Michael C. Bender and Lisa Lerer: New Hampshire and Iowa Reveal Broader Weaknesses for Trump

For weeks, Donald J. Trump has romped through Iowa and New Hampshire without breaking a sweat, muscling out rivals for the Republican nomination and soaking up adoration from crowds convinced he will be the next president of the United States.

But as Mr. Trump marches steadily toward his party’s nomination, a harsher reality awaits him.

Outside the soft bubble of Republican primaries, Mr. Trump’s campaign is confronting enduring vulnerabilities that make his nomination a considerable risk for his party. Those weaknesses were laid bare in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where independents, college-educated voters and Republicans unwilling to dismiss his legal jeopardy voted in large numbers for his rival, Nikki Haley.

Mr. Trump still won easily. The voters opposed to his bid didn’t outnumber the many Republicans clamoring to see him return to power. But the results, delivered by more than 310,000 voters in a politically divided state, pointed to the trouble ahead for Mr. Trump as the presidential race leaves MAGA world and enters a broader electorate, one that rejected him less than four years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/us/politics/trump-independent-voters.html
 

Katie Rogers: Biden Runs Against Man Who Already Thinks He’s President

He promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He demanded states deploy the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border. He warned congressional Republicans to hold out for a perfect deal on immigration — or else.

Former President Donald J. Trump has not even clinched the Republican presidential nomination, but he has wasted no time issuing directives as if he were making them from the Oval Office instead of between appearances in a New York courtroom.

And now, President Biden has been forced to ponder a campaign question that no president has ever had to consider: How do you run against a man who has already had the job, never conceded his election loss and is already acting like he has the job again?  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/us/politics/trump-biden-white-house.html

Molly Jong-Fast: E. Jean Carroll, Nikki Haley, and the Depths of Donald Trump’s Misogyny

Last week, in an incredible culmination of the multiyear ordeal, Trump was ordered to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages. And yet, even after the dust had settled, Trump had the gall—or foolishness—to spew yet more invective at Carroll, calling her case a “hoax” and claiming it was a miscarriage of justice.

If Carroll’s trial revealed anything, it was that women—and particularly outspoken women—trigger Trump. From Megyn Kelly and Rosie O’Donnell to Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, women of all stripes have felt the wrath of the ex-president’s sexism. As Sophie Gilbert wrote last month in The Atlantic, “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” You can, in other words, be a woman in Trump’s world—but only if you’re the kind of woman Trump likes.

Which is why former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who is continuing a long shot presidential bid against Trump, is fast becoming his new bête noire. Trump has openly critiqued one of her dresses; has mocked her given name, Nimrata, and has taken to calling her a “birdbrain.” Trump even attacks Haley when he doesn’t mean to: Last week, during a speech in New Hampshire, Trump confused her with Nancy Pelosi while repeating a baseless conspiracy theory about the January 6 attack. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/e-jean-carroll-nikki-haley-donalds-trumps-misogyny

Dan Balz: Nikki Haley taunts Trump and he takes the bait. Will she keep it up?

Donald Trump doesn’t respond well to women who challenge, question or mock him. They bring out the worst in him. Nikki Haley is doing all three and has turned the Republican nomination contest into something worth watching.

Put aside whether Haley can win next month’s South Carolina primary or how well she will do on Super Tuesday and beyond. Put aside questions about ‘the math’ or ‘her path’ to the nomination or discussion about whether the race for the Republican presidential nomination essentially ended after Trump’s decisive victories in Iowa and New Hampshire.

All of those are relevant but right now beside the point. Haley has found a soft spot in Trump’s armor. She seems to relish the opportunity to torment him. That could make the next few weeks much more interesting than anyone might have expected only a few days ago — if she keeps it up. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/27/nikki-haley-taunts-trump-primary/
 

David Rothkopf and Bernard Schwartz: Trump Is a Combination of Every Threat We Have Ever Faced in Our History

In recent days, we have watched as the vast majority of leaders of the Republican Party, including many of Trump’s former foes, from Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz, have lined up behind the twice-impeached, frequently indicted former president. Nikki Haley can stay in the race as long as she likes, but the primaries are now effectively over. The worst president in our history is, arguably, stronger within the leadership ranks of the Republican Party than he has ever been. He is now the most dangerous presidential candidate in U.S. history. As a consequence, the great question before the rest of us is whether enough of us are ready to do whatever is necessary to defeat this threat as we have all those that have come before.

