The U.S. has launched another round of retaliatory strikes against the Islamic State in Syria following last month’s ambush that killed two U.S. soldiers and one American civilian interpreter in the country.The large-scale strikes, conducted by the U.S. alongside partner forces, occurred around 12:30 p.m. ET, according to U.S. Central Command. The strikes hit multiple Islamic State targets across Syria.Video above: U.S. airstrikes target ISIS militants in NigeriaSaturday’s strikes are part of a broader operation that is part of President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly ISIS attack that killed Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, the civilian interpreter, in Palmyra last month.”Our message remains strong: if you harm our warfighters, we will find you and kill you anywhere in the world, no matter how hard you try to evade justice,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement Saturday.The administration is calling the response to the Palmyra attacks Operation Hawkeye Strike. Both Torres-Tovar and Howard were members of the Iowa National Guard.It launched Dec. 19 with another large-scale strike that hit 70 targets across central Syria that had IS infrastructure and weapons.
WASHINGTON —
The U.S. has launched another round of retaliatory strikes against the Islamic State in Syria following last month’s ambush that killed two U.S. soldiers and one American civilian interpreter in the country.
The large-scale strikes, conducted by the U.S. alongside partner forces, occurred around 12:30 p.m. ET, according to U.S. Central Command. The strikes hit multiple Islamic State targets across Syria.
Video above: U.S. airstrikes target ISIS militants in Nigeria
Saturday’s strikes are part of a broader operation that is part of President Donald Trump’s response to the deadly ISIS attack that killed Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, and Ayad Mansoor Sakat, the civilian interpreter, in Palmyra last month.
“Our message remains strong: if you harm our warfighters, we will find you and kill you anywhere in the world, no matter how hard you try to evade justice,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement Saturday.
The administration is calling the response to the Palmyra attacks Operation Hawkeye Strike. Both Torres-Tovar and Howard were members of the Iowa National Guard.
It launched Dec. 19 with another large-scale strike that hit 70 targets across central Syria that had IS infrastructure and weapons.
Brigitte Bardot, the French 1960s sex symbol who became one of the greatest screen sirens of the 20th century and later an animal rights activist, has died. She was 91.Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals, told The Associated Press that she died Sunday at her home in southern France, and would not provide a cause of death. He said no arrangements have yet been made for funeral or memorial services. She had been hospitalized last month.Bardot became an international celebrity as a sexualized teen bride in the 1956 movie “And God Created Woman.” Directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim, it triggered a scandal with scenes of the long-legged beauty dancing on tables naked.At the height of a cinema career that spanned some 28 films and three marriages, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting out of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blonde hair, figure and pouty irreverence made her one of France’s best-known stars.Such was her widespread appeal that in 1969 her features were chosen to be the model for “Marianne,” the national emblem of France and the official Gallic seal. Bardot’s face appeared on statues, postage stamps and even on coins.‘’We are mourning a legend,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote Sunday on X.Bardot’s second career as an animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she opposed sending monkeys into space.”Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest honor. Later, however, she fell from public grace as her far-right political views sounded racist, as she frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.She was convicted five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred. Notably, she criticized the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays like Eid al-Adha.Bardot’s 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d’Ormale, a onetime adviser to former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described the outspoken nationalist as a “lovely, intelligent man.”In 2012, she caused controversy again when she wrote a letter in support of Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the party — now renamed National Rally — in her failed bid for the French presidency. In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical” and “ridiculous” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.She said she had never been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.” Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist. A shy, secretive child, she studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at age 14.Bardot once described her childhood as “difficult” and said her father was a strict disciplinarian.But it was French movie producer Vadim, whom she married in 1952, who saw her potential and wrote “And God Created Woman” to showcase provocative sensuality.The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.The film was a box-office hit, and it made Bardot a superstar. Her girlish pout, tiny waist and shape were often more appreciated than her talent.”It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”Bardot’s unabashed, off-screen love affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant further shocked the nation. It eradicated the boundaries between her public and private life and turned her into a hot prize for paparazzi.Bardot never adjusted to the limelight. She blamed the constant press attention for the suicide attempt that followed 10 months after the birth of her only child, Nicolas. Photographers had broken into her house only two weeks before she gave birth to snap a picture of her pregnant.Nicolas’ father was Jacques Charrier, a handsome French actor whom she married in 1959 but who never felt comfortable in his role as Monsieur Bardot. Bardot soon gave up her son to his father, and later said she had been chronically depressed and unready for the duties of being a mother.”I was looking for roots then,” she said in an interview. “I had none to offer.”In her 1996 autobiography “Initiales B.B.,” she likened her pregnancy to “a tumor growing inside me,” and described Charrier as “temperamental and abusive.”Bardot married her third husband, West German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs, in 1966, but the relationship ended in divorce three years later.Among her films were “A Parisian” (1957); “In Case of Misfortune,” in which she starred in 1958 with screen legend Jean Gabin; “The Truth” (1960); “Private Life” (1962); “A Ravishing Idiot” (1964); “Shalako” (1968); “Women” (1969); “The Bear and the Doll” (1970); “Rum Boulevard” (1971); and “Don Juan” (1973).With the exception of 1963’s critically acclaimed “Contempt,” directed by Godard, Bardot’s films were rarely complicated by plots. Often they were vehicles to display Bardot’s curves and legs in scanty dresses or frolicking nude in the sun.”It was never a great passion of mine,” she said of filmmaking. “And it can be deadly sometimes. Marilyn (Monroe) perished because of it.”Bardot retired to her Riviera villa in St. Tropez at the age of 39 in 1973 after “The Woman Grabber.” She emerged a decade later with a new persona: An animal rights lobbyist. She abandoned her jet-set life and sold off movie memorabilia and jewelry to create a foundation devoted to the prevention of animal cruelty.Her activism knew no borders. She urged South Korea to ban the sale of dog meat and once wrote to U.S. President Bill Clinton asking why the U.S. Navy recaptured two dolphins it had released into the wild.She attacked centuries-old French and Italian sporting traditions including the Palio, a free-for-all horse race, and campaigned on behalf of wolves, rabbits, kittens and turtle doves.By the late 1990s, Bardot was making headlines that would lose her many fans. She was convicted and fined five times between 1997 and 2008 for inciting racial hatred in incidents inspired by her anger at Muslim animal slaughtering rituals.”It’s true that sometimes I get carried away, but when I see how slowly things move forward … and despite all the promises that have been made to me by all different governments put together — my distress takes over,” Bardot told the AP.In 1997, several towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne — the bare-breasted statue representing the French Republic — after the actress voiced anti-immigrant sentiment. Also that year, she received death threats after calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat.Environmental campaigner Paul Watson, who was beaten on a seal hunt protest in Canada alongside Bardot in 1977 and campaigned with her for five decades, acknowledged that “many disagreed with Brigitte’s politics or some of her views.”“Her allegiance was not to the world of humans,” he said. “The animals of this world lost a wonderful friend today.”Bardot once said that she identified with the animals that she was trying to save.”I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” Bardot said. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.” Ganley contributed to this story before her retirement. Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
PARIS —
Brigitte Bardot, the French 1960s sex symbol who became one of the greatest screen sirens of the 20th century and later an animal rights activist, has died. She was 91.
Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals, told The Associated Press that she died Sunday at her home in southern France, and would not provide a cause of death. He said no arrangements have yet been made for funeral or memorial services. She had been hospitalized last month.
Bardot became an international celebrity as a sexualized teen bride in the 1956 movie “And God Created Woman.” Directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim, it triggered a scandal with scenes of the long-legged beauty dancing on tables naked.
At the height of a cinema career that spanned some 28 films and three marriages, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting out of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blonde hair, figure and pouty irreverence made her one of France’s best-known stars.
Such was her widespread appeal that in 1969 her features were chosen to be the model for “Marianne,” the national emblem of France and the official Gallic seal. Bardot’s face appeared on statues, postage stamps and even on coins.
‘’We are mourning a legend,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote Sunday on X.
Bardot’s second career as an animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she opposed sending monkeys into space.
“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”
Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest honor.
Later, however, she fell from public grace as her far-right political views sounded racist, as she frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.
She was convicted five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred. Notably, she criticized the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays like Eid al-Adha.
Bardot’s 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d’Ormale, a onetime adviser to former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described the outspoken nationalist as a “lovely, intelligent man.”
In 2012, she caused controversy again when she wrote a letter in support of Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the party — now renamed National Rally — in her failed bid for the French presidency.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical” and “ridiculous” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.
She said she had never been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.”
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist. A shy, secretive child, she studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at age 14.
Bardot once described her childhood as “difficult” and said her father was a strict disciplinarian.
But it was French movie producer Vadim, whom she married in 1952, who saw her potential and wrote “And God Created Woman” to showcase provocative sensuality.
The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.
The film was a box-office hit, and it made Bardot a superstar. Her girlish pout, tiny waist and shape were often more appreciated than her talent.
“It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”
Bardot’s unabashed, off-screen love affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant further shocked the nation. It eradicated the boundaries between her public and private life and turned her into a hot prize for paparazzi.
Bardot never adjusted to the limelight. She blamed the constant press attention for the suicide attempt that followed 10 months after the birth of her only child, Nicolas. Photographers had broken into her house only two weeks before she gave birth to snap a picture of her pregnant.
Nicolas’ father was Jacques Charrier, a handsome French actor whom she married in 1959 but who never felt comfortable in his role as Monsieur Bardot. Bardot soon gave up her son to his father, and later said she had been chronically depressed and unready for the duties of being a mother.
“I was looking for roots then,” she said in an interview. “I had none to offer.”
In her 1996 autobiography “Initiales B.B.,” she likened her pregnancy to “a tumor growing inside me,” and described Charrier as “temperamental and abusive.”
Bardot married her third husband, West German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs, in 1966, but the relationship ended in divorce three years later.
Among her films were “A Parisian” (1957); “In Case of Misfortune,” in which she starred in 1958 with screen legend Jean Gabin; “The Truth” (1960); “Private Life” (1962); “A Ravishing Idiot” (1964); “Shalako” (1968); “Women” (1969); “The Bear and the Doll” (1970); “Rum Boulevard” (1971); and “Don Juan” (1973).
With the exception of 1963’s critically acclaimed “Contempt,” directed by Godard, Bardot’s films were rarely complicated by plots. Often they were vehicles to display Bardot’s curves and legs in scanty dresses or frolicking nude in the sun.
“It was never a great passion of mine,” she said of filmmaking. “And it can be deadly sometimes. Marilyn (Monroe) perished because of it.”
Bardot retired to her Riviera villa in St. Tropez at the age of 39 in 1973 after “The Woman Grabber.”
She emerged a decade later with a new persona: An animal rights lobbyist. She abandoned her jet-set life and sold off movie memorabilia and jewelry to create a foundation devoted to the prevention of animal cruelty.
Her activism knew no borders. She urged South Korea to ban the sale of dog meat and once wrote to U.S. President Bill Clinton asking why the U.S. Navy recaptured two dolphins it had released into the wild.
She attacked centuries-old French and Italian sporting traditions including the Palio, a free-for-all horse race, and campaigned on behalf of wolves, rabbits, kittens and turtle doves.
By the late 1990s, Bardot was making headlines that would lose her many fans. She was convicted and fined five times between 1997 and 2008 for inciting racial hatred in incidents inspired by her anger at Muslim animal slaughtering rituals.
“It’s true that sometimes I get carried away, but when I see how slowly things move forward … and despite all the promises that have been made to me by all different governments put together — my distress takes over,” Bardot told the AP.
In 1997, several towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne — the bare-breasted statue representing the French Republic — after the actress voiced anti-immigrant sentiment. Also that year, she received death threats after calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat.
Environmental campaigner Paul Watson, who was beaten on a seal hunt protest in Canada alongside Bardot in 1977 and campaigned with her for five decades, acknowledged that “many disagreed with Brigitte’s politics or some of her views.”
“Her allegiance was not to the world of humans,” he said. “The animals of this world lost a wonderful friend today.”
Bardot once said that she identified with the animals that she was trying to save.
“I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” Bardot said. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.”
