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      The Far-Reaching Consequences of the Latest Trump Indictment

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      The latest charges against Donald Trump amount to “the most consequential of all the indictments filed so far,” the Opinion columnist David French argues in this audio essay. On Tuesday, the former president was indicted on four federal counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, efforts that were part of what French calls “one of the most malicious conspiracies in American history.” Despite this, the case, which hinges on proving Trump’s intent, may not be a slam dunk.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesThe 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 Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Why Jack Smith Had to Bring This Indictment Against Trump

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      Donald Trump has now been indicted three times, accused of crimes occurring before, during and after his presidency. The latest indictment alleges facts from all quarters to prove his criminality: from the vice president to the White House counsel and the heads of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence, as well as many others. All are Republican loyalists.But the indictment does more: It skillfully avoids breathing air into a Trump claim of selective prosecution. To not have brought this case against Mr. Trump would have been an act of selective nonprosecution. The Justice Department has already charged and obtained convictions for myriad foot soldiers related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including charging well over 300 people for obstructing the congressional proceedings. In this indictment, the special counsel Jack Smith wisely brings that same charge, but now against the alleged leader of the effort to thwart the transfer of power.That charge of obstruction and conspiracy to defraud the United States in the administration of elections are entirely fitting for the conduct alleged in the indictment. In a civil case last year, the Federal District Court judge David Carter held that Mr. Trump and John Eastman likely engaged in a criminal conspiracy under both those statutes in their schemes to organize false electors and pressure the vice president. Mr. Smith has now said he can prove the same conduct beyond a reasonable doubt.Although the Jan. 6 select committee referred Mr. Trump for investigation for inciting an insurrection, Mr. Smith wisely demurred. The Justice Department has not charged that offense in any other case involving the attack on the Capitol, and insurrection has not been charged since the 19th century. Of course, no president has engaged in it since then — but since no one else has been charged with that crime relating to Jan. 6, it likely would have been an issue. And since the penalty for the insurrection offense is that the defendant would not be eligible to hold federal office, it would have fueled a claim of weaponizing the Justice Department to defeat a political rival.Mr. Trump and others like him will of course continue to assert that the Justice Department has been politically weaponized. That claim has it exactly backward.To not charge Mr. Trump for trying to criminally interfere with the transfer of power to a duly elected president would be to politicize the matter. It would mean external political considerations had infected the Justice Department’s decision-making and steered the institution away from its commitment to holding everyone equally accountable under the law.What those circling their wagons around Mr. Trump are in effect asking for is a two-tiered system, in which the people who were stirred by lies to interrupt the congressional certification are held to account but not the chief instigator. That injustice has not been lost on judges overseeing cases related to Jan. 6. In the 2021 sentencing of John Lolos — a 48-year-old man with no criminal record who traveled from Seattle to hear Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse before being convinced to “storm” the Capitol — Judge Amit Mehta commented on the incongruity in the D.C. courtroom.“People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, fed falsehoods, and told that our election was stolen when it clearly was not,” the judge said. He went on to add that those “who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos’s conduct” and the events of Jan. 6 have “in no meaningful sense” been held “to account for their actions and their words.”We are now on the doorstep of the sort of accountability that Judge Mehta found lacking.That is what also makes this indictment of the former president different. Where both the Manhattan hush money case and classified documents case have been, in some part, mired in discussions of whataboutism, the 2020 election interference indictment is where whataboutism goes to die.In this case, the Trump stratagem is unmasked. Given the record of robust prosecutions of Jan. 6 foot soldiers and Mr. Trump’s responsibility for their actions, he has had to resort to saying the Capitol attack was good, and he and his enablers have lauded convicted felons as heroes and “political prisoners.” Mr. Trump’s continued statements in favor of the Jan. 6 defendants can and likely will be used against him in any trial.As the narrative of the indictment lays out, Mr. Trump’s schemes — to sell the big lie and promote election fraud even when he privately conceded to advisers the claims were “unsupported” and “crazy” — are what contributed to the attack of Jan. 6. And it is a relief that the indictment includes Mr. Trump’s role and responsibility in that violence. Many Americans would not understand the Justice Department focusing only on bureaucratic and procedural efforts to affect the congressional certification.As Senator Mitch McConnell said at the close of Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”He added: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”What is also clear from the indictment is that Mr. Trump will most likely not be the last white-collar defendant charged for the set of crimes it sets out. Mr. Smith clearly, and properly, considers that the six co-conspirators — parts of the indictment describe actions by co-conspirators that correspond with those taken by, for example, Mr. Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — committed federal offenses that threatened the core of our democracy. The rule of law cannot tolerate those actors facing charges with the main protagonist going scot free.The main task ahead for Mr. Smith is getting his cases to trial before the general election. But the true test ahead will not be for Mr. Smith. It will be for us: Will Americans care about the rule of law enough to vote for it? The courtroom is a place where facts and law still matter, but the criminal cases against Mr. Trump will test whether the same can be said for the ballot box.Ryan Goodman, a law professor at the New York University School of Law, is a co-editor in chief of Just Security. Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is a professor at N.Y.U. School of Law and a host of the podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump.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

