest was too close to call, noting that while it would be unusual for a recount to shift the outcome of such a race, it would not be impossible. And Mr. Good has already made it clear he will seek a recount, an option under Virginia law, which allows such a request if the winner of a race is less than one percentage point ahead of his opponent.John J. McGuire, a state senator, speaking to supporters in Lynchburg, Va., last week. He declared victory on election night.Skip Rowland/Associated Press“While not unprecedented, it is rare for a race of this nature to shift by a few hundred votes during a recount,” The A.P. said in explaining its finding that the race was “too close to call.” “However, A.P. research has found that Virginia has a history of making small vote corrections after Election Day and that some past statewide races have shifted by hundreds of votes during a recount.”Mr. Good would have to pay for the recount himself because he trails Mr. McGuire by 0.6 of a percentage point, just above the 0.5 percentage point difference below which the state would finance it.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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      Donald Trump Doesn’t Have the Support of Corporate America

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      Stephan DybusRecent headlines suggest that our nation’s business leaders are embracing the presidential candidate Donald Trump. His campaign would have you believe that our nation’s top chief executives are returning to support Mr. Trump for president, touting declarations of support from some prominent financiers like Steve Schwarzman and David Sacks.That is far from the truth. They didn’t flock to him before, and they certainly aren’t flocking to him now. Mr. Trump continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party.I know this because I have worked with roughly 1,000 chief executives a year, running a school for them, which I started 35 years ago, and I speak with business leaders almost every day. Our surveys show that roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of them are registered Republicans. The reality is that the top corporate leaders working today, like many Americans, aren’t entirely comfortable with either Mr. Trump or President Biden. But they largely like — or at least can tolerate — one of them. They truly fear the other.If you want the most telling data point on corporate America’s lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, look where they are investing their money. Not a single Fortune 100 chief executive has donated to the candidate so far this year, which indicates a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican presidential candidates dating back over a century, to the days of Taft, and stretching through Coolidge and the Bushes, all of whom had dozens of major company heads donating to their campaigns.Mr. Trump secured the White House partly by tapping into the anticorporate, populist messaging of Bernie Sanders, who was then a candidate, a move that Mr. Trump discussed with me when I met him in 2015. The strategy may have won voters but did little to enhance Mr. Trump’s image with the business community. And while a number of chief executives tried to work with Mr. Trump as they would with any incumbent president, and many celebrated his move to cut the corporate tax rate, wariness persisted. 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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      Donald Trump Said He Proposed a ‘Migrant League of Fighters’ to U.F.C. Chief Dana White

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said in an address to an evangelical group that he had suggested starting a sports league for migrants to fight one another.Appearing at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington on Saturday, Mr. Trump described migrants with the dehumanizing terms he often uses to refer to them, saying they were “tough,” “come from prisons” and are “nasty, mean.”Mr. Trump then said that he had suggested to Dana White, an ally of the former president’s who is the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, “Why don’t you set up a migrant league of fighters?”He continued, referring to the U.F.C.: “And then you have the champion of your league — these are the greatest fighters in the world — fight the champion of the migrants? I think the migrant guy might win! That’s how tough they are.”Mr. Trump said that Mr. White “didn’t like the idea too much.” But, he added, “It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever had. These are tough people.”Mr. White, asked about Mr. Trump’s comment at a U.F.C. event on Saturday, confirmed that the former president had made the proposal, but said, “It was a joke, it was a joke. I saw everybody going crazy online. But yeah, he did say it.”The Biden campaign denounced Mr. Trump’s comments, attacking what it called “a rambling, confused tirade,” at what it said was intended to be “a conference for Christian values.”“Trump’s incoherent, unhinged tirade showed voters in his own words that he is a threat to our freedoms and is too dangerous to be let anywhere near the White House again,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement.Mr. Trump has made immigration a central part of his platform in the 2024 presidential election, as it was in his two previous campaigns. He has pledged to carry out sweeping raids and to use military funds to erect camps to hold undocumented detainees. He has also escalated his rhetoric against migrants, at times using language that invokes the racial hatred of Hitler by describing migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”“Fantasies about cage matches are a distraction from the very real plans Trump and his team are making to deport millions of people who have lived here for decades and the resulting inflation, joblessness and economic devastation,” said Doug G. Rivlin, a spokesman for America’s Voice, an immigrant-rights advocacy group that has been tracking the escalation of Republican rhetoric on the issue. “Republican politicians are going to find that hard to defend while campaigning this year.”Jazmine Ulloa More

