United States

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      On the Economy, Biden Struggles to Convince Voters of His Success

      by

      Wages are up, inflation has slowed and the White House has a new slogan. Still, President Biden’s poor marks on the economy are making Democrats worried.When a chant slamming President Biden spread from a NASCAR race to T-shirts and bumper stickers across red America two years ago, the White House pulled off perhaps its savviest messaging feat to date. Biden aides and allies repackaged the “Let’s Go Brandon” insult and morphed it into “Dark Brandon,” a celebratory meme casting Mr. Biden as some sort of omnipotent mastermind.Now, the White House and the Biden campaign is several weeks into another appropriation play — but it isn’t going nearly as well. Aides in July announced that the president would run for re-election on the virtues of “Bidenomics,” proudly reclaiming the right’s derisive term for Mr. Biden’s economic policies.The gambit does not appear to be working yet. Even as Mr. Biden presides over what is by all indicators a strong economy — one on track to dodge the recession many had feared — he is still struggling to convince most of the country of the strength of his economic stewardship. Wages are up, inflation has slowed, but credit to the president remains in short supply.Polling last month from the Democratic organization Navigator found that 25 percent of Americans support Mr. Biden’s major actions, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, but still think the president is doing a poor job handling the economy. It’s a group that tends to be disproportionately younger than 40 and is more likely to be Black or Latino — voters critical to Democratic victories.“This is the thing that’s vexing all Democrats,” said Patrick Gaspard, the president of the Center for American Progress.Democratic economists, pollsters and officials have a variety of explanations for why voters don’t credit Mr. Biden for the economy. Inflation remains elevated, and interest rates have made home buying difficult. There is also evidence that voters’ views on the economy are shaped as much by their political views as by personal experiences.And then there is the regular refrain that people don’t know about Mr. Biden’s successes. Even Mr. Biden’s supporters say that he and his administration have been too reluctant to promote their record and ineffective when they do.“I’ve never seen this big of a disconnect between how the economy is actually doing and key polling results about what people think is going on,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.Mr. Biden on Friday attempted another victory lap in a White House speech celebrating the latest jobs report, which found no sign of an imminent recession and a slight increase in the unemployment rate as more people sought work. He credited the heart of his economic plan, including investment in infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing and climate-related industries along with caps on the price of insulin medication.Bidenomics, Mr. Biden said, “is about investing in America and investing in Americans.”Mr. Biden said his economic plan was to credit for the latest jobs report, which found no sign of an imminent recession and a slight increase in the unemployment rate as more people sought work.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesThe term Bidenomics emerged as a pejorative in conservative media and has been widely adopted by Mr. Biden’s rivals. “One of the most important issues of the campaign will be who can rescue our country from the burning wreckage of Bidenomics,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a recent video, “which shall henceforth be defined as inflation, taxation submission and failure.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida offered his definition at a recent campaign stop in Rock Rapids, Iowa. “Bidenomics is basically: You have a lower standard of living so he can pursue the left’s ideological agenda,” he said.Behind the rhetoric, there is some debate over whether the economy will be the driving force it has been in past presidential elections. Some Democrats argue that their party’s resilience in last year’s midterm elections showed that the fight over abortion rights and Mr. Trump’s influence over Republicans can trounce more kitchen-table concerns.The White House argues that Democrats’ strong showing last year is a sign the Mr. Biden’s electoral performance isn’t strictly tied to the economy.“By all metrics, his economic record has improved since then,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.Still, nearly all of Mr. Biden’s campaign advertising this year sells his economic record. The ads — which don’t use the term Bidenomics — cast the president’s policies as a work in progress. “All of the things that Biden fought to get passed helped the middle class,” a cement mason from Milwaukee says in an ad the campaign released last week.