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      A President Accused of Betraying His Country

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      Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.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

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      The Trial America Needs

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      At last. The federal criminal justice system is going to legal war against one of the most dishonest, malicious and damaging conspiracies in the history of the United States. Tuesday’s indictment of Donald Trump, brought by the special counsel Jack Smith’s office, is the culmination of a comprehensive effort to bring justice to those who attempted to overthrow the results of an American presidential election.In the weeks after the 2020 election, the legal system was in a defensive crouch, repelling an onslaught of patently frivolous claims designed to reverse the election results. In the months and years since the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, the legal system has switched from defense to offense. With all deliberate speed, prosecutors first brought charges against Trump’s foot soldiers, the men and women who breached the Capitol. Next, prosecutors pursued the organizers of Trumpist right-wing militias, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had engaged in a seditious conspiracy to keep Trump in the White House.And now, Smith is pursuing Trump himself — along with six yet unnamed co-conspirators — alleging criminal schemes that reached the highest level of American government. This is the case that, if successful, can once and for all strip Trump of any pretense of good faith or good will. But make no mistake, the outcome of this case is uncertain for exactly the reason it’s so important: So very much of the case depends on Trump’s state of mind.At the risk of oversimplifying an indictment that contains four distinct counts — conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights — it can be broken down into two indispensable components. First, it will be necessary to prove what Trump knew. Second, it will be necessary to prove what he did. Let’s take, for example, the first count of the indictment: 18 U.S.C. Section 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States. The statute is designed to criminalize any interference or obstruction of a “lawful governmental function” by “deceit, craft or trickery.”There’s little doubt that Trump conspired to interfere with or obstruct the transfer of power after the 2020 election. But to prevail in the case, the government has to prove that he possessed an intent to defraud or to make false statements. In other words, if you were to urge a government official to overturn election results based on a good faith belief that serious fraud had altered the results, you would not be violating the law. Instead, you’d be exercising your First Amendment rights.The indictment itself recognizes the constitutional issues in play. In Paragraph 3, the prosecutors correctly state that Trump “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.”Thus, it becomes all-important for the prosecution to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump knew he lost. Arguably the most important allegations in the indictment detail the many times that senior administration officials — from the vice president to the director of national intelligence to senior members of the Justice Department to senior White House lawyers — told him that there was no fraud or foreign interference sufficient to change the results of the election. That’s why it’s vitally important for the prosecution to cite, for example, the moment when Trump himself purportedly described one of his accused co-conspirators’ election fraud claims as “crazy.”The strong constitutional protection for efforts to influence or persuade the government makes the intent element inescapable, no matter the count in the indictment. While there are certainly nuances in the other counts regarding the precise form of proof necessary to establish criminal intent, the fact remains that the prosecution will have to utterly demolish the idea that Trump possessed a good-faith belief that he had won the election.But that’s precisely why this case is so important — more important than any previous Trump indictment. If the prosecution prevails, it will only be because it presented proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the election fraud claims that a substantial percentage of Americans still believe to be true were not only false but were also known to be false when they