Sadly, there is reason to believe that this time we may not meet the challenge. Right now, Donald Trump is one of two people who could be our next president. The race, at the moment, between him and President Joe Biden, is too close to call.

That it seems a choice at all is what should mortify us. It is a sign that many in our society are blind to reality. And it is a sign that the rest of us, who understand both reality and what is at stake, have not yet done our job communicating to one another, to our friends, family, and communities what must be done to defend our country and our system.  https://newrepublic.com/article/178482/trump-2024-every-threat-ever-faced-history
 

Cornell Belcher: Panicking over polls showing Donald Trump ahead of President Biden? Please stop

A little less than a year out from the election, and the headlines are preoccupied with the latest bad poll for the president. The New York Times even wonders whether the president is “toast” as hand-wringing spreads across the progressive community.

While this might sound familiar to anyone reading about President Biden in recent weeks, I’m referring to the polling and headlines that confronted President Obama in the run-up to the 2012 election — which, in case you forgot, he won rather handily despite trailing Mitt Romney in surveys well ahead of the voting.

Over the last several election cycles, polling has increasingly become a central focus of media reporting on campaigns, particularly presidential contests. And that’s unfortunate. Average voters should rarely see or hear about polling because it’s not particularly relevant or actionable for them.

I do understand why polling has become a media obsession. People have always wanted to be able to predict the future, and polling is unfortunately being misconstrued as a political crystal ball.

But predicting the future is not what polls are for. “Polling is not designed or able to do what people most want it to do: predict election winners,” Monika McDermott, a Fordham University professor who studies political psychology and public opinion, told me. “There are far too many variables at stake in any election to perfectly predict the election. But the media and news consumers find horse race numbers exciting and easily digestible, and that’s why all the focus is on them.”

Covering the horse race therefore doesn’t just fail to give the voters vital information they need. It also spends an inordinate amount of time covering something that doesn’t have much of a relationship with what’s going to happen.

Working on campaigns, I often tell my clients that the horse race number — the one that shows how one candidate is faring versus another — is the least important one in a poll. That number is what campaign researchers are spending time and resources to understand how to change, and we do change it. Indeed, a presidential campaign will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to change that number. So as a pollster, I am not fixated on where my candidate is in the head-to-head number; I’m focused on the issues and messaging that will allow me to move that number. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-24/donald-trump-joe-biden-polls-president-election-2024
 

Philip Bump: Deposition transcript lays bare the GOP impeachment spin effort

One of the arguments offered by attorneys for President Biden’s son Hunter when responding to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door deposition was that the committee had shown a pattern of cherry-picking what would be presented to the public.

This is unquestionably true. Over and over and over and over and over, committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has made debunked and unsubstantiated public statements that cast the president and/or his son as dishonest or has rushed to release unsubstantiated claims or information that similarly collapse under scrutiny. The first year of his investigation into the Bidens made extremely little progress as a result — except where it matters, in the right-wing media universe.

Clearly, though, this has not gone unnoticed by those enmeshed in Comer’s sprawling investigation. There was that letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell in November. And then, this week, a letter from an attorney for Kevin Morris, a wealthy friend of Hunter Biden who helped pay off the president’s son’s tax liability.

“You did not treat Mr. Morris fairly and engaged in your standard practice of partially and inaccurately leaking a witness’s statements,” Morris writes in the letter obtained by The Washington Post. “Not two hours after we left Mr. Morris’ transcribed interview, you issued a press statement with cherry‐picked, out of context and totally misleading descriptions of what Mr. Morris said.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/19/comers-habit-cherry-picking-depositions-comes-back-haunt-him/

Pranshu Verma and Gerrit De Vynckz: AI is destabilizing ‘the concept of truth itself’ in 2024 election

Experts in artificial intelligence have long warned that AI-generated content could muddy the waters of perceived reality. Weeks into a pivotal election year, AI confusion is on the rise.