“It’s no secret that a lot of Americans are struggling with the cost of living, and that’s a reality that shapes their views about the economy more broadly,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster who conducts surveys for the Democratic National Committee.Explaining why Mr. Biden’s policies will help, Mr. Garin said, “is what campaigns are for.”This summer Mr. Biden has promoted “Bidenomics” at events around the country, often speaking in factories or with labor groups. Even some in friendly audiences of local Democratic leaders and supporters questioned whether his emphasis would resonate with the coalition that elected him in 2020.“Is Bidenomics the right thing to sell?” Mayor Katie Rosenberg of Wausau, Wis., said after seeing Mr. Biden speak in Milwaukee last month. “I just keep thinking, why aren’t they just doing Build Back Better still? That was a really good slogan. Bidenomics is just an effort to capitalize on the negativity around him.”Build Back Better, the mix of economic, climate and social policy that Mr. Biden ran on in 2020, was a bumper-sticker-length encapsulation of Mr. Biden’s ambitions as president. Significant elements became law, but the branding exercise failed, doomed in part by rising inflation.Mr. Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan was a bumper-sticker-length encapsulation of his ambitions as president.Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesDemocrats rebranded their climate legislation as the Inflation Reduction Act, even though the bill had little to do with inflation. Even Mr. Biden recently said that he regretted the name, suggesting that it promised something the bill was not devised to deliver.Though the rate of inflation has slowed, it remains the chief drag on Mr. Biden’s economic approval ratings, said Joanne Hsu, the director of Surveys of Consumers at the University of Michigan.“We track people who have heard negative news about inflation,” Dr. Hsu said. “Over the past year, that number has been much higher than in the 1970s and ’80s, when inflation was so much worse.”One theme of Mr. Biden’s aides, advisers and allies is to plead for time. The economy will get better, more people will hear and understand what Bidenomics means and credit will accrue to the president, they say.“The public more and more is going to be seeing low unemployment and will continue to get more bullish on the economy,” said Representative Robert Garcia of California, a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board. “But I also understand it’s very hard for people now. We just can’t expect overnight for people to feel better about the economy.”For most Americans, their views on the economy are directly tied to their partisan leanings — a phenomenon that is particularly acute for Republicans. In 2016, before Mr. Trump took office, just 18 percent of Republicans rated the economy excellent or good, according to a Pew Research survey. By February 2020, just before the pandemic shut down public life in America, 81 percent of Republicans said the economy was excellent or good.An Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last month found just 8 percent of Republicans, along with 65 percent of Democrats, approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy.Mr. Biden’s sympathizers say part of his problem on the economy is an unwillingness to promote its bright spots out of fear of seeming insensitive to Americans struggling with higher prices. Mr. Trump had no such restraint, describing the economy as the best in history and the envy of the world. Using “Bidenomics” as a framework lets the president take ownership of the economy, but it doesn’t exactly tell voters that the economy is great.“Trump chose people who were probably less experienced in terms of making policy, but some of them are quite good about talking up the president,” said Ben Harris, a former top Treasury official in the Biden administration who played a leading role in outlining the Build Back Better agenda during the 2020 campaign. “Biden’s taken a more modest and humble approach, and there’s a chance that’s come back to haunt him.”Jason Furman, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, said there was a regular debate in that White House about how much to sell the public on the idea that the economy was improving even if people didn’t feel in their own lives.Now he said it was difficult for the Biden administration to take victory laps over slowing inflation because wages haven’t kept pace, leaving a typical worker about $2,000 behind compared with before the pandemic.“The way to think about that is people were in an incredibly deep hole because of inflation and we’re still not all the way out of that hole,” Mr. Furman said. “The fact that you protected people in the bad times means the good times don’t feel as good.”Nicholas Nehamas More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy

      by

      As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”Wait. What?While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?A note on reader mailI want to end this newsletter with a note of thanks. I deeply appreciate your emails. Every week I receive an avalanche of thoughtful responses, some encouraging, some critical. I want you to know that while I can’t respond to them all, I do read every single email. If you care enough to take the time to write, the least I can do is take the time to read. Thank you, truly, for your thoughts. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Is It Time to Negotiate With Putin?

      by

      Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicIt’s been 18 months since Russia invaded Ukraine. No true negotiations have happened. As the stalemate continues, what role should the United States play in the fight?This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss how the war is playing out at home and why the G.O.P. seems more interested in invading Mexico than defending Ukraine.Plus, a trip back in time to a magical land of sorcerers and “Yo! MTV Raps.”(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)A photo illustration of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, as if printed in a newspaper, with one edge folded over, showing print on the other side.Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Nils Petter Nilsson/GettyMentioned in this episode:“An Unwinnable War,” by Samuel Charap in Foreign Affairs“The Runaway General,” by Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone“First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin,” by Vladimir PutinThoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on Twitter: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT) and Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Stephanie Joyce. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Our fact-checking team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Trump Trial Date Is a Big Mistake

      by

      I intended to write a normal horse-race column this week, about what we can glean from the polling that came out after the first Republican debate. The emphasis was going to be on the resilience of Ron DeSantis, the success of Nikki Haley, the modest perils for Donald Trump in not showing up for these affairs — and then the larger problem of how DeSantis or Haley or anyone else might unite the anti-Trump vote instead of just repeating the fragmentation of 2016.But is anything we could learn from one Republican debate more significant than the news that the most important legal case against Trump, his federal trial for alleged election-related crimes, will begin the day before Super Tuesday? Probably not. So let’s save DeSantis and Haley for another day and talk about the significance of a front-runner’s trial running through the heart of a primary campaign.From any theory of the law’s relationship to democratic deliberation, this seems like an extremely suboptimal convergence. If you take the judicial process seriously — as an exercise in fact finding and adversarial argument, with the presumption of innocence at the outset yielding to a legitimate verdict at the end — then clearly under ideal circumstances the trial of a major presidential contender would be completed before voters begin passing judgments of their own. Under less optimal circumstances, a verdict would be rendered before most of the votes are cast, instilling confidence that a majority of the electorate shared the same knowledge about the law’s decision.To its credit, that’s what the prosecution asked for: a January start date, with the trial potentially wrapping up around the end of the first phase of the campaign. But instead we’re headed for a world where the trial and the campaign are fully intertwined, with each primary associated with a different snapshot of the case’s progress — some votes cast pretrial, some after the opening statements, some with the prosecution’s arguments as a backdrop and some following the defense’s rebuttal.This means in turn that an underlying problem for these trials as an attempted vindication of the rule of the law — the fact that everyone watching can see that the law’s decisions are provisional and the final arbiter of Trump’s fate is the voting public — will be highlighted over and over again throughout the judicial process itself. The Republican primary electorate will be a kind of shadow jury, offering its reactions in real time, constantly raising or lowering the odds that the defendant can reverse a guilty verdict by the simple expedient of becoming the next president of the United States.The shrugging response from many liberals is that there’s simply no alternative here, that Trump committed so many potential crimes that the pileup of cases requires at least one, and possibly several, to go to trial during the primary campaign.But only one of the four prosecutions, the classified documents case, involves alleged crimes committed close to the 2024 election. In every other instance there’s been a winding, multiyear road to prosecution that could have been plausibly expedited so that Trump faced a jury by 2023.The pileup isn’t deliberate; New York and Georgia prosecutors didn’t get together with Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and plan things to end this way, and some of the federal delay arguably reflected a reluctance to pursue a case. But there is still a recurring pattern with these anti-Trump, anti-populist efforts, which so often seem to converge on stratagems and choices that further undermine confidence in officially neutral institutions.These choices are often defended with the suggestion that any criticism is just a bad-faith attempt to let Trump or his voters off the hook. So in that vein it should be stressed, not for the first time in this column, that Trump’s voters are responsible for his continued popularity, that he might well be headed to renomination without the pileup of prosecutions and that prosecutors aren’t forcing G.O.P. voters to do anything they don’t seem inclined to do already.But the pileup still seems like a boon to his renomination effort. Yes, there’s always “the possibility that Mr. Trump collapses under the weight of his legal challenges,” as my colleague Nate Cohn puts it. But we have months of polling in the shadow of these prosecutions, and it strongly suggests that along with the core Trump bloc (30 percent to 40 percent of the Republican electorate, let’s say) that will vote for him no matter what, there’s another bloc that’s open to alternatives but rallies to him when he’s perceived to be liberalism’s major target, in much the same spirit that liberals and feminists once rallied to an accused sexual predator named Bill Clinton when he was the target of the religious right.To beat Trump in the primary, any challenger would need part of that bloc to resist the rallying impulse and swing their way instead. So timing Trump’s prosecution but not the final outcome of the trial to some of the most important primaries seems more likely to cement his nomination than to finally make his poll numbers collapse.A conviction might be a different matter. There may be Republican voters who regard these prosecutions as theater designed to keep Trump from the nomination and therefore expect the legal cases to fall apart when his lawyers make their defense. A Reuters/Ipsos poll a few weeks ago found that 45 percent of the G.O.P. electorate said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony, compared with 35 percent (that Trumpian core again) who said they would and that more than half said they wouldn’t support him in the fall campaign if he was imprisoned.I do not believe the latter number, but at the very least the poll suggests that there is still enough faith in the legal system for an actual conviction to have a different effect on the Republican primary than the prosecutions have thus far.But on the current timeline, a conviction before the primary is decided is exactly what we aren’t going to get.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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      How Free Speech and Willful Blindness Will Play Out in the Trump Prosecution

