The conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court Olivier Douliery /AFP via Getty Images In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's [nearly three-hour oral argument](https://www.npr.org/2024/04/25/1246376720/donald-trump-supreme-court-immunity) Thursday, it seems apparent that at minimum, there will be no Trump trial on charges of obstructing the 2020 election until after the election this November. Perhaps it's Trump Derangement Syndrome that led lots of legal eagles, from liberal to conservative, to believe that former President Donald Trump's claim of immunity from criminal prosecution was preposterous. But it's more likely that court observers didn't properly account for the personal experiences of the conservative justices. Five of the six conservatives spent much of their lives as denizens of the Beltway. As young men, the five served in the White House and Justice Department, working for Republican presidents, often seeing their administrations as targets of unfair harassment by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. You can hear echoes of those experiences in some of Thursday's questions about the conspiracy to defraud charge against Trump. ### Kavanaugh and Alito's experience [Justice Brett Kavanaugh](https://www.npr.org/2018/10/07/654893306/a-quick-look-at-brett-kavanaugh-the-new-supreme-court-justice) worked for George W. Bush for five years, three of them as staff secretary, a position that's been described as the "nerve center" of the White House. "Conspiracy to defraud the United States can be used against a lot of presidential activities, historically, with a creative prosecutor who wants to go after a president," Kavanaugh cautioned. Indeed, he volunteered his view that a 1988 case in which the court upheld the now-defunct independent counsel law, was a "a terrible decision for the presidency and for the country." [Justice Neil Gorsuch](https://www.npr.org/2017/02/05/513532446/heres-what-we-know-about-neil-gorsuch) had a much more personal taste of Washington's instinct for criminal prosecution, seeing it as a blood sport. His mother was the Reagan administration's first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and ultimately became the first agency director in U.S. history to be cited for contempt of Congress. At the time, her son, now a Supreme Court justice, was just a teenager and reportedly felt the rebuke keenly. Fast forward to Thursday, when Gorsuch questioned Michael Dreeben, the lawyer representing the special counsel, saying he was not concerned about this case, "but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives." ### Alito's Reagan years Then too there is Justice [Samuel Alito](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1114281008/supreme-court-justice-samuel-alito), who held increasingly senior Justice Department positions for the entirety of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. "Presidents have to make a lot of tough decisions," Alito told Dreeben. He asked incredulously, "Did I understand you to say, 'Well, you know if he makes a mistake, he makes a mistake. He's subject to the criminal laws just like anybody else.' You don't think he's in a special, a peculiarly precarious position?" "Making a mistake is not what lands you in a criminal prosecution," Dreeben replied. Alito went on to suggest that barring criminal prosecutions of a former president would be a good thing for democracy. "If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows" there is "a real possibility after leaving office" that rather than being able to "go off into peaceful retirement," he may be criminally prosecuted "by a bitter political opponent," won't that "lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?" Alito asked. [Chief Justice John Roberts](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/19/880964209/who-is-chief-justice-john-roberts) was not as overt in his questioning, but when he served as a top aide to the attorney general in the Reagan administration, he was often the point man on political controversies. Then too, there is the fact Roberts sailed through his Senate confirmation hearings, unlike many of his conservative colleagues, including Kavanaugh, Alito and Clarence Thomas. ### A skeptical conservative Only one of the court's conservatives expressed doubts about the breadth of Trump's immunity claim. [Justice Amy Coney Barrett](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/28/917554001/amy-coney-barrett-a-dream-for-the-right-nightmare-for-the-left), ironically the last of President Trump's three appointees to the court, was the lone skeptic of his immunity claims. And she is a relative Washington newbie, having spent most of her adult life in academia at Notre Dame Law School. She challenged the idea that a president could not be prosecuted for submitting a slate of fake electors to thwart the certification of a new president. And she challenged the assertion from Trump's lawyer that no former president can be criminally prosecuted if he hasn't first been impeached, convicted, and removed from office. "There are many other people who are subject to impeachment, including the nine sitting on this bench," Barrett said, adding that nobody has ever suggested that Supreme Court justices couldn't be criminally prosecuted. "So why is the president different when the Impeachment Clause doesn't say so?" she asked.

The Supreme Court on Thursday [made it harder](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-585_k5fm.pdf) for people whose property had been seized by the police to argue for its swift return. By a 6-to-3 vote, the court ruled against two Alabama women who had sought prompt hearings to recover cars they owned that had been taken by the police in connection with crimes committed by others. “After a state seizes and seeks civil forfeiture of personal property, due process requires a timely forfeiture hearing but does not require a separate preliminary hearing,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority had adopted a wooden approach to a pressing problem. “The majority today holds that due process never requires the minimal check of a retention hearing before a police officer deprives an innocent owner of her car for months or years,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. Even as the court rejected the women’s argument that the Constitution requires streamlined procedures, five justices expressed grave misgivings about the practice of confiscating property said to have been used to commit crimes, known as civil asset forfeiture. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F09%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fsupreme-court-alabama-police-seized-cars.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F09%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fsupreme-court-alabama-police-seized-cars.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F09%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fsupreme-court-alabama-police-seized-cars.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2024%2F05%2F09%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fsupreme-court-alabama-police-seized-cars.html).

**Conservative bloc** * Alito – Majority * Barrett – Minority * Gorsuch – Majority * Kavanaugh – Majority * Roberts – Majority * Thomas – Majority **Liberal bloc** * Jackson – Minority * Kagan – Minority * Sotomayor – Minority The [US supreme court](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-supreme-court) has decided to put a hold on an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reduce harmful air pollution that drifts across state lines. The conservative-dominated court has granted a temporary halt to the EPA rule while a lower court challenge to it plays out, siding with three states – Ohio, [West Virginia](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/west-virginia) and Indiana – and industry allies that are attempting to derail requirements that prevent pollution from billowing into neighboring states. A [5-4 majority of the court](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23a349_0813.pdf), with Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices in dissent, decided that the EPA “offered no reasoned response” to concerns from upwind states over changes in their future obligations under the plan. “The court grants the states’ application to put the rule on hold while the case proceeds in the lower courts,” the majority ruled, adding that it was likely the EPA would lose its case in the lower Washington DC circuit court. Barrett, in her dissent, wrote that the court “justifies this decision based on an alleged procedural error that likely had no impact on the plan”. [ US supreme court allows emergency abortions in Idaho for now ](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/27/supreme-court-allows-emergency-abortions-idaho) The supreme court took up an emergency request by the three states to hear the case, thereby fast-tracking it for oral arguments that [took place in February](https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/supreme-court-likely-to-block-epa-ozone-regulation/). The decision to side with the challenge to the EPA rules, which environmental groups have called “extraordinary, premature and harmful”, threatens the future of what is known as the US’s “good neighbor” pollution regulations. “Giving corporate polluters a pass to keep prioritizing profits over people is a devastating outcome for public health, especially as we prepare for a summer that could be one of the worst smog seasons on record,” said Holly Bender, chief energy officer at the Sierra Club. Bender said that the decision sets a “dangerous precedent” by allowing polluting industries to get emergency hearings in the supreme court. “Today’s decision is not only harmful to communities breathing polluted air, but to democracy itself,” she added. Representatives of heavy industry and mining welcomed the ruling, meanwhile. “We’re pleased that the supreme court recognized the immediate harm to industry and consumers posed by this reckless rule,” said Rich Nolan, president of the National Mining Association. The program, first drawn up by the EPA in 2015, is designed to prevent “upwind” states from causing air pollution that flows to “downwind” neighbors. The primary target of the regulation is ground-level ozone, which forms smog that causes an array of health problems. When fully implemented, the EPA estimates it will save thousands of lives and reduce the number of asthma attacks by a million each year. It is already in place in 11 states, which saw a collective 18% cut in nitrogen oxide, the gas that helps create smog, last year. Under the plan, states have to submit proposals to cut pollution from power plants and other industrial facilities but 21 failed to do so, resulting in the EPA stepping in to set new standards. This triggered a legal challenge from the trio of midwestern states that create much of the pollution that then blows to their north-eastern neighbors. The states have claimed that the regulations are too onerous and will strain their power grids. Proponents of the rules point to the public health benefits. The recalcitrant states “refused to even try” to cut their pollution, to the detriment of other states, according to Robin Craig, an expert in environmental law at the University of Southern California. “So people who live in downwind states \[roughly the north-east states\] might not be able to enjoy the air quality that the EPA deems requisite to protect public health not because of their own failures, but because south-eastern and midwestern states don’t want to crack down on their major emitters like coal-fired power plants,” Craig said. The decision by the supreme court is the latest that has gone against established environmental protections. In other recent rulings, the court ordered the EPA to scale back clean water protections, while another prevented the agency from formulating a wide-ranging plan to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants. Charles Harper, senior power sector policy lead at Evergreen, said that the supreme court is showing “that it is increasingly substituting its own rightwing politics for the scientific expertise at federal agencies”.