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      Trump Hawks American Flag Pins with His Name in Gold Splashed Across Them

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      Donald J. Trump’s campaign is billing it as a must-have fashion accessory for his supporters: an American flag lapel pin with the former president’s name scrawled in gold block letters across it — in all caps.The pins were available starting Thursday for a $50 donation to the Trump campaign, the latest merchandising gambit from a candidate who has hawked a plethora of products over the decades, most recently Bibles and Trump sneakers.A donation page for the pins declared that Mr. Trump’s political opponents had rendered him a convicted felon and asked supporters if he could count on their support.His latest marketing pitch is further testing the norms of flag etiquette and drawing fresh scrutiny from critics.It’s not only the flag flap surrounding Mr. Trump, whose birthday, June 14, happens to fall on Flag Day. Some election deniers have flown the flag upside-down, a historical symbol of distress, to protest Mr. Trump’s 2020 election defeat. An inverted flag appeared at the home of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., a display that he attributed to his wife.Alterations to the flag are forbidden under the U.S. Flag Code, which was created in the 1920s by a group of patriotic and civic groups that included the American Legion and adopted as law by Congress in 1942.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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      David DePape Convicted in Attack of Nancy Pelosi’s Husband

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      In 2022, David DePape broke into Ms. Pelosi’s San Francisco home and eventually beat her husband with a hammer.David DePape was convicted on Friday of five charges, brought by the state of California, for breaking into Nancy Pelosi’s home in 2022 and beating her husband with a hammer.The verdict in the state trial concluded a case that had raised fears of politically motivated violence in a divided America and reflected some of the darkest currents in the country’s politics. In the years leading up to the attack, Mr. DePape was submerged in online conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon and the virulent rhetoric that right-wing figures had for years embraced against their opponents, including Ms. Pelosi.The convictions by a state jury in a San Francisco courtroom followed Mr. DePape’s convictions in federal court last year that resulted in a 30-year sentence. On Friday, he was found guilty of first-degree burglary; false imprisonment of an elder; threatening the family of a public official; kidnapping for ransom that resulted in bodily harm; and dissuading a witness by force or threat.Mr. DePape, 44, now faces a life sentence without parole in state prison, to be completed after he serves his federal term.Over the course of the two trials, he and his lawyers never contested the evidence against him. In interviews with police shortly after the incident in October 2022, he admitted to breaking into Ms. Pelosi’s house and attacking her husband, Paul Pelosi. He did the same in an interview from jail with a local television station and on the witness stand in his federal trial.His lawyer in the state case, Adam Lipson of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, told the jury in his closing statement on Tuesday that the group should find Mr. DePape guilty of some of the charges. But Mr. Lipson tried to convince jurors that the prosecution had not proved other charges beyond a reasonable doubt. He disputed, in particular, that Mr. DePape was guilty of kidnapping Mr. Pelosi because he did not tie up his victim or attempt to extract a ransom.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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      Judge in Trump Documents Case Hears Arguments Over Special Counsel

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      Judge Aileen Cannon held a hearing to consider a question that has been quickly dismissed in other cases: whether there is a constitutional basis for the appointment of a special counsel.Former President Donald J. Trump’s defense team tried on Friday to persuade the judge overseeing the national security documents case to dismiss the indictment, pushing a long-shot argument that the special counsel, Jack Smith, was not properly appointed.Such defense motions are routinely denied in federal cases involving special counsels. But the judge presiding over this case, Aileen M. Cannon, has given Mr. Trump’s request extra import by holding hearings and allowing three outside lawyers time in court to make additional arguments about whether there is a constitutional mechanism for naming special counsels.“This has been very illuminating and helpful,” Judge Cannon said at the close of about four hours of arguments and a steady beat of her own questions, which often began with, “Would you agree that.”Mr. Trump’s team argued that the attorney general lacks constitutional authority to appoint someone with the powers of a special counsel. “The text of these statutes really matters,” said Emil Bove, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers. He also argued that Mr. Smith should have been confirmed by the Senate because his position is so powerful.Prosecutors argued that well-established precedents demonstrate that the attorney general does have that power, citing a string of court decisions upholding special counsel investigations. “We’re interpreting statutory terms consistent with the Constitution,” said James I. Pearce, a member of the special counsel’s team.Judge Cannon’s questions addressed language in specific laws, past precedents and excerpts from lawyers’ written briefs. At times on Friday, her courtroom sounded like a university seminar on the history of the Justice Department, national scandals that have drawn special counsels and the various interpretations of the meaning of words in decades-old laws.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