Politicians around the globe have been swatting away potentially damning pieces of evidence — grainy video footage of hotel trysts, voice recordings criticizing political opponents — by dismissing them as AI-generated fakes. At the same time, AI deepfakes are being used to spread misinformation.

AI creates a “liar’s dividend,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies digital propaganda and misinformation. “When you actually do catch a police officer or politician saying something awful, they have plausible deniability” in the age of AI.

AI “destabilizes the concept of truth itself,” added Libby Lange, an analyst at the misinformation tracking organization Graphika. “If everything could be fake, and if everyone’s claiming everything is fake or manipulated in some way, there’s really no sense of ground truth. Politically motivated actors, especially, can take whatever interpretation they choose.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/22/ai-deepfake-elections-politicians/

Philip Bump: Revenge, dishonesty and irony: Donald Trump distills his politics

Haley, Trump  declared at the outset, "Nikki Haley is very bad for the Republican Party and, indeed, our Country.”

Why?

Because, the former president wrote, “Her False Statements, Derogatory Comments, and Humiliating Public Loss, is demeaning to True American Patriots.”

If there is one thing Donald Trump will not abide, it is false statements, disparaging people or refusing to accept a humiliating public loss. When one thinks of the things that are least Trump-like, it’s dishonesty, rudeness and a failure to concede elections.

One would be forgiven for marveling at the lack of self-awareness in that phrase or to assume that he is being intentionally ironic. We might also wonder if this is another example of Trump trying to redirect criticism he faced against someone else, either to dilute the criticism or to “what about” it. Either way, it stands out. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/25/trump-haley-donors/
 

Frank Bruni: The Victorious, Censorious, Malicious Donald Trump

About an hour and a half after Donald Trump was declared the winner of the Republican primary in New Hampshire, he appeared onstage at a victory rally in Nashua, N.H., to bask in his accomplishment and bash lesser mortals. Bask-and-bash is his preferred M.O., an indulgence of the love he feels for himself and the contempt he feels for almost everybody else, and his bearing and remarks indeed had a familiar, compulsory ring. As Trump performances go, it was an unremarkable one.

And yet so utterly revealing. So perfectly emblematic. CNN, which I happened to
be watching, went live to Nashua and stayed with him for maybe 10 minutes, maybe less — the new fashion is to mete out attention to Trump modestly, carefully, lest he get too big a megaphone for his lies — and yet that abbreviated encounter provided ample information. I was struck by all that it communicated.

Such as the sycophancy surrounding Trump. Right behind him, visible over his shoulder, was Senator Tim Scott, a man who prides himself on his faith and decency, a former rival of Trump’s for the Republican nomination, now another toady in Trump’s service, surely angling to be his running mate, already on board as a campaign-trail surrogate. Scott was smiling broadly. It was as sad an expression as I’ve ever seen. Maybe sacrificing scruples on the altar of ambition is more joyful than I ever imagined. Maybe Stockholm syndrome takes effect more quickly and fully than I ever realized.

Or maybe Scott was intent on being as sunny a sidekick to Trump as Vivek Ramaswamy, who jittered into the frame to take a turn at the microphone and declare his devotion. Trump is an inconstant ally, but no matter: He’s rewarded with a retinue of fawners and flatterers. It’s a parable of conquest. It’s also morally pathetic.  https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/24/politics/kamala-harris-biden-campaign/index.html
 

Jonathan Chait: Republican Plan to Link Ukraine Aid to Border Security Fails for Extremely Obvious Reason

Mitch McConnell announced last night that his plan to advance a combination of aid to Ukraine and border security has failed, due to the shocking discovery that Donald Trump, far from being the public-spirited citizen they apparently took him for, is a cynical, power-hungry demagogue and his allies are gutless sycophants.

You might wonder why this revelation struck him so late, and at a point where it has come at such immense cost. Let me explain the series of rather obvious miscalculations that led to this fiasco.