      by

      More than a decade ago, a divided Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Alvarez that an elected member of a district water board in California could not be prosecuted criminally for lying to an audience about winning the Medal of Honor. The court ruled that efforts to criminalize mere lying, without linking the lie to an attempt to gain a material advantage, posed an unacceptable threat to robust exercise of First Amendment rights.Given that decision, Jack Smith, the special prosecutor investigating former President Donald Trump, was right in concluding that Mr. Trump has a First Amendment right to lie to the general public.So, where’s the legal beef in the indictment arising from the events that culminated in the storming of the Capitol brought by Mr. Smith against Mr. Trump? It’s in the fact that Mr. Smith isn’t merely charging the former president with lying; he is contending that Mr. Trump lied to gain an unlawful benefit — a second term in office after voters showed him the exit. That kind of speech-related behavior falls comfortably within what the justices call “categorical exceptions” to the First Amendment like true threats, incitements, obscenity, depictions of child sexual abuse, fighting words, libel, fraud and speech incident to criminal conduct.As the court put it in 1949 in the case of Giboney v. Empire Storage and Ice Co., “it rarely has been suggested that the constitutional freedom for speech and press extends its immunity to speech or writing used as an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute.”That is why Mr. Smith will most likely seek to prove that the former president was engaged in “speech incident to criminal conduct” when he and his co-conspirators lied to state legislators, state election officials, gullible supporters, Justice Department lawyers and Vice President Mike Pence in an illegal effort to prevent Joe Biden from succeeding him as president. Since Mr. Trump is charged with, among other crimes, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to deprive people of the right to have their votes counted, Mr. Smith would clearly be right in arguing that the Alvarez decision doesn’t apply.Characterizing Mr. Trump’s words as “speech incident to criminal conduct” would neatly solve Mr. Smith’s First Amendment problem, but at a substantial cost to the prosecution. To win a conviction, the government must persuade 12 jurors to peer inside Mr. Trump’s head and find beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew he was lying when he claimed to be the winner of the 2020 election. If Mr. Trump actually believed his false assertions, his speech was not “incident to criminal conduct.”How can Mr. Smith persuade 12 jurors that no reasonable doubt exists that Mr. Trump knew he was lying? The prosecution will, no doubt, barrage the jury with reams of testimony showing that the former president was repeatedly told by every reputable adviser and administration official that no credible evidence of widespread electoral fraud existed, and that Mr. Pence had no choice but to certify Mr. Biden as the winner.But there also will likely be evidence that fervent supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts fed his narcissism with bizarre false tales of result-changing electoral fraud, and frivolous legal theories justifying interference with Mr. Biden’s certification as president-elect. Those supporters could include Rudy Giuliani; Sidney Powell, a lawyer and purveyor of wild conspiracy theories; Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, who apparently plotted with Mr. Trump to unseat the acting attorney general and take control of the department; and John Eastman, the lawyer who hatched the plan that Mr. Pence refused to follow to keep Mr. Trump in power.Maybe Mr. Trump himself will swear to his good faith belief that he won. With all that conflicting testimony, how is a conscientious juror to decide for sure what was really going on inside his head?The answer lies in the Supreme Court’s doctrine of “willful blindness.” A dozen years ago, in the case of Global-Tech Appliances v. SEB, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for all but one justice, ruled that proof of willful blindness is the legal equivalent of proving guilty knowledge.As Justice Alito explained it: “Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances.”In other words, when a defendant, like Mr. Trump, is on notice of the potential likelihood of an inconvenient fact (Mr. Biden’s legitimate victory), and closes his eyes to overwhelming evidence of that fact, the “willfully blind” defendant is just as guilty as if he actually knew the fact. While this argument is not a slam dunk, there’s an excellent chance that 12 jurors will find, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr. Trump hid from the truth by adopting willful blindness.Burt Neuborne is a professor emeritus at New York University Law School, where he was the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice. He was the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1981 to 1986.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

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Can Liberalism Save Itself?