The supreme court’s ruling [on presidential immunity](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jul/01/supreme-court-decision-trump-immunity-ruling) combines a tectonic constitutional shift and immediate political repercussions to devastating effect. It allows one man to stand above the law. It slows and appears to gut the 2020 election-subversion case against Donald Trump, though it does not necessarily end it. No one believes a trial can be held before November’s election, although court hearings could still offer [a detailed airing of the evidence this autumn](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/politics/supreme-court-immunity-trump-jan-6.html). There could hardly have been a better week for Mr Trump, who saw his rival stumble so badly in last Thursday’s debate that Joe Biden faces [growing calls to quit](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/02/texas-democrat-lloyd-doggett-biden) four months from election day. Anyone who doubts how consequential a second Trump administration term would be for the United States and the world need only look to the supreme court, now ruled by a conservative supermajority thanks to three Trump-appointed justices. Monday’s [majority ruling](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf), penned by Chief Justice John Roberts, is a disingenuous, bloodless discussion which pompously warns that “we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies”. The minority opinion, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is screaming to the people to wake up: the city on a hill is on fire. A twice-impeached convicted felon who attempted to overturn the people’s verdict, reveres authoritarians and pledges [to be a dictator](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/donald-trump-sean-hannity-dictator-day-one-response-iowa-town-hall) (only “on day one”) could soon be re-elected. This is not about exigencies; this is an emergency. Justice Sotomayor outlined the new limits for a president: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organises a military coup to hold on to power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune … In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.” The court’s ruling grants complete immunity from criminal prosecution to core presidential powers. But it also grants presumptive immunity to other “official acts” – and these are extraordinarily widely drawn. Pressuring Mike Pence not to certify the 2020 election results would probably enjoy immunity, Chief Justice Roberts writes, because if the president and vice-president are discussing official duties, this is official conduct; and presiding over the results is a constitutional responsibility of the vice-president. The bar for overturning presumption looks sky-high, as Justice Sotomayor notes – doing so must pose no danger of intrusion whatsoever on presidential authority. The president’s motives cannot be examined. Nor can official acts be used in criminal cases [relating to unofficial acts](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-decision-of-surpassing-recklessness-in-dangerous-times). The resulting scope is so great that any politician or official would surely balk at granting it to the other side – unless they were certain they could hold on to power indefinitely. This ruling will almost certainly, as it should, further lower [declining support](https://rollcall.com/2024/05/08/supreme-court-to-decide-contentious-issues-amid-ongoing-criticism/) for a court now mired in scandal, thanks to the Republican-appointed [Clarence Thomas](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/07/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-trips) and [Samuel Alito](https://www.theguardian.com/law/article/2024/may/29/samuel-alito-flag-jan-6-recusal). Other majority rulings in recent days have delivered a major blow to the [regulatory powers of federal agencies](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/jun/28/us-supreme-court-chevron-doctrine-ruling) and, extraordinarily, said that officials [can accept cash or gifts from people they have assisted](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/27/supreme-court-bribes-gratuities-snyder-kavanaugh): they only count as bribes if given before the favour. This is a court for the rich and powerful, and it is making them more so. The founders intended the supreme court to be part of the [solution to the tyranny of European kings](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/historians-amicus-brief-trump-v-united-states). Mr Trump, and the court’s conservative justices, have made it part of the problem.

 When Vice President Harris took the stage at the Essence Festival in New Orleans on Saturday, she walked the audience through her life story: from growing up the child of Oakland Calif., parents active in the civil rights movement, through some of the personal experiences that drove her to seek public office. And she wrapped up her remarks with some lines she hasn’t used much since 2019, when they were a regular part of her stump speech as she sought the Democratic nomination. “People in your life will tell you, “It's not your time. It's not your turn. Nobody like you has done it before.’ One of the things I love is they'll say, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be a lot of hard work,’” Harris said. “Don't you ever listen to that. I like to say, I eat no for breakfast.”  The revival of this message comes at a moment when Harris is under intense scrutiny because of questions about the age and health of President Biden after he badly stumbled in his debate against former President Donald Trump. There are [calls for Biden to step aside](https://www.npr.org/2024/07/07/g-s1-8696/congress-democrats-turmoil-biden), and for younger Democrats to sprint through a truncated contest to become the party’s nominee for November. That would be a race where Harris, 59, would be a leading contender. She’s already number two on the ticket, and has a national — and international — profile that other Democrats on the bench lack. Biden has been [defiant](https://www.npr.org/2024/07/05/nx-s1-5028578/biden-interview-debate), saying he intends to stick it out. And Harris has forcefully defended him on television, cutting short any speculation that she would take his place. "Look, Joe Biden is our nominee. We beat Trump once, and we're going to beat him again, period,” she [told CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-interview-joe-biden-after-debate/). Whether or not Biden weathers this crisis, Trump and his campaign have signaled they plan to make Harris an issue in the campaign. They say Biden would be unlikely to make it through a second term, and would hand the keys to the White House to his vice president — who Republicans argue is not qualified for the job. “Vote Joe Biden today – get Kamala Harris tomorrow,” is the Republican line in a [new attack ad](https://x.com/trumpdailyposts/status/1808259931839386108?s=46).  Harris allies say Trump’s ad — which harshly spotlights her laugh — is an example of the kind of racism and sexism she has persistently faced on the national political stage. “It’s not surprising to see this kind of attack from Trump,” said Karen Finney, a strategist who has worked for many female Democratic candidates. In 2020, after Biden tapped Harris as his running mate, Trump [perpetuated a racist birtherism conspiracy](https://www.npr.org/2020/08/15/902756963/trumps-attacks-on-harris-are-a-return-to-familiar-territory) about Harris, saying she didn’t meet the requirements to be vice president, because her parents were born outside the United States. Finney said Trump has long used the tactic of “othering” women — including Harris — by mocking the sound of their voices to say that “‘There’s something about this person that isn’t like us.’”  Harris made history on several fronts when she and Biden won in 2020: the first woman in the role, the first Black person, the first Asian American person, the first graduate of a historically black college. The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris was a prosecutor who rose to become California’s attorney general. She had [made a national name for herself as a senator](https://www.npr.org/2020/09/25/916640509/a-candidate-not-a-prosecutor-harris-role-in-upcoming-supreme-court-hearings) asking tough questions of Trump administration officials and nominees, including the televised confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice [Brett Kavanaugh](https://www.npr.org/2019/09/16/761147608/harris-and-others-call-for-kavanaughs-impeachment-after-allegations). ### Early stumbles fed doubts about Harris But being first — and managing lofty expectations — meant Harris was under "a magnifying glass" compared to her predecessors, said Rachel Palermo, who worked for Harris for the first few years of the administration. "I always felt like she had to overperform to get an average review," Palermo said.  And it took time for Harris to come into her own in a role where remaining in the background is part of the job description. “You have to learn your way around the house before you start moving furniture. I think Kamala Harris has been learning her way around the house in a new role,” said Democratic pollster Terrance Woodbury, founder of HIT Strategies. “Now we see her beginning to start moving furniture. And I think that's a role that that Americans have been wanting to see more of from her” > “We have to deal with what's happening at the border.”[@VP](https://twitter.com/VP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Kamala Harris spoke exclusively with [@LesterHoltNBC](https://twitter.com/LesterHoltNBC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) on her first trip overseas, how the administration is addressing the immigration crisis, and if she plans to visit the southern border herself. [pic.twitter.com/sA4We7peeR](https://t.co/sA4We7peeR) > > — TODAY (@TODAYshow) [June 8, 2021](https://twitter.com/TODAYshow/status/1402224936136187907?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Early on, Harris struggled to find her footing. One of her first assignments from Biden was to tackle the intractable root causes of migration, and her first foreign trip was to [Guatemala and Mexico City](https://www.npr.org/2021/06/07/1004074139/harris-tells-guatemalans-not-to-migrate-to-the-united-states?ft=nprml&f=). She was criticized for going nowhere near the southern U.S. border, [until weeks later](https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1009939218/harris-is-visiting-the-southern-border-after-trying-to-keep-the-focus-away-from-). But in a television interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, she [misstepped](https://www.npr.org/2021/06/08/1004504140/harris-tries-to-turn-the-focus-to-migration-but-gets-bogged-down-in-border-quest) with a defensive, flippant answer to why she hadn’t first visited the southern U.S. border, an exchange that overshadowed her work on the issue. Harris also took on the issue of [voting rights](https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015829043/transcript-vice-president-harris-on-voting-rights-the-filibuster-and-the-courts), an issue where she gave lofty speeches but one where real legislative solutions were impossible, given the deeply partisan divides in Congress. There were a series of staff shake-ups, and Harris often seemed uncomfortable and stilted in the limelight. Republican critics mocked her not only for what she said, but how she said it. Harris’ [approval ratings](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/kamala-harris/) remained persistently low — as did Biden’s. Even some Democrats wondered if she ought to stay on the ticket for 2024: the theory was that a more popular running mate could do more to quell voter concerns that Biden, 81, was too old for another four years in the job. Instead, from the start, the re-elect branded itself as the Biden-Harris campaign.  The vice president was on her way to an event about maternal health when she learned that the Supreme Court had [struck down Roe v. Wade](https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1102305878/supreme-court-abortion-roe-v-wade-decision-overturn), the constitutional right to an abortion. “We were in the car and she was reading the majority opinion line by line,” recalled Rohini Kosoglu, who was a long-time adviser to Harris. “She rewrote her entire speech from scratch, noting to us that it was not solely a woman’s issue. At the heart of this was a health care crisis.” Harris, who had long championed reproductive rights, now had a [clear mission](https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1171906116/harris-abortion-2024-campaign). “We have been on the frontlines of this fight for many years, all of us in this together. And now we enter a new phase. There is nothing hypothetical about this moment,” she told a crowd at the 2022 Emily’s List gala.  It was an issue where Harris brought a passion and ease to the discussion that Biden — a devout Catholic — has been unable to muster. And it was an issue voters cared deeply about. The White House put her front and center, rallying the troops, leading round tables across the country, meeting with patients, doctors, and advocates. And when Democrats pulled in better-than-expected results in the November 2022 midterms, that was, in part, credited to Harris. Harris has continued to be the main messenger on the issue ever since, inviting abortion providers to the White House and even visiting a clinic that provides abortions and other reproductive care — making history as the first president or vice president to do so. ### Harris has become a liaison to young Democrats and voters of color Harris has quietly worked on building foreign policy experience over the past few years. She has met with more than 150 world leaders, represented the White House at key meetings of global leaders on Ukraine and climate, and traveled to 21 countries as vice president.  