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Tag: former president

  • Bill Clinton faces grilling from lawmakers over his connections to Jeffrey Epstein

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    Former President Bill Clinton is testifying Friday before members of Congress investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, answering for his connections to the disgraced financier from more than two decades ago.The closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York, will mark the first time a former president has been compelled to testify to Congress. It comes a day after Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sat with lawmakers for her own deposition.Bill Clinton has also not been accused of any wrongdoing. Yet lawmakers are grappling with what accountability in the United States looks like at a time when men around the world have been toppled from their high-powered posts for maintaining their connections with Epstein after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.Hillary Clinton told lawmakers that she had no knowledge of how Epstein had sexually abused underage girls and had no recollection of even meeting him. But Bill Clinton will have to answer questions on a well-documented relationship with Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, even if it was from the late 1990s and early 2000s.Hillary Clinton said Thursday that she expected her husband to testify that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sexual abuse at the time they knew each other.Republicans were relishing the opportunity to scrutinize the former Democratic president under oath.“The Clintons haven’t answered very many, if any, questions about their knowledge or involvement with Epstein and Maxwell,” Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday.“No one’s accusing, at this moment, the Clintons of any wrongdoing,” he added.Republicans finally get a chance to question Bill ClintonRepublicans have wanted to question Bill Clinton about Epstein for years, especially as conspiracy theories arose following Epstein’s 2019 suicide in a New York jail cell while he faced sex trafficking charges.Those calls reached a fever pitch late last year when several photos of the former president surfaced in the Department of Justice’s first release of case files on Epstein and Maxwell, a British socialite who was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021 but maintains she’s innocent. Bill Clinton was photographed on a plane seated alongside a woman, whose face is redacted, with his arm around her. Another photo showed Clinton and Maxwell in a pool with another person whose face was redacted.Epstein also visited the White House several times during Clinton’s presidency, and the pair later made several international trips together for their humanitarian work.In the lead-up to the deposition, Bill Clinton has insisted he had limited knowledge about Epstein and was unaware of any sexual abuse he committed.“I think the chronology of the connection that he had with Epstein ended several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light,” Hillary Clinton said at the conclusion of her deposition Thursday.Comer has pledged extensive questioning of the former president. He claimed that Hillary Clinton had repeatedly deferred questions about Epstein to her husband.Has a precedent been set?Democrats, who have supported the push to get answers from Bill Clinton, are arguing that it sets a precedent that should also apply to President Donald Trump, a Republican who had his own relationship with Epstein.“We’re demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of Oversight Republicans and Democrats,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said Thursday.Comer has pushed back on that idea, saying that Trump has answered questions on Epstein from the press.Democrats are also calling for the resignation of Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick was a longtime neighbor of Epstein in New York City but said on a podcast that he severed ties with Epstein following a 2005 tour of Epstein’s home that disturbed Lutnick and his wife.The public release of case files showed that Lutnick actually had two engagements with Epstein years later. He attended a 2011 event at Epstein’s home, and in 2012 his family had lunch with Epstein on his private island.“He should be removed from office and at a minimum should come before the committee,” Garcia said of Lutnick.Comer on Thursday said that it was “very possible” that Lutnick would be called to testify.

    CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. —

    Former President Bill Clinton is testifying Friday before members of Congress investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, answering for his connections to the disgraced financier from more than two decades ago.

    The closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York, will mark the first time a former president has been compelled to testify to Congress. It comes a day after Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sat with lawmakers for her own deposition.

    Bill Clinton has also not been accused of any wrongdoing. Yet lawmakers are grappling with what accountability in the United States looks like at a time when men around the world have been toppled from their high-powered posts for maintaining their connections with Epstein after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

    Hillary Clinton told lawmakers that she had no knowledge of how Epstein had sexually abused underage girls and had no recollection of even meeting him. But Bill Clinton will have to answer questions on a well-documented relationship with Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, even if it was from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Hillary Clinton said Thursday that she expected her husband to testify that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sexual abuse at the time they knew each other.

    Republicans were relishing the opportunity to scrutinize the former Democratic president under oath.

    “The Clintons haven’t answered very many, if any, questions about their knowledge or involvement with Epstein and Maxwell,” Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday.

    “No one’s accusing, at this moment, the Clintons of any wrongdoing,” he added.

    Republicans finally get a chance to question Bill Clinton

    Republicans have wanted to question Bill Clinton about Epstein for years, especially as conspiracy theories arose following Epstein’s 2019 suicide in a New York jail cell while he faced sex trafficking charges.

    Those calls reached a fever pitch late last year when several photos of the former president surfaced in the Department of Justice’s first release of case files on Epstein and Maxwell, a British socialite who was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021 but maintains she’s innocent. Bill Clinton was photographed on a plane seated alongside a woman, whose face is redacted, with his arm around her. Another photo showed Clinton and Maxwell in a pool with another person whose face was redacted.

    Epstein also visited the White House several times during Clinton’s presidency, and the pair later made several international trips together for their humanitarian work.

    In the lead-up to the deposition, Bill Clinton has insisted he had limited knowledge about Epstein and was unaware of any sexual abuse he committed.

    “I think the chronology of the connection that he had with Epstein ended several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light,” Hillary Clinton said at the conclusion of her deposition Thursday.

    Comer has pledged extensive questioning of the former president. He claimed that Hillary Clinton had repeatedly deferred questions about Epstein to her husband.

    Has a precedent been set?

    Democrats, who have supported the push to get answers from Bill Clinton, are arguing that it sets a precedent that should also apply to President Donald Trump, a Republican who had his own relationship with Epstein.

    “We’re demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of Oversight Republicans and Democrats,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said Thursday.

    Comer has pushed back on that idea, saying that Trump has answered questions on Epstein from the press.

    Democrats are also calling for the resignation of Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick was a longtime neighbor of Epstein in New York City but said on a podcast that he severed ties with Epstein following a 2005 tour of Epstein’s home that disturbed Lutnick and his wife.

    The public release of case files showed that Lutnick actually had two engagements with Epstein years later. He attended a 2011 event at Epstein’s home, and in 2012 his family had lunch with Epstein on his private island.

    “He should be removed from office and at a minimum should come before the committee,” Garcia said of Lutnick.

    Comer on Thursday said that it was “very possible” that Lutnick would be called to testify.

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  • Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK, reveals terminal cancer diagnosis

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    Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of slain President John F. Kennedy, is battling a rare form of leukemia and may have less than a year to live.

    In an essay published Saturday in the New Yorker, the 35-year-old environmental journalist wrote her illness was discovered in May 2024 after she gave birth to her daughter. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia with a rare mutation known as Inversion 3 and has undergone several treatments, including chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants.

    Schlossberg is a daughter of former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, the former president’s daughter, and Edwin Schlossberg. They live in New York.

    In her essay, Schlossberg acknowledged that her terminal illness adds to a string of tragedies that has befallen the famous political family. Her grandfather was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Nearly five years later, his brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was fatally shot in Los Angeles after giving a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel following his California presidential primary win. Her uncle, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in 1999 when his small plane crashed.

    “For my whole life, I have tried to be good, to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry,” Schlossberg wrote.

    “Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

    She wrote her diagnosis was stunning. She had just turned 34, didn’t feel sick and was physically active, including swimming a mile one day before she gave birth to her second child at Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in New York.

    After the delivery, her doctor became alarmed by her high white blood cell count.

    At first, medical professionals figured the test result might be tied to her pregnancy. However, doctors soon concluded she had myeloid leukemia, a condition mostly observed in older patients. She ended up spending weeks in the hospital.

    “Every doctor I saw asked me if I had spent a lot of time at Ground Zero, given how common blood cancers are among first responders,” Schlossberg wrote. “I was in New York on 9/11, in the sixth grade, but I didn’t visit the site until years later.”

    She has endured various treatments. Her older sister, Rose, was one of her bone marrow donors.

    In the article, Schlossberg mentioned the Kennedy family’s dilemma over controversial positions taken by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., her mother’s cousin. Schlossberg wrote that while she was in the hospital in mid-2024, Kennedy suspended his long-shot campaign for president to throw his weight behind then-Republican candidate Donald Trump.

    Trump went on to name Kennedy to his Cabinet as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    In one of his early moves, Trump demanded a cut in government money to Columbia University, which employs her husband, George Moran.

    “Doctors and scientists at Columbia, including George, didn’t know if they would be able to continue their research, or even have jobs,” she wrote. “Suddenly, the health-care system on which I relied felt strained, shaky.”

    On Saturday, her brother Jack Schlossberg, who recently announced his bid for Congress in a New York district, shared on Instagram a link to her New Yorker essay, “A Battle with My Blood.”

    He added: “Life is short — let it rip.”

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    Meg James

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  • Joe Biden calls for Democratic momentum in Nebraska speech, urges party to ‘dream big’

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    Former President Joe Biden spoke to Nebraska Democrats on Friday evening.His appearance at the annual Ben Nelson Gala comes just days after nationwide elections. And, it was one of a handful of times we’ve heard from the former president since he left office and was undergoing radiation therapy for prostate cancer.On Friday, he addressed a crowd of several hundred in downtown Omaha with a message of momentum for the state of Nebraska.“Did you see the results Tuesday?” he asked, igniting another round of cheers as he listed Democratic victories from governorships in New Jersey and Virginia to the mayoral seat in New York to a redistricting decision in California, according to the Associated Press.It was a joyful return to the political stage for the former president, whose party’s effort to remain in the White House was rejected just over a year ago. Biden called for a political comeback, though not for himself, but to an audience hungry for a fight.”You have an election soon, an open seat right here in Omaha,” Biden said. “We can’t be afraid to dream big.”“You know what it feels like to be outnumbered,” he told Democrats in Nebraska, where Republicans have carried the state in every presidential election since 1968. “But every election, you put up the yard signs and you make your voices heard. The country needs you badly.”It was the kind of pep talk that sells in a place where Democrats lose statewide but have staged winning races for the Omaha area’s 2nd District electoral vote, elected a Democratic mayor for the first time since 2009 and feel energized about capturing the 2nd District seat in 2026.Biden’s speech centered around his time in office and the changes he said now hit American families during President Donald Trump’s term.He brought up the ongoing pause of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and the demolition of the East Wing.The major point from the former president centered around the future of his party.”The Democratic Party is back,” Biden said. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We’ve never lived up to it, but we’ve never walked away from it. And folks, we’re not going to walk away from it now. Tuesday night was a good start.”Biden was honored at the gala by four Native Nebraska tribes, draping a blanket quilt over his shoulders, which was then followed by a performance dedicated to the former president.Several other Democrats were at the gala, including Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Omaha Mayor John Ewing Jr.__The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Former President Joe Biden spoke to Nebraska Democrats on Friday evening.

    His appearance at the annual Ben Nelson Gala comes just days after nationwide elections. And, it was one of a handful of times we’ve heard from the former president since he left office and was undergoing radiation therapy for prostate cancer.

    On Friday, he addressed a crowd of several hundred in downtown Omaha with a message of momentum for the state of Nebraska.

    “Did you see the results Tuesday?” he asked, igniting another round of cheers as he listed Democratic victories from governorships in New Jersey and Virginia to the mayoral seat in New York to a redistricting decision in California, according to the Associated Press.

    It was a joyful return to the political stage for the former president, whose party’s effort to remain in the White House was rejected just over a year ago. Biden called for a political comeback, though not for himself, but to an audience hungry for a fight.

    “You have an election soon, an open seat right here in Omaha,” Biden said. “We can’t be afraid to dream big.”

    “You know what it feels like to be outnumbered,” he told Democrats in Nebraska, where Republicans have carried the state in every presidential election since 1968. “But every election, you put up the yard signs and you make your voices heard. The country needs you badly.”

    It was the kind of pep talk that sells in a place where Democrats lose statewide but have staged winning races for the Omaha area’s 2nd District electoral vote, elected a Democratic mayor for the first time since 2009 and feel energized about capturing the 2nd District seat in 2026.

    Biden’s speech centered around his time in office and the changes he said now hit American families during President Donald Trump’s term.

    He brought up the ongoing pause of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and the demolition of the East Wing.

    The major point from the former president centered around the future of his party.

    “The Democratic Party is back,” Biden said. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We’ve never lived up to it, but we’ve never walked away from it. And folks, we’re not going to walk away from it now. Tuesday night was a good start.”

    Biden was honored at the gala by four Native Nebraska tribes, draping a blanket quilt over his shoulders, which was then followed by a performance dedicated to the former president.

    Several other Democrats were at the gala, including Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Omaha Mayor John Ewing Jr.

    __
    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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  • Obama offers support to Mamdani: report

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    Former President Barack Obama told Zohran Mamdani that he was invested in the New York mayoral candidate’s success during a phone call Saturday, according to a report from The New York Times.

    Obama called Mamdani and they spoke for about 30 minutes, two people who were either on the call or were briefed about it told the outlet.

    Mamdani is leading in the polls over his rivals, former New York governor and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

    During the call, Obama praised Mamdani’s campaign and offered to be a “sounding board” for the Democratic candidate. The pair also discussed Mamdani’s affordability agenda as well as hiring a new administration, according to the report.

    Newsweek has reached out to Mamdani’s press team and the Obama Foundation on behalf of the former president for comment via email on Saturday. 

    This is a breaking news story. Updates to come.

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  • Contributor: How the conviction of Brazil’s former president echoes in the U.S.

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    Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday found former President Jair Bolsonaro guilty of conspiracies related to his failed 2022 reelection bid. The court found that Bolsonaro tried to instigate a military coup and to poison his opponent, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro, the former president of Latin America’s largest democracy and its wealthiest country, was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison and is barred from ever seeking public office again.

    Bolsonaro is one among two dozen elected presidents and prime ministers in recent history around the world who used their time in office to undermine their countries’ democratic institutions. In addition to undermining confidence in elections, the Brazilian leader weakened public and scientific institutions by defunding them. Bolsonaro’s family and political associates faced repeated scandals. As a consequence, the president governed in constant fear of impeachment — a fate that had ended the careers of two prior Brazilian presidents since the country’s return to democracy in 1998. To avoid this outcome, Bolsonaro forged alliances with an array of legislative parties and strange bedfellows. Brazilian political scientists describe the implicit agreement: “The deal is simple: you protect me and I let you run the Country and extract rents from it as you wish.”

    Curiously, the decision is also a setback for President Trump here in the United States. Trump views Bolsonaro as an ally who, like him, has been persecuted by leftists and subjected to retribution by courts. The American president tried hard to stop the Brazilian court from ruling against Bolsonaro. In August, Trump sent a letter to Lula, Bolsonaro’s nemesis. Trump threatened to hike most tariffs on Brazilian exports to the U.S. to 50% should his friend remain in legal peril.

    Trump’s empathy reflects the two presidents’ parallel paths. Bolsonaro, like Trump, used his time in office to test democratic norms, weaken independent public institutions and vilify his opponents. Both men express a taste for political violence. Where Trump has often mused about beating up hecklers and shooting protesters in the knees, Bolsonaro was nostalgic for military rule in his country. On the campaign trail in 2018, he asserted that Brazil would only change for the better “on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn’t do: killing 30,000.”