      by

      Liberalism is under siege. It is not just a problem for America’s Democratic Party, which once again may face either losing an election to Donald Trump or claiming victory with a bare majority. Around the world, the entire outlook of political liberalism — with its commitments to limited government, personal freedom and the rule of law — is widely seen to be in trouble.It wasn’t long ago that liberals were proclaiming the “end of history” after their Cold War victory. But for years liberalism has felt perpetually on the brink: challenged by the rise of an authoritarian China, the success of far-right populists and a sense of blockage and stagnation.Why do liberals find themselves in this position so routinely? Because they haven’t left the Cold War behind. It was in that era when liberals reinvented their ideology, which traces its roots to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — and reinvented it for the worse. Cold War liberalism was preoccupied by the continuity of liberal government and the management of threats that might disrupt it, the same preoccupations liberals have today. To save themselves, they need to undo the Cold War mistakes that led them to their current impasse and rediscover the emancipatory potential in their creed.Before the Cold War, President Franklin Roosevelt had demanded the renovation of liberalism in response to the Great Depression, emphasizing that economic turmoil was at the root of tyranny’s appeal. His administration capped more than a century in which liberalism had been promising to unshackle humanity after millenniums of hierarchy — dismantling feudal structures, creating greater opportunities for economic and social mobility (at least for men) and breaking down barriers based on religion and tradition, even if all of these achievements were haunted by racial disparities. At its most visionary, liberalism implied that government’s duty was to help people overcome oppression for the sake of a better future.Yet just a few years later, Cold War liberalism emerged as a rejection of the optimism that flourished before the mid-20th century’s crises. Having witnessed the agonizing destruction of Germany’s brief interwar experiment with democracy, liberals saw their Communist ally in that battle against fascism converted into a fearful enemy. They responded by reconceptualizing liberalism. Philosophers like the Oxford don Isaiah Berlin emphasized the concept of individual liberty, which was defined as the absence of interference, especially from the state. Gone was the belief that freedom is guaranteed by institutions that empower humanity. Instead of committing to make freedom more credible to more people — for example, by promising a bright future of their own — these liberals prioritized a fight against mortal enemies who might crash the system.This was a liberalism of fear, as another Cold War liberal intellectual, the Harvard professor Judith Shklar, said. In a way, fear was understandable: Liberalism had enemies. In the late 1940s, the Communists took over China, while Eastern Europe fell behind an Iron Curtain. But reorienting liberalism toward the preservation of liberty incurred its own risks. Anyone hostage to fear is likely to exaggerate how dangerous his foes actually are, to overreact to the looming threat they pose and to forsake better choices than fighting. (Ask Robert Oppenheimer, who signed up to beat the Nazis only to see paranoia spoil the country he volunteered to save.)During the Cold War, concern for liberty from tyranny and self-defense against enemies sometimes led not just to the loss of the very freedom liberals were supposed to care about at home, it also prompted violent reigns of terror abroad as liberals backed authoritarians or went to war in the name of fighting Communism. Millions died in the killing fields of this brutal global conflict, many of them at the hands of America and its proxies fighting in the name of “freedom.”Frustratingly, the Soviet Union was making the kinds of promises about freedom and progress that liberals once thought belonged to them. After all, in the 19th century liberals had overthrown aristocrats and kings and promised a world of freedom and equality in their stead. Liberals like the French politician and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville, though concerned about possible excesses of government, imagined democracy as a form of politics that offered startling new opportunities for equal citizenship. And while such liberals placed too much faith in markets both to emancipate and to equalize, they eventually struggled to correct this mistake. Liberals like the English philosopher John Stuart Mill helped invent socialism, too.The Cold War changed all that. It wasn’t