Rashad Robinson, who has known Harris since she was California's attorney general, traveled with her to Ghana as part of a U.S. delegation. "I felt like the VP was in her zone" on the trip, Robinson said, describing the crowd of thousands who packed Accra's Black Star Square to see her. "You know, she's the first to take on this role and no one's looked like her or had her story or her background. And I believe a lot of folks had to catch up," said Robinson, president of Color Of Change. But Harris has changed, too. "I do feel like just seeing her out in public and speaking, there's just a level of comfort and ease that is there that just looks and feels different from the earlier days," Robinson said. Harris has [more forcefully called](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/03/1235712368/kamala-harris-gaza-ceasefire-israel-aid) for a ceasefire in Gaza before Biden did – while her positions were in line with his policy, her emphasis was seen as more savvy by Democrats concerned that Biden’s unqualified support for Israel could erode his support on the left. Harris has also tried to connect with young voters and voters of color, parts of the Democratic base where Biden has struggled. Harris has invited more women and minorities to meetings at the White House, visited dozens of college campuses and has continued to speak at countless Black and Latino conventions. “She was really interested in hearing about the direct experiences of women who, frankly, have been really invisible in administrations, and, in general, in politics,” Ai-jen Poo, the co-founder of the National Domestic Workers told NPR in early 2022. Poo had met with Harris on four different occasions during the vice president’s first year in office to discuss issues concerning women in the workforce.  Harris has also played a leading role on gun violence prevention, overseeing a new White House office. Before it was torn down, she visited the [Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School](https://www.npr.org/2024/03/11/1237215884/harris-will-visit-parkland-school) building where 14 students and 3 adults were killed in a mass shooting in 2018. Gun violence prevention is among the top three issues in this election for more than a quarter of voters aged 18-34, according to a Tufts [poll](https://circle.tufts.edu/2024-election-youth-poll#diverse-issue-priorities,-like-climate,-shape-youth-votes-and-action).  Harris ran for the Democratic nomination against Biden and a crowded field, but short on money and down in the polls, her campaign fizzled and she [dropped out of the race](https://www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784443227/kamala-harris-drops-out-of-presidential-race) two months before anyone had even started voting in the 2020 primaries. But this time around, she’s expected to be a bigger force — especially if Biden pulls out the race, creating a truncated nomination process. She would come into that party battle with an advantage. Her name is already on the ticket, and she has more name recognition than any other potential candidate. And she has built up relationships with supporters in battleground states, making more than 60 trips in total this year, touting the accomplishments of the Biden administration and warning against a return to Trump.  David Milam, a Democratic voter from Purcellville, Va., says he’s been a fan since he saw Harris in the Kavanaugh hearings. “I liked her ability to get at the truth, to have that prosecutorial ability to be tough,” Milam said. He says he supports Biden and will vote for him if he stays in the race. But after the debate — which he called “distressing” — he hopes Biden will be convinced to pass the baton to Harris. There has been speculation about [other potential candidates](https://www.npr.org/2024/07/01/nx-s1-4850076/biden-harris-newsom-whitmer-2024) — including a long list of Democratic governors — who could challenge Harris as heir apparent. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said she wants Biden to stay in the race — but if that changed, she said it would be "political malpractice" for Democrats to go with someone other than Harris, who she said galvanizes support from women and from voters of color. "She is leading on the number one persuasion issue in this country: reproductive freedom," Timmaraju said. "She's not just the top spokesperson — she's been the person leading the strategy."  Black women are a key part of the Democratic party base, and prominent Black woman have said they expect Harris to ascend. “She's sitting right there as somebody who has been in the White House, as somebody who already has the name recognition, who's already out on the trail,” said Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., in a [recent interview](https://www.wesa.fm/politics-government/2024-07-03/summer-lee-biden-kamala-harris-fallback), explaining the "optics of pushing aside a Black woman" would be a mistake for the party. Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, a group that works with Black voters, said overlooking Harris would be offensive. "The thing they don't want to do is jump over the Black vice president. It's absurd,” she said. “There are many things that would be suicidal for the Democratic party. That is one of them."

BBC When Kamala Harris steps onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week as the party’s presidential nominee, she’ll do so knowing that many in the audience cheering her on once counted her out. Ms Harris, 59, has faced years of doubt from some within her party about her ability to run for America’s highest political office - including from President Joe Biden, the man whom she continues to serve as vice-president. Since replacing Mr Biden as Democratic nominee in mid-July, Ms Harris has seen a tidal wave of enthusiasm, reflected in polling, fundraising and the enormous crowds that have come out to see her at rallies across the country. But the political momentum and energy she has generated in recent weeks among Democrats was never a given. After failing in a short-lived presidential bid in 2019, she began her vice presidency on a shaky footing, beset by stumbles in high-profile interviews, staff turnover and low approval ratings. And for the last three-and-a-half years in the White House she has struggled to break through to American voters. Advisers and allies say that in the years since those early struggles she has sharpened her political skills, created loyal coalitions within her party and built credibility on issues like abortion rights that energise the Democratic base. She has, in other words, been preparing for a moment exactly like this one. On Thursday, as she formally accepts the Democratic nomination, Ms Harris has an opportunity to reintroduce herself on the national stage with fewer than 80 days until an election that could see her become the nation’s first female president. At the same time, she’ll have to prove that she is capable of leading a party that never saw her as its natural leader and remains divided over the war in Israel and Gaza. But above all, she’ll need put to rest any lingering doubt among the Democratic faithful that she can meet the challenge of defeating former president Donald Trump in what remains a tight and unpredictable contest.  Before Kamala Harris became a national figure, the former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general had forged a reputation as a rising star in the party, landing the endorsement of President Barack Obama in her 2010 race to become the state’s top lawyer. But those who followed her career closely saw a mixed record. As a prosecutor, she faced public outcry for refusing to seek the death penalty for a man convicted of killing a young police officer. And then as attorney-general, she upheld the state’s death penalty despite her personal opposition. Having reached the peaks of California state politics, she was elected to the US Senate the same night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. In her brief tenure, she made headlines for her searing and direct questioning of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his testy 2018 confirmation hearings. “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” she asked the Trump appointee, in an exchange that cascaded across social media and late night television. Like Mr Obama, she was a young senator of limitless ambition. Halfway through her first term, she launched a presidential campaign. That campaign, like this one, was met with great fanfare. More than 20,000 people gathered in her hometown of Oakland, California, for its launch. But her effort to become the Democratic nominee sputtered and collapsed before the first presidential primary ballot was even cast. Ms Harris failed to carve out a clear political identity and distinguish herself in a field of rivals that included Mr Biden and left-wing senator Bernie Sanders. Critics said she endorsed a range of progressive policies but seemed to lack clear conviction. A breakthrough June 2019 debate moment in which she challenged her then-opponent Mr Biden’s record on the racial desegregation of schools resulted in a brief surge in polling. She attacked Mr Biden for an earlier campaign moment in which he fondly recalled working with two segregationist senators, before accusing him of opposing the bussing of students between schools to help integrate them. “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day,” Ms Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”  Kamala Harris's powerful story about her upbringing during a debate became a breakthrough moment during her 2020 presidential bid But campaign infighting and indecision on which issues to emphasise ultimately sank her presidential bid. The campaign was marked by “a lot of rookie mistakes”, said Kevin Madden, an adviser on Republican Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaign. “The substance that needed to be there to pass the commander-in-chief test and to really fill in some of the blanks for voters, it just wasn’t there and as a result her opponents filled it in for her.” Eight months later, Mr Biden put aside their primary rivalry and announced Ms Harris as his running mate. She became the first woman of colour to ever be nominated in that position - and in January 2021, the first female vice-president in US history. A rocky start ------------- It was five months into her job as Mr Biden’s vice-president that Ms Harris endured her first public stumble during a foreign trip to Guatemala and Mexico. The trip was meant to showcase her role in pursuing economic initiatives to curb the flow of migrants from Central America to the US southern border, a foreign policy assignment given to her by Mr Biden. But it was quickly overshadowed by an awkward exchange in an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt, in which she dismissed repeated questions about why she had not yet visited the US-Mexico border. Later that day, during a press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Ms Harris tried to recapture the narrative, delivering a stark message to migrants thinking of making their way to the US. “Do not come,” she told them. “Do not come.” While the NBC News interview fuelled Republican attacks that continue to this day, the latter comments drew the ire of progressives and were quickly panned on social media, even though other administration officials had echoed the same rhetoric.  The issue of immigration has dogged Ms Harris and it's one that hasn't gone away The vice-president’s allies blamed the White House for failing to adequately prepare her and assigning an unwinnable issue. They complained that as the first woman, African-American and Asian-American to serve as vice president, outsized expectations had been imposed on her from the very start of her term, giving her little time to settle. “There was immense pressure in the beginning to own things,” said one former aide who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about their time in the White House. In the months that followed, Ms Harris endured more scrutiny as she faced high staff turnover, a slew of negative headlines about her performance and underwhelming media appearances. Hemmed in by Covid restrictions, she was limited in her public engagements, fuelling the perception that she was invisible. When critics labelled her a prop for standing behind Mr Biden at bill-signing ceremonies – as her white male predecessors in the role regularly did – a decision was made to remove her from those events altogether, according to aides, triggering more criticism that she was absent. “People had an expectation to experience her as vice-president as if she was Michelle Obama, but she was in a job… built for Al Gore or Mike Pence,” said Jamal Simmons, a longtime Democratic strategist who was brought in as her communications director during the second year. Roe v Wade and coalition politics --------------------------------- As her team sought to improve her poor public image, Ms Harris stepped into a bigger foreign policy role. She travelled to Poland in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, held bilateral meetings in Asia amid heightened tensions with China and stood in for Mr Biden at the Munich Security Conference that same year. But in May 2022, a political earthquake would reshape the trajectory of her vice-presidency. In a rare breach of the Supreme Court, a leaked draft opinion revealed plans to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade abortion ruling - which had protected American women’s federal right to abortion for nearly half a century. She seized on the opportunity to be the lead messenger on an issue that Mr Biden – a devout Irish Catholic who avoided even saying the term “abortion” – was reluctant to own. “How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?” she told the crowd at an event for a pro-choice group on the same day the bombshell leak was published, deciding to attack the nation’s top judges before their decision was officially released. The issue proved to be a driving force for voters in the midterm elections a few months later, helping Democrats to perform better than expected in congressional races and to hold the Senate.  