Ganley contributed to this story before her retirement. Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
Brigitte Bardot, the French 1960s sex symbol who became one of the greatest screen sirens of the 20th century and later an animal rights activist, has died. She was 91.Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals, told The Associated Press that she died Sunday at her home in southern France, and would not provide a cause of death. He said no arrangements have yet been made for funeral or memorial services. She had been hospitalized last month.Bardot became an international celebrity as a sexualized teen bride in the 1956 movie “And God Created Woman.” Directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim, it triggered a scandal with scenes of the long-legged beauty dancing on tables naked.At the height of a cinema career that spanned some 28 films and three marriages, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting out of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blonde hair, figure and pouty irreverence made her one of France’s best-known stars.Such was her widespread appeal that in 1969 her features were chosen to be the model for “Marianne,” the national emblem of France and the official Gallic seal. Bardot’s face appeared on statues, postage stamps and even on coins.‘’We are mourning a legend,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote Sunday on X.Bardot’s second career as an animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she opposed sending monkeys into space.”Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest honor. Later, however, she fell from public grace as her far-right political views sounded racist, as she frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.She was convicted five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred. Notably, she criticized the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays like Eid al-Adha.Bardot’s 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d’Ormale, a onetime adviser to former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described the outspoken nationalist as a “lovely, intelligent man.”In 2012, she caused controversy again when she wrote a letter in support of Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the party — now renamed National Rally — in her failed bid for the French presidency. In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical” and “ridiculous” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.She said she had never been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.” Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist. A shy, secretive child, she studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at age 14.Bardot once described her childhood as “difficult” and said her father was a strict disciplinarian.But it was French movie producer Vadim, whom she married in 1952, who saw her potential and wrote “And God Created Woman” to showcase provocative sensuality.The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.The film was a box-office hit, and it made Bardot a superstar. Her girlish pout, tiny waist and shape were often more appreciated than her talent.”It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”Bardot’s unabashed, off-screen love affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant further shocked the nation. It eradicated the boundaries between her public and private life and turned her into a hot prize for paparazzi.Bardot never adjusted to the limelight. She blamed the constant press attention for the suicide attempt that followed 10 months after the birth of her only child, Nicolas. Photographers had broken into her house only two weeks before she gave birth to snap a picture of her pregnant.Nicolas’ father was Jacques Charrier, a handsome French actor whom she married in 1959 but who never felt comfortable in his role as Monsieur Bardot. Bardot soon gave up her son to his father, and later said she had been chronically depressed and unready for the duties of being a mother.”I was looking for roots then,” she said in an interview. “I had none to offer.”In her 1996 autobiography “Initiales B.B.,” she likened her pregnancy to “a tumor growing inside me,” and described Charrier as “temperamental and abusive.”Bardot married her third husband, West German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs, in 1966, but the relationship ended in divorce three years later.Among her films were “A Parisian” (1957); “In Case of Misfortune,” in which she starred in 1958 with screen legend Jean Gabin; “The Truth” (1960); “Private Life” (1962); “A Ravishing Idiot” (1964); “Shalako” (1968); “Women” (1969); “The Bear and the Doll” (1970); “Rum Boulevard” (1971); and “Don Juan” (1973).With the exception of 1963’s critically acclaimed “Contempt,” directed by Godard, Bardot’s films were rarely complicated by plots. Often they were vehicles to display Bardot’s curves and legs in scanty dresses or frolicking nude in the sun.”It was never a great passion of mine,” she said of filmmaking. “And it can be deadly sometimes. Marilyn (Monroe) perished because of it.”Bardot retired to her Riviera villa in St. Tropez at the age of 39 in 1973 after “The Woman Grabber.” She emerged a decade later with a new persona: An animal rights lobbyist. She abandoned her jet-set life and sold off movie memorabilia and jewelry to create a foundation devoted to the prevention of animal cruelty.Her activism knew no borders. She urged South Korea to ban the sale of dog meat and once wrote to U.S. President Bill Clinton asking why the U.S. Navy recaptured two dolphins it had released into the wild.She attacked centuries-old French and Italian sporting traditions including the Palio, a free-for-all horse race, and campaigned on behalf of wolves, rabbits, kittens and turtle doves.By the late 1990s, Bardot was making headlines that would lose her many fans. She was convicted and fined five times between 1997 and 2008 for inciting racial hatred in incidents inspired by her anger at Muslim animal slaughtering rituals.”It’s true that sometimes I get carried away, but when I see how slowly things move forward … and despite all the promises that have been made to me by all different governments put together — my distress takes over,” Bardot told the AP.In 1997, several towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne — the bare-breasted statue representing the French Republic — after the actress voiced anti-immigrant sentiment. Also that year, she received death threats after calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat.Environmental campaigner Paul Watson, who was beaten on a seal hunt protest in Canada alongside Bardot in 1977 and campaigned with her for five decades, acknowledged that “many disagreed with Brigitte’s politics or some of her views.”“Her allegiance was not to the world of humans,” he said. “The animals of this world lost a wonderful friend today.”Bardot once said that she identified with the animals that she was trying to save.”I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” Bardot said. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.” Ganley contributed to this story before her retirement. Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
PARIS —
Brigitte Bardot, the French 1960s sex symbol who became one of the greatest screen sirens of the 20th century and later an animal rights activist, has died. She was 91.
Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals, told The Associated Press that she died Sunday at her home in southern France, and would not provide a cause of death. He said no arrangements have yet been made for funeral or memorial services. She had been hospitalized last month.
Bardot became an international celebrity as a sexualized teen bride in the 1956 movie “And God Created Woman.” Directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim, it triggered a scandal with scenes of the long-legged beauty dancing on tables naked.
At the height of a cinema career that spanned some 28 films and three marriages, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting out of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blonde hair, figure and pouty irreverence made her one of France’s best-known stars.
Such was her widespread appeal that in 1969 her features were chosen to be the model for “Marianne,” the national emblem of France and the official Gallic seal. Bardot’s face appeared on statues, postage stamps and even on coins.
‘’We are mourning a legend,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote Sunday on X.
Bardot’s second career as an animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals; she condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments; and she opposed sending monkeys into space.
“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”
Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest honor.
Later, however, she fell from public grace as her far-right political views sounded racist, as she frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.
She was convicted five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred. Notably, she criticized the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays like Eid al-Adha.
Bardot’s 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d’Ormale, a onetime adviser to former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described the outspoken nationalist as a “lovely, intelligent man.”
In 2012, she caused controversy again when she wrote a letter in support of Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the party — now renamed National Rally — in her failed bid for the French presidency.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical” and “ridiculous” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.
She said she had never been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.”
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist. A shy, secretive child, she studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at age 14.
Bardot once described her childhood as “difficult” and said her father was a strict disciplinarian.
But it was French movie producer Vadim, whom she married in 1952, who saw her potential and wrote “And God Created Woman” to showcase provocative sensuality.
The film, which portrayed Bardot as a bored newlywed who beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.
The film was a box-office hit, and it made Bardot a superstar. Her girlish pout, tiny waist and shape were often more appreciated than her talent.
“It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”
Bardot’s unabashed, off-screen love affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant further shocked the nation. It eradicated the boundaries between her public and private life and turned her into a hot prize for paparazzi.
Bardot never adjusted to the limelight. She blamed the constant press attention for the suicide attempt that followed 10 months after the birth of her only child, Nicolas. Photographers had broken into her house only two weeks before she gave birth to snap a picture of her pregnant.
Nicolas’ father was Jacques Charrier, a handsome French actor whom she married in 1959 but who never felt comfortable in his role as Monsieur Bardot. Bardot soon gave up her son to his father, and later said she had been chronically depressed and unready for the duties of being a mother.
“I was looking for roots then,” she said in an interview. “I had none to offer.”
In her 1996 autobiography “Initiales B.B.,” she likened her pregnancy to “a tumor growing inside me,” and described Charrier as “temperamental and abusive.”
Bardot married her third husband, West German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs, in 1966, but the relationship ended in divorce three years later.
Among her films were “A Parisian” (1957); “In Case of Misfortune,” in which she starred in 1958 with screen legend Jean Gabin; “The Truth” (1960); “Private Life” (1962); “A Ravishing Idiot” (1964); “Shalako” (1968); “Women” (1969); “The Bear and the Doll” (1970); “Rum Boulevard” (1971); and “Don Juan” (1973).
With the exception of 1963’s critically acclaimed “Contempt,” directed by Godard, Bardot’s films were rarely complicated by plots. Often they were vehicles to display Bardot’s curves and legs in scanty dresses or frolicking nude in the sun.
“It was never a great passion of mine,” she said of filmmaking. “And it can be deadly sometimes. Marilyn (Monroe) perished because of it.”
Bardot retired to her Riviera villa in St. Tropez at the age of 39 in 1973 after “The Woman Grabber.”
She emerged a decade later with a new persona: An animal rights lobbyist. She abandoned her jet-set life and sold off movie memorabilia and jewelry to create a foundation devoted to the prevention of animal cruelty.
Her activism knew no borders. She urged South Korea to ban the sale of dog meat and once wrote to U.S. President Bill Clinton asking why the U.S. Navy recaptured two dolphins it had released into the wild.
She attacked centuries-old French and Italian sporting traditions including the Palio, a free-for-all horse race, and campaigned on behalf of wolves, rabbits, kittens and turtle doves.
By the late 1990s, Bardot was making headlines that would lose her many fans. She was convicted and fined five times between 1997 and 2008 for inciting racial hatred in incidents inspired by her anger at Muslim animal slaughtering rituals.
“It’s true that sometimes I get carried away, but when I see how slowly things move forward … and despite all the promises that have been made to me by all different governments put together — my distress takes over,” Bardot told the AP.
In 1997, several towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne — the bare-breasted statue representing the French Republic — after the actress voiced anti-immigrant sentiment. Also that year, she received death threats after calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat.
Environmental campaigner Paul Watson, who was beaten on a seal hunt protest in Canada alongside Bardot in 1977 and campaigned with her for five decades, acknowledged that “many disagreed with Brigitte’s politics or some of her views.”
“Her allegiance was not to the world of humans,” he said. “The animals of this world lost a wonderful friend today.”
Bardot once said that she identified with the animals that she was trying to save.
“I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” Bardot said. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.”
Ganley contributed to this story before her retirement. Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
The meat processing company JBS is closing a packing facility in Riverside and will lay off 374 employees, according to a notice from the California Employment Development Department.
The closure comes as a limited cattle supply has led to record-high beef prices this year.
The Riverside facility, operated by JBS subsidiary Swift Beef Co., prepares meat for sale in U.S. grocery stores but does not slaughter animals, JBS spokesperson Nikki Richardson said.
The affected employees will be given opportunities at other JBS plants, including relocation support, Richardson said. Employees who choose not to relocate will be given a 60-day notice period before their employment ends.
The price of beef has soared in recent months as ranchers have cut their herds due to a drought across pastureland and a parasite known as screwworm, which forced a halt to U.S. imports of Mexican cattle. Last month, meat processing giant Tyson Foods closed one if its largest beef-processing facilities in Nebraska.
JBS said production handled at the Riverside plant will be transferred to other company facilities without interrupting customer supply or service.
The transition is expected to be complete by early next year, the company said.
“JBS is committed to supporting impacted team members through this transition,” Richardson said in a statement. “The company remains focused on delivering high-quality products and dependable service while strengthening its operational footprint to meet evolving market demands.”
The Riverside plant closure is part of a broader company strategy to optimize and simplify its operations. Shares of JBS were down less than 1% in midday trading Monday and have remained flat this year, rising about 2% since January.
The company, which has a U.S. headquarters in Greeley, Colo., also has facilities and offices throughout Europe and Australia.
The landscape is shifting in California’s oil industry as well, with Valero Energy Corp. planning to shut down a major refinery in the state by spring 2026.
Last year, Chevron moved its headquarters from San Ramon, Calif., to Houston, citing challenging business regulations in the Golden State. This year, the last factory that turned sugar beets into sugar in California shut down, leading to the elimination of hundreds of jobs in the Imperial Valley.
According to a Chapman University economic forecast released this month, California’s job growth totaled just 2% from the second quarter of 2022 to the second quarter this year, ranking it 48th among all states.
The state lost jobs consecutively from June to September. Also, next year the state is expected to add 62,000 jobs.
California also experienced a net population outflow of more than 1 million residents from 2021 to 2023, with the top five destinations being states with zero or very low state income taxes: Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and Florida, the report noted.
WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Friday released 19 photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s private email server showing a collection of powerful men in politics, media and Hollywood in the convicted sex offender’s orbit.
The photographs — which were released without information on the timing, location or context of the events portrayed — do not reveal any wrongdoing or show sexual acts but offer more detail about Epstein’s well-known associations with prominent men.
The 19 images selected and released by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are a small slice of more than 95,000 photographs the committee received on Thursday from Epstein’s private estate, Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat in the committee, told reporters on Friday.
Garcia, of Long Beach, added that the release of the images is an exercise in transparency, and said it serves as an example of why Democrats want to keep the pressure on the Trump administration to release its Epstein files ahead of a Dec. 19 deadline mandated by a law passed by Congress in November.
“I think people should be able to make judgments on their own as to what they see in these photos,” Garcia said. “For us this is about transparency.”
Most of the images Democrats released on Friday further illustrate Epstein’s already well-known relationships with prominent men, many of whom have over the years faced questions about their ties to Epstein, who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019.
Some of the photos show Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump advisor, meeting with Epstein at an office; tech billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates standing by what appears to be Epstein’s private jet; former President Clinton with Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell; Epstein with filmmaker Woody Allen on a movie set; and, before he became president, Donald Trump with six unidentified women.
Other images show stand-alone images of sex toys and, in what appears to be an attempt at racy humor, a bowl filled with what a sign identifies as the “Trump condom” — condom packages emblazoned with a caricature of Trump and the words “I’M HUUUGE!”
An image released by a House committee shows former president Bill Clinton, center, with Jeffrey Epstein, right, and Ghislaine Maxwell, second from right.
(House Oversight Committee )
Trump has denied any involvement or knowledge of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations, but thousands of emails released last month have suggested the president may have known more about Epstein’s abuse than he had acknowledged.
Epstein was a convicted sex offender who is believed to have abused more than 200 women and girls. His longtime associate, Maxwell, is serving a 20-year sentence for her role in a sex-trafficking scheme to groom and sexually abuse underage girls with Epstein.
The 95,000 photographs released this week were turned over to the House committee in response to a set of subpoenas issued for records related to Epstein’s estate.
Garcia said Democrats on the panel are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release them to the public in the days and weeks ahead.
“These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world,” Garcia said. “We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all of the files, NOW.”
One of the images released by a House committee shows Stephen K. Bannon, left, with Jeffrey Epstein.
(House Oversight Committee )
Trump had tried to thwart the release of what have become commonly known as the “Epstein files” for several months but reversed course in November under growing pressure from his party.
The president then signed legislation that requires the Department of Justice to release its investigative files related to Epstein by Dec. 19. But his past resistance has led to skepticism among some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who question whether the Justice Department may try to conceal information.
“The real test will be, will the Department of Justice release the files or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said in November. .
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters on Friday that if the Justice Department does not release its files by Dec. 19 it would be considered a crime.
“This is a new law with criminal implications if they don’t follow it,” Massie said.
Massie said he was “encouraged” by the Justice Department’s requests to unseal court records tied to the grand jury investigations into Epstein and Maxwell. Two judges granted the requests this week.
The Kentucky Republican said the Justice Department is required to release more than just the grand jury investigations, but also files that were not released to a grand jury.
“The FBI and DOJ probably have evidence that they chose not to take to the grand jury, because the evidence they are in possession of would implicate other people, not just Epstein or Maxwell,” Massie said. “What we want to see are the facts and evidence that the FBI and DOJ have never given to the grand jury.”