were made.I am not naïve. I know that not even a guilty verdict will change the perceptions of many of Trump’s most loyal supporters. As my Times colleague Nate Cohn wrote on Monday, “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.” The perceptions of these supporters may never change. They may remain loyal to Trump as long as they live.At the same time, however, a successful federal trial would strip Trump’s defenders of key talking points — that his voter fraud and vote manipulation claims have never been fully tested, that the House Jan. 6 committee was nothing but a one-sided show trial and that a proper cross-examination would expose the weakness of the government’s claims. Trump will have his opportunity to challenge the government’s case. His lawyers will have the ability to cross-examine opposing witnesses. We will see his best defense, and a jury will decide whether the prosecution prevails.The case is no slam dunk. I agree with the Politico Magazine columnist and former prosecutor Renato Mariotti, who stated that it is “not as strong” as the federal documents case against Trump. But that’s because the Mar-a-Lago documents case is exceptionally strong and clear. A former Trump administration attorney, Ty Cobb, has described the evidence as “overwhelming.” The facts appear to be uncomplicated. By contrast, the facts underlying this new indictment are anything but simple. And Trump possesses legal defenses — such as challenging the scope and applicability of the relevant statutes — that he won’t have in his federal trial for withholding documents.Yet if a prosecutor believes — as Smith appears to — that he can prove Trump knew his claims were false and then engineered a series of schemes to cajole, coerce, deceive and defraud in order to preserve his place in the White House, it would be a travesty of justice not to file charges.Consider some of the claims in the case. Paragraph 66 of the indictment says that Trump directed “fraudulent electors” to convene “sham proceedings” to cast “fraudulent electoral ballots” in his favor. Paragraph 31, quoting audio recordings, claims that Trump told the Georgia secretary of state that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes and said that the secretary of state and his counsel faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution if they (as the special counsel describes it) “failed to find election fraud as he demanded.”This is but the tip of the iceberg of the wrongdoing Trump is accused of. But those two claims alone — even leaving aside the events of Jan. 6 and the host of other Trump efforts to overturn the election — merit bringing charges.Millions of Americans believe today that Joe Biden stole the presidency. They believe a series of demonstrable, provable lies, and their belief in those lies is shaking their faith in our republic and, by extension, risking the very existence of our democracy. There is no sure way to shake their convictions, especially if they are convinced that Trump is the innocent victim of a dark and malign deep state. But the judicial system can expose his claims to exacting scrutiny, and that scrutiny has the potential to change those minds that are open to the truth.Smith has brought a difficult case. But it’s a necessary case. Foot soldiers of the Trump movement are in prison. Its allied militia leaders are facing justice. And now the architect of our national chaos will face his day in court. This is the trial America needs.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

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      The Conditions Are Ripe for a Third Party in 2024. Is No Labels It?

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      A majority of Americans don’t want to see President Biden and former President Trump compete for the White House again in 2024. No Labels, a nonpartisan political group, is talking about running a third-party unity ticket next year if Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the nominees. The Opinion writer and editor Katherine Miller has been reporting on a potential third option, and attended the first No Labels town hall in New Hampshire. In this audio short, Miller argues the group has failed to make the case that it holds a viable solution to voter unease.The political organization No Labels was created to support centrism and bipartisanship in American politics.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Associated PressThe 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 Times Opinion piece was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Where Trump, DeSantis and Other 2024 Candidates Stand on Immigration