    Both Trump and Bolsonaro tried to cling to power after losing their reelection bids. Heeding their presidents’ claims of electoral fraud, Trump’s supporters rioted in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, as did Bolsonaro’s in Brasilia, the Brazilian capital, on Jan. 8, 2023. Bolsonaro’s involvement in these post-election acts was the basis of the legal peril that has consumed him.

    Trump depicts the Brazilian judge most responsible for Bolsonaro’s prosecution, Chief Justice Alexandre de Moraes, with disdain. Trump describes the case against Bolsonaro as a “witch hunt” in support of a Lula government, describing the current president as a “radical leftist.”

    In fact there is little love lost between Lula and De Moraes. Lula is the leader of the social-democratic Workers’ Party; De Moraes is closely associated with the center-right PSDB and is known for his tough-on-crime stances. De Moraes’ activism dates back to the Bolsonaro presidency, when Brazil’s attorney general, appointed by Bolsonaro, was less than energetic in upholding the rule of law. To transpose the Brazilian situation and De Moraes’ activism to the U.S. context, imagine that, viewing the Justice Department’s lack of vigor in prosecuting Trump, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had roused himself to encourage legal action against the president.

    Many Americans will view Brazil and the Bolsonaro story with a certain envy. Here is a president who dealt with electoral loss by claiming fraud and by instigating his military and civilian supporters to violence, and who has been held decisively to account.

    Accountability of public servants is at the heart of democracy. Voters can hold incumbents accountable in elections — political scientists call this “vertical accountability” — as can coequal branches of government, which we call “horizontal accountability.” Would-be autocratic leaders such as Bolsonaro try to escape both kinds of accountability, staying in office even when they lose (the end of vertical accountability) and undermining independent courts, agencies, central banks and whistle-blowers (there goes the horizontal version). In the end, Bolsonaro was held to account both by voters and by the courts.

    Trump’s self-insertion into the Bolsonaro prosecution calls attention to another form of accountability, or at least presidential constraint, which has gone missing from our own governing administration. That is the constraint that presidents experience when advisors keep them from acting on instincts that are unwise.

    If such advisors were to be found in today’s White House, they might have counseled the president not to threaten Brazil with high tariffs. Doing so risks exacerbating inflation of the prices of key consumer goods (coffee, orange juice), something that is politically dangerous because controlling inflation was an issue at the heart of Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign. The use of tariff threats as a cudgel to try to save an ally from legal peril also gives lie to the purported rationale behind tariffs: protecting U.S. manufacturers or correcting trade imbalances.

    Gone, then, are the days when Americans might have served as a model of democratic governance. For all of its own problems, of which there are many, the second-largest country in our hemisphere is schooling us in what democratic accountability looks like.

    Susan Stokes is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She is the author, most recently, of “The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies.”

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    Susan Stokes

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  • As Jimmy Carter nears his 100th birthday, a musical gala celebrates the ‘rock-and roll president’

    As Jimmy Carter nears his 100th birthday, a musical gala celebrates the ‘rock-and roll president’

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    A range of stars from the stage, screen and sport paid tribute Tuesday to former President Jimmy Carter ahead of his 100th birthday, the eclectic lineup meant to highlight the 39th president’s emphasis on human rights and his love of music as a universal language.”Everyone here is making history,” Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson, told more than 4,000 people who filled Atlanta’s Fox Theatre to toast the longest-lived U.S. executive in history. “This is the first time people have come together to celebrate the 100th birthday of American president.”The benefit concert, with ticket sales funding international programs of The Carter Center that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982 after leaving the White House, brought together artists that crossed generations and genres that traced back to his 1976 campaign. The concert will be aired in full on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Oct. 1, Carter’s birthday. Carter remains in hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia. “He really was the rock-and-roll president,” said Chuck Leavell, whose Georgia-based Allman Brothers Band campaigned with Carter in 1976. But more than that, Leavell said, Carter always understood music as something “that brings people together.”Indeed, Tuesday’s run of show assembled artists as varied as India Arie singing R&B and soul draped in a resplendent purple gown; the B-52s, formed in Athens, Georgia, singing “Love Shack” and projecting psychedelic imagery across the concert hall; and the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus bringing a classical and patriotic repertoire.Former President Barack Obama, known for releasing his summer playlists on social media, marveled at the range.”Now I have another reason to respect you,” Obama said in a video message. “He has got great taste in music. … I’ve never thrown a concert that features pop, rock, gospel, country, jazz, classical and hip-hop.”Of course, Obama noted, “Jimmy never passes up the opportunity to send a message,” and several artists referenced one of Carter’s widely circulated quotes about music: “One of the things that has held America together has been the music that we share and love.”Leavell took the stage multiple times Tuesday, reprising music he played and sang almost 50 years ago when Carter, then an underdog former Georgia governor, outpaced better-known Democrats to win his party’s nomination and the presidency in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.”Music was such an important part of his political legacy,” Jason Carter told The Associated Press. “The Allman Brothers helped get him elected. Willie Nelson helped get him elected. He truly believed that.”When he was coming out of the South, running for president of the United States, the Allman Brothers and some of these other folks were really announcing this New South that was turning the page on the days of segregation – their lyrics, their whole vibe,” the younger Carter continued. “He used that to connect across generations.”Leavell traced Carter’s love of music to his upbringing in church; the former president has written about his early church experiences, including visiting a Black congregation near his home just outside Plains. Carter recalled being more captivated by the music there than what he heard in his all-white congregation. At the Naval Academy, Leavell noted, Carter and one of his friends would buy classical recordings of the same pieces to study how music can be interpreted differently. Part of the evening involved recounting Carter’s legacy as president and with The Carter Center, which advocates democracy, resolves conflict and fights disease across the world. Hannah Hooper, a lead singer of the alternative rock band Grouplove, praised Carter for dramatically expanding nationally protected park lands, most of it in Alaska. Actress Renee Zellweger narrated the lifelong relationship between the former president and his wife, whom he first met when she was just days old and who died last November after 77 years of marriage. Two former Atlanta Braves baseball stars, Terry Pendleton and Dale Murphy, celebrated Carter as the team’s No. 1 fan. They recalled what it was like to play with the Carters sitting in a field-level box, and they presented the former president’s great-grandsons with a Braves jersey to give their great-grandfather. The jersey number: 100. Bernice King, the daughter of slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., recounted Carter’s relationship with her family — he was close to her mother, and her grandfather was instrumental in Carter’s 1976 election. Though Carter was not actively involved in King Jr.’s work, Bernice King thanked the former president for publicly crediting her father for his indirect role in Carter’s political rise. Without the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, she recalled Carter saying, the nation never would have elevated a Southern governor who came of age in the era of Jim Crow segregation. The night was mostly void of partisan politics. But there were signs of Democratic allegiances to Carter and shadows of the 2024 election.Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers praised Carter as being ahead of his time and added that the country would have been better off if he had gotten to “finish the job” — an obvious reference to Carter’s landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980. The list of former presidents paying tribute was bipartisan: Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush were packaged with Obama. President Joe Biden added his greetings, recalling that he was the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s White House bid. “I admire you so darn much,” Biden said, calling Carter, “Mr. President.” But there was a notable omission: former President Donald Trump. The 2024 Republican nominee has this year repeatedly cast Carter as a failed president as he tries to make a comeback bid. After the 2016 election, Carter questioned Trump’s legitimacy. Arie’s selections, meanwhile, included “What If,” the lyrics of which include first names of Black women who have broken barriers. Among them: Kamala. That reference to the vice president and Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, drew roars from the crowd. Jason Carter, for his part, said his grandfather has been captivated by Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid and the possibility that Harris could become the first woman in the Oval Office. The younger Carter, who now chairs The Carter Center board, said Jimmy Carter struggled in the months after Rosalynn Carter’s death but now is excited by another campaign.”He’s ready to turn the page on Trump,” Jason Carter said, but more driven by the opportunity to vote for Harris. “When Kamala came onto the scene, it really galvanized the party, and it really energized him as well.”

    ATLANTA —

    A range of stars from the stage, screen and sport paid tribute Tuesday to former President Jimmy Carter ahead of his 100th birthday, the eclectic lineup meant to highlight the 39th president’s emphasis on human rights and his love of music as a universal language.

    “Everyone here is making history,” Jason Carter, the former president’s grandson, told more than 4,000 people who filled Atlanta’s Fox Theatre to toast the longest-lived U.S. executive in history. “This is the first time people have come together to celebrate the 100th birthday of American president.”

    The benefit concert, with ticket sales funding international programs of The Carter Center that Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982 after leaving the White House, brought together artists that crossed generations and genres that traced back to his 1976 campaign. The concert will be aired in full on Georgia Public Broadcasting on Oct. 1, Carter’s birthday. Carter remains in hospice care at his home in Plains, Georgia.

    “He really was the rock-and-roll president,” said Chuck Leavell, whose Georgia-based Allman Brothers Band campaigned with Carter in 1976. But more than that, Leavell said, Carter always understood music as something “that brings people together.”

    Indeed, Tuesday’s run of show assembled artists as varied as India Arie singing R&B and soul draped in a resplendent purple gown; the B-52s, formed in Athens, Georgia, singing “Love Shack” and projecting psychedelic imagery across the concert hall; and the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus bringing a classical and patriotic repertoire.

    Paras Griffin

    (L-R) Charlie Carter, Josh Carter, Jonathan Carter, Sarah Jane Opp Carter and guests attend Jimmy Carter 100: A Celebration in Song at The Fox Theatre on September 17, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

    Former President Barack Obama, known for releasing his summer playlists on social media, marveled at the range.

    ATLANTA, GEORGIA - SEPTEMBER 17: A view of the atmosphere at Jimmy Carter 100: A Celebration in Song at The Fox Theatre on September 17, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

    Paras Griffin

    A view of the atmosphere at Jimmy Carter 100: A Celebration in Song at The Fox Theatre on September 17, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)

    “Now I have another reason to respect you,” Obama said in a video message. “He has got great taste in music. … I’ve never thrown a concert that features pop, rock, gospel, country, jazz, classical and hip-hop.”

    Of course, Obama noted, “Jimmy never passes up the opportunity to send a message,” and several artists referenced one of Carter’s widely circulated quotes about music: “One of the things that has held America together has been the music that we share and love.”

    Leavell took the stage multiple times Tuesday, reprising music he played and sang almost 50 years ago when Carter, then an underdog former Georgia governor, outpaced better-known Democrats to win his party’s nomination and the presidency in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

    “Music was such an important part of his political legacy,” Jason Carter told The Associated Press. “The Allman Brothers helped get him elected. Willie Nelson helped get him elected. He truly believed that.

    Jason Carter, center, grandson of President Jimmy Carter, with his sons, Henry Lewis Carter, right, and Thomas Clyde Carter, left, attends the "Jimmy Carter 100: A Celebration in Song," concert at the Fox Theatre, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Atlanta. Former President Carter turns 100-years old on Oct. 1. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

    Mike Stewart

    Jason Carter, center, grandson of President Jimmy Carter, with his sons, Henry Lewis Carter, right, and Thomas Clyde Carter, left, attends the “Jimmy Carter 100: A Celebration in Song,” concert at the Fox Theatre, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, in Atlanta. Former President Carter turns 100-years old on Oct. 1. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

    “When he was coming out of the South, running for president of the United States, the Allman Brothers and some of these other folks were really announcing this New South that was turning the page on the days of segregation – their lyrics, their whole vibe,” the younger Carter continued. “He used that to connect across generations.”

    Leavell traced Carter’s love of music to his upbringing in church; the former president has written about his early church experiences, including visiting a Black congregation near his home just outside Plains. Carter recalled being more captivated by the music there than what he heard in his all-white congregation. At the Naval Academy, Leavell noted, Carter and one of his friends would buy classical recordings of the same pieces to study how music can be interpreted differently.

    Part of the evening involved recounting Carter’s legacy as president and with The Carter Center, which advocates democracy, resolves conflict and fights disease across the world.

    Hannah Hooper, a lead singer of the alternative rock band Grouplove, praised Carter for dramatically expanding nationally protected park lands, most of it in Alaska. Actress Renee Zellweger narrated the lifelong relationship between the former president and his wife, whom he first met when she was just days old and who died last November after 77 years of marriage.

    Two former Atlanta Braves baseball stars, Terry Pendleton and Dale Murphy, celebrated Carter as the team’s No. 1 fan. They recalled what it was like to play with the Carters sitting in a field-level box, and they presented the former president’s great-grandsons with a Braves jersey to give their great-grandfather. The jersey number: 100.

    Bernice King, the daughter of slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., recounted Carter’s relationship with her family — he was close to her mother, and her grandfather was instrumental in Carter’s 1976 election. Though Carter was not actively involved in King Jr.’s work, Bernice King thanked the former president for publicly crediting her father for his indirect role in Carter’s political rise. Without the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, she recalled Carter saying, the nation never would have elevated a Southern governor who came of age in the era of Jim Crow segregation.

    The night was mostly void of partisan politics. But there were signs of Democratic allegiances to Carter and shadows of the 2024 election.

    Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers praised Carter as being ahead of his time and added that the country would have been better off if he had gotten to “finish the job” — an obvious reference to Carter’s landslide defeat to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

    The list of former presidents paying tribute was bipartisan: Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush were packaged with Obama. President Joe Biden added his greetings, recalling that he was the first U.S. senator to endorse Carter’s White House bid. “I admire you so darn much,” Biden said, calling Carter, “Mr. President.”

    But there was a notable omission: former President Donald Trump. The 2024 Republican nominee has this year repeatedly cast Carter as a failed president as he tries to make a comeback bid. After the 2016 election, Carter questioned Trump’s legitimacy.

    Arie’s selections, meanwhile, included “What If,” the lyrics of which include first names of Black women who have broken barriers. Among them: Kamala. That reference to the vice president and Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, drew roars from the crowd.

    Jason Carter, for his part, said his grandfather has been captivated by Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid and the possibility that Harris could become the first woman in the Oval Office. The younger Carter, who now chairs The Carter Center board, said Jimmy Carter struggled in the months after Rosalynn Carter’s death but now is excited by another campaign.

    “He’s ready to turn the page on Trump,” Jason Carter said, but more driven by the opportunity to vote for Harris. “When Kamala came onto the scene, it really galvanized the party, and it really energized him as well.”

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  • Former President Trump In Court As Lawyers Fight To Overturn Verdict In E. Jean Carroll Sex Abuse Suit – KXL

    Former President Trump In Court As Lawyers Fight To Overturn Verdict In E. Jean Carroll Sex Abuse Suit – KXL

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    NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump looked on as his lawyers pressed federal appeals judges to overturn a verdict finding him liable for sexual abuse and slander.

    Attorney D. John Sauer told a three-judge panel Friday that the civil trial in a lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll was muddied by improper evidence.

    He noted that the jury was allowed to consider such items as the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted years ago about grabbing women’s genitals.

    Carroll says Trump attacked her in a department store dressing room in 1996.

    He denies it.

    A jury awarded Carroll $5 million.

    The appeals judges haven’t yet ruled.