Basically every Democrat in Congress, along with many Republicans, wants to continue giving military aid to Ukraine so it can defend itself against Russia’s ongoing invasion. But because the issue splits the GOP, and Republicans control the House, passing this aid isn’t easy. House Speaker Mike Johnson can block Ukraine aid from coming to the floor, even though a majority in both chambers favors this aid.

When anti-Ukraine Republicans articulated their opposition to helping Ukraine, they usually framed it as having something to do with the American border. “Critics asked how Biden could justify rushing thousands of troops to assist Ukraine and defend the borders of NATO, yet stubbornly neglect the chaos at our border,” wrote the Heritage Foundation in 2022. “We should be protecting our border, not the border of Ukraine,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene.

In reality, not even Marjorie Taylor Greene is stupid enough to think there is a direct trade-off between helping Ukraine and reducing the surge of asylum claims in the United States. It is simply a rhetorical conceit to avoid admitting that anti-Ukraine Republicans either don’t care about or actively support Russia’s goal of crushing Ukraine, using a facile rhetorical conceit that both issues can be described with the word “border” to create a false choice.

It was totally predictable that Trump would come out publicly against any deal that either made the immigration problem better or made Biden appear effective. Trump has been very clear all along that he wants conditions in the country to be as horrible as possible in every way when he is out of power. It was equally predictable that, when he did, most Republicans would go along with him.

The pro-Ukraine wing of the Republican party wasted months dithering on a doomed plan. Meanwhile Ukrainians are dying and desperately conserving ammunition, without being able to know when or even if they will receive more supplies.

So now that this doomed plan has wasted time and lives, pro-Ukraine Republicans face the choice that they were trying to weasel their way out of. They can split their party and jam through aid to Ukraine. Or they can let Russia win the war. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2024/01/republican-senate-deal-link-ukraine-border-fails-trump.html
 

John Ellis: Trump Digs Himself a Deeper Hole with Suburban Women

Ask a suburban woman in any major or secondary media market this question: which candidate do you feel best understands what your life is like? I would guess that at least two-thirds of them would say… "Nikki Haley." That doesn’t mean they would vote for her for president, necessarily. It does mean that, politically speaking, she deserves respect.”

Trump’s graceless and weirdly angry ‘victory speech’ in New Hampshire was incredibly stupid, politically speaking. He won. There was no need to use the occasion to demand that Haley drop out, to say that she would ‘be under investigation’ if she won — and to suggest there are skeletons in Haley’s closet that ‘she doesn’t want to talk about.'

Trump’s ‘victory speech’ will be long forgotten in a week or two. But it’s part of a pattern of behavior that has come to be part of his ‘brand.’ That’s fine in the GOP primary electorate universe. He has more than enough support across all the demographic sub-groups to win the nomination, quickly and decisively. It’s not fine in the general election universe. If 37% or 38% or 40% of suburban women think you’re a jerk and a bully, you’ll lose. https://politicalitems.substack.com/p/3-quick-political-notes
 

Ezra Klein: Gen Z Is Listening to What Netanyahu Is Saying. Is Biden?

“My insistence is what has prevented — over the years — the establishment of a Palestinian state that would have constituted an existential danger to Israel,” Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday. “As long as I am prime minister, I will continue to strongly insist on this.”

But consider Netanyahu’s boast. He is not just saying he opposes a Palestinian state now. He is saying he has opposed it for years. That he has worked to make it impossible. That he has succeeded.

The record backs him up. He allowed Hamas to hold Gaza, and Qatar to finance the group, because its presence kept the Palestinian leadership divided. No one could demand that Netanyahu accept a Palestinian state so long as that state would be governed by Hamas. This was his strategy, and he and his advisers said so.

In the West Bank, Netanyahu allowed settlers to run wild and rendered Hamas’s rival, Al Fatah, feckless. The Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority cooperated on security with Israel, day after day, but rather than raise Al Fatah up as a negotiating partner, he humiliated it. Netanyahu made Al Fatah into a subcontractor of Israeli control and gave Palestinians nothing for it. Instead, he allowed settlers to continue to take the little they had. It is no accident that the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy had collapsed even before the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.