HE IS, CALL THE STANISLAUS COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE. SACRAMENTO POLICE ARRESTED A MAN SUSPECTED OF SCAMMING A WOMAN OUT OF NEARLY $30,000. TODAY, SACRAMENTO POLICE ANNOUNCING THEY ARRESTED 36 YEAR OLD BALWINDER SINGH OF YUBA CITY. HE WAS BOOKED ON FELONY CHARGES. POLICE RELEASING THIS PHOTO OF MONEY. OFFICERS SAY THE SUSPECT HAD. RENEE THOMAS TOLD US IT STARTED WITH AN EMAIL THAT SHE THOUGHT WAS FROM PAYPAL. WE SPOKE WITH HER LAST MONTH, THE SCAMMER TOLD THOMAS HER IDENTITY AND INFORMATION HAD BEEN USED TO OPEN 22. PAYPAL ACCOUNTS AND PROMISED TO HELP AND TOLD HER TO WITHDRAW HER LIFE SAVINGS AND CASH. AND THEN THEY CAME TO HER HOUSE TO TO PICK IT UP. ONLINE SCAMS CAN BE INHERENTLY CHALLENGING. IT’S SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS OVER THE INTERNET, SO NOT NOTHING THAT YOU KNOW THAT IS EASILY TRACKED FACE TO FACE. IN THIS CASE, WE WERE ABLE TO LOCATE THE SUSPECT’S VEHICLE. TECHNOLOGY CAN BE A CHALLENGING POINT FOR THE ELDERLY COMMUNITY, UNDERSTANDABLY. AND SO A LOT OF TIMES THEY DO FALL VICTIM TO THESE INTERNET TYPE OF PHISHING SCAMS. WELL, POLICE SAY THEY ARE HOLDING CASH AS EVIDEN
Sacramento police arrest Yuba City man for alleged $30,000 scam
Sacramento police arrested 36-year-old Balwinder Singh of Yuba City on felony charges, suspecting him of scamming a woman out of her life savings.Last month, KCRA 3 spoke to Rhane Thomas, the victim, who said it started with an email she believed was from PayPal. The accused scammer told Thomas her identity and information had been used to open 22 PayPal accounts, promised to help, and instructed her to withdraw her life savings in cash, which he then collected from her home.Thomas shared her surveillance video with KCRA 3, which captured the moment she walked up to the car and handed over a box she said contained $28,000.Allison Smith, spokesperson with Sacramento Police, said identifying the vehicle was a key part of the investigation. “Online scams can be inherently challenging. It’s something that happens over the Internet,” said Smith. “In this case, we were able to locate this suspect’s vehicle.”Police say the cash is being held as evidence. “We do need all of that information for evidence for future prosecution,” said Smith. “In terms of like the timelines of things of when people are getting their finances back, that’s hard to say.”See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
Sacramento police arrested 36-year-old Balwinder Singh of Yuba City on felony charges, suspecting him of scamming a woman out of her life savings.
Last month, KCRA 3 spoke to Rhane Thomas, the victim, who said it started with an email she believed was from PayPal.
The accused scammer told Thomas her identity and information had been used to open 22 PayPal accounts, promised to help, and instructed her to withdraw her life savings in cash, which he then collected from her home.
Thomas shared her surveillance video with KCRA 3, which captured the moment she walked up to the car and handed over a box she said contained $28,000.
Allison Smith, spokesperson with Sacramento Police, said identifying the vehicle was a key part of the investigation.
“Online scams can be inherently challenging. It’s something that happens over the Internet,” said Smith. “In this case, we were able to locate this suspect’s vehicle.”
Police say the cash is being held as evidence.
“We do need all of that information for evidence for future prosecution,” said Smith. “In terms of like the timelines of things of when people are getting their finances back, that’s hard to say.”
The services of a life-preserving, ego-boosting retinue of intimidating protectors — picture dark glasses, earpiece, stern visage — were cited by more than one Harris associate, past and present, as a factor in her deliberations. These were not Trumpers or Harris haters looking to impugn or embarrass the former vice president.
According to one of those associates, Harris has been accompanied nonstop by an official driver and person with a gun since 2003, when she was elected San Francisco district attorney. One could easily grow accustomed to that level of comfort and status, not to mention the pleasure of never having to personally navigate the 101 or 405 freeways at rush hour.
That is, of course, a perfectly terrible and selfish reason to run for governor, if ever it was a part of Harris’ thinking. To her credit, the reason she chose to not run was a very good one: Harris simply “didn’t feel called” to pursue the job, in the words of one political advisor.
Now, however, the matter of Harris’ personal protection has become a topic of heated discussion and debate, which is hardly surprising in an age when everything has become politicized, including “and” and “the.”
There is plenty of bad faith to go around.
Last month, President Trump abruptly revoked Harris’ Secret Service protection. The security arrangement for vice presidents typically lasts for six months after they leave office, allowing them to quietly fade into ever greater obscurity. But before vacating the White House, President Biden signed an executive order extending protection for Harris for an additional year. (Former presidents are guarded by Secret Service details for life.)
As the first female, first Black and first Asian American vice president, Harris faced, as they say in the protective-service business, an elevated threat level while serving in the post. In the 230-odd days since Harris left office, there is no reason to believe racism and misogyny, not to mention wild-eyed partisan hatred, have suddenly abated in this great land of ours.
The president could have been gracious and extended Harris’ protection. But expecting grace out of Trump is like counting on a starving Doberman to show restraint when presented a bloody T-bone steak.
“This is another act of revenge following a long list of political retaliation in the form of firings, the revoking of security clearances and more,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass angrily declared.
True.
Though Bass omitted the bit about six months being standard operating procedure, which would have at least offered some context. It wasn’t as though Harris was being treated differently than past vice presidents.
Gov. Gavin Newsom quickly stepped into the breach, providing Harris protection by the California Highway Patrol. Soon after, The Times’ Richard Winton broke the news that Los Angeles Police Department officers meant to be fighting crime in hard-hit areas of the city were instead providing security for Harris as a supplement to the CHP.
Not a great look. Or the best use of police resources.
All well and good, until the conservative-leaning Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union representing rank-and-file officers, saw fit to issue a gratuitously snarky statement condemning the hasty arrangement. Its board of directors described Harris as “a failed presidential candidate who also happens to be a multi-millionaire, with multiple homes … who can easily afford to pay for her own security.”
One person in the private-security business told Winton that a certain household name pays him $1,000 a day for a 12-hour shift. That can quickly add up and put a noticeable dent in your back account, assuming your name isn’t Elon or Taylor or Zuckerberg or Bezos.
Setting aside partisanship — if that’s still possible — and speaking bluntly, there’s something to be said for ensuring Harris doesn’t die a violent death at the hands of some crazed assailant.
The CHP’s Dignitary Protection Section is charged with protecting all eight of California’s constitutional officers — we’re talking folks such as the insurance commissioner and state controller — as well as the first lady and other elected officials, as warranted. The statutory authority also extends to former constitutional officers, which would include Harris, who served six years as state attorney general.
Surely there’s room in California’s $321-billion budget to make sure nothing terrible happens to one of the state’s most prominent and credentialed citizens. It doesn’t have to be an open-ended, lifetime commitment to Harris’ protection, but an arrangement that could be periodically reviewed, as time passes and potential danger wanes.
Serving in elected office can be rough, especially in these incendiary times. The price shouldn’t include having to spend the rest of your life looking nervously over your shoulder.
Or draining your life savings, so you don’t have to.
Mayor Karen Bass has vetoed a proposed ballot measure to rework the disciplinary process at the Los Angeles Police Department — a step that could result in its removal from the Nov. 5 ballot.
In her veto letter to the City Council, Bass said the proposal, which would have allowed the police chief to fire officers accused of committing serious misconduct, “risks creating bureaucratic confusion” within the LAPD.
Bass said the proposal, which also would have reworked the composition of the department’s three-member disciplinary panels, provided “ambiguous direction” and “gaps in guidance.”
“I look forward to working with each of you to do a thorough and comprehensive review with officers, the department, and other stakeholders to ensure fairness for all,” she wrote. “The current system remains until this collaborative review is complete and can be placed before the voters.”
Bass issued her veto during the council’s summer recess, when meetings are canceled for three weeks. The deadline for reworking the language of the ballot proposal has already passed, City Clerk Holly Wolcott said.
“If the council does not override the veto or take any action, the measure will be pulled from the ballot,” Wolcott said in an email.
The council’s next meeting is scheduled for July 30. Whether it can muster 10 votes to override the mayor’s veto is unclear.
By issuing the veto, Bass effectively sided with top LAPD brass, who warned last month that the proposal would create a two-tier disciplinary system, with some offenses resulting in termination by the chief and others heading to a disciplinary panel known as a Board of Rights.
The mayor’s appointees on the Board of Police Commissioners also criticized the ballot proposal, saying they felt excluded from the deliberations. At least one commissioner voiced concern about the proposal’s creation of a binding arbitration process to resolve cases where an officer files an appeal of his or her termination.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez expressed similar worries, arguing that binding arbitration would lead to more lenient outcomes for officers accused of serious wrongdoing. Soto-Martínez, who voted against the proposal last month, had also argued that the range of offenses that would lead to termination by the police chief was too narrow.
An aide to Soto-Martínez said Tuesday that his boss supports the veto.
Councilmember Tim McOsker, who spearheaded the ballot proposal, said he is “deeply disappointed” with the mayor’s action, arguing that it threatens the most significant reform of the LAPD’s disciplinary system in more than two decades.
If the council fails to override the veto, the next opportunity for major reform would not occur until the 2026 election, McOsker said.
“What this veto would do is put us back in the status quo for at least two years,” he said in an interview.
McOsker said he is still looking at the options for responding to the mayor’s veto. During the council’s deliberations last month, four council members — Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, Eunisses Hernandez and Curren Price — backed a proposal to seek additional changes to the ballot measure.
Soto-Martínez took aim at the decision to let a police chief fire officers for some offenses but not others, saying it would create “ambiguity” in the disciplinary system.
That proposal was defeated on a 9 to 4 vote. Had it passed, it would have effectively killed the ballot measure for this year’s election, since the deadline had passed for making extensive changes.
The proposal vetoed by Bass had been billed as a way to undo some of changes brought by Charter Amendment C, a ballot measure approved by voters in 2017, which paved the way for all-civilian disciplinary panels at the LAPD.
The ballot proposal would have reworked the system, ensuring that each panel would have have two civilian members and one commanding officer.
Representatives of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents about 8,800 rank-and-file officers, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last month, the union issued a statement saying the ballot proposal struck “the right balance” on disciplinary issues, ensuring that officers who are terminated by a chief have access to an appeal process with binding arbitration.
Ippei Mizuhara, the former interpreter for Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, has agreed to plead guilty in federal court to stealing millions of dollars from Ohtani to cover gambling debts, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The 39-year-old Japanese-language interpreter has reached a plea deal for one count each of bank fraud and subscribing to a federal tax return, the Justice Department said. Mizuhara faces up to 33 years in federal prison for the two crimes, which authorities allege he committed as part of a scheme to surreptitiously steal more than $17 million from Ohtani to pay off an Orange County bookmaker.
The blockbuster March revelation that the Dodgers had fired Mizuhara amid an investigation into claims he had stolen Ohtani’s money and gambled on sports shocked the baseball world. Last month, federal authorities cleared Ohtani of wrongdoing in connection with the scheme, quieting widespread speculation about the potential fallout of the scandal for his baseball career and potential criminal charges.
Mizuhara has not yet formally entered a plea, according to Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the DOJ. McEvoy said Wednesday he expects Mizuhara to “plead guilty in the coming weeks.”
“The extent of this defendant’s deception and theft is massive,” U.S. Atty. Martin Estrada said in a news release. “He took advantage of his position of trust to take advantage of Mr. Ohtani and fuel a dangerous gambling habit. My office is committed to vindicating victims throughout our community and ensuring that wrongdoers face justice.”
Scores of emaciated brown pelicans, too weak to fly, have been found on Southern California beaches in the last month and taken to an Orange County rescue center, according to its director.
“We’re getting dozens of calls,” Debbie McGuire, executive director of the Wetlands and Wildlife Care Center in Huntington Beach, said on Saturday. “People are finding them in parking lots and their backyards.”
The rescued pelicans, she said, “are coming in at half their body weight. They are also very anemic.”
So far, she said, it’s unclear why the pelicans, which feed on anchovies, sardines and mackerel, are suffering from malnutrition.
McGuire said that she contacted scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week, who told her that there was “plenty of bait out there” for the birds to feed on.
“We don’t know the cause,” she said. “They are just all starving.”
Overwhelmed by the number of ailing birds, the wildlife center has been erecting pup tents to use as pens, she said.
In the last month, the center has taken in 89 brown pelicans, many of them quickly dying, McGuire said. More than 30 have survived, she said, as the center warmed them under heat lamps and gave them fluids.
She said the center sent tissue samples from the birds to labs for testing.
A similar spike in the stranding of brown pelicans up and down the California coast occurred in the spring of 2022. The cause has not been found.
The California brown pelican was listed as an endangered species decades ago after the spread of the chemical DDT caused the shells of their eggs to thin. The eggs became so fragile that nesting mothers crushed them.
After DDT was banned, the pelicans increased in number. The birds were removed from the endangered species list in 2009.
Wildlife officials say that anyone finding an ailing pelican should not touch or try to feed them. They urge people to instead call their local wildlife rehabilitation facilities. The Orange County center can be reached at (714) 374-5587.
It’s January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes.
In response, the Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona mobilize National Guard units, ordering them to disperse the paramilitaries. But these groups, having been deputized by the president, are recognized under Articles I and II of the Constitution as legal militias. The commander of the New Mexico National Guard refuses orders from the governor, saying that migrants pose the true threat, not patriotic Americans defending their homes. The governor summarily relieves him of command. On his way out the door, the general pledges to “continue to follow the lawful commands of POTUS.”
Last month, at one site in Washington, D.C., and another in Palo Alto, California, the advocacy group Veterans for Responsible Leadership hosted Constitutional Thresholds, a war game “designed to address the potential extra-constitutional actions of a second Trump presidential term.” The events described above were part of their scenario, an extrapolation based on statements from key Trump advisers. The game’s participants, a mix of former government officials, retired military officers, political operatives, and leaders of veterans’ organizations, were divided into a red pro-Trump cell and an anti-Trump blue cell. “As veterans, we are people who can uniquely communicate to the American public how important the Constitution is, because we took an oath to defend it,” Amy McGrath, a former Marine Corps pilot and a Democratic candidate for Senate in Kentucky who was one of the event’s organizers, told participants before it began. “That oath doesn’t go away just because you took off this uniform.”
I would think about this injunction repeatedly over the course of the war game, which I attended in D.C. The organizers were sincere in their concerns about a second Trump administration, and earnest in their desire to prepare for the potential challenges. But I still wondered about certain of their assumptions—about the ways veterans on the left and the right assert moral authority in our society, the ways the organizers’ political opponents might behave, and the ends to which each side might go to preserve their vision of our democracy. Perhaps most of all, I wondered whether any of them had paused to consider how these war games might look to those who do not share their assumptions.
The war game started with some minor confusion. The red and blue cells were decamping to their respective conference rooms, but William Enyart, a former member of Congress and retired major general in the Illinois National Guard, didn’t know where to go. He was assigned to play the role of adjutant general of the New Mexico National Guard. Although his character worked for the Democratic governor, the scenario cast him as sympathetic to the Trump administration. He wasn’t sure whether to head for the red or the blue conference room. He would, as the game progressed, wind up shuttling between the two, dramatizing the divided loyalties that were a theme of the day.