Kamala Harris faces a slew of reporters in the US Capitol In seeking to become the administration’s leading voice on abortion, Ms Harris tackled the issue with “clarity of purpose”, said former longtime adviser Rachel Palermo. She convened state legislators, faith leaders, constitutional law experts, healthcare providers and advocates for roundtable discussions. It was a move panned by some activists as not meeting the seriousness of the moment but it was part of a strategy of coalition-building across local and state politics that also helped lay the groundwork for any future presidential run. Ms Harris, who spent most of her career navigating California’s tricky mix of liberal and traditional Democratic politics, knew every event mattered. Every meeting, photo opportunity or dinner - whether it was with black business leaders or Hispanic female CEOs – was tracked by her team in detailed spreadsheets that she could utilise when the time came to call on a deep political network for support. “She forced the operation to mobilise around how she views politics, which is coalitions,” a senior official said. Ms Harris always had her eye on a 2028 bid for the White House, as Joe Biden’s natural successor, assuming he won a second term in the 2024 contest. Yet as rumblings mounted about replacing Mr Biden on the ticket after his stumbling debate performance in late June against Donald Trump, some Democrats openly overlooked her. They, and many pundits, suggested popular governors like California’s Gavin Newsom, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro or Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer as better replacements who could motivate voters and take the fight to Trump. On 21 July, Mr Biden phoned Ms Harris to tell her of his plans to drop out of the race and endorse her as his successor. It was a decision that took many of his closest allies by surprise, but she sprung into action. Over the course of 10 hours that Sunday, she called more than 100 party officials, members of Congress, labour leaders and activists. Within days, any potential rivals, including the powerful governors, had fallen into line and it was clear that she would take the Democratic mantle with no serious challenge.  Harris quickly united the Democratic Party behind her, and this was followed by an enthusiastic jolt of energy in the election cycle As a candidate, the vice-president has yet to lay out a detailed policy agenda or sit down for a tough media interview. She released an economic blueprint on Friday, calling for tax cuts for families and a wider push on capping drug pricing, her most detailed vision for the country so far. Even as Republicans accuse her of avoiding scrutiny, the team around her see no rush in cutting off the momentum she’s built over the last month. Political strategists say the campaign is right to capitalise on the “sugar high”. “What Kamala Harris is experiencing is a massive, pent-up demand for people to vote for anybody not named Biden or Trump,” said Mr Madden, the former Romney aide and Republican communications strategist. “But the test always comes with being exposed to interviews, the press, debates and the harsh glare of a campaign.” Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian who helped organise a meeting of historians at Ms Harris’s official residence last year, said the fact that she has been a blank slate for voters is more of a benefit than a burden. “She may not have been able to be in full bloom under Biden but she never crossed wires with him,” he said. “So she was able to be positioned for this moment and she can take what’s good about the Biden years and shed the baggage of what she wants to, or slightly disagrees with.” Though her entrance has jolted an outpouring of support among Democrats, it’s unclear whether she can translate that into broad appeal. While Ms Harris has made some inroads with key demographic groups that had drifted from Mr Biden – black, Latino and young voters in particular – she lags in other constituencies that made up his winning 2020 coalition. Recent polling has put her ahead or tied with Trump in six of the seven battleground states, according to the Cook Political Report survey released on Wednesday. In May, Trump was ahead or tied in all seven states. Anthony Zurcher analyses how Republicans are going after Harris - and how she's fighting back ‘I was born with a seatbelt’ ---------------------------- Thursday night’s speech at the Democratic convention is the most consequential moment in Kamala Harris’s political career. While the Republican convention served as a coronation for Trump, who was nominated as his party’s candidate for the third consecutive time, Ms Harris’s sudden rise means her speech will be seen as a pivotal moment to define who she really is. While she’s stood on the stage before, a senior aide said the speech will have a heavier focus on her personal story than previous nominees. “This is the why part of the conversation. Why is she running for president? What is her vision for the country?” said Mr Simmons, her former communications director. “That will help tie together all of the strands of her policy and political life that will make sense for people.” But over the course of four days, Ms Harris will need to sharpen her messaging around crime, inflation, the economy and immigration – issues the Trump campaign will relentlessly target between now and election day.  She will also be confronted with protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza, a polarising issue that has politically cleaved the party. Ms Harris has been more forceful in her calls for a ceasefire and condemnation of civilian deaths than President Biden, but she has not wavered from the administration’s steadfast support for Israel - a stance that risks alienating the party’s progressive wing. “How she positions \[herself on Gaza\] is going to be her hardest trick,” said Mr Brinkley, the presidential historian. Still, allies and advisers who have been preparing her over the last week contend she’s built the foundations for a presidential run over the last four – sometimes bumpy – years, even if few expected she would actually find herself in this position at this moment. “Opportunity is preparation meeting a little bit of luck and I wouldn’t characterise this as luck, because nobody wanted it to be this way, but certainly she was prepared to meet the moment of opportunity,” a senior political adviser said. Susie Tompkins Buell, a Democratic donor and co-founder of Esprit and The North Face who has known Ms Harris since the 1990s, said she wasn’t surprised by how Ms Harris had performed in the last few weeks. In the days after Mr Biden’s halting debate performance, she attended an event with the vice-president and said she could tell change was afoot. After telling Ms Harris to fasten her seatbelt, Ms Buell said the soon-to-be Democratic nominee quipped, “I was born with a seatbelt.” “I liked her response,” said Ms Tompkins Buell, who helped Ms Harris raise $12m at a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this month. “It was sudden and it was right on. She’s ready.”

[Kamala Harris](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/kamala-harris) and [Donald Trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump) will arrive in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday for their first (and potentially only) presidential [debate](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/08/kamala-harris-trump-presidential-debate). The event will mark the first time that Harris and Trump have ever met face to face, and it comes less than two months after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race following his own fateful debate performance in June. The change at the top of the Democratic ticket appears to have unnerved Trump and his campaign advisers, who have [struggled to land attacks](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/09/trump-harris-election-campaign) against Harris. The debate will present Trump with his most significant opportunity yet to negatively define Harris in voters’ minds, as polls [show](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/aug/23/presidential-polls-kamala-harris-donald-trump-election) a neck-and-neck race in key battleground states. For Harris, the debate could allow her to deliver on her oft-repeated promise to voters: that she will prosecute the case against Trump. Her political history – both on the debate stage and in Senate hearings – suggest she is well-positioned to make that case. But Harris is not without her vulnerabilities either. Here are five key moments from Harris’s career that could offer a preview of her debate strategy: **Sense of humor** ------------------ Before Harris became vice-president, she served as the attorney general of California and then the state’s junior senator. When Harris ran for her Senate seat in 2016, her top opponent was Democratic congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. The two candidates faced off in an hour-long debate in October 2016, and despite the robust conversation around policy, the event is best remembered for Sanchez’s bizarre closing statement. Sanchez chose to punctuate her final comments with a dance move: the dab. For those who were not extremely online in 2016, a dab involves stretching out an arm and lowering one’s head into the crook of the other arm. Harris [reacted](https://www.youtube.com/live/z-Ld4FJTra0?feature=shared&t=3331) to the move with baffled amusement, tightly pressing her lips together, in an apparent attempt to hold back laughter, before she said with a chuckle: “So there’s a clear difference between the candidates in this race.” The simple retort effectively undercut Sanchez and bolstered Harris’s pitch. And it worked; Harris defeated Sanchez by 23 points a month later. Harris has already deployed her sense of humor to undercut Trump, who has shown no tolerance for mockery, and she may be looking to do so again on Tuesday. **Prosecutorial skills** ------------------------ After taking her seat in the Senate, Harris quickly made a name for herself as a tough questioner who could put witnesses on the spot as she dissected their political records. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, experienced this first-hand in June 2017. When he [appeared](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/13/jeff-sessions-russia-collusion-senate-testimony) before the Senate intelligence committee, Harris pressed Sessions on his contact with Russian nationals during the 2016 campaign, as he was serving as a surrogate for Trump. Harris rattled off a series of questions to Sessions, who grew frustrated as he struggled to give clear, concise answers. As Sessions tried to further elaborate on one of his answers, Harris told him: “Sir, I have just a few minutes …” Sessions then interrupted, saying, “Will you let me qualify it? If I don’t qualify it, you’ll accuse me of lying, so I need to be correct as best I can … I’m not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous.” The exchange cast even more scrutiny on the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russian officials and showcased Harris’s prosecutorial skills. [Jeff Sessions ‘nervous’ during Capitol Hill questioning – video](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2017/jun/14/jeff-sessions-kamala-harris-testimony-video) Guardian **A clash with Kavanaugh** -------------------------- Harris’s questioning of Brett Kavanaugh went viral in 2018, when she [pressed](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/04/brett-kavanaugh-protests-disrupt-senate-supreme-court-hearing) the supreme court nominee on his conversations about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his views on abortion access. Harris asked Kavanaugh whether he had discussed Mueller’s investigation with anyone at a law firm founded by Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz. “Be sure about your answer, sir,” Harris told Kavanaugh. The nominee fumbled for a moment before saying, “I would like to know the person you’re thinking of.” Harris replied: “I think you’re thinking of someone, and you don’t want to tell us.” A Republican senator interjected to relieve the pressure on Kavanaugh, but Harris’s questioning raised questions about the nominee’s credibility. An even more telling exchange came when Harris asked Kavanuagh, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Kavanaugh replied: “I’m happy to answer a more specific question.” When pressed, he conceded: “I’m not thinking of any right now, senator.” That comment gained renewed attention in 2022, when Kavanaugh became one of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn [Roe v Wade](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/roe-v-wade), ending federal protections for abortion access. Harris has blamed Trump for that decision, as he nominated three of the justices who issued the ruling, and she is sure to uplift the fight over abortion access on Tuesday. **A challenge on busing** ------------------------- Harris launched her first presidential campaign in January 2019, but she and other Democratic candidates found it difficult to overtake Biden’s early polling advantage. At a primary debate in June 2019, Harris decided to [confront](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/27/second-democratic-debate-joe-biden-bernie-sanders) Biden head-on. Biden had recently attracted controversy for praising the past “civility” of politics, citing his cordial relationships with two late segregationist senators as examples. Harris attacked Biden over the comments and connected them to his past opposition to busing, the practice of transporting children to schools outside their local neighborhood to help achieve racial equity in classrooms. “You know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Harris told Biden. “So I will tell you that, on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously.” The attack line increased Harris’s national profile, [boosting](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-d/2020/national/) her standing in the polls. But that surge became the high-water mark for Harris’s campaign, and she was forced to withdraw from the race in December.  