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      Support for a wall is now routine, and some presidential candidates say they would use military force to secure the border if elected.The blistering immigration policy that Donald J. Trump enacted when he was in the White House shifted his party’s baseline on the issue to the right.His policies are now standard Republican fare: Calls to “build the wall” once set apart the right-wing fringe, but several Republican candidates now support even more exceptional measures, such as using military force to secure the border or ending birthright citizenship.Here is a look at where the candidates stand.Donald J. TrumpHis policies cemented hard-line immigration stances in the G.O.P. mainstream.Mr. Trump’s administration separated thousands of migrant families — traumatizing children and causing a public outcry. As recently as May, during a CNN event, he did not rule out reinstating that policy.His administration also forced asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while awaiting hearings, leading to the development of squalid refugee camps, and held children in crowded, unsanitary facilities.While his signature campaign promise in 2016 was to build a border wall, fewer than 500 miles of barriers were built along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border, largely in places that already had them. (At points, he suggested spikes, a moat and permission for officials to shoot migrants in the legs.)Mr. Trump toured the southern border wall near Alamo, Texas, in January 2021. Some of his 2024 rivals say they would continue work on the border wall; Mr. Trump built fewer than 500 miles during his tenure.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOne of his first actions upon taking office was to ban travelers from several majority-Muslim countries. In 2019, he began denying permanent residency to immigrants deemed likely to require public assistance, a rule that disproportionately affected people from Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Congress did not enact his proposals to slash legal immigration by limiting American citizens’ ability to bring in relatives and by adding education and skill requirements, but he cut it drastically in 2020 through pandemic-related actions.Ron DeSantisHe has tried to run to the right of Trump on immigration, but is mostly aligned with him.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has outlined an aggressive policy that includes mass deportations, indefinite detention of children (in violation of a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores agreement), and license to kill some border crossers.“We have to have appropriate rules of engagement to say, if you’re cutting through a border wall on sovereign U.S. territory and you’re trying to poison Americans, you’re going to end up stone cold dead,” he told Fox News, shortly after saying while in Texas that he would authorize “deadly force” against people “demonstrating hostile intent.”He also wants to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, an idea Mr. Trump floated in 2018 that rejects the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Any such effort by a president would almost immediately wind up in court.Mr. DeSantis wants to finish building a border wall; require asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while awaiting hearings, as Mr. Trump did; deputize state and local officials to carry out deportations; and deploy the military to the border, which could violate a federal prohibition on using the military for civilian law enforcement. He has said he would declare a national emergency, allowing more unilateral action.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida held a campaign event in Eagle Pass, Texas, last month. He has tried to stake out territory to the right of Mr. Trump on some campaign platforms, including immigration.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesChris ChristieHe mostly toes the G.O.P. line, but is also critical of Trump on the issue.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has proposed sending the National Guard to the border to stop illegal crossings and intercept fentanyl (though fentanyl mostly comes into the U.S. through official ports of entry, hidden in legitimate commerce).He has criticized Mr. Trump as all talk on border security, noting that his wall covers only a quarter of the border. But he also said on CNN last month that since the wall had been started, “you might as well finish it,” even though “I probably wouldn’t have done that at the start.” He argues that Mr. Trump erred by enacting immigration policy through executive actions that President Biden could easily undo.Mr. Christie has changed his mind on