With the players settled into their respective war rooms, the scenario began with a social-media post from the governor of Texas:
For too long, we Texans have paid the price as Democrat governors and a Democrat president failed to protect our borders. The American people voted out a weak president and replaced him with one who will enforce our laws, and who is now delivering justice on behalf of the people of Arizona and New Mexico. We stand with them and President Trump’s plan to end the open-border regime of the past.
Donald Trump, somewhat improbably played by the Never-Trump conservative Bill Kristol, posted his own brief statement of support on social media: “Help is on the way.” In addition to sending National Guard units, the president deputized members of two right-wing groups. Soon, the video of these groups killing the migrant family was introduced into the scenario.
The scenario reached an inflection point for the blue cell when Enyart, as commander of the New Mexico National Guard, refused to disperse the federally deputized militias. Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state playing the role of New Mexico’s governor, pulled Enyart into a separate conference room to confront him. “I took a dual oath, one to the State of New Mexico and one to the Constitution,” Enyart told Boockvar. “I am obligated to follow the Constitution first and foremost. It is my duty to disregard any unconstitutional orders that I’m given. With all due respect, governor, I will obey your directions so long as they’re within the parameters of the Constitution.”
He began debating Articles I and II, and their authorities for use of militias, with Boockvar and a man playing the role of her counsel. They also began to debate which was the larger threat, the crisis at the border or the militias who’d ostensibly arrived to secure it. Boockvar summarily relieved Enyart of his command, and her counsel told him not to communicate with any of his subordinate commanders or key leaders within the New Mexico National Guard if he “wanted to remain on the right side of history.”
Events in the red-cell war room, meanwhile, were moving briskly along. The White House seized on reports of tuberculosis to reinstate Title 42, the COVID-era provision that secured the border. In coordination with the speaker of the House, the president was planning a joint address to Congress that evening in which he’d update the American people on the situation. At that address, the president also planned to pardon those convicted after January 6. There was some internal White House debate as to whether Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, should be present at the Capitol for the mass pardoning. The consensus, however, was that he should instead be flown down to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to galvanize the militias.
The situation at the border was deteriorating rapidly. In the last hour of the war game, the governors of New Mexico and Arizona ordered law enforcement to detain militia members. The Texas governor and Tucker Carlson hosted a mass militia-deputization ceremony next to the border crossing in El Paso. One of the right-wing groups warned that it might escalate; a left-wing veterans group responded by asking the Defense Department to remind veterans and National Guard members of their duty. Then, in the final minutes of the game, a shootout in El Paso left 14 members of a right-wing paramilitary group dead. This seemed to be the final provocation, the crescendo for which the entire scenario had been constructed, delivering the excuse Trump needed to invoke the Insurrection Act. Kristol demurred.
“Trump can be canny when his future is on the line,” Kristol said later. “He’s got a sense that there’s things he could do that would go too far, that would lose him the support he really cares about. He’s a very effective demagogue.” Kristol believed that Trump might ultimately hang back in such a scenario, allowing the governors to carry the burden of securing their states. Given Trump’s history of shifting responsibility for his mistakes onto subordinates, Kristol’s assessment certainly didn’t seem far off.
After the game, the participants gathered to debrief. They were struck by the speed at which events had unfolded. Some believed that the courts would, in reality, have slowed things down, serving as a check on executive power, while others were equally certain a second Trump administration would blow past the judiciary. “In the second term, there will be no grown-ups in the room. No one in that room will even have a moment mentally where they say, ‘This is against the law, Mr. President. We can’t do it,’” said Rick Wilson, a political operative and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, who’d played the White House chief of staff. “They’ll say, ‘This is against the law, Mr. President. How do we do it?’”
Kristol wasn’t so sure. “There’s lots of ways to slow this down,” he said. “Trump can’t replace everyone on January 20.” He suggested that if Trump wins, the Biden administration can spend the months before his inauguration preparing for the challenge, and outside groups can ready legal challenges to the things he’s promising to do.
Participants lamented that the left was too often caught flat-footed by the right, and started exploring ideas about how best to prepare. Some floated the idea of forming “a parallel government” or “government in exile” or “shadow government” focused on countering Trump’s administrative actions. Will Attig, one of the few participants with a background in organized labor, noted that a third of airline pilots are veterans. What if those pilots organized a boycott and decided that they wouldn’t fly into red states? At times, the participants spoke of veterans as a cohesive group, one that the left could corral. Yet veterans are divided politically, just like the rest of Americans—and a majority of veterans supported Trump in the 2020 election. No one seemed to consider that political action designed to appeal to veterans on one end of the political spectrum would inevitably invite a response from veterans on the other side.
Veterans played a leading role in the day’s events. Most of the game’s key organizers were veterans. And although many participants were not, the veterans are the ones who argued most stridently that constitutional norms would do little to stymie Trump, and that veterans should help lead efforts to organize against a second Trump administration. Perhaps that’s because those who have experienced war—particularly the brutal insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan—need less convincing of civilization’s inherent fragility.
Veterans have played a vital role in our civic life. A disproportionate number of veterans held elected office after the Second World War, the last era in which our politics was functional. Their shared experience helped ward off the endemic hyper-partisanship we suffer today. If you’ve fought a war together, you’re less likely to fight a war among yourselves.
The idea that veterans should play a central role in resisting any constitutional overreach from Trump seemed to rely on the argument that the oath we swore to “support and defend the Constitution” extends to civilian life. But this neglects a far less frequently referenced, but equally essential, portion of the oath of office, which concludes with a commitment to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.” When you take off your uniform, the term of your oath ends. When veterans assume an active role in civic life, they do so as civilians, not as extrajudicial defenders of the Constitution.
The far-right has long urged veterans to remember their oaths. Does the left want to travel further down that same road? Imagine if the Heritage Foundation, or any other right-wing advocacy group, hosted a set of veteran-led war games based around countering the sort of extra-constitutional violations that some conservatives already allege that President Joe Biden is indulging: Biden has stolen the election through mail-in ballots; Biden has abandoned his obligation to seal the border. It’s not hard to anticipate the denunciations that would flood in from the left. In such exercises, the scenarios reveal as much about the participants and how they imagine their adversaries as they reveal about those adversaries themselves.
The war game I witnessed built to the question of whether the president would invoke the Insurrection Act. The organizers approached the federalization of the National Guard as an unconscionable act that would grant President Trump dangerous powers. A previous war game, organized by many of the same participants and turned into the documentary War Game, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, also featured the invocation of the Insurrection Act as the scenario’s climax. In the documentary, the scenario was built around a repeat of January 6, and centered on the question of whether the Democratic president would evoke the Insurrection Act to contain protesters at the Capitol, deploying the military to contain the protests with force. He did not.
And yet, many presidents have made a different choice. Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, and Reagan all invoked the Insurrection Act at least once during their administrations. Kennedy and Johnson each invoked it three times, Kennedy twice to federalize the Alabama National Guard when the governor refused to integrate schools. The Insurrection Act was last invoked 32 years ago, in 1992, by President George H. W. Bush during the Los Angeles riots. Whether you identify as a Democrat or a Republican, a president of your own party has invoked the act within living memory of many of your fellow citizens. The problem, it seems, is not invoking the act, but the fact that Trump might be the one who has the power to invoke it. Follow that logic. Trump would reclaim that power only if he wins the election. And if he wins the election, it will be because enough Americans choose to give him their vote.
This is where the logic of war games begins to break down in a democracy. Unless you believe a constitution that can deliver a Trump presidency is not worth upholding, you must accept a president’s legal use of his executive authority. Is it possible that war games in American politics are, at least in this moment, less about countering illegal actions and more about planning to undermine opposing administrations? If war games like the one I watched become a political norm, will that be healthy for our democracy?
During the debrief, Kristofer Goldsmith touched on the role of the courts. Goldsmith is an Iraq War veteran who now works for an organization called Task Force Butler, focused on countering right-wing extremist groups. “I know gameplay for this type of scenario can feel very fast,” he said. “I just want to emphasize that this is the way things can develop on the ground, and there will not be time for the courts to intervene. The distance between deputizing an extremist organization and 14 people getting killed on the ground is minutes, and there’s no way to actually do a filing or to get a response from a judge.”
I walked away from the war game wondering whether the participants were cognizant of how their actions might be perceived not only by those on the right, but also by those who don’t entirely share their views. If some on the left don’t believe that courts or systemic checks will be able to halt the extra-constitutional actions of a second Trump administration—or even its legal ones—does it follow that the opposition should abandon constitutional norms and establish “shadow governments” and resistance cells to check executive authority? Many of the war game’s participants seemed to think so.
If the divide between the left and the right in America has become so wide that neither can conceive of the other wielding power legitimately, then perhaps the war game I observed wasn’t a game at all.
Donald Trump has long detested Barack Obama and sought to present himself as the opposite of his presidential predecessor in every way. But in his takeover of the Republican National Committee, he risks echoing one of Obama’s biggest political mistakes.
Last night, Trump’s handpicked leadership of the RNC took charge and conducted a purge. The new regime, led by the new chair, Michael Whatley; the vice chair, Lara Trump; and the chief of staff, Chris LaCivita, fired about 60 employees—about a quarter of the staff—as part of “streamlining.” The “bloodbath” includes members of the communications, data, and political departments. Insiders told Politico they anticipate that existing contracts with vendors will be voided.
When the new leaders were announced last month, I suggested that the GOP was ceasing to function as a political party, and becoming another subsidiary of Trump Inc. But there is another way to view it. For years now, the RNC has struggled. Republicans might have lost the 2016 presidential election if not for the emergence of Trump, who shook up the party’s longtime platform and forged a new coalition, turning out voters no other recent candidate had. Since then, however, Republicans have continued to lag, even with Trump juicing turnout. Republicans got slammed in the 2018 midterms, lost the 2020 presidential race, and missed expectations in 2022. Special elections have been a Democratic playground. The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves.
From this perspective, it’s about time that Trump took charge and cleared out the deadwood. Allies such as Charlie Kirk and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene were jubilant at the overhaul. Although Trump’s appointments of his daughter-in-law and a top campaign aide are unusual, nominees typically take over the campaign apparatus ahead of a presidential election, the better to align aims.
Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly rejected a proposal by an old-line member to prevent that.
Let’s take the best-case scenario for Republicans, though. In the past, the RNC seemed like the professionals compared with the chaotic, amateurish Trump campaigns of 2016 and 2020. (There’s a reason Trump resorted to appointing RNC Chair Reince Priebus as his first White House chief of staff, despite Priebus representing the establishment Trump hated.) This year, however, the Trump campaign has seemed organized and disciplined, and LaCivita is reportedly a big part of that. National committees tend to be bloated and old-fashioned. A more focused, streamlined operation could fix what ails the GOP.
The problem is that Trump sees his own success and the success of the Republican Party as bound up together. But some things that are good for Trump are not good for the Republican Party over the long run. This is where Obama offers a cautionary tale.
When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.
The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that some Democrats blamed on the national party. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.
The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).
Democrats, including Obama, suffered for their missteps. As the Obamacare experience shows, it’s harder to push a policy agenda when you lose elections. Losing control of the Senate makes it difficult to confirm judges, especially to crucial spots such as the Supreme Court—just ask Justice Merrick Garland. And implementing policy is challenging if governors and state Houses are working against you.
An excessive focus on presidential races is also the danger of Trump’s RNC takeover. He and his aides have announced that, like Obama, they see the party committee as basically an instrument for the presidential election. “Our mission is straightforward: maximize the Republican Party’s resources to get President Trump elected,” LaCivita told The New York Times last month. Echoing Obama’s Chicago move, the RNC is reportedly already moving most of its operations to Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters. All of this makes sense. Trump is a narcissist who can’t and won’t separate his self-interest from the party’s or the nation’s.
Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently ousted amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates mostly ran ahead of Trump.
And even if Trump’s theory of the RNC works out in 2024, what happens next? Trump will not always be the president or the nominee. Someday, Republicans will need to choose a new leader, and they may be left with only a shell of a party committee, gutted and stretched to be part of Trump’s personal election apparatus. It’s a hard and long road to rebuilding from there. Just ask a Democrat.
Former Los Angeles County Probation Department chief Adolfo Gonzales, who was fired last March amid widepread dysfunction at the agency’s juvenile halls, alleges in a lawsuit that he was ousted for reporting dire staffing shortages to state regulators.
Gonzales’ two-year, one-month tenure was marked by near-constant controversies. But in a lawsuit filed last month, he argued that county supervisors decided to terminate him only after he was frank with inspectors from the Board of State and Community Corrections about the agency’s staffing crisis.
The board, referred to as the BSCC, has the power to shut down juvenile detention facilities if inspections reveal that conditions aren’t up to state standards.
“Gonzales candidly reported to the BSCC inspectors the staffing shortages in Probation Department which caused lack of compliance with various California State regulations and mandates,” the lawsuit says. “As a result of Gonzales’ reports to BSCC, he was terminated by the County.”
The state board declined to comment. Mira Hashmall, outside counsel for L.A. County, called the lawsuit baseless.
“The Probation Department suffered from a lack of leadership under Adolfo Gonzales, which is why his employment was terminated,” she wrote in a statement to The Times. “He is no whistleblower.”
Under Gonzales’ leadership, the perennially struggling agency careened from one problem to the next. There were more lockdowns, more fights and fewer staff members to deal with them. Deputies said they were too scared of the violence inside the juvenile halls to come to work. Youths were traumatized too, forced to urinate in their locked rooms because no one was around to let them out.
Gonzales’ attorney, Michael Conger, said his client’s account of staffing issues heavily influenced a Jan. 13, 2023, report from state inspectors, which found, among other shortcomings, that the county’s two juvenile halls were dangerously short-staffed. Months later, the board would shut down the two halls after the county repeatedly failed to improve conditions.
Conger said it was Gonzales’ “candid” portrayal of staffing problems that led to his termination two months later.
The state inspection was not the only embarrassment Gonzales’ agency suffered in the months leading up to his firing, however. On Feb. 11, 2023, The Times reported that Gonzales overrode an internal disciplinary board’s recommendation to fire an officer who had violently restrained a 17-year-old. After The Times’ report, a majority of the Board of Supervisors called for Gonzales’ resignation.
Gonzales’ attorney said this was not what earned the board’s ire.
“We don’t believe that had anything to do with it,” he said. “That was a complete non-issue. They were not mad at that.”
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Records show the county spent more than $900,000 on Gonzales during his stint with the department.
By the time he left, Gonzales had received $927,000 in compensation, according to county salary data. It’s unclear if that figure includes other perks Gonzales was entitled to under his employment agreement with the county, which promised relocation costs and severance pay.