Kamala Harris confronts Joe Biden over his civil rights record during Democratic debate – video Despite their earlier clash, Biden selected Harris as his running mate after winning the nomination, and the new vice-presidential candidate immediately got to work promoting their campaign. In her debate against Mike Pence in October 2020, Harris had to push back against the then vice-president as he attempted to talk over her. In what became a viral moment, Harris told Pence, “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking.” The catchphrase inspired campaign merchandise and painted Pence as out of touch. The success of that moment might explain why Harris’s campaign fought to have the candidates’ mics unmuted at all times during the debate on Tuesday, as that could create an opportunity to establish a similar dynamic against Trump. But Trump’s team successfully fought that rule change, so mics will only be unmuted when moderators cue a candidate to speak. Regardless, the pushback against Pence might still teach Trump a lesson going into the debate: Harris refuses to be steamrolled.  'I'm speaking': Kamala Harris reins in Mike Pence during VP debate – video **An imprecise answer** ----------------------- Trump has reason for concern as he plans for Tuesday. But Harris has also displayed vulnerabilities that could help Trump in the debate. In Harris’s first major [interview](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/29/cnn-harris-walz-interview) since becoming the Democratic nominee, CNN host Dana Bash started off with a rather obvious question: what were her plans for day one of her administration? “Well, there are a number of things,” Harris said. “I will tell you first and foremost one of my highest priorities is to do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class. When I look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people, I think that people are ready for a new way forward.” The vague answer prompted Bash to follow up by reiterating, “So what would you do day one?” Harris then described her plans to implement an “opportunity economy”, including expanding the child tax credit, but the exchange underscored the nominee’s penchant for avoiding specifics when discussing policy. Trump is not exactly known for his detailed policy positions either, but voters will be looking for Harris to outline a more precise vision for her presidency when she takes the debate stage on Tuesday.

Bernie Sanders said he opposes any move to urge Sonia Sotomayor, the senior liberal justice on the [US supreme court](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-supreme-court), to step down so that Joe Biden could nominate a younger liberal replacement before he finishes his term as president. Sotomayor, 70, is known to suffer from health issues, and some Democrats fear a repeat of [Ruth Bader Ginsburg](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ruth-bader-ginsberg), who died during Donald Trump’s first term – giving him a third opportunity to nominate a new justice and further shore up the top court’s conservative bent. In his first term, Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to replace Antonin Scalia, Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Anthony Kennedy, and [Amy Coney Barrett](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/amy-coney-barrett) to take the place of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died less than two months before the 2020 election – leaving six largely conservative judges to just three liberals. Trump’s first-term appointees to the court were critical to overturning abortion rights and a series of other rulings that delighted conservative activists. In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders, a progressive senator who identifies as an independent but usually votes with [Democrats](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/democrats), said it would not be “sensible” to ask Sotomayor to step down while Biden is still in office. He added he’d heard “a little bit” of talk from Democratic senators about asking Sotomayor, who is serving a lifetime appointment to the supreme court, to step aside. “I don’t think it’s sensible,” Sanders said, without elaborating further. No elected Democrat has so far publicly called on the justice to resign, but the idea comes amid a feverish effort by Democrats to “Trump-proof” their agenda before the Republican takes office in January. Supreme court justices are nominated by the sitting president but face an often grueling confirmation process in the Senate. With Democrats soon to lose control of the body, the opportunity for Biden to appoint – and for Democratic senators to confirm – a successor to Sotomayor is fast slipping away. Biden appointed Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson to the supreme court. She was confirmed in 2022. However, with just two months left in office, it is unlikely that Biden and a Democrat-controlled Senate would be able to nominate and confirm a new justice to the court in time. Democrats have previous floated the possibility of increasing the number of justices to counter the court’s political make-up. In July, Biden proposed term limits and a code of ethics for court justices, after a series of scandals relating to the conservatives [Clarence Thomas](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/clarence-thomas) and Samuel Alito called into question their impartiality. [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/10/bernie-sanders-supreme-court-justices-sonia-sotomayor-biden#EmailSignup-skip-link-11) Sign up to Fighting Back Big thinkers on what we can do to protect civil liberties and fundamental freedoms in a Trump presidency **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion Biden said the court had “gutted civil rights protections, taken away a woman’s right to choose, and now granted Presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office”. In a second term, meanwhile, Trump could have the opportunity to further deepen the court’s conservative leaning, as Thomas and Alito are both in their mid-70s. Just as Democrats are considering whether Sotomayor should step down to install a replacement liberal justice, Republicans could do the same after they take power in January. “Alito is gleefully packing up his chambers,” Mike Davis, a conservative legal operative, [predicted on social media this week](https://x.com/mrddmia/status/1854213822837670371). Although a Republican majority in the Senate refused to take up confirmation hearings in 2016 when Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia, protesting that to do so in an election year would be unfair, they had no such problems when Trump nominated Barrett to replace Ginsburg in 2020, also an election year.

[Donald Trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrumphttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump) decided to nominate [Matt Gaetz](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/matt-gaetz) as attorney general last Wednesday, during a flight home from Washington, where the president-elect had visited Joe Biden at the White House. The pick proved as surprising as it was controversial. Just eight days later, after a week of relentless hullabaloo, Gaetz withdrew from contention. It was a Washington farce for the ages. But how did it happen? Gaetz, now 42, made his name as a far-right Florida congressman, a pro-Trump publicity hound and gadfly who in October 2023 made history by [bringing down a House speaker](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/09/matt-gaetz-kevin-mccarthy-ouster-worth-risk-losing-seat): Kevin McCarthy, the first ever ejected by his own party. The seeds of Gaetz’s own downfall were to be found in that extraordinary episode. Ostensibly, Gaetz moved against McCarthy in order to install a speaker more amenable to rightwing threats to shut down the federal government over arguments about funding, and less likely to seek Democrats’ help in avoiding such outcomes. But McCarthy never believed that. He [insisted](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/gaetz-mccarthy-johnson-ethics-report.html) Gaetz moved against him in order to block release of a [House ethics committee report](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/20/matt-gaetz-house-ethics-committee-vote) into allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other offenses. Gaetz vehemently denied – and still denies – wrongdoing but, nonetheless, when Trump nominated him for [attorney general](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/19/trump-cabinet-picks-administration-appointees), he promptly [resigned his seat in the House](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/13/trump-matt-gaetz-attorney-general). According to precedent, that blocked release of the ethics report. The report duly became the hottest property in Washington, reporters chasing it, Democrats and some skeptical [Republicans](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans) eager to find out what it contained. It promised sensational reading. [ Trump’s cabinet and White House picks – so far ](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/19/trump-cabinet-picks-administration-appointees) Gaetz was initially investigated by the US justice department, in relation to the actions of Joel Greenberg, a Florida tax collector who in 2021 pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of a minor and agreed to cooperate in the investigation of Gaetz. Eventually, the justice department dropped that investigation. But the House ethics committee had been investigating Gaetz too, and in [June](https://ethics.house.gov/press-releases/statement-regarding-matter-representative-matt-gaetz) it outlined the scope of its work: it was investigating claims the congressman “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift”. Trump’s nomination of Gaetz was controversial for other reasons. There was Gaetz’s loud support for Trump supporters convicted in relation to the January 6 attack on Congress, and his promises to seek revenge against Trump’s political opponents. There was his almost complete lack of legal experience and expertise, having graduated from law school but practiced only briefly before entering politics. But in Washington, the ethics committee report remained the holy grail. Details began to leak, ABC News first to [report](https://abcnews.go.com/US/gaetz-10k-venmo-payments-2-women-testified-house/story?id=116019367) that the committee had obtained records showing Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the panel, with some of the payments being for sex. A lawyer for two women spoke to the media, saying one had been 17 – under the age of consent – when she was paid for sex with Gaetz. The Trump camp repeatedly pointed to the justice department’s decision to drop its investigation of allegations against Gaetz, without official reason but amid reports of concerns about witness credibility. On Wednesday, the House committee considered whether to release the report. The session ended in deadlock, five Democrats for release, five Republicans against it. In the House at large, Democrats introduced motions calling for a full vote to force the issue. Controversy switched to the Senate. As Democrats said they had asked the FBI for its files on Gaetz, the congressman himself climbed Capitol Hill, in the company of JD Vance, to meet the vice-president-elect’s erstwhile Senate colleagues and seek to convince them that Gaetz should be confirmed. [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/21/matt-gaetz-withdraws-ag-nomination#EmailSignup-skip-link-18) Sign up to The Stakes — Presidential Transition We will guide you through the aftermath of the US election and the transition to a Trump presidency **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion It did not go well. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, relative Republican moderates already used to saying no to Trump, at least some of the time, were not supportive. Gaetz found sympathy from others. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, said he would “urge all of my Senate colleagues, particularly Republicans, not to join the lynch mob and give the process a chance to move forward”. But plenty of other Republicans cast doubt on Gaetz’s chances of being confirmed. John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the judiciary committee, said any hearings for Gaetz would be like “Kavanaugh on steroids” – a reference to the tempestuous hearings in 2018 in which Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second pick for the supreme court, angrily rejected accusations of sexual assault. In Kavanaugh’s case, the Capitol Hill circus proved controversial but survivable. But Gaetz would not be given a chance to pull off a similar escape. On Thursday, on social media, he said: “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as attorney general.” CNN subsequently [reported](https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/politics/matt-gaetz-second-sexual-encounter-minor/index.html) that the woman who says she had sex with him when she was a minor told the ethics committee she had another sexual encounter with Gaetz, which also involved another adult woman. “After being asked for comment for this story,” the CNN report said, “Gaetz announced he was backing out as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee.” However, a source familiar with Gaetz’s nomination process told the Guardian that privately confirmed opposition from four senators – enough to sink the nomination if no Democrats defected – was what pushed Gaetz to decide to withdraw, before the call from CNN. Murkowski and Collins were opposed. So was John Curtis, the senator-elect from Utah who will succeed Mitt Romney, another Trump critic, in the new year. The fourth voice set against Gaetz was an influential one: [Mitch McConnell](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/mitch-mcconnell) of Kentucky, the former Republican leader now beginning life back in the rank and file. In his announcement, Gaetz proclaimed his support for “the most successful president in history” and said he would “forever be honored” that Trump nominated him for attorney general. Elsewhere in Washington, it seemed safe to bet, politicians and reporters alike were reflecting on an extraordinary episode of near-unsurpassable Washington dishonor.