just that socialism became a liberal swear word for decades (at least before Senator Bernie Sanders helped revive it). Liberals concluded that the ideological passions that led millions around the world to Communism meant that they should refrain from promising emancipation themselves. “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes,” the Columbia professor and Cold War liberal Lionel Trilling explained.The Cold War transformation of liberalism wouldn’t matter so profoundly now if liberals had seized the opportunity to rethink their creed in 1989. The haze of their geopolitical triumph made it easy to disregard their own mistakes, in spite of the long-run consequences in our time. Instead, liberals doubled down. After several decades of endless wars against successor enemies and an increasingly “free” economy at home and around the world, American liberals have been shocked by blowback. History didn’t end; in fact, many of liberalism’s beneficiaries in backsliding new democracies and in the United States now find it wanting.A great referendum on liberalism kicked off in 2016, after Mr. Trump’s blindsiding election victory. In books like Patrick Deneen’s best-selling “Why Liberalism Failed,” there was an up-or-down vote on the liberalism of the entire modern age, which Mr. Deneen traced back centuries. In frantic self-defense, liberals responded by invoking abstractions: “freedom,” “democracy” and “truth,” to which the sole alternative is tyranny, while distracting from their own errors and what it would take to correct them. Both sides failed to recognize that, like all traditions, liberalism is not take it or leave it. The very fact that liberals transformed it so radically during the Cold War means that it can be transformed again; liberals can revive their philosophy’s promises only by recommitting to its earlier impulses.Is that likely? Under President Biden’s watch, China and Eastern Europe — the same places where events shocked Cold War liberals into their stance in the first place — have attracted a Cold War posture. Under Mr. Biden, as under Mr. Trump before him, the rhetoric out of Washington increasingly treats China as a civilizational threat. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has once again made Eastern Europe a site of struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of repression. Some like to claim that the war in Ukraine has reminded liberals of their true purpose.But look closer to home and that seems more dubious. Mr. Trump is the likely 2024 Republican presidential nominee (if not the potential winner of the election). Yet liberals seem to be betting their success less on a positive vision for America’s future and more on the ability of courts to protect the nation. Even if one of Mr. Trump’s many prosecutors manages to convict him, this will not rescue American liberalism. The challenge cuts deeper than eliminating the current enemy in the name of our democracy if it is not reimagined.Since his election in 2020, Mr. Biden has been championed by some pundits — and by his administration itself — as the second coming of Franklin Roosevelt. But Roosevelt warned that “too many of those who prate about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things as they were. Democracy should concern itself also with things as they ought to be.”Mr. Biden, despite an ambitious agenda of so-called supply-side liberalism, doesn’t seem to have internalized the message. And for their part, voters do not yet seem fully convinced. A liberalism that survives must resonate with voters who want something to believe in. And liberalism once had it, revolving not around fear of enemies but hope in institutions that lead to what Mill called “experiments in living.” He meant that people everywhere would get the chance from society to choose something new to try in their short time. If their hands are forced — especially by a coercive and unequal economic system — they will lose what is most important, which is the chance to make themselves and the world more interesting.If there is any silver lining in the next phase of American politics, which Mr. Trump continues to define, it is that it provides yet another opportunity for liberals to reinvent themselves. If they double down instead on a stale Cold War ideology, as they did after 1989 and 2016, they will miss it. Only a liberalism that finally makes good on some of its promises of freedom and equality is likely to survive and thrive.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.Samuel Moyn is a professor at Yale and the author of the forthcoming book “Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.” More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      The Trump-Free Debate That’s All About Trump