    More about:

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    Grant McHill

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  • FBI says Trump was indeed struck by bullet during assassination attempt

    FBI says Trump was indeed struck by bullet during assassination attempt

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    FBI says Trump was indeed struck by bullet during assassination attempt

    Good morning, Chairman Jordan, ranking member Nadler members of the committee. Uh I want to begin by offering my condolences on the passing representative Jackson Lee who served the people of Texas in this body and on this committee for so long, thank you all for your support of our efforts to protect the American people and uphold the constitution. I am proud to be here today representing the 38,000 special agents, intelligence analysts and professional staff who make up the FBI men and women who every day work relentlessly to counter the most complex threat environment I’ve seen in my tenure as FBI director maybe in my entire career in law enforcement before I go any further. I also want to acknowledge and offer my deepest condolences to the victims of the horrific assassination attempt in Butler County, to the friends and family of Coy comparator who by all accounts lost his life, protecting others from danger to the other victims, two of whom were critically wounded and of course, of course to President Trump, former President Trump and his family, as I’ve said from the beginning, the attempted assassination of the former president was an attack on our democracy and our democratic process. And we will not, and do not tolerate political violence of any kind, especially *** despicable account of this magnitude. And I want to assure you and the American people that the men and women of the FBI will continue to work tirelessly to get to the bottom of what happened. We are bringing all the resources of the FBI to bear both criminal and national security. Now, there’s *** whole lot of work underway and still *** lot of work to do and our understanding of what happened and why will continue to evolve. But we’re going to leave no stone unturned. The shooter may be deceased but the FB I’s investigation is very much ongoing to that point. I also want to acknowledge that I recognize both the congressional and the public interest in this case and the importance of this investigation to the American people. And I understand there are *** lot of open questions. So while the investigation is very much ongoing and our assessments of the shooter and his actions continue to evolve. My hope here today is to do my best to provide you with all the information I can given where we are at this point. I have been saying for some time now that we are living in an elevated threat environment and tragically, the Butler County assassination attempt is another example, *** particularly heinous and very public. One of what I’ve been talking about but it also reinforces our need at the FBI and our ongoing commitment to stay focused on the threats on the mission and on the people we do the work with and the people we do the work for every day all across this country. And indeed around the world, the men and women of the FBI are doing just that working around the clock to counter the threats we face just in the last year. For example, in California, the FBI and our partners targeted an organized crime syndicate responsible for trafficking fentaNYL meth and cocaine all across North America. We charged the Mexican based suppliers who brought the drugs into the United States. *** network of Canada based truck drivers who delivered the drugs and the distributors in the United States who spread the poison into our communities. Staying on threats emanating from the border. I have warned for some time now about the threat that foreign terrorists may seek to exploit our Southwest border or some other port of entry to advance *** plot against Americans. Just last month. For instance, the Bureau and our joint terrorism task forces worked with IC in multiple cities across the country. As several individuals with suspected international terrorist ties were arrested using ISIS immigration authorities leading up to those arrests, hundreds of FBI employees dedicated countless hours to understand the threat and identify additional individuals of concern. Now, the physical security of the border is of course not in the fbi’s Lane. But as the threat has escalated, we’re working with our partners in law enforcement and the intelligence community to find and stop foreign terrorists who would harm Americans and our interests.

    FBI says Trump was indeed struck by bullet during assassination attempt

    The FBI said former President Donald Trump was struck in the ear by a bullet during an assassination attempt on July 13, as the agency moved Friday to clarify what happened after nearly two weeks of confusion and conflicting accounts.Related video above: FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies to House committee on Trump assassination attemptIn a statement issued Friday evening, the FBI said: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”The statement came two days after FBI Director Christopher Wray said during congressional testimony that it was not clear whether Trump’s injuries were caused by a bullet or shrapnel.

    The FBI said former President Donald Trump was struck in the ear by a bullet during an assassination attempt on July 13, as the agency moved Friday to clarify what happened after nearly two weeks of confusion and conflicting accounts.

    Related video above: FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies to House committee on Trump assassination attempt

    In a statement issued Friday evening, the FBI said: “What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”

    The statement came two days after FBI Director Christopher Wray said during congressional testimony that it was not clear whether Trump’s injuries were caused by a bullet or shrapnel.

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  • The Dead-Enders of the Reagan-Era GOP

    The Dead-Enders of the Reagan-Era GOP

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    For those of us who very much want to see Donald Trump defeated in November by the widest possible margin, the news on Friday afternoon that former Vice President Mike Pence would not be endorsing his former boss seemed encouraging. Not that Pence commands a large faction of voters. Given that he dropped out of the Republican presidential-primary race late last year after failing to rise above the lower single digits, there’s no reason to assume that he does. Still, every prominent, normie Republican who rejects Trump moves us further down the road.

    But toward what?

    A lot of my Never Trump allies on the center-right feel sure that Pence’s refusal to endorse the man he served for four years points the way (or “creates a permission structure,” as the fashionable parlance has it) for Republican voters to abandon the former president. By joining Nikki Haley, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, Bill Barr, Mark Esper, John Kelly, Mick Mulvaney, Dan Coats, John Bolton, H. R. McMaster, Liz Cheney, and a long list of additional former Cabinet members, present and former members of Congress, and state officials in opposing Trump’s bid to become president again, Pence supposedly helps guarantee Trump’s loss in November.

    But is this really true? I’m quite willing to believe that some measurable number of Reaganite Republicans may be persuaded to stay home, or to vote for someone other than Trump, on Election Day. (One wonders if somewhat more of them might have been moved to do so had Pence called the post–January 6 Trump unfit for the presidency, instead of focusing on Trump’s ideological heterodoxy.) But this will doom Trump’s chances only if he fails to pick up support from different sorts of voters to replace the ones he loses from the (former) GOP mainstream. Is it possible that the very act of Republicans of the Reagan and Bush eras distancing themselves from Trump could burnish the former president’s credentials as a man seeking to transform his party in a populist direction?

    [David Frum: The ego has crash-landed]

    The Trump presidency was peculiar. On the one hand, this highly irregular candidate who attacked the Republican establishment and dissented from the party’s long-standing policy commitments on a range of issues managed to win the nomination and the presidency. He also brought with him to the White House people such as Steve Bannon, who actively wanted to blow up the GOP’s electoral coalition in order to transform it into a “workers’ party.”

    On the other hand, these radicals were severely outnumbered in the administration by holdovers from the prior dispensation of the Republican Party. These GOP normies pretty much ran the show; their primary accomplishments were helping ensure a large corporate tax cut and the appointment of staunchly conservative federal judges and Supreme Court justices. Most of the Trump administration’s other, right-populist initiatives—such as anti-internationalism in foreign policy and funding the construction of a wall along the southern border—were blocked or slow-walked for four years.

    When it came time for Trump’s reelection bid, in 2020, enough upper-income, highly educated, suburban Republicans defected to Joe Biden for Trump to lose. One path toward Republican victory this coming November would involve trying to win back those suburban voters by portraying Trump as a safe alternative to Biden, who will mainly aim to get the economy back to where it was before the coronavirus pandemic sent the country into a tailspin. If this were the Trump 2024 electoral strategy, Pence’s refusal to endorse the former president might be a serious problem for the campaign—because it would signal to like-minded voters that Trump doesn’t deserve their support.

    Equally possible, though, is that Pence’s refusal to endorse hastens the GOP’s transformation into the party that Trump and Bannon had originally hoped to build eight years ago—a workers’ party that could more precisely be described as a cross-racial coalition of voters who haven’t graduated from college.

    The evidence in favor of such an evolution of the GOP has been mixed over the past few election cycles, but polling so far in this cycle has pointed to something bigger going on, with significant signs of a “racial realignment” under way. If such a shift proves real in November, it could well turn out to have been enabled by Pence, Haley, and others abandoning Trump over his divergences from Reaganite conservatism. The policies favored by those old-line Reagan-Bush Republicans are no longer particularly popular with less educated voters, and the highly ideological and inauthentic way in which the old guard talks and thinks also diverges from what Trump is teaching many of these voters to look for in a political tribune: unapologetic brashness, braggadocio, and bullshit.

    I’m not suggesting that this is a ticket to a Trump victory in November. All of Trump’s many liabilities remain. He’s despised by tens of millions of Americans. He’s been indicted in multiple jurisdictions. He faces dozens of felony charges. He attempted to overturn the 2020 election by spreading delusional lies about election fraud that he continues to affirm. He incited a riot that disrupted the national legislature as it tried to certify the results of the election, making him the first president in American history to attempt a coup to remain in power.

    [Damon Linker: Democrats should pick a new presidential candidate now]

    All of this and so much more will make the 2024 election a challenge for Trump. But the very fact that polls show the election is close, even tilting against Biden, points to a surprisingly high floor under the former president—higher than was the case in either 2016 or 2020. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s on track to win. But it does suggest that the GOP’s new electoral coalition is stable and possibly growing—even as Reaganite Republican grandees express constant outright disgust at the man who is somehow behind this stability and growth.

    Whether or not Trump manages to win, we’re likely to see the continued evolution of the Republican base away from what Pence, Haley, and others would like it to be. As I’ve argued before, the relatively few voters who pine for a Reagan restoration aren’t going to find it in the present-day Republican Party. They might not fully find it in the Democratic Party of Joe Biden either. But at least there, they can make common cause with centrist factions open to the Reaganite mix of low taxes, liberal immigration, free trade, and hawkish internationalism combined with a civil religion of American exceptionalism. In the post-Trump GOP, such views are actively unwelcome (aside from the tax cuts).

    That’s because a sizable portion of Americans who haven’t graduated from college, of whatever race or ethnicity, have different priorities—and, more and more, they form the base of the GOP. Those voters prefer to think of the nation as an armed camp; they want to see government power used to advance what they conceive as their own and their country’s interests, and they like that message conveyed in a muscular style of trash-talking vulgarity and humor. The old high-minded, edifying, and earnest Reagan speeches that portrayed America as a shining city on a hill, with the duty to defend democracies abroad, leave these voters cold. In this respect, “America First” really does work well as a slogan for the Republican Party now emerging, eight years after Trump first captured it.

    If Trump loses in November, none of this is likely to change. The new Republican base isn’t going to reverse course and suddenly decide it loves Pence and Haley after all. The old Reaganite approach is a dead end. Instead, the party will finally begin to look seriously for a Trump successor. Ron DeSantis auditioned for that role over the past year, and it didn’t work out; the voters decided they still preferred Trump himself. DeSantis will probably try again, but he’ll be joined by many others next time. (Conspicuous among them is J. D. Vance, who’s spending much of his first term as the junior senator from Ohio testing out elements of a right-populist agenda for a post-Trump Republican Party.)

    No matter who Trump’s successor turns out to be, that person will be someone who speaks the language of non-college-educated voters and views the world as they do. The GOP is now a vehicle for right-wing populism. Pence expressing dissatisfaction with this fact likely does more to confirm the completion of this transformation than it does to scuttle the new GOP’s political ambitions.

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    Damon Linker

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  • In South Carolina, Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due

    In South Carolina, Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due

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    The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.

    They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service, while Trump Jr. lacerated President Joe Biden, the media, the multiple legal proceedings against his father, and the punishment of the January 6 insurrectionists. “Trump is my president,” one man shouted.

    Hargenrader and Poulnot were still feeling that spirit when they stopped on their way out from the rally to talk with me. When I asked them why they were supporting Trump over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, they started with conventional reasons. “Because he did a great job and he can do it again,” Hargenrader told me. Poulnot cut in to add: “He stands for the people and he tells the truth.”

    But within moments, the two women moved to a higher plane in their praise of Trump and condemnation of Haley. “I think the Lord has him in the chair,” Hargenrader told me. “He’s God’s man.” Poulnot jumped in again. “And the election was stolen from him,” she said. “You have to live on Mars to not realize that.” And Haley? “I think she’s an opportunist and … she sold her soul to the devil,” Poulnot told me.

    Such is the level of evangelical fervor for Trump within much of the GOP base that buried Haley in her home state on Saturday. Haley had said her goal in South Carolina was to match the 43 percent of the vote she received in last month’s New Hampshire primary, an exceedingly modest aspiration. But she appeared to fall short of even that low bar, as Trump routed her by a tally of about 60 percent to 40 percent, at the latest count.

    Trump’s victory in South Carolina placed him in a virtually impregnable position for the nomination. Since South Carolina established its primary near the front of the GOP calendar in 1980, the candidate who won here has captured the Republican nomination in every contested race except one. With his win tonight, Trump became the first GOP contender other than an incumbent president to sweep the big three early contests of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

    Reinforcing the message from the key initial contests of Iowa and New Hampshire, the South Carolina result showed that Haley faces a ceiling on her support too low to beat Trump. For Haley to catch Trump now would require some massive external event, and even that might not be enough.

    But for all the evidence of Trump’s strength within the party, the South Carolina results again showed that a meaningful floor of GOP voters remains uneasy with returning him to leadership. “I like his policies, but I’d like to cut his thumbs off and tape his mouth shut,” Juanita Gwilt of Isle of Palms told me last night just outside Charleston, before Haley’s final rally leading up the primary. In Haley’s speech to her supporters, she insisted that she would remain in the race. “I’m an accountant. I know 40 percent is not 50 percent,” she said. “But I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”

    As in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump’s pattern of support in South Carolina simultaneously underscored his dominant position in the party while pointing to some potential vulnerabilities for the general election. In this deeply conservative state, Trump carried virtually every major demographic group. Trump beat Haley, for instance, by nearly as much among women as men and by nearly as much among suburban as rural voters, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. The robust overall turnout testified again to Trump’s greatest political strength—his extraordinary ability to motivate his base voters.

    Still, some warning signs for him persisted: About one-third of all primary voters and even one-fourth of self-identified Republicans said they would not consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. More than four in five Haley voters said he would be unfit if convicted, about the same elevated share as in Iowa and New Hampshire. And as in the earlier states, Trump faced much more resistance among primary voters with a college degree than those without one, and among voters who did not identify as evangelical Christians than those who did. (The exit polls showed Haley narrowly carrying both groups.) As in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump won only about two in five independents in South Carolina, the exit polls found.

    The magnitude of Trump’s victory was especially striking given the mismatch in time and money the two candidates devoted to the state. Haley camped out in South Carolina for most of the month before the vote, barnstorming the state in a bus; Trump parachuted in for a few large rallies. Her campaign, and the super PACs supporting her, spent nearly $9.4 million in South Carolina advertising, about nine times as much as Trump and his supporters, according to data provided by AdImpact.

    In South Carolina, Haley also delivered a case against Trump that was far more cogent and cohesive than she offered earlier in the race. During the multiple nationally televised Republican debates through 2023, Haley barely raised a complaint about Trump. Through Iowa and New Hampshire—when she had the concentrated attention of the national media—she refused to go any further in criticizing Trump than declaring that “chaos follows him, rightly or wrongly.”

    But after allowing those opportunities to pass, she notably escalated her challenge to Trump over the past month in her South Carolina rallies and a succession of television appearances. This morning, after she voted near her home in Kiawah Island, reporters asked her about some racist comments Trump made last night at an event in Columbia. In her response, no trace remained of that passive voice. “That’s the chaos that comes with Donald Trump,” she said firmly, now clearly describing him as the source of the chaos rather than a bystander to its eruption. “That’s the offensiveness that is going to happen every day between now and the general election.”