Video transcript The Road to Trump’s ‘Grand New Party’ ------------------------------------- #### Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam had a vision for how Republicans could reclaim the working class. They never expected Trump to fulfill it. Ready? I’m ready. All right. We’re going to start. The name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Here we go. From New York Times Opinion. I’m Ross Douthat, and this is “Matter of Opinion.” And this week, I’m striking out on my own to talk about the future of the Republican Party, because the second election of Donald Trump didn’t just win a majority for Trump himself. It also solidified a remarkable transformation in the Republican Party, which has gone from being a party associated with the wealthy and the white suburban upper middle class to being a party that represents a much more diverse coalition. More blue collar with fewer college educated voters. And in this election, with a much more multiracial coalition as well. So that’s quite a shift. And it’s quite remarkable that Trump himself would be the one to accomplish it. So to map out the recent history that brought us to this moment and some of the arguments that Republicans and conservatives have been having about their changing coalition, I’ve brought on a very special guest. Nowadays, Reihan Salam is best known as the distinguished president of the storied right of center think tank the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. But I knew Reihan once upon a time as my fellow somewhat disheveled junior varsity pundit in Washington, DC, where we shared a somewhat shabby rowhouse somewhere in the Northwestern part of the city. I won’t say exactly where to protect both the innocent and the guilty. And where we were both deeply involved in arguments about where the Republican Party was going to go late in the presidency of George W. Bush, which led eventually to the publication of our jointly authored book, “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” An argument that is now almost 20 years old. But in the things it got right and the things it got wrong still, I think, has some relevance for debates about the future of conservatism. So I’m really glad that I was able to pry Reihan away from his immense responsibilities and have him join me today. Reihan, good to see you. I am honored and delighted to be with you. Ross, are you honored and delighted? I am both firmly, vigorously. And also it is funny and sad that we as middle aged dads only get to hang out when we’re on a podcast together. So here we are. We were talking about this beforehand, that this is the life, the life of the middle aged pundit dad, as you say, we haven’t seen each other in a while. Would you like to come on a New York Times podcast with me? Although we do, I’m struck by the fact that we have spoken to one another every fateful political moment of the 21st century. And I know that when I’m watching these election results unfold, that after midnight, I do know that Ross Douthat is going to be awake and we are going to talk and we’re going to think about it in real time And that is a very precious gift. That’s right. That’s how the magic happens. Me sitting in a food spattered kitchen - spattered by myself to make it clear. To be clear, I don’t want to blame my wife and children for the food spattering. So, let’s go back in time. We met in the early 2000s in Washington, DC. I really met, then. We really met that. No, technically. Technically, we met as undergraduates at a panel held at the Harvard Institute of Politics and featured featured Bill Kristol. During that George W. Bush presidency. So at that point, you were doing a lot of theater as a Harvard undergraduate, right. That’s right. And I was running the conservative newspaper, so we didn’t have a lot in common except, except that you were except for hearing our paths converged. And I think that one thing is that we both came to conservatism through a kind of winding path. Just the fact that you came from this crunchy Christian world, having parents, Boomer parents, growing up in this secular milieu. I came to it as a son of immigrants growing up in an outer borough, New York, that had been transformed by Giuliani and just coming to conservatism from different angles, but both being at an angle to movement conservatism. And I think that’s something we bonded over early on. Yeah And as I remember it, we were also young journalists everywhere trying to make some kind of a name for ourselves. And we were working and writing at a time when almost all writing and arguing being done in Washington, DC was writing and arguing about foreign policy. This was the period after September 11, after the invasion of Iraq. I was working as a very junior editor for The Atlantic, and essentially foreign policy had subsumed almost all conversation and debate in Washington, DC at that time, and certainly on the political right where there was obviously a rally around George W. Bush’s foreign policy. And then as that foreign policy soured, as the Iraq war ran into difficulties. And I think we maybe not completely consciously and deliberately, but we’re trying to carve out a somewhat different niche by looking for a set of issues that fewer people were writing about in 2005 or 2006. So we ended up converging, in effect, as writers, trying to think through domestic policy. Which again, in that period was an extremely unsexy portfolio for a couple of young writers to have. Indeed totally different. Now, of course when, domestic policy is very, very hot. So one element of this is I think that our views on domestic policy were also a little idiosyncratic. You I think, were drawn to Christian Democratic ideas. And the idea that there was a place for a religious conservative synthesis that was modern and where there was a kind of thoughtful policy dimension that was not reflexively free market, but that took the idea of tradition seriously. And what does it mean to modernize a tradition. For me, I was someone who was very market oriented, but also to someone who was really interested in the idea of emerging critiques of 90s capitalism and what should we take seriously, what should we not. And we were also in some ways reacting to interesting intellectual energies on the left. The kind of inequality obsession that really peaked during the Occupy era was something that you and I had experienced as undergrads and had been around. These ideas were already in wider currency. So it really was a very dynamic and fun intellectual partnership because we were obsessing over a lot of the same things for very different reasons. Well, and it was coming at this moment where, to try and put it in historical perspective, you had a Republican Party that had been not completely dominant, but very powerful in American politics with a coalition built in the 1970s and early 1980s by Ronald Reagan. That was in part a kind of reaction against Great Society liberalism and a sense of the failures of liberalism in the 1970s, which included galloping inflation included rising crime rates, included a sense of foreign policy weakness. And so out of that had this Republican Party that was organized famously around some combination of social and religious conservatism, foreign policy, hawkishness and free market economics. The three stools, as they often said at the time, the three legged stool or the three. The three legged three legged stool. Not three separate stools, but. Well, that is serendipitous, mixed metaphor because by the time we were young and writing, it seemed like those different pieces maybe didn’t necessarily fit together quite as well. There was a sense that the country was secularizing and becoming more socially liberal. So social conservatism had to adapt and rethink things. And then as you mentioned, there was this very strong, not just left wing, but also center left critique of where the American economy was going. And George W. Bush, when he was elected president in 2000, very explicitly tried to address these changes. This was where the idea, now 25 years old of so-called compassionate conservatism, came in and the ownership society. The ownership society, the idea that you were going to essentially use different government policies and levers to build a kind of society of independent stock owning, home owning entrepreneurs. And a lot of that concept came to grief with the financial crisis, the real estate bubble bursting and so on. But in some ways we were trying to pick up where compassionate conservatism had left off, figure out what it had gotten wrong, and but figure out what would a Republican Party that wasn’t just doing tax cuts for the rich. What if we actually took these ideas seriously and had the right intellectual formation foundation for them. I think that’s exactly right because in the second term of the Bush presidency, there was this line of argument from call it mainstream conservative ink, which was essentially the real failure here is that George W. Bush was not sufficiently rigorous in his adherence to small government orthodoxy. The real. Problem was his Medicare expansion. Et cetera. Et cetera. But actually, there was no one actually defending the idea that, look, you actually have to have a credible, serious approach to the welfare state. And this was the disconnect that we had observed. And we were not as I recall, we were not people who were statists by reflex or anything like that. It was just guys, we need some modicum of realism about how this coalition won and where this coalition has room to grow. And also some realism about American political economy and the fact that the welfare state is not going to go away. Can it actually rest on a more solid, moral normative foundation and also something that makes sense given the ways in which the economy is changing. So I think that we were filling this missing quadrant because there was actually no one willing to defend the proposition that we need to modernize a market oriented conservatism. And social conservatives have a really important role to play here, if only they seize it. And we were framing it also in terms of electoral politics. So the subtitle of the book we wrote referenced the idea of Republicans winning the working class, meaning in our definition, non-college educated Americans of all races and ethnicities. And part of our argument was that there had been after the 1970s, a kind of unfinished realignment in American politics, where a large group of non-college educated voters had shifted from the Democratic coalition to the Republican coalition. These were the voters who got described as Reagan Democrats once upon a time, but that Republicans, because of their inability to quite figure out how to actually run the government, had not been able to fully cement that realignment. And from that was where you got basically the policy agenda that we tried to sketch out in the book. And Ross, I will just note for our listeners that we had a bunch of wacky ideas regarding who could be the Tribune of this coalition. I hate to embarrass you with this, but we talked about who is a blue collar populist who represents just something outside of conventional politics, who is someone who is a celebrity, who is someone who could actually break the stranglehold of what we saw as a kind of cosseted political establishment. So we talked about Bill O’Reilly as someone who is a Long Island middle class, upper middle class, but with a blue collar ethos. We had a bunch of different names. And one of my favorite pieces from the Ross Reihan collabs of that era was 2007, something that must have been painful for you. But we wrote our manifesto for what a Giuliani presidential bid could look like. Painful just because you obviously an ardent pro-lifer. This is something that was very important for you. But we came up with, I think, an extremely compelling vision for what a future Trump presidential candidacy could look like in describing something that would resonate with this working class, lower middle class, the outer borough ethnics of America. So obviously, this was very special to me for biographical reasons. But then we already had in mind there has to be