According to his employment agreement, reviewed by The Times, Gonzales was entitled to up to $25,000 to relocate from San Diego, where he worked for five years running the county’s Probation Department.
Records show he also received $172,521 — equivalent to six months’ salary — as severance pay after he was fired.
The board replaced Gonzales with Guillermo Viera Rosa, promising a new chapter for the long-troubled agency. But so far, his tenure has been plagued by the same staffing crisis that haunted his predecessor.
A report released Thursday from the county’s Office of Inspector General found that “dangerously low staffing levels” had contributed to the chaotic Nov. 4 escape of a youth from Los Padrinos juvenile hall. After several teens attacked a staff member, one briefly escaped to a neighboring golf course.
At the time of the incident, only one staff member — who had never before been assigned to juvenile halls — had been in the unit with 14 youths, the report’s authors found. The report notes the staffing level violates state law, which requires the agency maintain a ratio of one staff member for 10 youths.
That day, the Probation Department had scheduled 100 staff members to work at the facility — the minimum required in order to operate.
For three decades, Jamie Nelson has considered Ojai her personal paradise. It’s where she raised her children and cherishes the springtime, when the air smells like jasmine and orange blossoms.
“Lots of times, I’ve said, ‘God, I think Heaven probably smells like this,’” Nelson said of this artsy tourist town of 7,500 people.
Now, Nelson, a 74-year-old grandmother who has heart problems and bad knees and leans heavily on a cane, is homeless. She lives in a tent outside the historic Ojai City Hall, where a growing encampment filled with older people has vexed a community known for spiritual retreats, chakra-aligning crystals and organic farms.
“I was scared to death of coming here,” said Nelson, who moved to City Hall in November. “I was so afraid, because I’m older. And I got here and the people are just — they’re very precious. They are very good and very intelligent, and just had things happen.”
Thirty people live on the wooded eight-acre campus. Half are older than 55, and eight are older than 65. And — despite some locals’ assertions that they are refugees from bigger cities like Ventura and Santa Barbara — most are longtime Ojai residents, said Rick Raine, the city’s new homeless services coordinator.
“They say, ‘You’re bringing in people!’ No, people have always been here,” said Raine, who was Nelson’s neighbor years ago.
Rick Raine, Ojai’s homeless services coordinator, created a community room at the City Hall encampment where residents can find fresh coffee and conversation.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
The affordable housing shortage is nothing new in Ojai, but the issue received increased attention last year after a septuagenarian member of the City Council was priced out of her rented house, declared herself homeless and was investigated by a grand jury for no longer living within her council district.
In this 4.4-square-mile city, homelessness used to be more spread out, with people sleeping in their cars or bundled in blankets in the open-air shopping arcade. Now, the crisis is harder to ignore because it is concentrated at the City Hall encampment, which has become a flashpoint as the city pours money and resources into making the setup more livable.
Local politicians and law enforcement officials say they cannot move the encampment because of decisions by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Ojai has no dedicated homeless shelter, and — in cases from Boise, Idaho, and Grants Pass, Ore. — the court determined it was unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment for cities to criminalize camping in public spaces when there are not enough shelter beds.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last month to review the lower court’s decision in the Oregon case and to decide whether cities can enforce camping bans. A ruling is expected this summer.
Melissa Balding is among the homeless residents at Ojai’s City Hall encampment who are trying to keep the property tidy.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
For now, the lower court rulings “really bind us with what we can do,” Ojai Police Chief Trina Newman said. Officers, she said, have responded to reports of theft, loud music, drinking and homeless people trespassing on neighbors’ property.
“We have individuals that have their share of difficulties: Addiction. Mental health problems. When you get a certain amount of people in a small area, there’s going to be problems,” she said.
“But our hands are tied.”
William Holden has encouraged homeless people in Ojai to shelter at the City Hall encampment. “It’s not a new problem,” he says of homelessness. “It’s just been moved to where you can see it.”
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Ojai’s City Hall is an architectural gem and point of local pride. Originally a family home, later gifted to the city, it was built in 1907 as a Craftsman-style house and later remodeled to fit in with the Mission Revival architecture that Ojai became known for.
Today, scores of tents spread out just beyond the building’s stately arches and wide patios. Many of the campers try to keep the property tidy, picking up trash and cutting the grass with a manual push mower. Some keep tchotchkes — small statues, faux flowers — outside their tents to make the place feel more homey.
Over the last year, the number of people living at the encampment exploded, from about five people to 30.
At a City Council meeting in September, William Holden, a resident of Ojai for 23 years, pushed his elderly chihuahua, Fievel Mouskawitz, in a pink stroller up to the microphone.
“I did this,” Holden, 61, said of the encampment, where he now lives.
“I invited these people who were sleeping in their cars, these people that were under the bridge, to come back here, because I’ve heard the police are not making us move like they do when you’re in an unregistered motor vehicle or sleeping where you’re not supposed to be sleeping.”
“It’s not a new problem,” he added. “It’s just been moved to where you can see it.”
City officials confirmed that word of mouth helped grow the camp, which sits on environmentally sensitive oak woodland grounds that slope down to a creek. The ground is soft, muddy and, in some portions, at risk of a landslide if it gets too saturated, Raine said.
This fall, the City Council allocated $200,000 to deal with the crisis, and Raine was hired to be the city’s first homeless services coordinator. He opened a break room at the encampment where he brews a fresh pot of Folgers coffee every morning. He keeps blankets, coats, boots and extra food on hand — for the people and their pets.
The city added portable toilets, and, in late January, Raine and a slew of volunteers built eight sturdy wilderness tents in the parking lot, off the muddy ground. Raine said he chose eight of the older, more vulnerable campers — including Nelson — for the 8-by-10-foot tents, each of which sits on a fire-treated platform and includes a storage shed.
Four more tents will go up in the coming weeks.
Homeless services coordinator Rick Raine is working with volunteers to erect wilderness tents to shelter the most vulnerable campers in Ojai’s sanctioned homeless camp.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Overall, the town has been supportive of the city’s efforts, said Mayor Betsy Stix. “We’re a loving, caring community, and I think that — it’s so personal,” she said, adding that some municipal employees have a high school classmate living at the camp.
Last month, the city applied for $12.4 million in state grant funding to build tiny homes and provide case management and security. City leaders have promised to relocate the encampment once the money and expansion plans are in place.
But furious neighbors don’t believe them.
“We understand that city staff has stated that the neighbors are fully on board with this plan. That could not be further from the truth,” read a letter sent last month to the City Council and city manager that was signed by 47 people who live near City Hall.
One neighbor, a 73-year-old woman who has owned her house for 39 years, told The Times that the city made no effort to talk to nearby residents.
The woman, who did not give her name because she feared being harassed by people in the encampment, said she worried about fires, with people cooking under the trees and some using propane heaters in their tents. She said she also worried about vulnerable senior citizens living among other campers “who are real bullies.”
Jerry O’Dell returns to his tent, right, at a homeless encampment at Ojai’s City Hall.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Another neighbor — a 43-year-old single mother of three who also declined to give her name — said a man from the camp lunged at her 12-year-old daughter as she rode a skateboard and that her children “do not feel safe.”
“We feel like our neighborhood has been taken over,” she said. “It’s completely changed the vibe here. There’s a port-a-potty right on the corner that doesn’t give the homeless people any privacy. It doesn’t feel like a compassionate solution for them or for us.”
During Ventura County’s point-in-time census in January 2023, Ojai recorded 44 unhoused people. That’s a 42% increase from five years prior — but a steep decline from the 82 people counted in 2007, when the annual survey began. In all of Ventura County last year, there were 2,441 homeless people, the highest number since the count began.
The sharp rise, as in so many places in California, has coincided with skyrocketing housing costs.
The average home price in Ventura County was $834,180 in December 2023, up 38% from December 2018, according to Zillow. The median rent was $2,373 in December 2023, up nearly 23% from 2018, according to data from the real estate firm Apartment List.
In Ojai, the housing shortage has been compounded by strict slow-growth laws, which — along with a ban on chain stores — were intended to maintain the small-town charm. Before an apartment complex opened in 2019, the city had gone for more than a decade without building any multifamily housing.
In December, the City Council approved a 50-unit development that will be Ojai’s first entirely affordable housing project in 30 years. This month, the council tightened a ban on short-term vacation rentals, arguing they are driving up housing costs.
“We natives have worked and volunteered hundreds of hours to keep our town small,” said Councilwoman Suza Francina, a yoga teacher who has lived in Ojai for 67 years. “The irony is that now we’re so desirable and internationally known that people want to invest. The new wave of people, they come here and can afford second and even third homes.”
Longtime residents, she said, are being priced out — including herself.
Ojai City Councilwoman Suza Francina, second from right, nearly lost her seat last year after she was priced out of her rental housing and temporarily moved into a garage room at a friend’s home outside her district.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
In late 2021, Francina, 74, lost the two-bedroom house she had leased for eight years when an investor purchased it, she said. Francina had been paying $1,650 a monthin rent. She later saw it listed for $4,000 a month.
Francina, a former mayor, had spent more than a decade on the City Council. To keep her seat, she had to stay within her district, a roughly two-square-mile portion of south Ojai.
Francina could not find an affordable rental that would accept her two small dogs, Benny and Honey. While she searched, she moved, rent-free, into a small room with no kitchen above a friend’s garage that was in Ojai but not in her district. Francina put most of her belongings in storage and said she was homeless, arguing that people who are couch-surfing fit the description.
She was investigated by the Ventura County Grand Jury, which, in a report last May, said her seat was legally vacant since she did not find housing in her district within 30 days. But she was not removed from office.
Late last summer, Francina rented a bedroom in a house in her district for $950 a month plus utilities, along with a $300-per-month storage unit. The situation, she said, “broadened my whole perspective on how hard it is if you don’t have a home base, and how quickly it affects your mental health, how you can go downhill very quickly.”
Kristen Wingate, who grew up in Ojai, became homeless while recovering from a neck surgery.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Kristen Wingate, who was born in Ojai and has spent most of her life here, also lost her rental house. But unlike Francina, she wound up in the City Hall encampment.
Wingate, 52, has degenerative disc disease. Two years ago, after a neck fusion surgery, she went on state disability. But the money ran out after a year, she said, and she was not medically cleared to go back to her job at a local hardware store. She said her application to receive Social Security disability benefits was denied, a decision she is appealing.
While she was recovering, she said, the owner of her rental house, which was split into three units, sold it. Tenants had to leave.
Wingate lived in her Toyota Camry for a while and, in August, moved into a tent at City Hall with Roscoe, her 50-pound pug and Boston terrier mix. The size of the camp broke her heart, she said, and “everything is just too expensive here” in this town she grew up in. A friend she has known since she was 6 also lives at the encampment.
Kristen Wingate tends to her dog, Roscoe, outside her tent in Ojai.
(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)
Wingate’s brown tent sits near a wooden gazebo with chipped white paint. Her sister got married there decades ago. Now, there are tents on either side.
Nelson lives nearby in one of the new white tents, beneath an enormous eucalyptus tree, with her 3-year-old chihuahua mix, Mae Mae.
Bespectacled, with shoulder-length gray hair and a quick laugh, Nelson said she lost her husband to pancreatic cancer six years ago. She ran out of money, moved out of her house, then out of a hotel. She moved to City Hall just before Thanksgiving.
She is stoic, a trait from her south Texas upbringing. Asked if the last few years had been tough, she downplayed her situation: “A little tough, yeah. But the people here always made it better. And being in Ojai just made it all better.”
She hopes the city is able to build tiny homes for people in the encampment. For now, she waits.
On a recent Tuesday night, at a City Council meeting inside City Hall, a discussion about giving grant money to local artists dragged on for more than an hour. Then protesters — including one soaked in faux blood who collapsed and performed the motions of dying — called for a cease-fire in Gaza, half a world away.
Just outside, temperatures dipped into the 40s. In her tent, Nelson piled on blankets, held her dog close and went to sleep.
Times staff writer Andrew Khouri contributed to this report.
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Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, officially endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection two Saturdays ago. The news landed as an afterthought, which is probably how she intended it. “Today at the @WVGOP Winter Meeting Lunch, I announced my support for President Donald Trump,” Capito wrote on X, as if she were making a dutiful entry in a diary.
Republicans have reached the point in their primary season, even earlier than expected, when the party’s putative leaders line up to reaffirm their allegiance to Trump. Several of Capito’s Senate colleagues joined the validation brigade around the same time: the GOP’s second- and third-ranking members, John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming, along with Trump’s long-ago rivals Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida. None of their endorsements caused much of a ripple. Perhaps some mischief-maker surfaced the old video of Cruz calling Trump “a sniveling coward” in 2016 or Rubio calling him “the most vulgar person ever to aspire to the presidency.” But for the most part, the numbing shows of conformity felt inevitable, just as Trump’s third straight presidential nomination now appears to be.
The GOP once prided itself on being an alliance of free-thinking frontiersmen who embraced rugged individualism, a term popularized by Republican President Herbert Hoover. This is no longer that time. Full acquiescence to Trump is now the most essential Republican “ethic,” such as it is, or at least the chief prerequisite to viability in the party. This near-total submission to the former boss has persisted no matter how egregious his actions are or how plainly he states his authoritarian goals.
Yet the Republican Party now appears to have entered a new level of capitulation to Trump: a kind of ho-hum acceptance phase, where slavish devotion has become almost mundane, like joining a grocery line. There’s a certain power in bland and seemingly harmless gestures from people who know better. Permission structures strengthen over time. Complicity calcifies in obscurity.
It’s natural to focus on the more blatant markers of Trump’s domination and his facilitators’ dereliction. You can scoff at the clownish stunts of sycophancy shown by the Ramaswamy-Scott-Stefanik wing of the hippodrome. Or marvel at the prevailing silence that greeted Trump’s vow to suspend the Constitution or the legal finding that he was liable for sexual abuse. Or be amazed by the swiftness with which Republican lawmakers reversed course this week on a bipartisan border bill, which many of them had demanded, simply because Trump insisted it die.
In a sense, though, the innocuous statements from the periphery, such as Capito’s post, are more stupefying.
Capito, 70, served seven terms in the House before being elected to the Senate in 2014. She has earned a reputation as a serious, relatively moderate lawmaker, and has forged a host of bipartisan alliances. She is the fifth-ranked senator in Republican leadership and is the ranking member on the Senate environment committee.
The daughter of a three-term governor of West Virginia, Capito was born into the status of “Republican in good standing,” something she has worked throughout her long career to maintain. This also makes her a classic “Republican who knows better.”