    Yesterday, at a rally in Moncks Corner, a small town about an hour north of Charleston, Haley delivered a biting critique of Trump’s comments that he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries that don’t meet the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense. “Trump is siding with a thug where half a million people have died or been wounded because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin invaded Ukraine,” she said. “Trump is siding with a dictator who kills his political opponents. Trump is siding with a tyrant who arrests American journalists and holds them hostage.”

    A few minutes later, Haley lashed Trump for questioning why her husband, who is on a military deployment, has not appeared with her during the campaign. “Donald Trump’s never been near a uniform,” she said. “He’s never had to sleep on the ground. The closest he’s ever come to harm’s way is if a golf ball happens to hit him on the golf course.” Later, she criticized Trump for using tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to pay his own legal bills. And she insisted that he cannot win a general election.

    Read: Could South Carolina change everything?

    Haley remains careful to balance every criticism of Trump with an equal jab at Biden. But though she portrays both Biden and Trump as destabilizing forces, the core of her retooled message is a repudiation of Trump’s insistence that he will make America great again. No, she says, the challenge for the next president is to make America normal again. “Our kids want to know what normal feels like,” she insisted in Moncks Corner.

    Taken together, this is an argument quite distinct from the case against Trump from Biden, or his sharpest Republican critics, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Representative Liz Cheney. Haley doesn’t join them in framing Trump as a threat to democracy or an aspiring autocrat. The refusal to embrace that claim as well as the staunch conservatism of her own agenda and her repeated indications that she’ll likely support Trump if he wins the nomination probably explains why Haley failed to attract as many independent and Democratic voters as she needed to participate today. Those non-Republicans cast only about 30 percent of the total votes, according to the exit polls. That’s about the same share as in both the 2016 and 2012 South Carolina primaries, and far less than the nearly 40 percent share then-Senator John McCain turned out in his “maverick” 2000 presidential bid against George W. Bush. (And even with that, Bush beat him by consolidating a big majority of partisan Republican voters, as Trump did earlier today.)

    Instead, in South Carolina, Haley offered a case against Trump aimed more directly at wavering Republicans. She accused Trump of failing to display the personal characteristics that conservatives insist they value. It’s telling that at Haley’s rallies yesterday, she drew almost no applause when she criticized Trump on policy grounds for enlarging the federal deficit or supporting sweeping tariffs. But she inspired cries of disdain from her audience when she disparaged Trump, in so many words, as a grifter, a liar, and a self-absorbed narcissist more focused on his own grudges than on his voters’ needs. “Poor guy,” one man yelled out last night after Haley complained about Trump constantly portraying himself as a victim.

    Would it have made any difference if Haley had pressed these assertions earlier in the race, when she had the large national audience of the debates, and Trump had not progressed so far toward the nomination? Several GOP strategists and operatives this week told me that attacking Trump while the field was still crowded would only have hurt Haley and benefited the other contenders who stayed out of the fray. Even now, in a one-on-one race, directly confronting Trump is rapidly raising Haley’s negative rating among GOP voters. Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, told me as the results came in Saturday night that GOP voters who voted for Trump twice might take it as a personal insult about their own prior decisions if Haley echoed Christie and Cheney in portraying the former president as “unfit for office and a threat to democracy.”

    Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy

    Hargenrader and Poulnot underscored Ayres’s point yesterday: They speak for millions of Republican voters who see Trump in quasi-religious terms as uniquely fighting for them, and the legal challenges ensnaring him only as evidence of the burdens he’s bearing on their behalf. “I don’t think people appreciate sufficiently the fine line Nikki Haley has to walk with this coalition,” Ayres told me.

    After months of vacillation and caution, Haley is now making a forceful case against Trump, and displaying great political courage in doing so: She is standing virtually alone while most of the GOP establishment (including virtually all of the political leadership in South Carolina) aligns behind him. Ayres believes that Haley is speaking for a large enough minority of the party to justify continuing in the race for as long as she wants—even if there’s virtually no chance anymore that she can expand her coalition enough to truly threaten Trump. “Nikki Haley represents a perspective, an outlook on the world, and a set of values that are still held by what remains of the Reagan-Bush coalition in the Republican Party,” Ayres told me.

    But the bill for treating Trump so gingerly for so many months has now come due for Haley in South Carolina. Haley waited until the concrete in this race had almost hardened before giving Republican voters a real reason to think twice about nominating Trump again. Perhaps the circle of GOP voters open to an alternative was never large enough to support a serious challenge to the former president. What’s clear after his decisive victory in South Carolina is that neither Haley nor anyone else in the GOP tried hard enough to test that proposition until it was too late.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Real Difference Between Trump and Biden

    The Real Difference Between Trump and Biden

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    Listen to this article

    Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.

    Americans likely face a choice this fall between two men they don’t want for president. Or they can stay home and get one of the two guys they don’t want for president anyway. The reasons for voter disdain are clear enough: Poll respondents say Joe Biden is too old, an impression reinforced by last week’s special-counsel report, and they have always been troubled by Donald Trump’s judgment and character (though a majority think he’s too old too.)

    Voters have genuine questions about both men. But we’ve seen each occupy the presidency. One thing the two administrations have made clear is that whereas Biden follows an approach to governance that seems to offset some of his weaknesses, Trump’s preferred managerial style seems to amplify his.

    Many people treat elections as a chance to vote a single individual into office; as a result, they tend to focus disproportionately on the personality, character, and temperament of the people running. But voters are also choosing a platform—a set of policies as well as a set of people, chosen by the president, who will shape and implement them. The president is the conductor of an orchestra, not a solo artist. As the past eight years have made very clear, the difference in governance between a Trump administration and a Biden administration is not subtle—for example, on foreign policy, border security, and economics—and voters have plenty of evidence on which to base their decision.

    But for the sake of argument, let’s consider the potential effects of Biden’s failures of memory and Trump’s … well, it’s a little tough to say what exactly is going on with Trump’s mental state. The former president has always had a penchant for saying strange things and acting impulsively, and it’s hard to know whether recent lapses are indications of new troubles or the same deficits that have long been present. His always-dark rhetoric has become more apocalyptic and vengeance-focused, and he frequently seems forgetful or confused about basic facts.

    To what extent would either of their struggles be material in a future presidential term? One key distinction is that Biden and Trump have fundamentally different conceptions of the presidency as an office. Biden’s approach to governance has been more or less in keeping with the traditions of recent decades. Biden’s Cabinet and West Wing are (for better or worse) stocked with longtime political and policy hands who have extensive experience in government. Cabinet secretaries largely run their departments through normal channels. Policy proposals are usually formulated by subject-area experts. The president’s job is to sit atop this apparatus and set broad direction.

    Read: The presidency is not a math test

    Biden doesn’t always defer to experts, and he has clashed with and overruled advisers on some topics, including, notably, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Such occasional clashes are fairly typical—as long as they’re occasional. As my colleague Graeme Wood wrote this week, “The presidency is an endless series of judgment calls, not a four-year math test. In fact, large parts of the executive branch exist, in effect, to do the math problems on the president’s behalf, then present to him all those tough judgment calls with the calculations already factored in.”

    This doesn’t mean that Biden’s readily apparent aging doesn’t bring risks. The presidency requires a great deal of energy, and crises can happen at all hours and on top of one another, testing the stamina of any person. The oldest president before Biden, Ronald Reagan, struggled with acuity in his second term, an administration that produced a huge, appalling scandal of which he claimed to be unaware.

    In contrast to the model of the president as the ultimate decision maker, Trump has approached the presidency less like a Fortune 500 CEO and more like the sole proprietor of a small business. (Though he boasts about his experience running a business empire, the Trump Organization also ran this way—it is a company with a large bottom line but with concentrated and insular management by corporate standards.) As president, Trump had a tendency to micromanage details—the launching system for a new aircraft carrier, the paint scheme on Air Force One—while evincing little interest in major policy questions, such as a long-promised replacement for Obamacare.

    At times, Trump has described his role in practically messianic terms: “I alone can fix it,” he infamously said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He has claimed to be the world’s foremost expert on a wide variety of subjects, and he often disregarded the views of policy experts in his administration, complaining that they tried to talk him out of ideas (when they didn’t just obstruct him). He and his allies have embarked on a major campaign to ensure that staffers in a second Trump administration would be picked for their ideological and personal loyalty to him. Axios has reported that the speechwriter Stephen Miller could be the next attorney general, even though Miller is not an attorney.

    Perhaps as a result of these different approaches to the job, people who have served under the men have divergent views on them. Whereas Biden can seem bumbling and mild in public, aides’ accounts of his private demeanor depict an engaged, incisive, and sometimes hot-tempered president. That’s also the view that emerges from my colleague Franklin Foer’s book The Last Politician. “He has a kind of mantra: ‘You can never give me too much detail,’” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has said. “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it, because he is sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented and focused,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last weekend. (As Jon Stewart noted on Monday night, the public might be more convinced were these moments videotaped, like the gaffes.)

    Former Trump aides are not so complimentary. Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly called Trump “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law,” adding, “God help us.” Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that he “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.” Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper described him as “unfit for office.” Of 44 former Cabinet members queried by NBC, only four said they supported Trump’s return to office. Even allowing for the puffery of politics, the contrast is dramatic.

    Read: A Hail Mary to save ‘The Daily Show’

    None of this is to say that Biden’s memory lapses aren’t worth concern or that he is as vigorous as he was as a younger man. But someone voting for Biden is selecting, above all, a set of policy ideas and promises that he has laid out, with the expectation that the apparatus of the executive branch will implement them.

    Voting for Trump is opting for a charismatic individual who brings to office a set of attitudes rather than a platform. Considering the presidency as a matter of individual mental acuity grants the field to Trump’s own preferred conception of unified personal power, so it’s striking that the comparison makes the dangers posed by Trump’s mentality so stark.

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    David A. Graham

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  • ‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

    ‘The Most Entertaining Dead-Cat Bounce in History’

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    Not very long ago, the harshest thing Nikki Haley would say about Donald Trump was that “chaos follows him”—a sort of benign jab that creatively avoids causation and suggests mere correlation, like noting that scorched trees tend to appear after a forest fire.

    For most of the Republican-primary campaign to date, Haley adopted a carefully modulated approach toward the former president, and reserved most of her barbs for her other primary rivals. Her motto seemed to be “Speak softly about Trump and carry a sharp stick for Vivek Ramaswamy.” Recently, though, Haley has made a hard pivot.

    Read: What Nikki Haley (maybe) learned in New Hampshire

    Just two days after she came in (a distant) second to Trump in the New Hampshire primary, she began fundraising for the first time off his attacks on her—selling T-shirts with the slogan BARRED PERMANENTLY after the former president said that anyone who continues to support her will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp,” whatever that means.

    In the past week, Haley has been on a tear, calling Trump “totally unhinged,” “toxic,” “self-absorbed,” and lacking in “moral clarity.” Her campaign unleashed a new attack-ad series in which Trump and President Joe Biden are portrayed as two “grumpy old men” standing in the way of the next generation. And yesterday, Haley posted a gag photo of a Trump Halloween costume labeled “Weakest General Election Candidate Ever.” To paraphrase the words of the Democratic-primary candidate Marianne Williamson, Girlfriend, this is so on.

    Such an aggressive posture is new for Haley, and Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have applauded her for it. She should have been talking this way all along, some of her supporters argue. “If she started it sooner, she would’ve cut the lead in New Hampshire,” Chip Felkel, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, told me. In his view, Haley thought she “had to play nice” to win over Trump voters: “But this ain’t a nice game.”

    Can Haley still achieve anything by playing hardball at this point? Things don’t look promising. Her bid to defeat Trump is already the longest of long shots, based on the polls coming out of virtually every state, including Haley’s own South Carolina. So what’s the point of changing things up? Why muster the courage to smack-talk Trump now, when the race seems all but over? I asked a number of political strategists and experts for their view, and pieced together a few plausible theories. (Neither the Haley nor the Trump campaign responded to a request for comment.)

    1. Attacking Trump is easier now.
    The most obvious theory for Haley’s more combative rhetoric is that with only one other major candidate still in the primary, the task of drawing a direct contrast with Trump is much simpler. “If you have six people in a race and a couple are attacking a couple others, it’s hard to predict how that’s going to work in terms of driving your ballots,” David Kochel, a longtime Iowa Republican strategist, told me. “When it’s a multi-candidate field, you’ve got to tell your own story.” After Iowa, “that’s resolved,” he said, and so “she has no choice but to turn her attention to Trump.”

    The jabs are meant to draw Trump out—to pressure him to join her on a debate stage or to provoke a tantrum that turns off his potential voters and motivates her own. “She needs him to make a mistake,” Kochel said. “She needs some intervening activity, some dynamic that is not completely in her control.”

    Maybe this is a good moment for Haley to exploit Trump’s weakness with women voters. In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Biden beats Trump with the support of women, a new Quinnipiac poll showed, and that gender gap appears to be growing. Last week, Haley dragged Trump over his defamation-case loss to E. Jean Carroll, in which he was ordered to pay $83 million in additional defamation damages to the woman whom he was previously found liable for defaming and sexually abusing. “Haley is running the Taylor Swift strategy in the primary,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s playing to the ‘Trump is toxic’ women’s vote.’” The pop star’s apparent potential to influence Americans, and especially women, to vote Democratic, coupled with the results of the Quinnipiac poll, represent “deep, underlying forces that need to be addressed,” Bannon said—something Haley will continue to seize on.

    2. Haley’s anti-Trump rhetoric represents the death throes of her campaign.
    Haley’s campaign has followed the same trajectory as several other Republicans’ efforts in the Trump era: They might have avoided attacking him directly at first, but when their prospects dimmed, they lashed out. Marco Rubio mocked Trump’s small hands just before dropping out of the race; Ted Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar” at the tail end of his own campaign. “It seems like they all have consultants in their ear telling them if they take on Trump directly, they are going to crater support with the base, which is true,” Tim Miller, a political consultant and writer at the conservative outlet The Bulwark, told me. “Then, finally, when they’re up against the wall and in the final stages, they figure it’s worth a shot.”

    Read: What is Nikki Haley even talking about?

    Maybe ratcheting up the combativeness is a form of emotional catharsis. When I asked the Democratic strategist James Carville about Haley’s change in approach, he texted me that Haley “is tired, scared & pissed off.” Because she’s trailing Trump in her own state, “certain doom in SC is eating at her. NEVER discount the human element.” Haley now sounds a lot more like she did behind closed doors during the Trump administration, Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant, told me, citing conversations he’s had with former Haley staffers. “This is Nikki therapy,” he said. “She’s just having fun poking him in the eye, getting all her ya-yas out. It’s the most entertaining dead-cat bounce in history.”

    3. Haley is giving her donors what they want.
    Haley’s billionaire supporters adore this new, aggressively anti-Trump candidate, and they’re rewarding her with cash. “Nikki’s more aggressive posture toward Trump was welcomed as it is communicating the stark choice in front of the party,” Bill Berrien, the CEO of the manufacturer Pindel Global Precision, who hosted a fundraiser for Haley in New York, told The Washington Post. Cliff Asness, a co-founder of AQR Capital Management and a Haley donor, wrote on X that, in response to Trump’s attacks, he “may have to contribute more” to her.