a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — in 2010, he urged Congress to create one; then, during his first presidential campaign in 2015, he said he considered it “extreme.” His campaign did not respond to a request to confirm his current position or to elaborate on what other immigration policies he supports.Nikki HaleyShe is largely aligned with the bulk of the field and supports most of Trump’s policies.When she was governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley signed a law requiring businesses to use a federal database to check prospective employees’ immigration status, mandating that police officers check the status of some people they stopped for unrelated reasons, and making it a crime to “harbor or transport” an undocumented immigrant. She has cited this as a national model, though a judge blocked parts of the law and the state agreed to soften it.Nikki Haley has expressed support for some of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, but not separating families.Kathryn Gamble for The New York TimesMs. Haley has also said that she wants to restore Mr. Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy, add 25,000 Border Patrol and ICE agents, withhold funding from “sanctuary cities” that limit cooperation with immigration officials, and immediately deport migrants. But she does not support separating families, she said.Like Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, she wants to limit birthright citizenship. “For those that are in this country legally, of course I think we go according to the Constitution, and that’s fine,” she told Fox News. “But it’s the illegal immigrations that we have to make sure that just because they get here, if they have a child, you’re just building on the problems.”She told CBS News that she wanted legal immigration to be based on “merit” and businesses’ needs.Tim ScottHe is largely aligned with the bulk of the field and supports most of Trump’s policies.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina introduced legislation alongside other Republican senators this year to withhold funding from sanctuary cities and to redirect funding that Democrats had allocated for new I.R.S. agents to border security instead. Neither bill is viable in the Democrat-controlled Senate.Mr. Scott told NBC News that he supported a requirement for asylum seekers, if they cross other countries en route to the U.S. border, to request asylum in those countries before requesting it in the United States — a policy that Mr. Biden has enacted and that a judge blocked on Tuesday.In the same interview, he said he supported a border wall, new surveillance technology and an increased military presence along the border. He said he would not rule out the possibility of sending troops into Mexico to combat drug cartels.Senator Tim Scott has said that he supports a border wall, new surveillance technology and an increased military presence along the border.Travis Dove for The New York TimesLike many candidates, Mr. Scott also wants to reinstate the Title 42 policy that allowed rapid explusion of migrants on pandemic-related public health grounds. He argued in an interview with Fox News that fentanyl, rather than the coronavirus, was the public health crisis that now justified the policy.Mike PenceHe is largely aligned with the bulk of the field and supports most of Trump’s policies.Former Vice President Mike Pence said last year that he supported a return to Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, including continuing to build a border wall, banning the establishment of sanctuary cities and reinstating the “remain in Mexico” requirement for asylum seekers.He said in a CNN town hall event that he would not, however, reinstate family separation because “we got to stop putting Band-Aids on the problem.”In the same event, he called for a “guest worker” program under which people seeking jobs in agriculture and other industries could “come and for a short period of time pay taxes, participate in our economy, and go home.”Mr. Pence also vociferously opposed the Biden administration’s lifting of Title 42 and wants to reinstate it — as well as a requirement that legal immigrants demonstrate that they will not rely on public assistance.Vivek RamaswamyHe has proposed some of the most aggressive stances of any candidate.Vivek Ramaswamy has called for securing the border by any means necessary, including military force. This could violate an 1878 law that forbids the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement, but Mr. Ramaswamy argues that securing the border isn’t civilian law enforcement.He wants to “universally” deport undocumented immigrants and opposes any path to legal residence because “we are a nation of laws,” he said at a campaign event. “That is something we cannot