      by

      Donald Trump may not be on the stage for tonight’s Republican primary debate, but at least eight other candidates will still have to contend with his presence — and his lead in the polls.The Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that tonight is an opportunity for Trump’s opponents to convince Republican voters that they can be as dominant as the former president, but without the legal baggage. The question remains, though: Will the Republican base buy it?Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Joe Buglewicz for The New York Times; Scott Morgan, Jim Young, Dan Koeck, Cheney Orr/Reuters; Ben Gray, Alex Brandon/Associated Press; Megan Varner/Getty ImagesThe 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.This Opinion Short was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristina Samulewski and Annie-Rose Strasser. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      ‘I Don’t Think Trump Will Be the Nominee’: Three Writers on the First G.O.P. Debate

      by

      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted an online conversation with Ann Coulter, who writes the Substack newsletter Unsafe, and Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant, to discuss their expectations for the first Republican debate and the future of American politics.Frank Bruni: Stuart, I’ve done many of these political roundtables, but never one at a juncture this titanically and transcendentally bizarre. The first Republican debate of the presidential election season is tonight, the party front-runner is absent, and he’s running, oh, infinity points ahead of his Republican rivals despite two impeachments, 91 felony counts and unquantifiable wretchedness. Color me morose.But also, illuminate me: Given Donald Trump’s lead and its durability, does this debate matter, and how? Is there an argument that it could change the trajectory of this contest?Stuart Stevens: If a candidate enters the debate with a strategy of taking out another candidate, it can change a trajectory. In the 2012 primary, Mitt Romney did this to Rick Perry in their first debate and again in a subsequent debate to Newt Gingrich. (I was the campaign strategist for that Romney campaign.) But you must go into a debate with the attitude “one of us will walk off this stage alive.” I don’t think anyone has the nerve to do that.Ann Coulter: I think this is Ron DeSantis’s to lose. If he’d just ignore the media and be the nerd that he is, he’ll do great.Bruni: Stuart, do you agree that DeSantis has an underappreciated strength and that there’s really a path for him to this nomination? And other than DeSantis, is there anyone on that stage tonight who could have a breakout moment and matter in this nomination contest?Stevens: DeSantis is Jeb Bush without the charm. He is a small man running for a big job and looking smaller every day. If I were advising Tim Scott or another candidate, I’d advise them to use the debate to attack DeSantis and blow him up. This is a man who lost a debate to Charlie Crist.Coulter: I’m sorry, but this just shows that you have zero understanding of the country, much less the party. Also, famous last words, but: I don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but you’d really do the country a solid if you could get Democrats to stop indicting him.Bruni: Ann, in just a few sentences, why won’t Trump be the nominee? That’s a renegade perspective. (Or, given recent Republican political history, should I say maverick?) Convince me.Coulter: Trump can barely speak English. He’s a gigantic baby. The only reason he crushed in 2016 is because of immigration — the wall, deport illegal immigrants, the travel ban (which imposed limits on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries). That is DeSantis this time — without the total lack of interest in carrying it out.Bruni: OK, but before we move on, is there anyone else in this debate who could break out and matter?Coulter: No.Bruni: Stuart, do you too believe Trump will not or might not get the nomination, as Ann does?Stevens: Trump is what the Republican Party wants to be. He’s a white grievance candidate in a party that is over 80 percent white and has embraced its victimhood. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson are alternatives, but there isn’t a winning market for an anti-Trump message. Trump will be the nominee.Coulter: I think you’re both more focused on personalities and whiteness than the voters are. It’s issues. And on the issues, Christie is totally out of step with the G.O.P. — and I’d say the country. He weeps about Ukrainians killed and raped by Russians, but doesn’t seem to give two figs about Americans killed and raped by illegal immigrants in our country.Bruni: Fair point about personalities, Ann, so let’s indeed turn to issues and larger dynamics. You’ve identified Ukraine as an issue getting too much attention. What else is getting lots of attention but largely irrelevant to this race’s outcome, and what’s hugely relevant and being overlooked?Stevens: It is actually all about race. Eighty-five percent of the Trump coalition in 2020 was white non-Hispanic in a country that is about 60 percent non-Hispanic white, and less since we’ve been chatting. The efforts in 2020 to deny votes was focused in places like Atlanta and Philadelphia. Why? That’s where a lot of Black people voted.Coulter: So you think the G.O.P. is racist. Wow, never heard that before.Stevens: In 1956, Eisenhower got about 39 percent of the Black vote. In 2020 Trump got 8 percent. A majority of Americans 15 years and younger are nonwhite or Hispanic white. This is what terrifies Republicans.Coulter: This is just your excuse for your candidate losing a winnable election in 2012.Bruni: You and Stuart are both hugely down on Trump as a human and as a candidate. Do you think he loses to Biden despite Biden’s age and low approval ratings, or is this a jump ball if Trump gets the nomination?Coulter: If Trump gets the nomination, I say he will lose. I know it, you know it, the American people know it (to paraphrase Bob Dole).Stevens: Trump could win. In 2020, he lost by a combined 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin. Otherwise, he would still be president. Biden needs to win by 4.5 percent to carry the Electoral College. So it is inevitable it will be close.Coulter: Nah. OK, maybe. I think Trump loses, but who knows? He’s not the Trump he was in 2016 — it’s the same old thing over and over and over again. “Shifty Schiff,” “perfect phone call,” “we won BIG,” strong, strongly, strong — zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.Bruni: There’s sustained chatter that someone significant — Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp — could join and upend the Republican field at a late moment, presented as a savior. Do you foresee that? How would it play out?Stevens: There is this need among some in the donor Republican class and the National Review types that the Republican Party can revert to being a normal party. That’s insane. Take Glenn Youngkin. He endorsed Kari Lake for her Arizona gubernatorial run. Youngkin