    At least some of these funders are convinced that Haley still has a shot. “She’s got donors saying, ‘You have a credible campaign, and you never know when Trump is going to choke to death on a meatloaf,’” Murphy said. Whether or not Haley believes that, she’s going along with it. The odds that she might become the nominee through an act of God or a brokered convention, after all, are probably better than buying a Power Ball ticket. “It’s a clutching-at-straws thing, but she’s got the best straw in town to clutch on,” Murphy said. “Why the hell not? It’s free and fun.”

    4. Haley is looking to a post-Trump future.
    A few weeks ago, rumors circulated that Haley might be on Trump’s shortlist for vice president. If the decision, though unlikely, went her way, that could set her up to be Trump’s political heir. But Haley’s recent hostility toward Trump—and his splenetic response—have surely shut the door on that possibility. Instead, Haley is staking out her own territory.

    “She’s not done. She’s running for 2028,” Sarah Isgur, a senior editor at The Dispatch and a former deputy campaign manager for the 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina, told me. Trump has “changed her brand-thinking.” Instead of gunning for some sort of role in MAGA world, Haley can portray herself as the last person standing in the war against Trumpism—a position that many men before her have fought for and failed to achieve. If she can do that, she can consolidate a leadership future for herself, post-Trump, Isgur said.

    Haley will be able to say “I told you so” if Trump loses to Biden in November—or if he wins but then governs disastrously. She’ll be “the good conservative who tried to warn you,” Murphy said. This also means that after the race is over, she’ll have to lie low for a while, and not join other Trump rivals turned grovelers, including Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. She’s playing “the long-term game,” Murphy said.



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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • First in the Nation—And Last?

    First in the Nation—And Last?

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    Donald Trump shares an essential trait with the voters of New Hampshire: a craving for flattery and affirmation.

    Residents here are accustomed to parades of candidates trekking up every four years to tell them how sacred their first-in-the-nation primary is, how discerning their famously “independent” and “contrarian” voters are. Politicians strain endlessly to convey how vital New Hampshire is to the process.

    But things feel precarious and a bit upside down here these days—more final whimper than first salvo.

    I landed in Manchester on Friday afternoon and found the place almost numb with abandonment. Elm Street, the “main drag” of New Hampshire’s biggest city, which is usually good for a few candidate sightings and media scrums, was quiet. Once the marquee stopover on the presidential tour, this original colony felt neglected in the final weekend before today’s primary, and well past its glory.

    “Where is everyone?” I asked the woman next to me at the counter of the downtown Red Arrow Diner on Friday. The century-old greasy spoon on Lowell Street has served as a landmark for visiting political hacks and as a reliable backdrop for candidate photo ops.

    “Ryan Binkley was just here,” my stool-neighbor informed me. I Googled Ryan Binkley. He is a pastor from Texas who says he is running for president because God called him to. Who is Ryan Binkley? the yard signs say (good enough to finish fifth in Iowa, apparently).

    You can see why the once-pandered-to populace of the Granite State might feel unloved. Last year, the Democrats—led by the current president of the United States—dumped New Hampshire in favor of South Carolina as the party’s official first primary. The scorned New England mainstay scheduled its primary anyway, even though the Democratic National Committee said it would not recognize the results or award any delegates derived from this unholy action. President Joe Biden has not campaigned in the state, and his name is not on the ballot.

    Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley

    Now Republicans keep dropping out, leaving the GOP race down to Trump, who routed the field in Iowa last week, and the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley (plus Binkley and a few others). Campaign events were still occurring in New Hampshire in this final week, but far fewer than usual; Trump, and to a lesser extent Haley, drew most of the attention and the biggest crowds.

    The former president seemed both rambling and serene. “When I fly over a blue state, two days later, I get a subpoena,” Trump said at the start of a rally in Concord on Friday night. Technically, New Hampshire is itself a blue state, or at least it has been in the past several presidential elections; Trump lost it in both 2016 and 2020. But things were feeling quite safe here for Trump in the primary. Recent polls showed him with double-digit leads over Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was still in the race heading into the weekend but barely bothered with New Hampshire.

    “DeSantis, God bless him. He’s a remainder at this point,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, told me at a Haley event in a Milford restaurant on Friday afternoon. “What happened to this guy?” Trump asked of DeSantis a few hours later in Concord. “One of the great self-destructions I think I’ve ever witnessed.”

    At the very least, DeSantis understood that the prevailing dynamic of the Republican Party over the past eight years has stayed intact. “You can be the most worthless Republican in America,” he said in one of his final campaign stops in Iowa, discharging a few nuggets of clarity as he approached the end. “If you kiss the ring, he’ll say you are wonderful.” The governor quit the race on Sunday and, yes, kissed the ring on the way out, endorsing Trump.

    Read: Ron DeSantis’s cold, hard reality

    This followed a week’s procession of white flags. Former Trump “opponents” kept endorsing the former president—Vivek Ramaswamy last Monday; the governor of North Dakota, whoever that was, the day before; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina on Friday, joining Trump in Concord. By Sunday, New Hampshire felt like the last stand of a battle that had never started.

    Throughout the weekend, Trump tried to assure his supporters that he knows how important the state is, even though he would almost certainly rather spend his time elsewhere; he described New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den” in a 2017 phone call with the then-president of Mexico. He has been holding nightly rallies across the state since Friday, telling everyone how special they are, and the admiration is of course mutual.

    “I’m thrilled to be back in the home of first-in-the-nation,” Trump said at his Concord rally. Any candidate who comes to New Hampshire cannot utter those four words—first in the nation—enough. And Trump did, four times in the space of a few sentences.

    “You know who kept you first in the nation?” Trump asked the crowd.

    “Trump!” he said, uttering his own name along with some in the audience.

    “But I just want to tell you, you’re first in the nation,” he said. “You’re always going be first in the nation!”

    Read: What is Nikki Haley even talking about?

    For her part, Haley has been intent on convincing everyone that New Hampshire is still a race at all. A two-person race, to be precise. “Between Nikki and Trump,” Sununu repeated, like a fleece-wearing parrot, as he accompanied Haley across the state, four or five stops a day. He and Haley kept contrasting this particular two-person race with the one most Americans are dreading, between Trump and Biden.

    “People don’t want two 80-year-olds running for president,” Haley said in a brief press conference Friday at a diner in Amherst (Trump is 77; Biden is 81). She devoted much of the session to scolding the media for not properly correcting the false things Trump says about her. “Y’all need to call him out,” she urged. She also theorized that although 70 percent of Americans don’t want to be subjected to a Trump-Biden rematch, “70 percent of the media does want a rematch.”

    This is dubious, for what it’s worth. If anything, “the media” wanted a competitive primary campaign—some genuine uncertainty and drama, and a reason beyond obligation to keep tuning in.

    Like Trump, Dean Phillips is happy to fill the vacuum of love for New Hampshire. “We’ve got to practice democracy,” the Democratic representative from Minnesota said at a Nashua senior center on Saturday afternoon. Phillips, a wealthy former gelato baron, is waging a long-shot campaign against Biden—actually, a write-in version of Biden, who, because he’s not on the ballot, can be voted for only that way by New Hampshirites willing to overlook the president’s ghosting of their state.

    “Why write in Biden?” Phillips asked at the event, if Biden is “writing off New Hampshire?” Polite chuckles, maybe a moan or two. Phillips also suggested that Biden was “taking the Granite State for granted.” (Dean Phillips: The Dad Joke candidate!)

    Read: 90 minutes in a van with Dean Phillips

    Back in Concord, Trump had gone even further in conveying his admiration for his host and its traditions—reaching all the way back to the Civil War. Uh-oh. Haley did this last month, and it didn’t go well. But Trump—student of history that he is—had an important lesson to share. “They said the people from New Hampshire were very tough fighters,” Trump said. “Did you know that?” (No one seemed to.) He said he had read that somewhere. “History,” he continued. “Very tough fighters.”

    “You won a lot of battles. That was a nasty war.”

    He later proceeded with a strange flurry of comments about Haley, ridiculing her failure to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6—wait, did he mean Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House? Maybe, but Trump kept saying Haley’s name, over and over.

    “They,” he said, don’t want to talk about how Haley was in charge of security on January 6.

    He also said that Haley—this time he apparently did mean Nikki Haley, the one he’s running against—was not “capable,” “tough,” “smart,” or “respected” enough to be president and handle Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong Un. “Very fine people,” Trump called them.

    In a different time, this would be the kind of weird front-runner face-plant that could turn a New Hampshire primary on its head. Haley did her best to keep Trump’s bizarre comments aloft over the weekend. But mostly they were met with the usual resignation of a party with little will to fight, drifting toward the inevitable.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Ron DeSantis’s Cold, Hard Reality

    Ron DeSantis’s Cold, Hard Reality

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    Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

    Updated at 4:40 p.m. ET on January 16, 2024

    Even before the caucus began, Matt Wells was working the room. The 43-year-old wore an autographed Ron DeSantis trucker hat as he strolled up and down the aisles of the Washington High School auditorium in rural southeast Iowa, greeting neighbors and passing out DeSantis flyers. When it was time for three-minute speeches, Wells spoke from the podium without notes, his voice quivering with emotion. DeSantis “always backs up his words with action,” he told the crowd. “He will be a president we can be proud of.”

    Minutes later, Wells’s hopes were dashed. DeSantis lost to Donald Trump in Wells’s precinct by five votes. The former president went on to win the Iowa caucus by nearly 30 points statewide, carrying 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties and beating his own 2016 margin of support by more than 25 points.

    This wasn’t exactly a surprise. Trump had held a similar lead in opinion polls beforehand, and the only question was whether that margin would hold up if the snowdrifts and subzero temperatures kept caucus-goers frozen in their homes. Turnout was low, but by the end of the evening, that uncertainty was answered definitively: Trump is still the guy. But in second place, DeSantis led former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley by a mere two points, denying both a clear claim to the title of “Obvious Viable Trump Alternative.”

    Read: What Trump’s victory in Iowa reveals

    By clinging to second—despite polling in the days before the caucus forecasting that he could be pushed into third—DeSantis has lived to fight another day. Barely. “This is going to be a long battle ahead, but that is what this campaign is built for,” a campaign official told Fox News last night, trying to sound resolute if not exactly optimistic. “No shot,” an Iowa GOP strategist texted me at midnight.

    DeSantis is being eclipsed in two directions, simultaneously. Trump continues to hoover up all the GOP votes, and Haley is consolidating the rest; even though she ranked third in Iowa, she looks poised to run a strong second to Trump in New Hampshire’s primary next week, with a shot at pulling off an upset. Which is probably why, according to the campaign, DeSantis will fly straight to South Carolina, where he will attempt to chip away at Trump’s double-digit lead and beat Haley in a state where she once served as governor. His path forward doesn’t make much sense—and, in any case, his efforts seem unlikely to make a difference.

    “In my heart of hearts, I’d hoped …” Wells told me, trailing off as the statewide results were pouring in on TV. “It’s us. It’s the American people. We get the government we deserve.”

    It’s been rare this election cycle to find a voter who really likes Ron DeSantis—not just his policies but the man himself. And Wells really does. He sees DeSantis as a Republican for the next generation: fiscally and socially conservative, a biblically “sound” family man who is devoted to keeping his campaign promises. Sometimes, I found myself thinking that Wells made a better case for DeSantis than DeSantis did for himself.

    Wells, a small-business owner, has volunteered at more than 40 DeSantis events since March. He brought the governor and his wife to his church to meet his pastor. He recruited phone canvassers for DeSantis from all over the country. I first met Wells at the Iowa State Fair last summer, where he and the rest of the DeSantis posse were being pursued along the midway by a boisterous herd of men in Trump hats. They catcalled DeSantis, shouting, “Go home, Ron!” and “Smile, Ron!” Wells, who is short and stout, with a dark-brown goatee, tried to run interference. “You’re all a bunch of degenerates!” he yelled. The guys looked like they wanted to give him a swirly.

    Read: You should go to a Trump rally

    Since then, I’ve watched as Wells challenged Trump supporters online and in person. He seems to find some kind of perverse satisfaction in correcting media reports and taking on trolls. He confronted them in public, too, including one QAnon conspiracy theorist who’d accused Casey DeSantis of faking her breast-cancer diagnosis. Wells stopped attending meetings of the Washington County Republican Party in the fall, he said, because the chairman is a Trump devotee. (When I reached the county GOP chair by phone, he told me that Wells is “a toxic individual.”)

    The primary has been this way since its start: ugly, mean, and probably a foretaste of the next nine months.

    In the days before the big event, the candidates were made to suffer one final indignity of the Hawkeye State’s unglamorous process: arctic weather conditions. Driving sleet and snow made major highways temporarily impassable. Pines collapsed under the weight of the flakes, and oaks along the highway were dusted white like birches. The cold was even more extreme than the precipitation: Over the weekend, the temperature dipped well below zero in parts of the state, with a torturous –26 windchill. On Saturday, standing on a street in downtown Davenport, one of the Quad Cities along the Illinois border, I felt my cheeks burning.

    Still, Iowans ventured out to watch Haley and DeSantis duke it out for second place. And so did the press corps. At times, in knotty-pine-walled restaurants and industrial-chic event centers across southeast Iowa, journalists were barely outnumbered by voters. The silliness was perhaps best captured in a moment at the end of one Haley rally in Cedar Rapids, when attendees scrambled from their seats to take a photo with her, and a horde of reporters followed in a mad dash for interviews. Somewhere in the melee, I tripped on a plastic cup, sending ice and brown alcohol shooting across the floor. Reporters rushed by, slipping on the cubes and thwacking me with their bags, as I knelt to clean it up. Over the loudspeakers, “Ants Marching” began playing at full blast.

    More than other candidates’ rallies, Haley’s felt warm. Her voters are the kind of people who are eager to talk to reporters, people who sigh and say, “I’m just looking for a candidate who can bring us all together.” These Iowans supported the former UN ambassador because of her foreign-policy experience, they told me, but also because they found her refreshingly competent. She’s “somebody that’s really smart and really experienced and qualified,” Jane Fett, a financial manager from Long Grove, told me in Davenport. “It takes my breath away to bring that back to politics.” DeSantis is too conservative for them—not a unifier.

    A few registered Democrats went to Haley rallies, too, which made sense, given that her supporters are more likely to prefer Joe Biden over Trump. These are people who are exhausted by Trump’s antics but yearn for more youthful political leaders; they planned to reregister as Republicans on the day of the caucus in order to vote. Haley “unites, and she also brings hope,” Jerry Stewart, a former Biden supporter wearing a black Hawkeye sweatshirt, told me. “This is going to sound far-fetched, but she brings hope like Obama did.”

    Paul Farhi: Fox News isn’t a kingmaker

    Some voters still seemed undecided just days before caucus night. Outside the Olympic Theater in Cedar Rapids on Friday, I listened as two men discussed the merits of Haley versus DeSantis as the GOP nominee. “I’m twisting his arm for Nikki,” Lyle Hanson said. His friend, Scott Garbe, nodded, before unleashing a darting series of thoughts that only an Iowan, overwhelmed at the national significance of the task before him, could have:

    “She’s electable, and I don’t think DeSantis is. He’s not going to get a crossover vote, an anti-Trump vote. When Haley goes against Biden, or when Haley goes against—I’m not saying this right. She’ll get the anti-Biden vote. When Trump goes against Biden, Biden’s going to get a lot of anti-Trump vote. There isn’t going to be an anti-Haley vote. So that’s why she’s going to win.”