Like many of her GOP colleagues, Capito has expressed serious unease with Trump in the past. She said she “felt violated as an American” by the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters, which she called an “incredibly traumatic” experience. She voted against convicting Trump in the Senate impeachment trial over the riot but made a point of saying it was only because he was not in office anymore (“My ‘no’ vote today is based solely on this constitutional belief”). In general, Capito deemed Trump’s conduct after the 2020 election to be “disgraceful” and declared in a statement that “history will judge him harshly.”
Although she did not expect Trump to be the Republican nominee again—“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said in October 2021—Capito is now fully on board with his restoration. Her endorsement on January 27 carried an almost nostalgic longing for Trump’s time in the White House. “Our economy thrived, our nation was secure, and we worked to address the challenges at our border,” she wrote. Sure, Trump wasn’t perfect, but what’s a little violation, trauma, or national disgrace? Apparently it still beats the alternative, Nikki Haley.
Capito’s office declined a request for comment.
This is not meant to single out Shelley Moore Capito for special cowardice or delinquency. Okay, maybe it is meant to single her out a little, but mostly as an object lesson in the insidious complicity of going along merely by adding one’s name to a stockpile. (Trump had yet to receive a single endorsement from a Senate Republican at this point in the campaign eight years ago: Jeff Sessions of Alabama became the first, on February 28, 2016.)
Capito illustrates the power of the random. She could be any number of Republican officeholders. When he quit the presidential race last month, Chris Christie mentioned some others. “Look at what’s happening just in the last few days,” Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said in his exit speech, taking note of high-level elected Republicans who were falling into line. He singled out Barrasso and House Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota.
Barrasso and Emmer are “good people who got into politics, I believe, for the right reasons,” Christie said in his speech. They are both well-mannered institutionalists who have been flayed by the former president in the past: Trump dismissed Barrasso as Mitch McConnell’s “flunky” and “rubber stamp,” and torpedoed Emmer’s bid to replace Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, deriding him as a “Globalist RINO.” Barrasso and Emmer would probably rather their party moved on from Trump.
And yet, they endorsed him. “They know better,” Christie said. “I know they know better.” From direct experience, in Christie’s case: He endorsed Trump in 2016 for what he now admits were purely political reasons. He then embarked on a long and at times debasing stint as one of Trump’s chief political butlers during his presidency.
In his speech last month, Christie said his biggest frustration with the GOP primary was that so many Republican officials and candidates complain privately about Trump yet remain loath to condemn him in public. (Of course, many Democrats engage in a similar dance about President Joe Biden and his age, expressing fulsome delight in public that he’s running for reelection at 81—he has the energy of a 35-year-old!—while moaning endlessly in private about how old he seems.)
Shared tolerance for conduct like Trump’s tends to build over time. “People are more likely to accept the unethical behavior of others if the behavior develops gradually (along a slippery slope),” according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, which was quoted by my colleague Anne Applebaum in her 2020 Atlantic cover story, “History Will Judge the Complicit.”
“What’s just astounding to me is that there are so few outliers,” Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, told me. Edelman, a career foreign-service officer, is a friend of the Cheney family and a fervent critic of Trump.
“I know that ambition in Washington is kind of a garden-variety sin, right?” Edelman said. Partisan considerations are inevitable, he added, “but by and large, the people I saw in Washington, whether I thought their policies were good or bad, on some level you expected them to be animated by what’s best for the nation.”
Pioneers, by definition, are outliers. Republicans from Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump were first viewed by their party as rogues or extremists. But the main driver for most politicians is almost always longevity, Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. “It’s to stay in the game for as long as you can, which is really the opposite of leadership,” said Sanford, who himself was an outlier—an anti-Trump Republican—which essentially cost him his job in Congress (he was defeated in a Republican primary in 2018). “Leadership is, I believe, This is my true north; I’m going to stand where I’m going to stand.”
Edelman quoted a line attributed to Ted Cruz in 2016, after Trump had defeated him in a bitter nomination fight, smearing the senator’s wife and father in the process. Cruz famously refused to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention that year. “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” Cruz told friends, according to an account by my colleague Tim Alberta in his 2019 book, American Carnage.
Cruz has since become a chief accessory to Trump in a party lousy with jacket-holders for the former president.
I remember being in Cleveland on the night Cruz gave his mutinous convention speech. It was a stirring and gutsy performance, the first (and last) time I’d ever felt much admiration for him. The bloodlust in the hall was palpable as it became clear that he was not building to any endorsement. “Vote your conscience” was Cruz’s crescendo line, which aroused the loudest boos of the night. They lingered like a warning siren, and if Cruz ignored it at the time, he has heeded it ever since. Add him to the list.
Alameda County prosecutors have filed murder charges against a third defendant in connection with the fatal shooting of an Oakland police officer, who was killed last month while responding to a report of a burglary, according to the district attorney’s office.
On Friday, prosecutors filed murder charges against Marquise Cooper in the killing of Officer Tuan Le, 34, officials said. Cooper is being held without bail and is scheduled to have an initial court appearance on Tuesday, jail records show.
Earlier this month, prosecutors announced they had filed murder charges against Mark Demetrious Sanders, 27, and Allen Starr Brown, 28, for their roles in the killing. A fourth defendant, Sebron Ray Russell, 28, was charged with burglary, according to a statement from Alameda County Dist. Atty. Pamela Price.
“I will leverage the full weight of my office against these people who we believe ruthlessly and wantonly murdered an officer,” Price said.
Le, an undercover officer, was shot and killed inside an unmarked police vehicle while responding to a report of a burglary on the morning of Dec. 29, police said. He was 36.
Oakland Police Officers Assn. President Barry Donelan has described the killing as an ambush, saying that Le and the officer with him, who suffered minor injuries, “were taken entirely by surprise” and “never had an opportunity to draw their service weapons.”
Born in Vietnam, Le emigrated to Oakland and graduated from the police academy in 2020, according to a tribute posted on the website of the City of Oakland.
“Officer Le was a devoted husband to his wife,” the tribute reads. “His passing leaves a void in the law enforcement community, the city of Oakland, and in the hearts of those who knew him.”
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ikki Haley was standing a few feet in front of me on a warm December night in New Hampshire. She had just finished a town-hall event at a Manchester ski lodge, from which no snow was visible for miles except the manufactured white stuff coating a sad little hill outside.
Presidential candidates often try to conjure a sense of momentum around their campaign, and Haley’s had been accumulating the key elements: rising poll numbers, crowd sizes, and fundraising sums. Her ascendancy began around Thanksgiving, an unofficial benchmark for when voters supposedly tune in to primary campaigns. Among many of them, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador had become a source of intrigue: Could she actually win? Or was she merely the latest contender to lead a post–Donald Trump Republican Party that never arrives?
I was in New Hampshire to gauge the extent of this apparent upsurge. Of all the campaign events in the past year—except Trump’s, which occupy their own category—Haley’s have been the most commanding. She has run the best race against Trump out of a motley bunch of Republicans—far better than former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, both long gone; Vivek Ramaswamy, whose yapping provocations gained him early notoriety but grated fast; and especially Florida GovernorRon DeSantis, who squandered his early status as Trump’s main challenger—and massive amounts of cash—by turning out to be a colossal dud of a candidate. (“Like a wounded bird falling from the sky,” Trump said of DeSantis, an overlooked but fascinatingly poetic assessment.)
On this night in Manchester, I watched Haley pound out a stump speech about how, among other things, her main achievement as UN ambassador was to take “the kick-me sign off of our backs.” And how “our kids need to know to love America.” And how she was determined to “humanize” the fractious issue of abortion and, rest assured, “the days of demonizing that issue are over.”
Haley is a gifted political performer, particularly in a certain kind of room. This was one of those, a politely boisterous gathering of a few hundred people, serious and professional, many still dressed for work. She came off as reasonable and solicitous, holding the same authority as she did at the various Trumpless debates she has rated so well in. You can see how Haley could rise to the level she has, the most formidable alternative to Trump or (if you prefer) first among the Republican also-rans.
After completing her set remarks to a standing ovation, Haley took audience questions, greeted a 30-minute lineup of supporters, and satisfied their various selfie and autograph needs, nailing eye contact, small talk, and drive-by rapport. “She understands that kind of customer-service approach,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu raved to me after telling the Manchester crowd that he was endorsing Haley. (“You bet your ass I am!”)
At the end of the night, Sununu stood to Haley’s left as she faced a clot of television cameras and microphones and shouted questions from reporters. She is good at this too—parrying pointed inquiries with self-assurance, then moving on before anyone can really reflect on what she said, or didn’t say.
But Haley’s sturdy pronouncements belie a certain wobbliness. Wait, what did she say exactly?
Nikki Haley supporters at a town hall in Manchester, New Hampshire, in December
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley at the Manchester event
Beyond her expertly rendered deliveries, Haley’s actual answers can be mushy or even nonsensical, with strange constructions and frequent malaprops. In Manchester, Haley praised Sununu for having his “pulse to the ground” in his state and boasted that her campaign already had momentum before his endorsement “just gave it a speed bump.” At a November debate, she ordered Ramaswamy to “leave my daughter out of your voice” (as opposed to her daughter’s name out of his mouth). “We have to deal with the cancer that is mental health,” she declares in her town halls when the subject arises (mental health, not cancer).
Later in the session, a reporter asked Haley about Trump’s then-most-recent flare-up, his statement to Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator “on day one,” long since overshadowed by Trump’s “rot in Hell” Christmas message and his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” In the moment, the “dictator” comment did feel germane, as did the question to Haley about whether that should perhaps preclude him from leading the world’s most powerful democracy.
“First of all, that’s for the voters to decide,” Haley declared, “if they want a dictator on day one.”
Yes, unquestionably. But what about Haley, the candidate we were speaking to—what did she decide?
“I’m not going to be a dictator on day one,” she assured everyone, not answering.
“I’ve always spoken in hard truths” is one of Haley’s trademark claims. In reality, the bluntness she discharges is reserved mostly for easy targets: the media, President Joe Biden, and “Kamala” (first name only, per GOP style). When it comes to speaking the hardest Republican truths of all—about Trump—Haley’s words fall feebly (wounded-bird-like), and her voice acquires a slightly halting tone and slower cadence.
Her preferred pose is one of pronounced exasperation. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough; pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough,” Haley said at the press gaggle. She shook her head and flashed a Man, I just can’t win look before escaping into a smoke screen of platitudes (“at the end of the day, I just put my truths out there and let the chips fall where they may”).
For all her cultivated brashness, Haley, whose campaign declined my requests to interview her, can also convey an impression of being terrified—of saying the wrong thing, of offending too many MAGA or MAGA-adjacent voters, or certainly of Trump himself.
The most excruciating example of this occurred a few days after Christmas, when a New Hampshire voter asked Haley to explain why the Civil War was fought. She provided a stem-winder of vague conservative assertions (“government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life”) while omitting the obvious cause: slavery. She appeared to be sensitive to the fact that some Americans might be sick of being reminded about the nation’s shameful, bloody history. Haley, who as governor removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, has said that as president she would not play into the “national self-loathing” that she is always lamenting, “this idea that America is bad, or rotten, or racist.”
But trying to talk about the Civil War without mentioning slavery is like trying to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 while barely touching the all-encompassing, front-running figure at the center of it all.
One of Haley’s niftier moves occurs later in her stump speech, when she builds to a seemingly dramatic revelation.
“I think President Trump was the right president at the right time,” she reassures her audience. It is an imprecise and puzzling statement—what “time” exactly? (Charlottesville? COVID?) But Haley delivers the line with a force that sets a few heads bobbing in the crowd and leads her safely into her next credential. “I had a good working relationship with him when I was in his administration,” she further affirms.
“But …”
The words that follow this inevitable but are as fraught as any that a Republican candidate can utter. Say something like “He’s becoming crazier,” as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did of Trump last month, and you might win candor points but probably not any Republican primaries.
Haley’s next line barely deviates a word, speech to speech: “Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.” You could construct a tidy diagram to illustrate the perfect passivity she achieves here. Haley assigns no judgment (“rightly or wrongly”) and makes no suggestion that Trump might have ever said or done anything that actually caused this “chaos”—a euphemism for, say, the events of January 6 or whatever else is embedded in those 91 criminal counts. All of this “chaos” somehow comes randomly to rest upon the 45th president.
“Chaos follows him,” Haley said again at a December 14 town hall in the southern–New Hampshire town of Atkinson. “You know I’m right” was the extent of her elaboration.
“It just does.”
Haley’s soft landing at “chaos follows him” comes after a zig-zagging and sometimes turbulent journey with Trump. The odyssey began during the 2016 campaign, when Haley called him “scary” and the embodiment of “everything we teach our kids not to do in kindergarten.” She endorsed Senator Marco Rubio—like Haley, a child of immigrants—by saying she was excited to support a candidate who “was going to go and show my parents that the best decision they ever made was coming to America.”
Haley speaks at the Manchester town hall.
After Trump won the Republican nomination, Haley said, reluctantly, that she would vote for him. Trump asked her to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations reportedly as a favor to South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Henry McMaster, a big Trump supporter, who wanted Haley out of the way so he could become governor. The UN job allowed Haley to burnish her foreign-policy résumé, and being in New York kept her removed from the daily discord of Trump’s White House. She served until 2018. “I got out of the administration without a tweet,” she likes to say.
Following Trump’s 2020 defeat and the January 6 insurrection, Haley sounded eager to bury her former boss and get on with her pursuit of his job. “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history,” she declared in a January 7 speech at a Republican National Committee meeting. Haley said there was no chance Trump would ever run for federal office again. When those predictions proved premature, she reportedly tried to pay a quick make-up visit to Mar-a-Lago but was told by the proprietor not to bother. Less than three weeks after the insurrection, she told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham that everyone should “give the man a break.”
That April, Haley promised that she would support Trump if he ran for president again in 2024. And if he did, she said, she would not run herself.
Until … never mind.
As a candidate, Haley, whom Trump has taken to calling “Birdbrain,” frequently mentions how much better she would fare against Biden than Trump or DeSantis would. She often cites a Wall Street Journal poll from last month that shows her leading Biden by 17 points in a head-to-head matchup (Trump wins by four points). No doubt “electability” is a compelling argument, but this hypothetical Haley blowout is also premised on a dubious assumption—that Trump would be a gracious loser and urge his supporters to vote for their Republican standard-bearer, Ambassador Birdbrain.