compromise on.”He added that, for people brought to the United States as children, he would be open to a process allowing them to return after being deported. But all legal immigration, he says, should run on a “meritocratic” points system, with lottery-based paths eliminated.His anti-immigrant language has been incendiary. On Fox News, he said citing undocumented immigrants’ economic contributions was tantamount to making economic arguments for slavery: “‘The vegetables will rot in the field, we need people to pluck our crops’ — this is a thing that Democrats were saying in the South in the 1860s to justify a different form of immoral and illegal behavior,” he said.Asa HutchinsonHe is somewhat more moderate than Trump, but still advocates strict policies.Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, in a Fox News opinion essay, called for adding Border Patrol agents and authorizing murder charges against people accused of supplying fentanyl that leads to deaths. “We should ensure those who bring evil across our borders and sow criminality throughout our country are proportionately punished,” he wrote.In an interview with the New Hampshire news station WMUR, he didn’t rule out supporting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but said a secure border was a prerequisite for any such immigration reform. He also said that he supported a wall in some places, but that it wasn’t feasible along the full border.As governor, Mr. Hutchinson signed a law to make immigrants with federal work permits eligible for professional licenses. He also authorized the deployment of 40 Arkansas National Guard troops to the border in Texas in 2021.Doug BurgumHe expresses some more moderate views but hasn’t made detailed proposals.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has expressed support for lowering barriers to legal immigration, a stance that sets him apart from most other candidates in the field.In an interview with Forbes, he criticized the obstacles encountered by seasonal agricultural workers and prospective tech employees, saying, “We put them through two, three, four, five years of red tape, and then we let people illegally cross the southern border, so the two things juxtaposed against each other make no sense.”In the same interview, he accused President Biden of being weak on border security and said, “We can’t have a discussion in this country about legal immigration until we solve the illegal immigration.” But he has not described how to do that, and his campaign did not respond to a request for details.As governor, he signed legislation to create an Office of Legal Immigration to help North Dakota businesses hire foreign workers. He has also sent state National Guard troops to the border in Texas.Will HurdHe is on the more moderate end of the G.O.P. field.As a member of Congress, Will Hurd described a border wall as a “third-century solution to a 21st-century problem,” called the separation of migrant families “unacceptable,” and said Mr. Trump’s ban on travelers from several Muslim countries “endangers the lives of thousands of American men and women in our military, diplomatic corps and intelligence services.”He has also criticized Mr. Biden’s policies from the opposite direction, telling CBS News that the president is “treating everybody that comes into the country as an asylum seeker.”What Mr. Hurd himself would do is less clear, and his campaign did not respond to a request for information. He told NBC News that he wanted to “streamline” legal immigration, but offered no details. He has supported protections for “Dreamers” who migrated illegally as children, and he has also previously called for a new version of the post-World War II Marshall Plan to strengthen Central American economies and reduce the poverty and instability driving migration.Francis SuarezHe is on the more moderate end of the G.O.P. field.Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami opposes many of the far-right immigration policies outlined by many other candidates, including by his governor, Mr. DeSantis. He argued on Fox Business that the aggressive immigration bill Mr. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature had enacted was “having an adverse impact on small businesses in our state.”He said that he believed the country was “not ready” for amnesty for undocumented immigrants, but that he was open to creating some legal status that would protect them from deportation. Of actually deporting all of them, he said, “It’s not possible.”He has otherwise been vague, saying that he wants to make legal immigration “merit-based and skill-based” and that he believes he has “credibility” on the issue as a Hispanic Republican, but not proposing specific policies. His campaign did not respond to a request for details. More