    That was not supposed to be the calculation that Iowa voters were making. The DeSantis campaign began last May with promise. Here was a governor who had finally put some respect next to Florida’s name, his allies said. He’d cut taxes and promoted school choice. He’d proved his leadership ability with Hurricane Ian—in a smart pair of go-go boots. He was Trump minus the chaos and the nutty tweets, right-wing pundits said. Remember the fuss? The conservative parents’-rights group, Moms for Liberty, was so excited about DeSantis that its founders gave him a ceremonial sword.

    DeSantis adopted a maximal ground campaign in Iowa: He spent millions and set up a get-out-the-caucus team rivaling, experts say, that of Senator Ted Cruz, 2016’s surprise caucus winner. DeSantis also earned the endorsement of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and the evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. To prove the wisdom of this all-in strategy, DeSantis needed to soar to victory in Iowa, and he told reporters he would. “I think it’s going to help propel us to the nomination,” he said on Meet the Press. Instead, the campaign is plummeting to Earth like a plug door off a Boeing Max 9.

    What brought him down? As many have noted, the governor lacks personal warmth and much capacity for small talk. He is seemingly unable to stand naturally; his hands are always slightly raised, as though he’s wearing too many layers, like Randy in A Christmas Story. DeSantis has an unsettling habit of licking his lips when he speaks, and his smile never quite reaches his eyes, which seem full of terror.

    “You can almost hear the thoughts in the back of his head: “How am I losing? Why am I not connecting?” the Iowa GOP strategist told me. The heel lifts haven’t helped. At an event in Davenport two days before the caucus, DeSantis passed me on his way to the bathroom, waddling stiffly in a pair of shiny black boots.

    A few DeSantis supporters told me they actually liked his lack of charisma. “He’s not running for Miss America,” Ross Paustian, a farmer from Walcott, Iowa, told me in Davenport. Wells put it even more simply: “He’s not fake.” Yet even the governor’s fans were not predicting victory, days before the caucus. “Trump is going to win,” Gloria King, a DeSantis supporter and retiree from Davenport, told me on Saturday. Her enthusiasm was entirely for Casey: “She was like, so cool! The coolest. She should be running!”

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    Perhaps the crumbling of the DeSantis campaign could be blamed, at least in part, on Trump and his allies, who, very early on, had carpet-bombed the Florida governor with abuse and mockery. The former president made up nicknames like “Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron” (an insult less easy to parse but goofily evocative). He recruited Florida lawmakers to endorse him and taunt their governor.

    Even in Iowa, Trump and his allies were relentless. Two days before the caucuses, a comedian handed DeSantis a “participation” trophy at a campaign rally. “He’s special, he’s unique, and he’s our little snowflake,” the provocateur announced, before security guards dragged him away.

    Last night, Wells stood up once more for his candidate. A few days ago, he’d told me that he not only expected DeSantis to beat Trump, but that DeSantis had to beat him. “The one thing that I have really learned this cycle is that it’s going to be a contest of work versus a cult of personality,” he said. The only way to break the narrative, he said, was to win the caucus.

    Instead, I watched in real time as Wells came to the realization that so many others already have: His party and its members are not who Wells wishes they were.

    After the caucus was over, Wells drove two hours on dark roads to Des Moines to say farewell to his friends on the DeSantis campaign. He called me from the road, sounding more dejected than he had when he’d left. For 30 minutes, he sighed and paused and quoted the Bible (“Our people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge”). Wells wouldn’t vote for Trump or Biden in the fall, he said. But he might move to Florida.

    This article originally stated that a Trump fan awarded Ron DeSantis a “participation” trophy at a rally. In fact, it was a comedian who did so.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

    The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

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    As every politician knows, openly campaigning for the job of vice president is bad form. But Kristi Noem doesn’t seem to care.

    Last week alone, the South Dakota governor sent out a dozen tweets praising Donald Trump. She went on Fox News’s Hannity to condemn attempts in Maine and Colorado to remove the former president from the ballot. And she hosted a get-out-the-caucus rally for him across the border in Iowa. “Show up for a couple hours and fight for the man that’s fought for you for years!” the 52-year-old governor told the crowd at the event in Sioux City. “The only reason that we have this country is because of the good that he did when he was in that White House—and how he still continues to tell the truth out there every single day.”

    Asked by a reporter at the event whether she would consider the Trump VP slot, Noem smiled and replied, “I think anybody in this country, if they were offered it, needs to consider it.” Later, she retweeted the clip.

    Noem’s name has been popping up on vice-presidential shortlists in the media—and in Republican focus groups—for a while now. The way that she has defended and mimicked Trump’s actions for the past several years suggests that as his VP, she would be more of an enabler than a moderating force—and aggressive on Trump’s behalf in a way that Mike Pence never was. Picking Noem as his running mate would signal that Trump will be even less willing in a second term to kowtow to the Republican establishment. Compared with two other names that also appear regularly in shortlists, Noem would be more comfortable in MAGA world than the GOP conference chair Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, but less kooky than the Trump loyalist and Senate candidate Kari Lake. Noem also has more actual governing experience than either.

    Read: Trumpism has found its leading lady

    It’s still early in the primary season. Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, and although all signs point to Trump, even his own team claims it hasn’t officially begun the brainstorming process for a running mate. “Much too soon for any of that talk,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign, told me. Typically, a VP candidate is not announced until around the time of the convention, months after the presidential primary is concluded. Unofficially, though, the audition process began long ago.

    Noem will be “very competitive,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s burnishing her MAGA credentials, and the more she comes across as a fire-breathing populist, that’ll help her.” (The governor did not respond to my requests for an interview.)

    Noem, a former farm girl and South Dakota beauty queen, was elected in 2018 as the state’s first female governor. Before that, she spent four years in the state legislature and another eight in the U.S. Congress as South Dakota’s sole House representative. But most Americans probably heard Noem’s name for the first time in 2020, when she made national news for her laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus pandemic.

    Like most governors, at the start of the virus’s spread, Noem closed schools and ordered businesses to follow CDC guidelines. But quickly, taking cues from the Trump administration, she let up on those regulations. Noem never issued a statewide mask mandate, and she encouraged counties to return to business as usual sooner than other states did. She welcomed the return of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in late summer of 2020, which ultimately resulted in “widespread transmission” of the virus throughout the Midwest, according to a study from the CDC. Her office used $5 million in pandemic-relief funds for an ad campaign promoting state tourism.

    Her pandemic-era decisions were evidence of bold, freedom-loving leadership, Noem has said, and her handling of the crisis remains a top bragging point as she travels the country giving speeches and hosting fundraisers. In other ways, too, Noem has perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of the modern Republican Party. She has repeated Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” In 2022, she signed legislation banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams; last year, she called upon an adviser from the conservative Hillsdale College to rework the state’s social-studies curriculum as part of a broader effort to eliminate “critical race theory” from public schools. “She’s brought legislation that is increasingly far-right for South Dakota—more so than any previous governor,” Bob Mercer, a longtime journalist in the state’s capital, Pierre, told me.

    Jonathan V. Last: Nikki Haley’s endgame

    Noem has also seemed much more focused on securing national media attention than past state leaders. In 2020, she built the first TV studio in the state capitol, and she’s become a regular on Newsmax, Fox News, and other major conservative outlets. Last spring, she signed a gun-related executive order onstage during a speech at the annual NRA convention in Indiana. (In that address, Noem boasted that her 2-year-old granddaughter already had a shotgun and a rifle.)

    She has also brought in several aides with national political experience, including the former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. And she kicked off a new national “Freedom Works Here” ad campaign that urges Americans living all over the country to move to South Dakota for jobs. Noem has starred in each of the spots, cosplaying as various members of the South Dakota workforce, including a welder, a plumber, and a nurse.

    Trump has always favored a culture warrior, and Noem’s political choices alone are enough to warrant VP consideration. But the governor, who is married with three children, can also claim the kind of corn-fed American backstory that voters love and that most Republican politicians wish they had. She spent her childhood pulling calves and driving grain carts on the family farm. As a teenager, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen, and her 2022 memoir, Not My First Rodeo, is chock-full of folksy idioms and Bible verses; Noem’s political MO, she writes, citing Matthew’s Gospel, is to “be wise like snakes and gentle like doves.” The book also recounts her life’s biggest tragedy: When Noem was pregnant with her first child, her father was killed in a grain-bin accident, forcing her, she writes, to leave college and go home to run the farm. Noem ended up earning her college degree by taking online classes during her time in Congress.

    Noem has always been adept at appealing to voters by using “the great mythology of America that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Michael Card, a political-science professor at the University of South Dakota, told me. Those rural bona fides could be effective if she makes the Republican presidential ticket. But gender could work in her favor at least as much.

    “Trump is well aware of his deficiencies as a candidate,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. And his weakness among women voters—compounded by a penchant for baiting women he perceives as a challenge and the long list of sexual-harassment allegations against him—makes choosing a female running mate seem advisable. He’ll likely try to find “somebody who normalizes him somewhat,” Longwell said, and exploit “the excitement of a woman on the ticket, someone to push back on the idea that the party is sexist.” Bannon agreed: Trump’s MAGA movement is mostly woman-led, he claimed—“smart to engage that base and make your case to suburban women.”

    Eric Schnurer: Kristi Noem’s National Guard deployment is America’s future

    Noem has downsides as a VP contender. It’s not as though Trump would need her on the ticket to win over rural voters; they already love him. Vice-presidential candidates can be chosen to deliver a state that might not be in the nominee’s column, but South Dakota is a safe Republican state, and, with only three Electoral College votes, it’s not a particularly useful pickup. And although Noem has yet to come under national scrutiny, she’s already had her share of controversy. In the spring of 2022, a Republican-controlled panel of South Dakota lawmakers found that one of Noem’s daughters had received special treatment in an application for her real-estate-appraiser license. (Noem has denied any wrongdoing.) And last fall, the New York Post and the Daily Mail ran reports about an alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski. (In response, the governor’s spokesperson dismissed the allegation as “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.”)

    Trump has other options. He could run on a ticket with his current primary opponent Nikki Haley, as a way to appease moderate Republicans. The pairing doesn’t seem particularly plausible right now, given the sharp words both candidates have had for each other during this campaign, but Bannon sees it as a possibility—even if he and others in MAGA world don’t approve. “Haley has two constituencies—the Murdochs and the donors—and they are trying to buy her way on the ticket as VP,” he told me.

    As for Noem’s other potential rivals for a Trump VP pick, a lawmaker with Stefanik’s Ivy League credentials and political experience on the ticket could help Trump shore up support from moderates, some strategists said. “Elise could at least pass as somebody who eats with a fork in Washington circles but would satisfy the MAGA base,” Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and senior adviser at the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me. But Stefanik perhaps has to work harder to win over the MAGA crowd—she was dutifully parroting Trump’s lines on Meet the Press this weekend by referring to the convicted January 6 rioters as “hostages.” Aside from Lake, the former newscaster and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom I profiled in 2022, other women who could get consideration include Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

    If Trump has secured the nomination, the VP-selection process could look very different from the way it did eight years ago. Back then, Trump was still looking to consolidate support among Republicans; now his lock on the party is airtight, unquestionable. “He gets to pick whoever he wants,” Timmer said. Which makes competition for the spot pretty unpredictable: Trump could follow his gut and pick a MAGA-style politician and relative outsider like Noem, or make a more strategic choice with a GOP insider like Stefanik. Regardless of whether Republican leaders like either, “they’re gonna smile and go along with it.”

    One thing is certain: No candidate will be considered for the Trump VP slot without having demonstrated sycophantic devotion to the former president—a willingness to defend him no matter what. Noem is not the only one to clear that bar, but she has jumped higher than most.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • 'I must be better than Trump': Why California's elections chief is keeping the former president on the ballot

    'I must be better than Trump': Why California's elections chief is keeping the former president on the ballot

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    SACRAMENTO — 

    California Secretary of State Shirley Weber is resisting pressure from within the Democratic party to remove Donald Trump from the March statewide primary ballot due to his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — arguing that, unlike the former Republican president, she feels obligated to follow the law.

    Weber said she finds Trump’s “behavior and his actions, not just as a former president, but as a citizen of the United States, to be abhorrent and disturbing and an attack on democracy.”

    “But at the same time, if I believe in this democracy that is there, I have to basically continue to abide by the rule of law, and for me not to do that, then I am no better than Trump,” Weber told The Times on Friday. “And I must be better than Trump.”

    Weber said attorneys in her office have been working for months with the California attorney general’s office and lawyers for local cities and counties to determine whether there was any legal ground to remove Trump from the March 5 primary ballot due to his role in the Capitol insurrection after his loss in the 2020 presidential election. She said the California Constitution does not give her clear authority to take action and leaves the decision to the courts.

    Weber was put in the hot seat after Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis sent her a letter Dec. 20 imploring her, the state elections chief, to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.” The letter drew mixed opinions among Democrats.

    Weber responded a few days later, stating her commitment to place the sanctity of the electoral process over “partisan politics.”

    “I’m not sure why the lieutenant governor says, ‘Use every means possible,’ because we have been doing that,” Weber said Friday. “I haven’t shared that information with her, because she hasn’t asked me.”

    Trump critics have filed legal actions to force the secretary of state to remove him from the ballot, but none have succeeded, Weber said. Her office is closely monitoring any potential action from the U.S. Supreme Court.

    This isn’t the first time Democrats have tried to keep Trump off the ballot in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 2019 law to require candidates to disclose their tax returns in order to appear on the presidential primary ballot, a requirement that was shot down by the California Supreme Court.

    Newsom agrees with Weber

    In a rare rebuke of the lieutenant governor, Newsom criticized the assertion that Trump should be removed from the ballot.

    “There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy, but in California, we defeat candidates we don’t like at the polls,” Newsom said last week. “Everything else is a political distraction.”

    Kounalakis is running to succeed Newsom in California’s 2026 gubernatorial election, and her letter to Weber was largely seen as a way to score political points among Democratic voters.

    “In my conversations with some political consultants in recent days, there’s unanimous agreement that sending the letter was heavy-handed and unlikely to provide her with any significant political benefit,” said Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist.

    Sragow said “long-standing political rules of engagement” suggest that such matters need to be adjudicated in the courts, and blatant efforts to intervene can come off as tone-deaf.

    A bad precedent

    Weber made the case that public trust in the voting process is more crucial than ever, and she wants to set “the correct precedent for future action.”

    “If you do the loosey-goosey kind of interpretation and implementation, then you open us up as a state and a nation for all of us being vulnerable simply because we have an opinion and a point of view,” Weber said.

    Close to a third of Republicans say they have a little or no confidence that votes in the Republican presidential primary and caucuses will be counted correctly, according to a recent poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That follows years of false claims by Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by President Biden.

    Weber said that barring Trump from California’s ballot could be perceived as purely political and embolden his base, and feeds his effort to undermine Democratic institutions.

    “I’m very conscious of that it’s not about me, and I know what I would do, but when I’m gone, what would somebody else do? And what could they do?” Weber said. “I don’t want to open a door that is too ugly and that puts everybody at risk,” she said.