In recent months, I’ve been thinking, as many American Jews have, about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. And I’ve been thinking, too, about the polls showing that support for Israel, in America, is generational.

Is there antisemitism on campuses? Absolutely. But I visit colleges constantly. Antisemitism isn’t what is bringing most of those students out to the rallies. Antisemitism is not why most 18- to 29-year-olds see Israel as the aggressor nation. Antisemitism is not why the images and facts out of Gaza horrify. They are opposed to the Israel they know: an Israel that has no interest in peace — that has actively sabotaged efforts at peace — and that can imagine no security for itself absent the endless control of Palestinian lives.

Which is one reason I think the response to the protests on campus has been misguided. This is not a problem you can solve by firing college presidents or blackballing student radicals. Israel is losing the support of a generation, not a few student groups. And it is losing it because of what it does, not what it is. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/netanyahu-biden-israel-gaza.html
 

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court Has Itself to Blame for Texas Defying Its Orders

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is engaged in a number of legal battles with the Biden administration over immigration. One of them involves Abbott ordering the Texas National Guard to set up razor wire and floating barriers in an effort to deter migrants. The federal government argues that those barriers have also blocked Border Patrol from being able to arrest and process migrants in accordance with federal law. Earlier this month, a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande, the river that runs along the border with Mexico. A short time later, when Border Patrol was alerted to two other migrants in distress, National Guardsmen reportedly prevented federal agents from reaching them. In 2023, the Houston Chronicle reported that a Department of Public Safety trooper wrote to his supervisor that officers were told “to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande, and have been told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat.

There are many factors that led to this point. One is the reigning Republican ideology of Trumpism, which holds that only conservative electoral victories, conservative laws, and conservative governments are legitimate and must be obeyed—the ideology that led a mob to ransack the Capitol to overturn an election. Another is the steady drumbeat of catastrophizing right-wing propaganda about the recent rise in migrants at the border, which seeks to validate extreme responses, including violence and lawlessness. But even accounting for those two elements, the most significant proximate reason for Abbott’s response may be that four Supreme Court justices sent Abbott an implicit message that they agreed with him.

When the Court sided with the Biden administration, it was a 5–4 split, with Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees. This should have been a unanimous ruling; for more than a century, the Supreme Court has held that the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration law in most cases and that the states cannot usurp that jurisdiction just because they disapprove of federal policy. Abbott is now thumbing his nose at the federal government and, by extension, the authority of the high court itself, and four Republican appointees—Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch—are saying: Go right ahead. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/greg-abbott-texas-border-stunt-supreme-court/677267/
 

David French: Never-Trumpers Never Had a Chance

Since the moment Trump took the G.O.P. primary lead in 2015, he’s never relinquished his hold on the party. And since Trump’s hostile takeover and unexpected 2016 victory, the G.O.P. has also experienced consistent losses. Democrats seized the House from Republicans in 2018. They took the presidency and the Senate in 2020. In those two elections, the Democrats accomplished a political feat not seen since the Herbert Hoover era: winning the House, Senate and White House in a single four-year span.

And the Democrats’ success didn’t stop there. In 2022, despite political conditions that should have been overwhelmingly favorable to Republicans, Democrats made a modest gain in the Senate and barely lost the closely divided House. Election-denying MAGA candidates were routed in multiple swing-state elections. Yet none of those setbacks broke Trump’s grip on the G.O.P.

One of the sobering realities of life is that we often don’t understand our true hierarchy of values until they come into conflict. We might say, for example, that we believe that our political leaders should be men or women of high character who broadly agree with our policy positions. But do we believe that at the cost of actually losing a political race? Or is victory the necessity, and character and ideology the luxuries?

I don’t regret my arguments against Trump. I’d make them again, and I will continue making them. I do ask myself how I missed the sheer extent of Republican anger. And I’m deeply, deeply grieved by the thought that I did anything in my life before Trump to contribute to that unrighteous rage. Animosity is the enemy of liberty and unity. Before Republicans can reject Trump or end Trumpism, they’ll have to ease the anger that dominates far too many right-wing hearts. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/opinion/trump-primary-election-2024.html