When it comes to Trump’s indictments, Haley can’t bat away questions fast enough. “A lot of these cases have been politicized, we all know that,” she said in Manchester. Haley has promised to support the GOP nominee, whether it’s Trump or someone else. And in Plymouth, New Hampshire, at the end of December, she said that if she were elected president and Trump were convicted, she would likely pardon him “so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”
Such flaccid scolding is of course a big part of why Trump is still here. Appeasement has been the Republican business model since 2015. “It’s like what happened last time—nobody wanted to criticize Trump,” Mark Sanford, a former Republican representative from and governor of South Carolina, told me. Sanford, who declined to speak about Haley on the record, lost his 2018 House primary after becoming a strident Trump critic. “They figured he would go away,” Sanford said, referring to Trump’s Republican opponents over the years. “And they sort of waited and waited and waited, and he didn’t go away.”
Eight years later, Haley seems to be of a similarly passive mindset: put up tepid resistance to Trump, at least early on; stay alive; and hope that someone, or something, comes along to take care of the problem. “Maybe she catches a break from a jury,” Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican strategist in South Carolina told me, referring to the possibility of Trump being convicted in the coming months. Felkel, who is not affiliated with Haley’s campaign, says that he’s no fan of hers but that he’s hugely hostile to Trump, so he’ll support his former governor.
Chris Christie offers a different specimen of Trump alternative: a former friend and longtime ally of the 45th president whose unambiguous denunciations were the centerpiece of his campaign. Christie has held back little, calling Trump a “coward,” a “fool,” and a “self-centered, self-possessed, self-consumed, angry old man.”
In other words, Christie has been the rare candidate willing to tell actual hard truths about Trump. He will also not be the Republican nominee: He suspended his campaign last night.
Will Haley be the nominee? Are her pillowy “attacks” on the front-runner simply the undignified price of Republican viability today? Has this approach at least given her the best shot of any Republican to defeat Trump—an extremely long shot, but a shot nonetheless?
Her theory of the race is straightforward enough: Beat DeSantis for second in Iowa; be competitive with Trump in New Hampshire, where she’s gained in recent polls but still trails by double digits in most; and then parlay that momentum into defeating Trump in her home state (where the former president also remains well ahead).
Both Christie and Haley are pragmatic former governors who appeal to independents and college-educated moderates. Polling this past fall showed that a significant portion of his backers in New Hampshire would migrate to Haley if he bowed out of the race before the state’s January 23 primary.
A week before Christmas, Christie faced growing public pressure, much of it from people backing Haley, to drop out in the name of stopping Trump. The former New Jersey governor had made a sustained and effective case against Trump over several months, but struggled to boost his support into the teens and was strongly considering it.
But he held off for a few weeks. Christie has been frustrated, even appalled, by Haley’s unwillingness to say how she really feels about Trump, according to sources close to Christie. He has become less and less shy about expressing his dissatisfaction with her in public. He has taunted Haley for not ruling out a role as Trump’s running mate, as he and DeSantis have. “I don’t play for second” has been Haley’s standard answer to the vice-presidential question, an emphatic non-denial. “That’s why she’s not saying strong things against Donald Trump,” Christie said on Face the Nation.
His reaction to Haley’s slavery misadventure was especially pointed. “She’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth,” he said in Epping, New Hampshire. “It’s worse to be able to be dishonest with people, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Now that Christie’s out of the primary, Haley will surely get some of his voters, though an endorsement seems unlikely anytime soon. Shortly before Christie announced his exit last night, at a town hall in New Hampshire, a hot mic caught him saying of Haley: “She’s gonna get smoked … She’s not up to this.”
Christie’s quandary over Haley is one that many Trump-skeptical Republicans identify with. “It’s the Nikki Haley dilemma,” Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican media consultant who has deep loathing for Trump and would love to see him lose, told me. He finds Haley’s cynicism depressing and is disgusted by her willingness to pander to “the latest insipid GOP crowd-pleasing trope,” as he recently wrote on Substack.
“Still, compared to Trump, she’s Gandhi,” Murphy continued. And he thinks she has a real chance to beat Trump in New Hampshire, where Murphy helped John McCain upset George W. Bush in 2000. “If I lived in New Hampshire, I’d vote for Haley in a heartbeat,” he told me.
Left: Haley signs an autograph. Right: Supporters leave after the town hall.
Haley’s knack for connecting one-on-one with voters does not always extend to political peers. On the contrary, her career has featured an array of disposable alliances, stubborn grudges, and a sense of paranoia about opponents, as my colleague Tim Alberta, then of Politico, documented in a 2021 profile of Haley. “She cut me off,” Sanford told Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki,” he continued. “She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”
“I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust,” Haley told Alberta. “Friend,” she added, “is a loose term.” She is fond of saying she wears heels not as a fashion statement but “for ammunition.”
No doubt Haley comes to this worldview honestly, having grown up as an Indian American in the Deep South of the 1970s and ’80s. She has faced discrimination, racism, sexism, and smears—not subtle ones, either. When she ran for governor, in 2010, a South Carolina political blogger and a lobbyist working for one of Haley’s rivals in the race both claimed to have had affairs with Haley (she denied them), and a Republican state senator called her a “raghead.”
“Every South Carolina politician here has been through that, all of us,” Katon Dawson, the former chair of the South Carolina GOP and a Haley supporter, told me. “We’re from South Carolina, and it is a bare-knuckled brawl.”
For Haley to win, Felkel, the South Carolina strategist, said he thinks she will have to channel some of that South Carolina pugilism and “open up a can of whoop-ass” on Trump. “We need to see more stiletto weaponry from her, and less ‘bless your heart,’” Felkel said.
In recent days, Haley has taken a somewhat more combative tack against Trump, after a pro-Trump super PAC released a campaign ad in New Hampshire that accused her of supporting a gas-tax increase in South Carolina and dubbed her “‘High Tax’ Haley.” (Haley had backed a gas-tax hike coupled with an income-tax cut.) “In his commercials and in his temper tantrums, every single thing that he’s said has been a lie,” she told an audience at a January 2 town hall on the New Hampshire coast.
“So if he’s gonna lie about me,” Haley went on, “I’m gonna tell you the truth about him.” The line drew the biggest applause of the event. Haley delivered it slowly, clearly, and with authority—like a candidate to be reckoned with, who might just be willing to escalate things.
But wasn’t Haley supposedly telling “hard truths” all along? Isn’t that kind of her signature thing? “She’s admitting that her retaliation to Trump’s lying about her is that she will stop lying about him,” Jonathan V. Last wrote in TheBulwark. Last dubbed Haley’s line “the most complete exposure to a politician’s subconscious I’ve ever seen.”
Or maybe this was always Haley’s conscious plan—to gradually parcel out her clever “hard truths” if convenient and when openings arise, and impress the right people and donors while doing so. Perhaps Haley already views this foray as a success. Even if she never seriously threatens Trump, she’s likely to perform respectably in the early states, win a second place or two, outlast DeSantis, and land some breezy swipes at Trump. Then, when his nomination becomes inevitable again, she can safely endorse her old boss (they always had a good working relationship!) and move on to her next campaign, to be Trump’s vice president or to try again in 2028.
Related Podcast
Listen to Mark Leibovich discuss Nikki Haley on Radio Atlantic:
House Republicans didn’t exactly have a banner year in 2023. They made history for all the wrong reasons. Last January, they presided over the most protracted election for speaker in a century, and nine months later, for good measure, lawmakers ejected their leader, Kevin McCarthy, for the first time ever. Last month, the House expelled one of its own, George Santos, for only the sixth time.
The rest of the year wasn’t any more productive. Thanks in part to Republican discord, the House passed fewer bills that became laws than any other year in decades. And for the few important measures that did pass, GOP leaders had to rely on Democrats to bail them out.
Republican lawmakers have responded by quitting in droves. After the House spent much of October fighting over whom to elect as speaker, November saw more retirement announcements than any single month in more than a decade. Some members aren’t even waiting for their term to end. McCarthy resigned last week, depriving the party that fired him of both his experience and, more crucially, his vote. Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, a Republican, and Brian Higgins of New York, a Democrat, are each leaving for new jobs in the next several weeks. (Santos would have stuck around, but his colleagues had other ideas.)
A roughly equal number of members from each party plan to forgo reelection this year. But the most powerful departing lawmakers are Republicans: The chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Kay Granger of Texas, is leaving after a quarter century in Congress, and the head of the Financial Services Committee, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, will end his 20-year House career next year.
Still, some Republicans are leaving after just a few years in Congress, including Representatives Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Debbie Lesko of Arizona, both former state legislators. For them, serving in Congress simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—not when your party can’t seem to figure out how to govern. “People don’t engage with each other,” Lesko told me. “They just make speeches.”
Here are the stories of four Republicans who are calling it quits at different stages of their career: McHenry, a onetime rabble-rouser who became a party insider; Brad Wenstrup, an Army podiatrist whose House tenure spanned from the Tea Party to Donald Trump; Spartz, a conservative with an impulsive streak; and Lesko, a Trump loyalist who never quite found her way in Washington. Taken together, their departures reflect the rising frustrations within a Republican Party that has floundered in the year since it assumed power in the House—a year in which it has spent more time fighting than governing.
Debbie Lesko
On October 17, after House Republicans had just tanked their third choice for speaker, Representative Debbie Lesko finally decided she’d had enough: She wouldn’t be seeking reelection. The 65-year-old grandmother of five had been planning to stay for one more term, but the ouster of Kevin McCarthy and the weeks of chaos that followed changed her mind. “It kind of put me over the top,” Lesko told me.
Lesko had higher hopes for Congress back in 2018, when she won a special election to represent a safely Republican seat north of Phoenix. “Perhaps I was naive,” she conceded. Lesko prioritized border security during her first campaign and managed to get one border-related bill signed into law while Trump was president and Republicans controlled the House in 2018, but her legislative goals have fallen short since then. In the Arizona state legislature, she had served in the leadership and chaired two powerful committees. “I was used to getting things done in a bipartisan fashion,” Lesko said. The House proved to be far more difficult terrain. As a Trump ally, Lesko found few willing Democratic partners after the GOP lost control first of the House majority in 2018 and then of the presidency in 2020.
In Arizona, Lesko said, lawmakers actually debated bills and amendments on the floor of the House and Senate; in Washington, by contrast, members just deliver speeches written for them by their young staff. “We don’t listen to each other,” Lesko lamented. “We just go in and read a statement.” She bemoaned the “lack of civility” and the hurling of personal insults between members in both parties. (When I asked if Trump had contributed to the incivility, she said, “I would prefer he not attack people personally, but he does a great job.”)
Lesko told me she enjoyed most the days she spent interacting with constituents back home, but over six years, they could not make up for the family time she gave up on cross-country flights and on fundraising. “If I felt we were getting a whole lot accomplished, I would sacrifice it,” she said. Instead, Republicans spent a week in January 2023 fighting over their speaker and then did it all over again in October. “That certainly didn’t make me feel like I wanted to stay,” she told me.
Patrick McHenry
Representative Patrick McHenry introduced himself to much of America last year as a very frustrated man. The North Carolina Republican opened his unlikely stint as House speaker pro tempore with a memorable slam of the gavel—a brief eruption of anger aimed at the rump group of Republicans who had dethroned his ally, Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
When McHenry arrived in Congress nearly two decades ago, he might have counted as one of the renegades. He was a brash 29-year-old who liked nothing more than to pick fights with Democrats on cable news. After his first term, however, McHenry began to shift his strategy and redraw his image. He wanted to become a serious legislator, capable of using influence in Congress to affect public policy. “I realized that my actions were not enabling my goal, so I changed how I operated,” he told me. He became less of a partisan brawler and more of an inside player, studying the institution and how leaders in both parties wielded power. “My early years in Congress were like graduate school,” McHenry said.
McHenry is leaving with a reputation as a widely respected if not-quite-elder statesman (he’s only 48). He serves as the chair of the Financial Services Committee and acted as one of the GOP’s top negotiators of perhaps the most significant bill to come out of Congress last year, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which prevented a debt default and ordered modest budget cuts. McHenry is retiring in part because he has to give up the committee gavel he so enjoys; Republican term limits allow most members to hold top committee posts for up to six years.
He also passed up a bid for a more permanent promotion. At one point in October, some of the same Democrats who had chafed at McHenry’s bombast as a young lawmaker were open to the idea of him serving as speaker. McHenry told me he’d wanted to be speaker earlier in his career, but not anymore. He refused entreaties to seek election as speaker or even to use his temporary position to try to pass legislation. “It would have been to the institution’s detriment and, frankly, even to mine,” he told me. “So I decided the best course of action is to want for nothing during that time period, and that meant resisting the opportunity to use power.”
When McHenry announced his retirement from the House two months later, he insisted that he was departing with none of the bitterness people might assume he carried. “I truly feel this institution is on the verge of the next great turn,” he said in his statement. When I asked him what gave him hope, he tried to put a positive spin on the dysfunction and disenchantment that have plagued Congress for years. “The operations of the House have been under severe pressure for a while,” McHenry said. “We have an institution that is struggling to perform in the current political environment.” He then made a prediction: “There’ll be significant changes that will happen in the coming congresses to make the place work.”
He won’t be around to see them. The GOP’s term limits for committee leaders is an often-underappreciated reason for turnover in the party’s House ranks, but McHenry declined to seek a waiver so he could stay atop the Financial Services Committee. “I’m going to honor our rules,” he said. He hasn’t decided what comes next: “This chapter is closing, and I’ve got another chapter ahead of me.”
Brad Wenstrup
This much is clear: Representative Brad Wenstrup is not leaving the House out of frustration with Washington gridlock. “I reject the notion that this has been a do-nothing House of Representatives,” he told me. Wenstrup proceeded to read from a list that he said ran to 20 pages of bills that the narrow Republican majority had advanced through the lower chamber of Congress over the past year. Most of these measures are gathering dust in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the fact that a onetime outsider like Wenstrup would be defending an embattled institution so fervently is itself something of a revelation.
Wenstrup won election to the House a decade ago as a Tea Party–backed insurgent, having defeated an incumbent Republican in a surprising 2012 primary challenge from the right. He’ll leave next year as a leadership loyalist, positioned in the ideological center of a GOP conference that has grown decidedly more conservative in the past decade. He voted for the debt-ceiling deal in June, despite having criticized his first Republican opponent during their campaign for backing a similar bipartisan agreement. “Am I a conservative? Yes,” he said. “Did I try to advance common sense? Yes. Did I try to establish myself as a statesman? Yes.”