this class break, there has to be this cultural break. The Perot voters, the northern secularizing working class, the multiracial, working class, who brings it in. And we were actively fantasizing like lunatics about who is the person who could actually break that and change that. But before our fantasies, let’s say collided, collided with reality. There was this period when I would say our ideas were completely rejected, which was 2008 to 2012, a 2000 question mark. Question mark, right. I mean, the period in which our ideas are rejected may extend indefinitely into the future, but there was a special rejection. So we wrote this book. It came out at the very end of George W. Bush’s presidency. The financial crisis hit. Barack Obama was elected president, and the mood in the Republican Party picked up on the mood you’ve already described. This sense that the only problem with George W. Bush was that he spent too much money, that he was a big government conservative, and it ran with that. And this gave us the Tea Party era, which was effectively a limited government anti-deficit movement, reacting against bailouts, stimulus spending, eventually Obamacare. And that, I would say, set the tone for Republican debates in a way that didn’t preclude some ideas we were interested in. We both have issues where we have libertarian impulses and sympathies. But the general mood of the Republican Party for the four years after 2008 was we don’t need to think about how to run the government. We just need to stand against socialism and figure out how to cut spending. And I think the Tea Party moment, what happened is that people saw discontent. They saw opposition to Obama, they saw a weak economy, and they saw this grassroots energy. And the narrative was the Tea Party, small government thing. And I think you and I both saw it. That’s not really what’s going on here. There’s something else happening. There’s a different kind of discontent. And these guys are missing it. And I think that the “Grand New Party” thesis was closer to being correct than the Tea Party thesis. And just without getting too deep into the policy weeds, the specific ideas that we were associated with, that we argued for in the book and have, in different ways argued for since fit into that perspective you just described. The idea that the welfare state has to be based on respect, reciprocity and support for certain valuable habits and ways of life. Yes, right. So we spend a lot of time arguing for family supports that would make it easier to have and rear children again with an explicit link between some form of responsibility in whatever way the government was spending money. And that to us was the middle ground. And I think pretty clearly the more stringent we’re just going to cut government spending model came to grief in 2012. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on a very well-intentioned and serious blueprint for remaking Medicare and Social Security. But they had no I think it’s fair to say, no positive vision of what the government policy, public policy could be doing to help working Americans in that particular moment. The Bush era positive vision had been discredited, fairly or otherwise. But what was interesting in that moment is that had there been a Romney Ryan administration, I think it’s fair to say that we would have known a ton of people in it. We would have maybe even had some modicum of influence, but they were open to some of these things. But they were so risk averse, they were walking on eggshells. They didn’t really seize the main chance. What I mean. Well, and they were afraid and this is comical given what happened next. But they were afraid that if they supported anything that seemed too much like big government that they would be attacked as socialist rhinos and so on. As none other than the late Rush Limbaugh attacked us. We were not important enough to be consistently attacked, but we were but we were attacked by people in the talk radio sphere of conservatism for selling out conservative principles by being willing to contemplate the government doing certain things. And that’s amusing because, of course, of what then followed four years later. And what happened to that entire world of people who notionally were committed to this really hardcore libertarian small state vision. Suddenly some of those people are the ones who flipped most aggressively to this very different vision. But first, you had this brief opening for Republican politicians who, again, wanted to go back to where George W. Bush started to say, look, we need a middle class, working class policy agenda. We need to look at family policy. We need to look at health care. We need to look at education. And there was a larger group of policy writers to which we were somewhat attached that got called the reform conservatives or the reform of cons. I remember it well. We’re really we’re giving listeners the truly the truly deep cuts. But I think pretty clearly there was a narrative that said, O.K, these guys, the reform conservatives, they’re going to have influence on the next Republican administration, which will probably be led by someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who will modernize the Republican Party in various ways and will be a kind of Republican equivalent of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, something like that. But that story was then completely steamrolled and shattered and everything else by what happened next, which was the rise of Donald J. Trump right. As the actual embodiment of the blue collar populist tendency that we had been describing it is. Or was he really. And of course, we would think this, but the we anticipated someone very much like him When you look to “Grand New Party” itself. But certainly when you look at our conversations around that time. But we didn’t anticipate him. Let’s be fair. No, no, no. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So here’s what I’ll say about that reform conservative moment is that I think you and I both just as lovers of history saw that it’s never going to be just tax credits, right. It’s never going to be just pure, unadulterated wonkery. Narrative is really important. And also just blood and guts are important. And by that I mean public safety crime. These are things that we wrote about in “Grand New Party.” Just the idea that do you feel safe. Do you belong. These basic. Do you matter. Donald Trump the first thing that he did was talk about immigration in a way that was markedly different from how Jeb Bush talked about immigration, markedly different from the thesis that a lot of people in that kind of respectability seeking moment have. And I don’t say that derisively. The big thing that he did was it his specific policy prescriptions about building the wall and what have you. I don’t think it was exactly that. It was rather directional. Jeb Bush gave people a sense, fairly or otherwise, that he cherished immigrants. He was married to an immigrant and he valued them. He saw them as really so central to the American story, whereas a multigenerational blue collar, working class American, maybe whose life has been a little bit chaotic at the edges, you’re not the hero of this story. And I think that Donald Trump made an argument. He did something that was so shattering, but it was basically a directional argument that we decide that we’re going to put Americans first. And it’s something that you could plainly see in the politics of the right for the previous decade and a half. So anti-immigrant and anti-immigration sentiment, restrictionist sentiment in various guises had been a really powerful current in Republican politics. And there were every now and again, there was a flash in the pan. There was someone who would run on this but would never penetrate, would never break through. And Trump is someone who was able to really capitalize on it. And again, I don’t actually think it was necessarily about the policy specifics, but it was I am listening to you. I am listening to you. And this immigration issue is a synecdoche for a ton of other issues where there are people who are not listening to you, they are not respecting you, they are not taking your concerns here seriously. And I will. And I think that was hugely powerful. And of course, it applied in a bunch of other domains, too. With regard to trade, with regard to China and the threat that it poses, the idea of an elite that is selling out our country. Those themes were there. It was visible, and Obama was the one who capitalized on them in 2012 ambivalently. So that was to me what was so you mean by going after Romney’s corporate rating and exactly. Outsourcing exactly. Exactly right. No, there was some proto Trumpism in the way that Obama ran against Romney as an embodiment of borderless, anti-patriotic capitalism. The Obama Trump voters didn’t change. It’s the coalitions that changed around them. But to me, that power that Trump had won was substantially different from the vision that we were offering. If you go back, it was, in the end, just a much more powerful story. Like we thought we had this story about here’s how the government can stand up for people who work, people who raise families, all of these things. And I think there was potency in that story and that it would have helped Rudy Giuliani in 2012. It would helped Marco Rubio in 2016. But Trump just blew it up bigger in the way that you describe. He folded in the entire post 1991 globalization push. He folded in the outsourcing of US jobs to China and the ethnic and demographic transformation of the country. And against a backdrop of collapsing birth rates and this deep intergenerational tension that stems from that, he put it together. He put it together. But he also did so in a way that certainly from my perspective in 2016 was often malignant. I think I wrote a column at that time describing Trumpism as a kind of dark mirror universe version of Grand new party, where he was making a pitch to the kind of voters we wanted the Republican Party to make a pitch to. But it wasn’t just more sweeping, it was more demagogic. And there was this strong white identity politics component that liberal critics were not wrong to see in it. Now, I think there was always an underestimation, not everywhere on the left, but among many liberals, of how important economics was to Trump’s appeal. He was literally flying around the country, going to cities where factories had closed and where jobs had gone overseas and saying I. Will bring back the good times. If you can’t write that out of the 2016 story. But in the end, what he did electorally was not in that election to build the pan ethnic working class Republican Party. He boosted the Republican share of white working class voters beyond what the Romney campaign had imagined in the right competitive states, in the right competitive states, he flipped the Midwest, but he won more electorally important votes, and he won the election without a popular vote majority. But I think it was reasonable to look in that moment from our perspective and say, O.K, Trump did a version of what we’d urged on the Republican Party, but there was both something clearly toxic about the way he did it, and it didn’t build a new majority. Donald Trump didn’t come into office in 2016 with majority support. He didn’t complete the realignment. He just boosted a particular part of the working class share of the GOP coalition. What do you think, though. That all sounds exactly right. This was a very strange moment for both of us because, first of all, in “Grand New Party” itself, we literally were saying that, look, if you do not embrace our path, there will be a demagogue who will capitalize on this discontent, on this rupture between call it the conservative elite and the small C conservative majority, or what we saw as an incipient potential conservative majority. We were both in different ways that with questions of ethnic change, immigration. I look back at the things I was writing in the second Obama term, and it’s just crazy things are I mean, not to Pat ourselves on the back, but things that have now become total cliches, just getting savagely attacked for saying