didn’t change her, she changed him.Coulter: I hope it doesn’t come to that because DeSantis is head and shoulders above every other G.O.P. presidential candidate (or politician) on the three most important issues: immigration, crime and the Covid response. Unless the prime minister of Sweden is running in this race, no one beats DeSantis on the Covid response. That’s the 3 a.m. phone call — every state and world leader faced the exact same unseen-before virus. Only those two got it exactly right.Bruni: Ann, I have to ask you this simply because your pom-poms for DeSantis are so large and exuberantly shaken. How are you comfortable with how negative, vengeful, naming-of-enemies, slaying-of-enemies his whole shtick and strategy are? Dear God, you are the biggest Reagan lover I know, and there’s no “It’s Morning Again in America” from the Florida governor. It’s the darkest night, all the time.Coulter: So glad you asked that. As I describe in my book “In Trump We Trust” — about the greatest presidential campaign in history (followed by the most disappointing, wasted presidency in history) — this “I’m optimistic!” talking point that campaign consultants feed their candidates is absurd. Ronald Reagan was not optimistic in 1980 — it was only after four years in office that it was “Morning in America.” He was not “positive” or “optimistic” in 1980 at all.It’s nauseating to see candidates try to pull off the “I’m optimistic” nonsense — which I promise you they will in the debate, especially Tim Scott.Bruni: Well, I’m not optimistic, for what that’s worth.Coulter: Yes, Frank — you’re like most voters! That’s why the “I’m optimistic” idiocy falls so flat.Stevens: Republican donors looked at a model for Republican success as a big-state governor: Reagan, George W. Bush and Romney won the nomination. But all of those candidates were optimistic, expansive candidates. DeSantis is an angry little man who can’t articulate why he wants to be president. He got in a fight with the Happiness Company, Disney, and lost. He created a private police force at a cost of over $1 million to go after voter fraud in his own state, which he had claimed had a perfect election. They arrested 20 people — and convicted just one.Bruni: I still prefer candidates who, I don’t know, tell us to try to find the good in, and common cause with, one another rather than identify whom to hate and how much. I’m old-fashioned that way. To return to the debate: Is there any chance Trump is hurt by his decision to skip it? Or is he showing considerable smarts? By choosing tomorrow to turn himself in in Georgia, he will compete with and shorten the media’s post-mortems on the debate. He will, in his signature manner, yank the spotlight back toward … himself!Coulter: The only reason Trump will “stay in the news” is that the media keep him there. The weird obsession liberals have with Trump is driving normal people away from the news. Even I, MSNBC’s most loyal viewer, cannot watch it anymore. The same words, same arguments, same info, same topics for over two years now! “We almost lost our democracy!”Trump is a bore. Please stop covering him.Bruni: Let’s do a lightning round. Fast and quick answers. If something happened soon and Biden couldn’t or didn’t run, which nationally known Democrat would be the party’s fiercest presidential candidate, assuming that candidate had just enough runway to take off, and in a few phrases or one sentence, why?Stevens: Gavin Newsom. He’s a skilled politician who can build the coalition it takes to win. It’s not a bad exercise to ask, “Could this candidate win X state as governor?” Newsom is someone you could see as governor of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio.Coulter: No one the Democrats would ever nominate — for example, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, possibly Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown.Bruni: Why?Coulter: Because they’re all white men.Bruni: Is the widespread belief that Kamala Harris negatively impacts Biden’s prospects for re-election overstated or understated?Stevens: Overstated. Has anybody actually looked at her record as a candidate? She’s won big, tough races. Until her presidential bid, she never lost.Coulter: Understated. I heard a discussion on MSNBC yesterday about how she’s fantastic one-on-one, a laugh riot, a charm offensive. That just doesn’t come out when she’s in front of a crowd, you see.The last person they tried that with was Al Gore, who apparently reached comedic highs alone in his bathtub.Bruni: Should Clarence Thomas be impeached?Stevens: Is that a rhetorical question? A Supreme Court justice who acts like an oligarch’s girlfriend, flying around on special vacations. Of course. He’s a disgrace.Coulter: No, he should be made czar of our country. For decades, liberals were mostly OK with the Supreme Court as it was inventing rights like abortion or Miranda or throwing out the death penalty. But now, suddenly there’s a major ethics issue about a justice who’s gotten the left’s goat since he was nominated.Thomas votes and writes opinions exactly as his judicial philosophy would predict. The idea that he ruled a certain way because someone took him on a fishing trip is ludicrous.Bruni: Lastly, rank these American institutions in the order of influence they might have over the final results — the winner — of the 2024 presidential contest: Fox News, Facebook, The New York Times, the Supreme Court.Coulter: Fox News: almost zero, unless the nominee is Trump — then you can blame Fox. Facebook: 2 percent. New York Times: 8 percent, maybe 10. The political economist Tim Grosseclose wrote a book (“Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind”) estimating the influence of the media on elections and concluded it was about 8 percent. But that was roughly 10 years ago. It’s probably more now. The Supreme Court: hopefully zero.Stevens: The Supreme Court by far. In the history of the country, only five justices were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the country’s population. All five are on the court today. It is completely out of step with the majority of the country, and the results played out in 2022.I don’t think Fox created the Republican Party; the Republican Party created Fox. For the most part, Fox didn’t support John McCain, didn’t support Romney, didn’t support Trump in his nomination campaign. They couldn’t affect the outcomes with their own base.Facebook has the potential to impact the race, as it did in 2016.I don’t think The Times has played a major role in a presidential campaign, and I think that’s a good thing — it’s not their job to play a major role.Bruni: Thank you both for your time, your insights and your energy.Coulter: Thank you, Frank, thank you, Stuart.Stevens: Thanks, all!Source photograph by Mark Wallheiser/Getty.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.Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram • @FrankBruni • FacebookAnn Coulter is the author of the Substack newsletter Unsafe.Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens), a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.” More