Wenstrup has become an institutionalist in other ways too. His biggest complaint—a common one among small-government conservatives—is that federal agencies have taken too much power from Congress, evading proper oversight and interpreting laws beyond the intent of the legislators who wrote them. “We have to bring back Schoolhouse Rock,” Wenstrup said, recalling the cartoon that taught a generation of Americans a somewhat-idealized version of legislative sausage-making. “A bill on Capitol Hill gets signed by the president. That’s the law. Agencies don’t get to change it.”
An Iraq War veteran who served as a combat surgeon, Wenstrup, 65, started his family later than most and has two young children in Ohio. He told me he had decided that this term would be his last in the House before any of the speaker tumult of the past year: “I decided that I wanted to make sure that I raised my kids, not someone else.”
Victoria Spartz
Good luck trying to predict Representative Victoria Spartz’s next move. The Indiana conservative is leaving Congress next year after just two terms—assuming she sticks with her plan.
That hasn’t always been the case during Spartz’s short tenure in the House. She is fiercely protective of her options, and she has made her name by going her own way. At one point this fall, she threatened to resign her seat if Congress did not create a commission to tackle the federal debt. “I cannot save this Republic alone,” she said at the time. (Congress has created no such commission, but Spartz isn’t leaving quite yet.)
Spartz, 45, is the only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, and she assumed a prominent role in the GOP after Russia’s invasion in 2022. Her nuanced position on the conflict has defied easy characterization. While cheering for Ukraine’s victory, she sharply criticized its prime minister, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a time when much of the West was rallying to his side. Spartz has accused Zelensky of “playing politics and theater” and demanded an investigation of one of his top aides. When members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee traveled to Ukraine on an official visit without her—she doesn’t serve on the panel—Spartz paid her own way and “crashed” the trip. She supports more U.S. aid to Ukraine, but not without conditions, and she believes that the funding must be more targeted toward heavy military equipment rather than humanitarian assistance. “Ukraine must win this war,” she told me, “but wars are won with weapons, and we need to be much faster, much tougher, and better.”
Spartz again proved to be a wild card during the House’s recurring struggles over picking a speaker. During the 15 rounds of balloting last January, she supported Kevin McCarthy on the first three turns, then voted “present” eight times before returning to McCarthy for the final four rounds. In October, she voted with McCarthy’s critics to bring up a resolution to oust him as speaker, but on the climactic vote, she stuck with McCarthy. “Kevin wasn’t a bad guy. He just didn’t like to govern,” Spartz said.
Midway through Spartz’s first term, Politicoreported on high staff turnover in her congressional office, quoting former aides who described Spartz as a quick-tempered boss who frequently yelled at and belittled her underlings. Spartz made no effort to deny the accounts, telling Politico that her style was “not for everyone.” After winning a second term that fall, however, Spartz quickly announced that she would not seek office in 2024—forgoing both a third bid for the House and open statewide races for governor and Senate in Indiana.
Her departure, she insisted to me, represents a break from politics, and not a retirement. “Sometimes it’s good to take some time off,” Spartz said. She denied that any of the drama of the past two years—the war in Ukraine, the speaker fights, criticism of her management—contributed to her decision to leave. Her children are now teenagers, Spartz said, and she wants to spend more time with them.
Still, Spartz doesn’t quite seem at peace with her plans. Given her past shifts, I asked if she still might change her mind and run again. She wouldn’t, she said, but with a caveat: “Unless I get real upset!”
Given the volatility of the past year in Congress, that’s a threat it would be wise not to ignore.
Southern California home prices dipped from October to November, the first decline in nine months.
The average home price in the six-county region clocked in at $829,557 in November, down 0.1% from October, according to data released by Zillow this week.
All counties saw drops except Orange County, where values rose slightly.
Nicole Bachaud, a senior economist with the real estate website Zillow, said the small price declines across much of Southern California can be attributed to two things: Fall is typically a slower time of the year for home sales and buyers are struggling with high prices and high mortgage rates.
“It’s really challenging,” she said.
According to the California Assn. of Realtors, only 11% of households in both Los Angeles County and Orange County could afford a median-priced house during the third quarter; that measure stood at 19% in Riverside County and 25% in San Bernardino County.
When mortgage rates first surged last year, home prices fell in response as buyers pulled away and inventory swelled. But prices started rising again this year as homeowners increasingly chose not to sell, unwilling to give up their rock-bottom mortgage rates on loans taken out before or during the pandemic.
In most counties, home prices are near their all-time peaks despite November’s small decline. In Orange County, prices are setting records.
Prospective buyers received a sliver of good news in recent weeks. Mortgage interest rates have fallen from a high of 7.79% to the low-7% range, giving them a bit more buying power.
But experts don’t expect a significant improvement in affordability.
Bachaud said mortgage rates are likely to remain high, which will keep inventories tight as many existing homeowners choose to stay put. At the same time, those high rates should also keep prices from surging, since they limit how much people can afford, Bachaud said.
Overall, Zillow expects home prices over the next year to rise 0.1% in the Inland Empire counties of Riverside and San Bernardino. Across Los Angeles and Orange counties, prices should fall 1.6%. In San Diego County, prices are expected to remain flat, while in Ventura County they should drop 2%.
When it comes to the rental market, prices are also dropping slightly. Experts say that’s because the number of vacancies is rising as apartment supply expands and consumers worry about the economy and inflation.
In November, the median rent for vacant units of all sizes across Los Angeles County was $1,900, down 1.9% from a year earlier, according to data from Apartment List.
If the Federal Reserve’s actions to tame inflation push the economy into recession, home values and rents could drop further. However, there’s growing optimism that the country will avoid an economic downturn.
Like many politicians, Representative Dean Phillips likes to look people in the eye. And because he’s a politician, Phillips can glean things, just as President George W. Bush did when he peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.
“I’ve looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye,” Phillips told a group of students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, last week.
And?
“I did not like what I saw,” Phillips said of the Israeli prime minister. “I do not like his government. He’s got to go.”
Philips has also looked into Donald Trump’s eyes. That, too, was ominous. It was a few years ago, and the former president had invited a bunch of new House members to the White House for an introductory visit.
“I looked him in the eye for the better part of an hour,” Phillips told me.
And?
“I saw right through him,” Phillips said. “I know exactly how to handle weaklings like Donald Trump.”
How?
“You’ll see,” he said. “Why would I give away my special sauce?”
Phillips was telling me this while tucked into the back of a minivan, having just set off on a 90-minute ride from Hanover to Manchester. He wore a down vest over a blue dress shirt and looked me straight in the you-know-what as he described the “gravity of this entire circumstance” he was now embarked upon.
He had just concluded one of his early days as an official primary challenger to President Joe Biden, the incumbent he must first dispatch before he can douse Trump with his proprietary Dean Sauce. Phillips is pursuing this mission despite long odds and an unsurprising chorus of how dare yous and not helpfuls from various Democratic gatekeepers. He has already said plenty about why he is doing this—about how Democrats are desperate for a Plan B to Biden, who Phillips says has no business seeking reelection at his age (81 on Monday), with his poll numbers and the catastrophic threat of his likely GOP opponent (yes, him). Phillips agonized over his decision and unburdened himself in multiple forums, including, quite expansively last month, to my colleague Tim Alberta.
I was in New Hampshire because I wanted to see Phillips transition from theoretical to actual challenger. It is one thing to scream warnings about alarming data, and another to segue into the granular doings of a campaign. “This is an all-hands-on-deck initiative,” he told me, his words landing somewhere between hyper-earnest and naive, with occasional tips into grandiose. Phillips, 54, is a figure of uncommonly big plans and weighty burdens, especially given his relatively modest station (he has represented Minnesota’s Third Congressional District since 2019). He seems sincere about what he’s doing, especially compared with the two-faced default of so many elected Democrats who tout Biden’s reelection in public while privately pining for some other candidate, like Gretchen Whitmer, the Rock, or whomever they want instead. In this sense, Phillips’s gambit is noble, even necessary. It can also be lonely and awkward to watch up close.
Since entering the race a month ago, Phillips has held a series of mostly low-key events in New Hampshire and has made a stop in South Carolina. I first encountered him during a heartfelt give-and-take with half a dozen members of the Dartmouth Political Union. “This is a beautiful American moment,” Phillips declared after a dialogue about abortion policy with a polite young Nikki Haley supporter. Later, at a town hall across campus, Phillips described that bridge-building exchange as “one of the most profound hours of engagement” he’s had in a long while and something “I will remember for years to come.”
Phillips told me that his initial campaign forays have only—surprise—reaffirmed the premise of his errand: “Other than some Democratic elected officials, and only a few of them, I’ve not yet encountered a single person who doesn’t feel the same way,” he said, about the need for a Biden alternative. His go-to weapon against the president is public opinion, for which Phillips keeps getting fresh ammunition. “I want to give you some simple data,” he said during a meet and greet with about 50 students, faculty, and community members before the town hall. He mentioned a recent survey of voters in battleground states that had Biden trailing Trump by four points, 48–44. “But then you look at how Trump does against a ‘generic Democrat,’” Phillips said, “and the generic Democrat wins 48–40.” Heads bobbed in the classroom; Phillips shook his in exasperation.
Phillips himself is polling at just 10 percent among likely New Hampshire Democratic-primary voters, according to a CNN survey released last week that had Biden at 65 percent. During our car ride, I suggested to Phillips that maybe he should change his name to “Generic Democrat.”
“I never in my life aspired to be generic,” he replied, chuckling.
Primary challenges to incumbent presidents have historically been associated with signature causes and fiery rhetoric. They tend to be ideologically driven—such as Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter from the left in 1980 and Pat Buchanan’s to President George H. W. Bush from the right in 1992. No one will mistake Phillips for a brawling populist. He is affable, well mannered, and extremely rich, with a net worth of about $50 million, some portion of it derived from the gelato-and-sorbet company—Talenti—that he co-owned before it was sold.
Still, Phillips frequently brings up the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, a fellow Minnesota Democrat, whose uprising against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 helped push Johnson to not seek reelection. The comparison is fraught in that Democrats wound up nominating another Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose to Richard Nixon. Carter and Bush also lost their general elections. This tends to be the main critique of Phillips: that his project could weaken Biden against Trump.
One student at Dartmouth questioned Phillips about the 1980 example, arguing that Kennedy was the reason that Carter was ultimately blown out by Ronald Reagan. Phillips came back with a lengthy and somewhat defensive response. “Ted Kennedy didn’t cause Carter’s problems any more than I’ve caused Joe Biden’s problems,” he said. The student nodded and thanked the candidate, who in turn thanked the student—and another beautiful American moment was forged.
“I am the anti-defeat candidate,” Phillips said, describing his enterprise to me later. “I am the truth-telling candidate.” “Truth-telling” is of course subjective, in campaigns as in life. Phillips then told me about a visit he’d made to a Hanover restaurant that day. After a series of “wonderful conversations” with random diners, he’d encountered a young woman who “I sensed was not showing any compassion for butchered Israelis”—a reference to the Hamas attacks on October 7. So Phillips, who is Jewish, paused the conversation and asked a question of his own. “I said, ‘Are you telling me that you support Hamas?’” Phillips said. “And she goes, ‘Yes.’” At which point, he’d heard enough.
“I said, ‘Look, I really enjoyed our conversation, but I can’t continue this.’”
“Wait, did you really enjoy that conversation?” I interrupted, questioning his truth-telling.
“I’ll tell you what, that’s a good point,” Phillips acknowledged. “I did not enjoy it.”
In that spirit of engaging with people of different backgrounds and persuasions, Phillips frequently invokes his friendship with Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, who was censured by the House this month for her comments about Israel. Phillips refers to Tlaib as “my Palestinian sister” and to himself as “her Jewish brother.”
I pressed Phillips on the state of his relations with Tlaib. “It’s as difficult as ever and more important than ever,” he said. He then raised the stakes even higher. “I believe that as Rashida Tlaib and Dean Phillips go, so will the Middle East,” he said. (A lot of pressure there!)
As our nighttime ride persisted southeast down Interstate 89, the conversation took some quick turns.
“Is Kamala Harris prepared to step in if something happened to Biden?” I asked Phillips.
“I think that Americans have made the decision that she’s not,” he said.
I replied that I was interested in the decision of one specific American, Dean Phillips.
“That is not my opinion,” Phillips clarified. He said that every interaction he’s had with the vice president has been “thoughtful” and that “I’ve enjoyed them.”
“That said …” Phillips paused, and I braced for the vibe shift.
“I hear from others who know her a lot better than I do that many think she’s not well positioned,” he said of Harris. “She is not well prepared, doesn’t have the right disposition and the right competencies to execute that office.” Phillips also noted that Harris’s approval numbers are even worse than Biden’s: “It’s pretty clear that she’s not somebody people have faith in.”
But again, Phillips is not one of those people: “From my personal experiences, I’ve not seen those deficiencies.”
If Phillips had looked me in the eye at that moment—and granted, it was dark in the back of the van—he would have seen a slightly confused expression. Why was he hiding behind these Trumplike “many people are saying” attributions? Similarly, he often speaks in glowing terms about Biden’s performance in office—“his administration has been quite extraordinary”—while leaning heavily on “the opinion of others” or “the data” to make his case that the president himself needs to go. Phillips can seem torn at times as he attempts to hedge his way through somewhat contradictory impulses: to give Biden his proper due while also trying to end his career.
I asked Phillips what would happen if his campaign really takes off—he wins a bunch of primaries—and then Biden tries to placate the insurgents by dumping Harris in favor of their hero, Dean Phillips. Would he agree to serve as Biden’s new understudy?
I anticipated the “I’m not answering hypothetical questions” blow-off that they teach in Candidate School. But Phillips apparently skipped class that day. “That’s a really interesting question,” he said, before letting me down gently.
“President Biden will never replace Vice President Harris on the ticket, ever,” he said.
For the record—bonus nugget—Phillips predicts that Trump will select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his running mate. “And they will be very difficult to beat,” he fears. These are the kinds of empty punditing calories that get passed around during long drives on chilly campaign nights.
As we approached Manchester, Phillips flashed back to reality, or something. “I am the best positioned to defeat Donald Trump,” he said. “All I’m focused on right now is to run a spirited, thoughtful, and energetic campaign.”
“What about ‘vigorous’ and ‘robust’?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” Phillips said, nodding. It was getting late, and we were both getting a bit punchy.
“And bold,” he added.
Our van pulled into the Manchester DoubleTree just before 10 p.m. Phillips had to wake up in a few hours to catch a 6:15 a.m. flight back to Washington. He looked me in the eye. I’m not sure what he saw, or what I saw, but I wished him luck.