    While Kounalakis said “the Constitution is clear” on the issue, it’s not so simple.

    Kounalakis and other state Democrats who support removing Trump from the race point to his role in provoking the Capitol riot and a section of the Constitution that bans from office those who “engaged in insurrection.”

    For some Trump critics, Weber’s approach was viewed as too passive, while others applauded her for allowing the traditional route to take its course.

    The decision ultimately will be up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which appears destined to review decisions in other states on Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 ballot, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law. The high court will have to decide if Trump is eligible under a clause in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that prohibits officials from holding office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

    It’s unclear if the amendment applies to presidential candidates and if Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection meets that constitutional threshold.

    “It is not going to be for the main election official in Colorado or California to decide. It is a straightforward question about the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide for the whole country,” Chemerinsky said.

    It’s a decision that the constitutional law expert hopes is made quickly, as the November election looms.

    “I think the longer it goes, the worse it is for the country,” he said.

    What other states are doing

    Lawsuits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot have been filed in dozens of states, with mixed results.

    Maine and Colorado have moved to bar Trump from their ballots. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellow, a Democrat, said Trump violated the Constitution’s insurrectionist ban. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled the same, in a case the state’s Republican Party has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Supreme courts in Michigan and Minnesota, however, are allowing Trump to stay on the ballot, at least in the March primary, and are leaving the door open for challenges in the November general election.

    States are working with a patchwork of procedural laws to navigate the issue, and not all have equal weight in the matter, said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School.

    In deep-blue California, where Biden won 64% of the vote against Trump in 2020, it may not be worth the “political thicket” for state officials to intervene, Levinson said.

    “What Weber is aware of is the fact that to bar [Trump] would be viewed as democracy-limiting or anti-democratic,” she said. “Some would argue that, politically, the benefit here is very small, because we know what the outcome will be in California.”

    Times Staff Writer Jeong Park contributed to this report.

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    Taryn Luna, Mackenzie Mays

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  • Gov. Gavin Newsom pans talk of banning Donald Trump from presidential race in California

    Gov. Gavin Newsom pans talk of banning Donald Trump from presidential race in California

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    Many leading California Democrats have been clamoring to jettison Donald Trump from the state’s election ballot, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has made it clear he is against the move.

    “There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy,” Newsom said, “but in California, we defeat candidates at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

    Newsom’s terse statement on Friday runs counter to the position taken by Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and nine state lawmakers, who have pushed to remove the former president from the California ballot. The campaign gained momentum this week when the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump ineligible for spurring on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

    Political opinions on Trump’s eligibility ultimately are expected to be of little consequence on a novel question of the law that will almost certainly have to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. If the high court agrees to take the case, election law experts said its decision would probably affect primary and general election ballots across the country.

    “I think Newsom is showing that — in a state dominated by Democrats, who might easily succumb to their partisan interests — he is being the grown-up in the room,” said Sara Sadhwani, a political science professor at Pomona College and sharp critic of Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. “We have institutions, the courts, to answer these questions. And political meddling in elections does not lead to stability for our democratic institutions.”

    Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School, predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn the Colorado court, with the justices probably loath to give the appearance that they are “throwing the 2024 presidential election or putting their thumb on the scale in the 2024 presidential election.”

    Levinson said that that does not mean the Colorado high court’s decision was unreasonable, given the 14th Amendment’s provision that individuals could be deemed ineligible for office if, as an “officer of the United States,” they engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States or aided its enemies.

    As a strict legal question, Levinson said, “if you give aid or comfort to those who engage in insurrection, then you are not eligible for the ballot in my view.”

    Trump’s disqualification from the Colorado ballot would not necessarily block him from returning to the presidency. He lost the state by 13 percentage points in 2020 and could find a path to 270 electoral votes without the state’s 10 electoral votes. He also won the presidency in 2016 without California’s huge electoral trove, which now stands at 54.

    But the campaign to remove Trump from the ballot is continuing in many other states, provoking charges from the candidate and other Republicans that Democrats are trying to rig the 2024 election.

    In the swing state of Michigan, which Trump carried in 2016 and lost in 2020, some voters have sued to keep Trump off the ballot.

    Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, is considering arguments from both sides as to Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 ballot.

    California has picked Democrats for president in eight consecutive elections since it went for Republican George H.W. Bush in 1988. Trump trails badly in early California polling for the 2024 presidential contest.

    But several of the state’s top Democrats have said that Trump should be disqualified from the March primary ballot.

    Kounalakis, a Democrat who is running for governor in 2026, wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who oversees elections, asking her “to explore every legal option” to keep the former president off the March 5 ballot.

    “This decision is about honoring the rule of law in our country and protecting the fundamental pillars of democracy,” Kounalakis wrote, citing the Colorado Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision.

    Assemblyman Evan Low, who represents the Silicon Valley, heads a group of nine Democratic legislators who asked state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta to drop Trump from the ballot. They say the action would force the courts to determine the former president’s eligibility.

    “No one is above the law,” Low said in an interview this week, “and the courts should enforce the Constitution. Period. Full stop.”

    Jaime Regalado, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State Los Angeles, viewed Newsom’s stand for keeping Trump on the ballot as the governor’s latest gambit to differentiate himself from California’s liberal orthodoxy.

    “I think that, at least in part, this is a way to distance himself from the left a little bit and to move a little bit toward the political middle,” said Regalado. “We don’t expect him to be challenging Biden. But at the same time, we expect him to be a candidate soon for national office.”

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    James Rainey

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  • Trump Insists He Hasn’t Read Mein Kampf

    Trump Insists He Hasn’t Read Mein Kampf

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    This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

    A little more than halfway into his speech in Waterloo, Iowa, last night, former President Donald Trump returned to his new favorite line.

    “They’re destroying the blood of our country,” Trump said, complaining that immigrants are arriving from Africa, Asia, South America, and “all over the world.” He said that unnamed individuals (presumably his advisers) do not like it when he uses these sorts of phrases. During this section of his speech, the packed crowd inside the Waterloo Convention Center was pin-drop silent. He suddenly assured everybody that he’s never read Mein Kampf. “They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that,’” he explained, adding, “in a much different way.” Then he was right back to it. “They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country,” Trump warned. “They’re destroying the blood of our country; they’re destroying the fabric of our country.”

    Trump has enjoyed a double-digit lead in the polls for months. “We could put this to bed after Iowa, if you want to know the truth,” he said of the GOP-primary race. His first-place finish in the caucus less than four weeks from now seems all but certain. He continues to trounce Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose campaign has become something like a balloon expelling air, chaotically fluttering in its descent. And although former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has continued to rise in the polls, she remains a long shot in Iowa, and only slightly less of a long shot in New Hampshire. Congressional Republicans are coalescing around their leader. Over the weekend, Representatives Lee Zeldin of New York, Wesley Hunt of Texas, and Matt Gaetz of Florida were all stumping for Trump in Iowa. The former president smells it in the air. Last night, he seemed animated, as if taking a preemptive victory lap.

    Read: ‘Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump’

    As Trump’s position in the race has improved, his rhetoric has become more extreme. Speaking to the overwhelmingly white crowd in Waterloo, he spent even more time than usual demonizing nonwhite people. Immigrants, Trump said, are dumped on our borders, pouring into our country, bringing in crime. He said they were coming from other nations’ prisons and mental institutions, that they were “emptying out the insane asylums.” Later, he went after the kids. “You have children going to school, speaking languages that nobody even knows what the language is,” Trump said, adding that “there’s no room for our students in the classrooms”—emphasis on the “our.” He once again promised that, if reelected, he’ll carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.

    Two weeks ago, Trump said he would be a dictator “on day one.” Last night, he praised the “great gentleman” Viktor Orbán of Hungary. “He’s the leader, he’s the boss, he’s everything you want to call him,” Trump said of the autocratic Orbán. He cautioned that our planet is on the brink of World War III, and that he, Donald Trump, is the only one who can prevent it. (He bragged about how he personally made sure our nuclear stockpile was “all tippy-top.”) Trump scoffed at his indictments, particularly the classified-documents case against him: “I have total protection. I’m allowed to do it.” He vowed to “take over our horribly run Washington, D.C.” and give indemnification to any police officer who “gets in trouble” for pursuing a criminal. I’ve watched Trump speak live in several different settings over the past several months. I’ve never seen him more bombastic this year than he seemed last night; he sounded like an unmoored strongman.

    Scott Olson / Getty

    Trump’s pageant of darkness unfolded against a backdrop of Christmas cheer. The former president was flanked by two Christmas trees, each topped with a red MAGA hat. Prop presents in Trump-branded wrapping paper dotted the stage. Red, green, and white lights glowed down from the ceiling. Trump opened with a long monologue from his earlier days: how we’re all saying “Merry Christmas” again. (His campaign volunteers handed out signs plastered with the phrase.) Even the press laminates were decorated with a string of cartoon Christmas lights.

    One of Trump’s warm-up speakers, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, asked the audience, “What do you give the man who has everything as a Christmas present?” This was a slightly confusing setup for a joke about how Christmas is going to come late for Trump this year, when he wins the Iowa caucus in mid-January. People sort of got it.

    Before Trump took the stage, I spotted Santa Claus leaning against a brick wall outside the assembly hall and asked for an interview. He wavered, then reluctantly agreed. The back of his red suit said MAGA CLAUS in gold block letters. Santa, it turns out, is a man in his mid-20s named Alex. He said he lives in Northern Virginia and works for Public Advocate of the United States, a conservative nonprofit group. He told me he plays all sorts of characters, such as Cupid and an evil doctor/mad scientist who forces people to take a COVID vaccine. He told me he had showed up at the Loudoun County school protests dressed as Uncle Sam. Two of his organization’s signs hung outside the venue’s entryway: Make the Family Great Again! and There are only TWO genders: Male & Female. Merry Christmas.

    Read: What is this ‘Christmas’ you speak of?

    Sitting at a nearby table was 81-year-old Susan Holland and her husband, Buzz. Both welcomed me with a nod as I pulled up a chair next to them. Holland, wearing a bedazzled Trump hat and an American-flag sweater with flag earrings, told me she had seen Trump in person about 10 times over the years. “We can hardly wait ’til he’s sworn in again,” she said. I asked her where she gets her news. “We watch Fox News,” she said. “We watch the regular news too.”

    Over the past several months, I’ve asked dozens of Trump supporters if there is anything the former president could do or say that would make them withdraw their support. Mike Benson, a 62-year-old retired carpenter from Waterloo, was posted up a few blocks away from the venue at the Broken Record Bar earlier in the afternoon, wearing a red TRUMP 2024 hat, nursing a Bud. He told me about being out of step with his union buddies, who all staunchly vote Democratic. (He said he cast his first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan and has supported the GOP ever since.) I brought up that Trump had been praising people like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Orbán, and asked if he thought Trump himself would end up a dictator.

    “Not a chance,” Benson said. “People confuse Trump’s praise for them. He’s not praising them; he’s acknowledging that they’re smart people. They’re smart enough to manipulate their population, and Trump is acknowledging that,” he said. “The devil is smart,” he added.

    I asked him if he thinks Trump manipulates our population.

    “No,” he said. “He puts what he believes is true out there, and if you believe that too, all you have to do is follow him. He’s not strong-arming people around. He’s not manipulating facts. He’s not militarizing government departments to go after opponents. He’s not doing any of that.”

    Less than an hour before Trump took the stage last night, the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled that the former president was disqualified from appearing on the state’s ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his actions leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. His campaign has already said that it will appeal the decision, and the case appears destined to wind up before the Supreme Court.

    In Waterloo, Trump didn’t mention the Colorado ruling. Instead, he focused on Biden, the swamp, and the “deep state.” “We’re going to bring our country back from hell; our country’s gone to hell,” Trump said. By Christmas 2024, he countered, the economy will be roaring back and energy prices will be plummeting. He claimed responsibility for the presently high stock market—arguing that returns are up because people believe he is returning to office.

    John Hendrickson: Could the courts actually take Trump off the ballots?

    “Crooked Joe Biden” is “a low-IQ individual” and “the most incompetent, most corrupt president in the history of our country,” Trump said. “Other than that, I think quite a bit of him.” Later, Trump mocked Biden’s slow speech at a recent news conference.

    Throughout the night, Trump pandered to Iowa voters, attacking electric cars, talking about persecution of Christians, and praising those who “still till that soil.” He fired off some strange ad-libs: “Does everybody in this room love their children? Does anybody in this room not love their children? Raise your hand. Oh, that guy in the blue jacket raised his hand!”

    But his grotesque anti-immigrant rhetoric kept returning—a messier, ganglier version of “Build the Wall.”

    As attendees filtered into the convention center, a 69-year-old man stood outside in the frigid cold and wind holding a handwritten sign. It read: EVERY TIME YOU EAT A PORK CHOP OR RIBEYE STEAK THANK AN IMMIGRANT. The man, Paul, had driven from his home in Manchester, about 50 miles east. He told me he used to work alongside many immigrants at a seed-corn plant. He said he was dismayed by all the slurs he had been hearing about foreigners. “I decided I was gonna come, I was gonna hold the sign,” and offer a message that was “at least halfway positive,” he said. I didn’t see any members of Trump’s flock stopping to consider it.

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    John Hendrickson

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  • The Two Republican Theories for Beating Trump

    The Two Republican Theories for Beating Trump

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    The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.

    The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.

    DeSantis delivered a stronger overall debate performance than Haley. But the evening mostly displayed the structural limitations of the theory that each campaign is operating under, and the limited progress either candidate has made toward surmounting those obstacles.

    As he showed during the debate, DeSantis is grounding his coalition on the right by defining himself as an unflagging champion for the party’s most conservative elements. During the debate, the Florida governor’s frequent attacks on Haley, and more infrequent (and oblique) jabs at Trump, both represented variations on the charge that neither rival can be trusted to advance conservative priorities.

    Haley, in mirror image, is grounding her coalition in the party’s center. She has focused on consolidating the centrist GOP voters and donors who have long expressed the most resistance to Trump. That includes moderates, people with at least a four-year college degree, GOP-leaning independents, and suburbanites.

    DeSantis’s vision, in other words, has been to start on the right and over time build toward the center; Haley wants to grow in the opposite direction by locking down the center, and then expanding into the right.

    Supporters of both Haley and DeSantis believe that the other’s approach lowers their ceiling too much to ultimately topple Trump. The problem for all Republicans looking for an alternative to the former president is that last week’s debate offered the latest evidence that each camp may be right about the other’s limitations. With the voting beginning only five weeks from Monday in the Iowa caucus, neither Haley nor DeSantis has found any effective way to loosen Trump’s grip on the party.

    Neither, in fact, has even tried hard to do so. Instead, they have centered their efforts almost entirely on trying to squeeze out the other to become Trump’s principal rival. To beat Trump, or to come close, eventually either of them will need to peel away some of the roughly 60 percent of GOP voters who now say in national polls that they intend to support him for the nomination. But both have behaved as if they can leave that challenge for a later day, while focusing on trying to clear the field to create a one-on-one contest with the front-runner.