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      Are We Doomed to Witness the Trump-Biden Rematch Nobody Wants?

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      Have you met anyone truly excited about Joe Biden running for re-election? And by that, I mean downright Obama-circa-2008 energized — brimming with enthusiasm about what four more years of Biden would bring to our body politic, our economy, our national mood, our culture?Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a quiet “Yay!”? And no, we’re not counting the guy who sounds like he’s performing elaborate mental dance moves to persuade himself nor anyone who is paid to say so. According to a recent report in The Times, Biden’s fund-raising thus far doesn’t exactly reveal a groundswell of grass roots excitement.Instead, most Democrats seem to view what looks like an inexorable rematch between Biden and Donald Trump with a sense of impending doom. My personal metaphor comes from Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia,” in which a rogue planet makes its way through space toward an inevitable collision with Earth. In that film, the looming disaster symbolized the all-encompassing nature of depression; here, the feel is more dispiritedness and terror, as if we’re barreling toward either certain catastrophe or possibly-not-a-catastrophe. Or it’s barreling toward us.A Biden-Trump rematch would mean a choice between two candidates who, for very different reasons, don’t seem 100 percent there or necessarily likely to be there — physically, mentally and/or not in prison — for the duration of another four-year term.To take, momentarily, a slightly more optimistic view, here is the best case for Biden: His presidency has thus far meant a re-establishment of norms, a return to government function and the restoration of long-held international alliances. He has presided over a slow-churning economy that has turned roughly in his favor. He’s been decent.But really, wasn’t the bar for all these things set abysmally low during the Trump administration (if we can even use that word given its relentless mismanagement)? We continue to have a deeply divided Congress and electorate, a good chunk of which is still maniacally in Trump’s corner. American faith in institutions continues to erode, not helped by Biden’s mutter about the Supreme Court’s most recent term, “This is not a normal court.” The 2020 protests led to few meaningfully changed policies favoring the poor or disempowered.A Biden-Trump rematch feels like a concession, as if we couldn’t do any better or have given up trying. It wasn’t as though there was huge passion for Biden the first time around. The 2020 election should have been much more of a blowout victory for Democrats. Yet compared with his election in 2016, Trump in 2020 made inroads with nearly every major demographic group, including Blacks, Latinos and women, except for white men. The sentiment most Democrats seemed to muster in Biden’s favor while he was running was that he was inoffensive. The animating sentiment once he scraped by into office was relief.This time, we don’t even have the luxury of relief. In the two other branches of government, Democrats have been shown the perils of holding people in positions of power for too long — Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the judiciary and Dianne Feinstein in the legislature. Democrats and the media seem to have become more vocal in pointing out the hazards of Biden’s advancing age. In an April poll, of the 70 percent of Americans who said Biden shouldn’t run again, 69 percent said it’s because of his old age.That old age is showing. Never an incantatory speaker or a sparkling wit, Biden seems to have altogether thrown in the oratorical towel. Several weeks ago, he appeared to actually wander off a set on MSNBC after figuratively wandering through 20 minutes of the host Nicolle Wallace’s gentle questions. In another recent interview, with Fareed Zakaria, when asked specific questions about U.S.-China policy, Biden waded into a muddle of vague bromides and personal anecdotes about his travels as vice president with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. When asked point blank whether it’s time for him to step aside, Biden said, almost tangentially, “I just want to finish the job.”But what if he can’t? Kamala Harris, briefly a promising figure during the previous primary season, has proved lackluster at best in office. Like Biden, she seems at perpetual war with words, grasping to articulate whatever loose thought might be struggling to get out. The thought of her in the Oval Office is far from encouraging.One clear sign of America’s deepening hopelessness is the weird welcoming of loony-tune candidates like Robert Kennedy Jr., who has polled as high as a disturbing 20 percent among Democratic voters. Among never-Trumpian Republicans, there is an unseemly enthusiasm for bridge troll Chris Christie, despite his early capitulation to Trump, for the sole reason that among Republican primary candidates, he’s the one who most vociferously denounces his former leader. And a Washington nonprofit, No Labels, is gearing up for a third-party run with a platform that threatens to leach support from a Democratic candidate who is saddled with a favorable rating of a limp 41 percent.Trump, of course, remains the formidable threat underlying our malaise. Though he blundered into office in 2016 without a whit of past experience or the faintest clue about the future, this time he and his team of madmen are far better equipped to inflict their agenda. As a recent editorial in The Economist put it, “a professional corps of America First populists are dedicating themselves to ensuring that Trump Two will be disciplined and focused on getting things done.” The idea that Trump — and worse, a competent Trump — might win a second term makes our passive embrace of Biden even more nerve-racking. Will we look back and have only ourselves to blame?It is hard to imagine Democrats, or most Americans, eager to relive any aspect of the annus horribilis that was 2020. Yet it’s as if we’re collectively paralyzed, less complacent than utterly bewildered, waiting for “something” to happen — say, a health crisis or an arrest or a supernatural event — before 2024. While we wait, we lurch ever closer to something of a historical re-enactment, our actual history hanging perilously in the balance.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

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      How Affirmative Action Changed Their Lives

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      Stella Tan, Sydney Harper, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Liz O. Baylen, Lisa Chow and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell and Alyssa Moxley and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTwo weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court struck down affirmative action, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful.Today, three people whose lives were changed by affirmative action discuss the complicated feelings they have about the policy.On today’s episodeSabrina Tavernise, a co-host of The Daily.Opponents of the ruling marching this month in Cambridge, Mass.Kayana Szymczak for The New York TimesBackground readingFor many of the Black, Hispanic and Native Americans whose lives were shaped by affirmative action, the moment has prompted a personal reckoning with its legacy.In earlier decisions, the court had endorsed taking account of race as one factor among many to promote educational diversity.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Sabrina Tavernise More