    The theory in DeSantis’s camp has been that the only way to beat Trump is to aim directly at his core supporters with a conservative message. DeSantis advisers acknowledge that his positioning has not connected with many centrist voters. But his camp believes that if DeSantis can emerge after the early states as the last viable alternative to Trump, the moderates most resistant to the former president will have no choice but to rally around the Florida governor, even if they consider him too Trump-like himself.

    The voters now drawn to Haley “share a goal in common with Governor DeSantis in that they want an alternative to Trump,” Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa religious conservative who has endorsed DeSantis, told me. “The more that DeSantis proves there is one alternative to Trump, he will start peeling off that lane as well.” By contrast, Vander Plaats argues, if DeSantis falls out of contention, his support is more likely to flow back to Trump than toward Haley. “I haven’t heard any supporter of DeSantis yet saying: ‘I’m deciding between him and Haley,’” he told me. “Basically, they are between Trump and him.”

    DeSantis’s supporters anticipate that his strategy will pay off if he finishes strongly in Iowa. But so far, his decision to offer voters what amounts to Trumpism without Trump has returned few dividends. With his Trump-like agenda on immigration and foreign policy, and emphasis on culture-war issues such as transgender rights, DeSantis has alienated many of the centrist GOP voters most dubious of the former president while failing to dislodge many of his core supporters.

    “Ron DeSantis should have consolidated the non-Trump wing of the party from the get go and then gone after soft Trump supporters,” Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me in an email. “Instead, he tried to out-MAGA Trump from the right and alienated not only soft-Trump voters but also the more pragmatic wing of the party. It was a strategic blunder.”

    Haley has filled that vacuum with the elements of the party most skeptical of Trump. Her approach has been to start with the primary voters who like the former president the least, with the hope of eventually attracting more of those ambivalent about him. Her backers believe she has a better chance than DeSantis to reach those “maybe Trump” voters. As the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me, DeSantis “has tried to appeal to some of the ‘always Trump’ voters, but the ‘always Trump’ voters are always Trump for a reason. Nikki Haley seems to have figured out the job is to consolidate the ‘maybe Trump’ voters who supported Trump twice but now … want a different style and different temperament.”

    Read: A war on blue America

    DeSantis still leads Haley in most national polls, though that may be changing. And he remains even or ahead of her in the polls in Iowa, where he has campaigned relentlessly, won support from most of the state’s Republican leadership (including Governor Kim Reynolds), attracted broad backing in the influential religious-conservative community, and spent heavily on building a grassroots organization.

    But DeSantis is in a much weaker position in the other early states. A recent poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found him falling to fourth in the Granite State. That poll found Haley emerging as a clear second to Trump, as did another recent CNN survey in South Carolina. In each state, she attracted about twice as much support as DeSantis did. Polls also consistently show Haley running much better than DeSantis, or Trump, in hypothetical general election match ups against President Joe Biden.

    All of these positive trends largely explain why DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP contender, attacked Haley at the debate. Haley was right when she suggested that the attention reflected anxiety in DeSantis’s camp about her rise. But that motivation doesn’t necessarily make the attacks any less effective.

    After delivering the most assured performances in the first three GOP debates, Haley seemed wobbly last week as DeSantis and Ramaswamy pummeled her from the right. Dave Wilson, a longtime Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me that Haley had not faced that kind of sustained ideological assault from the right during her career in the state. “It hasn’t been used against her in South Carolina,” Wilson said. “Nikki has never been some kind of mainstreamer or a shill for the big corporations. That’s not who she has portrayed herself as, or how she governed, when she was governor of South Carolina.”

    Read: Trump voters are American too

    At the debate, Haley never seemed to find solid ground when DeSantis accused her of resisting the hard-line approaches he has championed in Florida on issues affecting transgender people. Haley neither embraced DeSantis’s agenda nor challenged it and instead insisted he was mischaracterizing her own record, without entirely clarifying her views. “Especially on those types of cultural issues, it is probably always going to be advantage DeSantis,” Vander Plaats told me. “I think if you turned down the volume and just [looked at] the physical appearance, Nikki was very concerned at that point, like she knew she was in a tough space, and DeSantis was in a very confident space.”

    Her uneasy response on issues of LGBTQ rights was a stark contrast to the confident course she has set on abortion. One reason Haley has gained favor with more centrist Republicans is that she has so clearly argued that the GOP cannot achieve sweeping federal abortion restrictions and must pursue consensus around more limited goals. “I think Nikki Haley talks about social issues the same way that real people do: not through demagoguery or hysterics like some candidates, but having real policy disagreements while showing compassion for those affected—and I think that’s the winning formula,” Stroman said.

    But at the debate, Haley was unwilling to apply that formula to LGBTQ issues, even as she seemed to seek a more empathetic tone than DeSantis.

    “She has clearly thought through a more moderate, nuanced position on abortion that would have greater appeal in a general election,” Alice Stewart, a longtime GOP strategist who has worked for leading social-conservative candidates, told me. “It appears she has not mapped out her position on other culture-war issues, such as transgender procedures and school bathrooms.”

    Doubling down on his message at the debate, DeSantis’s campaign told me afterward that “within the confines of the Constitution” he would support nationalizing the key laws affecting transgender people that he has passed in Florida, such as banning gender-affirming care for minors. Haley’s campaign still appeared focused mostly on deflecting this argument: In comments to me after the debate, her aides stressed that although DeSantis criticized her for opposing legislation as governor requiring students to use the restroom of the gender they were assigned at birth, he similarly indicated that the issue was not a priority for him not long thereafter, during his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018. Their message was that DeSantis is stressing these issues now merely out of expediency. But in an email exchange with me after the debate, Haley’s campaign drew a clearer distinction with DeSantis than she did during the encounter: rather than national action to impose on every state the restrictions Florida has approved on LGBTQ issues, the campaign said Haley would “encourage states to pass laws” that ban classroom discussion of sexual orientation or regulate bathroom use for transgender kids. The one exception the campaign noted is that, like DeSantis, she would also support national legislation banning transgender girls from competing in school sports.

    The debate drew only a small audience and is unlikely by itself to significantly change the trajectory of the DeSantis and Haley competition. Wilson and Stroman both said they doubt that DeSantis’s ideological attacks will hurt Haley much in the South Carolina primary. “It’s going to be harder in South Carolina than he thinks, because everyone knows what Nikki Haley did in this state,” Wilson said. “Under her leadership, a lot of strong conservative stands were taken.”

    But, of course, GOP voters don’t know nearly as much about Haley in the cascade of states that will vote in early March, after South Carolina. DeSantis supporters view her unsteady response to his ideological assault at the debate as validation of their belief that Haley can never attract enough conservative voters to genuinely threaten Trump. “There’s just no path for her to win the nomination,” Vander Plaats argued. “That lane doesn’t exist.”

    The path for any alternative to beat Trump is a rocky one, but it’s premature to assume that Haley cannot outlast DeSantis to become the last viable challenger to the former president. She still has time to formulate better responses to the charge that she’s insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era GOP. Portraying Haley as too squishy in the culture war might help her in New Hampshire, the state where she’s hoping to emerge as Trump’s principal rival.

    But the debate underscored her need to sharpen her answers on those issues as the race moves on. And for Haley’s supporters, it raised an ominous question: If she couldn’t respond more effectively to an attack on her conservative credentials from DeSantis and Ramaswamy, how would she hold up if she ever becomes enough of a threat for Donald Trump to press that case himself?

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • A Military Loyal to Trump

    A Military Loyal to Trump

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    If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.

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    But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The president and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics. They were hindered as well by the courage and professionalism of the military officers and civilian appointees who, side by side, serve in the Defense Department.

    Trump now nurses deep grudges against these officers and civilians, who slow-rolled and smothered his various illegal and autocratic impulses, including his enraged demand to kill the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2017, and his desire to deploy America’s military against its own citizens during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

    The 2020 election, of course, is the source of Trump’s chief grudge against senior military leaders. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was especially determined to keep the armed forces out of the various schemes to stay in office devised by the Trump team and its allies, including a delusional plan, proposed by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, to have the military go into swing states and seize voting machines. Trump has since implied (in response to a profile of Milley by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg) that Milley should get the death penalty. Milley reportedly believes that Trump, if reelected, will try to jail him and other senior national-security figures, a concern shared by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

    From the November 2023 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg on how Mark Milley held the line

    In a second term, Trump would combine his instincts for revenge and self-protection. He would seek not only to get even with an officer corps that he thinks betrayed him, but also to break the military as one of the few institutions able to constrain his attempts to act against the Constitution and the rule of law.

    Publicly, Trump presents himself as an unflinching advocate for the military, but this is a charade. He has no respect for military people or their devotion to duty. He loves the pomp and the parades and the salutes and the continual use of “sir,” but as retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said in 2023, Trump “couldn’t fathom people who served their nation honorably” when he was in office. Privately, as Goldberg has reported, Trump has called American war dead “losers” and “suckers,” and has said that wounded warriors are disgusting and should be kept out of sight.

    Trump instead prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.

    On November 9, 2020, Trump dumped Esper and named Christopher Miller, a retired colonel and Pentagon bureaucrat, as acting secretary of defense. Miller took along Kash Patel, a Trump sycophant, as his chief of staff. Trump sent Douglas Macgregor, another retired colonel and a pro-Russia Fox News regular, to Miller as a senior adviser. (Earlier, Trump had attempted and failed to make Macgregor the ambassador to Germany.) Trump installed Anthony Tata—a retired one-star Army general who has claimed that Barack Obama is a Muslim and that a former CIA director was trying to have Trump assassinated—in the third-most-senior job at the Pentagon. A few months earlier, the Senate had wisely declined to confirm Tata’s appointment to that position, but in November, Trump gave him the job in an acting capacity anyway.

    These moves, among others, led all 10 living former secretaries of defense to issue a startling and unprecedented joint statement. On January 3, 2021, they directly enjoined Miller and his subordinates to uphold their constitutional duty and “refrain from any political actions that undermine the results of the election or hinder the success of the new team.” The letter pointedly reminded Miller and his team that they were “bound by oath, law and precedent,” and called upon them, “in the strongest terms,” to honor “the history of democratic transition in our great country.”

    If reelected, Trump would attempt to gain authoritarian control of the Defense Department’s uppermost levels from the very beginning. There are more Anthony Tatas and Douglas Macgregors out there, and Trump’s allies are likely already seeking to identify them. If the Senate refused to confirm Trump’s appointees, it wouldn’t matter much: Trump has learned that he can keep rotating people through acting positions, daring the Senate to stop him.

    The career civil servants underneath these appointees—who work on everything from recruiting to nuclear planning—would disobey Trump if he attacked the constitutional order. These civilians, by law, cannot be fired at will, a problem Trump tried to remedy in the last months of his administration by proposing a new category of government appointments (Schedule F) that would have converted some of the most important civil-service positions into political appointments directly controlled by the White House. President Joe Biden immediately repealed this move after taking office, but Trump has vowed to reinstate it.

    Read: Trump’s open plot to dismantle the federal government

    In his two-pronged offensive to capture the military establishment while eviscerating the civil service, Trump would likely rely on former officers such as Miller and fringe-dwelling civilians such as Patel, but he would also almost certainly find at least a few serving senior officers—he would not need many—who would accept his offer to abandon their oath. Together, they would make a run at changing the nature of the armed forces.

    This is not abstract theorizing. The Heritage Foundation recently released “Project 2025,” a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican president’s administration. The Defense Department chapter was written by none other than former Acting Secretary Christopher Miller. It is mostly a rationalization for more spending, but it includes a clear call for a purge of the military’s senior ranks to clean out “Marxist indoctrination”—an accusation he does not define—along with demands for expelling trans service members and reinstating those service members who were dismissed for refusing COVID vaccinations.

    The problems of ideological polarization and extremism in the armed forces are not as extensive as some critics of the military imagine, but they are more worrisome than the military leadership would like to admit. Military officers tend to be more conservative than the public, and as far back as the Clinton and Obama administrations, I occasionally heard senior officers speak of these liberal presidents in deeply contemptuous terms (potentially a crime under military regulations). Today, military bases are subjected to a constant barrage of Fox News in almost every area with a television, and toward the end of my teaching career (I retired in 2022), I often heard senior officers repeating almost verbatim some of the most overheated and paranoid talking points about politics and national affairs from the network’s prime-time hosts. Some of these officers would be tempted to answer Trump’s call.

    The rest of the members of the professional military, despite their concerns, would likely follow their instincts and default to the orders of their chain of command. The American political system was never intended to cope with someone like Trump; the military is trained and organized to obey, not resist, the orders of the civilian commander in chief.

    Trump’s plans would likely use this obedience to the chain of command to exploit an unfortunate vulnerability in the modern American armed forces: The military, in my experience, has a political-literacy problem. Too many people in uniform no longer have a basic grounding in the constitutional foundation of American government and the civil-military relationship. (Some of my colleagues who teach in senior-military educational institutions share this concern, and over the years, some of us have tried, often in vain, to push more study of the Constitution into the curricula.) These men and women are neither unintelligent nor disloyal. Rather, like many Americans, they are no longer taught basic civics, and they may struggle with the line between executing the orders of the president as the commander in chief and obeying the Constitution.

    Trump’s appointees also would be able to influence the future of the armed forces through assignments and promotions (and non-promotions) within each branch—and through their behavior as examples to the rest of the military. With top cover from the White House, Trump’s functionaries in the Pentagon, working with his supporters in the ranks, could poison the military for years to come by ignoring laws, regulations, and traditions as they see fit. (Recall, for example, that Trump is an admirer of the disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and intervened to make sure Gallagher kept his SEAL Trident after he was charged with war crimes and found guilty of posing for photos with a captive’s dead body.) America’s military is built on virtues such as honor and duty, but abusing and discarding the norms that support those virtues would change the military’s culture—and faster than we may realize.

    Even if only some of the actions I’ve described here succeed, any number of disasters might follow. Trump could jeopardize national security by surrounding himself with military and defense officials who would help him dissolve our alliances (especially NATO), weaken our military readiness, undermine our intelligence services, and abandon our friends around the world, all while he seeks closer relations with authoritarian regimes—especially Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He could issue illegal orders to engage in torture or to commit other war crimes overseas. And he could bring the entire planet to disaster should senior military leaders obey his unhinged orders to kill foreign leaders, start a war, or even use nuclear weapons.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: Anne Applebaum on how Trump will abandon NATO

    At home, Trump could order unconstitutional shows of military support for his administration to intimidate his opponents. He could order American soldiers into the streets against protesters. (Trump’s allies are reportedly drawing up plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day to quell any demonstrations against his return to office.) Officers refusing such orders could be dismissed or reassigned, which in turn could provoke a political confrontation between the Trump loyalists in the high command and the rest of the armed forces, itself a frightening and previously unthinkable prospect.

    And if Trump succeeds in simultaneously capturing the U.S. military while gutting the other key institutions that protect democracy—especially the courts and the Justice Department—nothing will stop him from using force to put down opposition and stay in power.

    Some Americans fear that the United States is already in a struggle with fascism. The firm constitutional loyalty of the armed forces during Trump’s presidency was a reminder that such fears are overblown, at least for the moment. But Trump and his allies understand that by leaving the military outside their political control the last time around, they also left intact a crucial bulwark against their plans. They will not make the same mistake twice.

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “A Military Loyal to Trump.”

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    Tom Nichols

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