that Hispanics do not care about Amnesty. This is not the issue. Just talking about the idea that there is a more balanced, sane approach to immigration that can build a kind of multiethnic, working class conservative majority. Because an important just to clarify our own perspective. Like we were immigration Hawks relative to George W. Bush and John McCain. Yes, right. Our view was that securing the border and having some kind of skills based immigration policy that limited, low skilled immigration was one the policy sweet spot, the place where you could have substantial immigration, but not at a rate that was too disruptive, but also something that, as you just said, would appeal more to Hispanic voters, to a lot of Exactly. The descendants of recent immigrants than just saying we’re going to legalize everyone who’s here and not open the border, because that wasn’t the open borders moment, had not yet arrived on the political left. But at the very least, there was the conventional wisdom was that the Republican Party had to move substantially to the left on immigration. Exactly an argument was that an emphasis, a Frank emphasis on the importance of assimilation and the idea that immigration policy should be in the National interest, that there was such a thing as too fast or too many, and that actually it was legitimate. And not racist. And then to see Trump in this moment, it almost felt like my gosh, there’s going to be a backlash. He’s going to talk about immigration in this way that is inciting and it’s going to be something that will jeopardize the formula. The coalition that we had hoped to see. We had a scheme, we had a plan for what it was going to look like, and then it actually happened in this much more chaotic way. I mean, our plan was Marco Rubio, let’s say, or someone like him reinventing himself as a kind of moderate restrictionist on immigration while having a more middle class friendly agenda than Mitt Romney and winning a multi-ethnic blue collar majority on that basis. Instead, we had Trump winning a minority of the popular vote, President making much darker, more sweeping and again, in my view, more toxic appeals. But so then how this is my this is the core question. How did we get from there to here. Because in 2024, as I said at the outset, the Republican coalition looks not completely, but it looks like the coalition we imagined 20 years ago. But guess what. It was Donald Trump, who did it. So how. There are two phases. One is during the first Trump presidency period, you saw these dramatic gains in urban counties. You saw really material gains among Hispanic voters between 2016 and 2020. And that was in the thick of the COVID crisis. That was in a moment when as many of our listeners will recall, our senses were being assaulted at all times. So many things that radicalized people that we people who had been call it respectability seeking conservatives were ambivalent about Trump. And when they actually turned, when they embraced him, the Kavanaugh hearings, when you think about the kind of early stages of woke discourse, just there are a lot of things that happen there where you saw this kind of diaspora of folks on the broad center right going and really different directions depending on what it is that animated them most. And Trump was someone who galvanized this. But I think that that’s important to remember that there was something that happened during that first presidency. But this is my question about that galvanizing effect, which is, was it purely negative in the sense that you could make a case that what happened in Trump’s presidency, especially at the end and to some extent in Biden’s presidency, but really in that, pre COVID and COVID window, was that liberalism and the left kind of recreated some of the crises in miniature from the 1970s that had made the Reagan coalition possible in the first place. After the killing of George Floyd, you had riots and a retreat from urban policing. Yes, a spike in crime. So crime came back. You had in the beginning of the Biden administration a unwise stimulus package and recovery bill that goosed inflation and brought inflation back, which it hadn’t been around since the late 1970s and early 1980s. And then you had without litigating all the details in woke progressivism, a form of cultural radicalism that looked a bit like the cultural radicalism of the 1970s. Yes so you could tell a story where all of basically everything we were saying in the Bush presidency was premised on the idea that the 1970s weren’t coming back and the Republican Party therefore needed this forward looking agenda. But maybe what happened in Trump’s presidency was that briefly, the 1970s did come back. And so the Republican coalition could expand to include blue collar Hispanics and all of these extra voters without having some dramatic shift in agenda of the kind we’d imagined. What do you think. That’s one reason I stress these two different periods from the first Trump presidency and then the Biden presidency. So big picture, I think that when you say negative, I do think the first Trump presidency, the real thing that happened was this galvanizing, this coalescing, this transformation of the left that happened, this sense of cohesion, just cultural power, cultural institutions, prestige, status, the idea of affluent, educated, but also just high status, high prestige people exerting this incredible power. And the sense that many people had that Trump was the one thing standing against that. So I think that was one foundation of it. Then you see a Biden presidency where I think there was this view that we are in the midst of a kind of Democratic emergency. This legitimates real dramatic change. We need to question neoliberalism. We need to dismantle systems. We need to do something really new and different in 2020. Oh my gosh, when you look at the state of the Trump presidency in that moment, I don’t think anyone would argue, including those who see a lot of virtue in that presidency as I do, I think they got some big important things right. But that it was pretty chaotic in 2020. And then despite that, the massive gains that he made in that election against this whole of society effort he made kind of incredible. Well, he didn’t make massive gains relative to 2016. He made massive gains with certain set of voters, again, minority voters, for instance, while losing voters in the suburbs. And losing pieces of the White working class vote. So he essentially it’s a good point. It’s a good point. There was a trade, a less efficient coalition, but a coalition that in a sense, as you’re saying, kind of reflected the outlines of what you and I had envisioned in the past. Of course, there are people who are determined, bitter ender never-trumpers, who are gone from the coalition. But then the number of people that you and I both call them center-right normies, who are alarmed in some respects by the Trump phenomenon, but then who found their way back into the coalition as a reaction to that kind of integrated progressive. Apparatus and the question now is the question that you and I have been struggling with and thinking through. And passionate about for this century, which is there some positive case here. Is there something that is dynamic and real and substantive that can fill this vacuum. Are we something other than merely being anti-left? Do we really want the left to be the only dynamic force, or do we want there to be another dynamic force. And what we envision in “Grand New Party” was the right as a culturally creative, dynamic force that was offering this moral ethical synthesis that actually made sense and that you could kind of champion and carry forward. And then I don’t know if we have, but centrally, that had some very specific economic policies. Yes policies for how the government taxes and spends and regulates that we’re supposed to be not just winning working class votes, but building a more prosperous middle class American future. And so let’s look back at the first Trump presidency and then forward to the new Trump presidency to ask, were there in the first few years of the Trump presidency something that looked like a forward looking economic policy agenda for middle class America. Do you think this is an area where I suspect you and I have some subtle differences of perspective. I guess I’m a big trade off, obsessive and just the idea that, when you have a package deal, this thing has to fit with this thing. So, for example, you could say that I want to have no immigration or very little immigration or radically reduced immigration, but also I’m going to embrace trade. And I’m going to say that, O.K, that means that we’re going to import more strawberries or we’re going to import more of this or that, things that are low skill, labor intensive goods. And we’ll do that. That’s one formula. Or you could say you’re going to have a selective immigration policy and we’re going to embrace trade. What I mean. I think that there are a lot of things about that Trump moment because you had all these outsiders who were coming in and they had conflicting imperatives. There were some people who came in who were like, let’s hope that Trump just isn’t serious about his trade agenda or about the idea of making a radical break with romney-ryan ISM or what have you. And let’s just see if we can be chill and just kind of hope everything is going to be fine and it’s largely rhetorical. Then there are other people who were real post neoliberals, anti neoliberals and who didn’t have cadres. And so they were trying to coexist with one another in this White House where it was, one voice was dominant one day. And Steve Bannon had one perspective and Steve Moore had a different perspective. Well, that’s a good way to distill it. Steve Moore, for those who don’t is a long term. Wing economist who supply side, supply side economics just wants to cut taxes. And cutting taxes is the solution to all of life’s problems. That’s slightly unfair, but only slightly. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, when he initially came in to the first Trump administration, said, we’re going to do a kind of right wing New Deal. We’re going to spend a ton of money on infrastructure and we’re going to rebuild the American working class that way. And one way to look at the first four years of Trump is that Moore got what he wanted and Bannon didn’t. Infrastructure became a joke. Trump did cut taxes in a way that included some family friendly provisions, included some ideas that you and I supported, but was still a fairly conventional Republican tax cut. And in a way, the Trump innovation was just to say, we’re just going to run the economy hot. We’re not going to worry about entitlement spending or anything like that, and we’re going to raise wages with a hot economy, and that’ll be it. That’s the real innovation, which is that Trump recognized that taking Medicare and Social Security off the table is something that would shatter the Obama coalition. It would really change things. It would make the cultural issues more salient. I do believe in wealth creation. I am not a huge fan of high taxes. I do believe there is a place for that, but it has to be connected to some larger vision for what it is we want when it comes to upward mobility and the Bush ownership society, imperfect as it was, there was some thesis there. I think that with the first Trump presidency, it just didn’t really come together. It didn’t gel. And in the absence of COVID, who knows. Maybe we would have seen something different going forward. I just think that if the Republican Party is not the party of private property and wealth building, so I don’t think. Is there any chance that the Republican Party is about to not be the party of private property and wealth building No, no, I think you’re right. But I do think that you have some people on the right who basically embrace a kind of left ideas about inequality and what have you. And I. That’s a dead end. So there’s just to set out. Set out categories, right. There is a kind of thoroughgoing populist right that is essentially shares not the prescription, but the critique of how the American economy is performed for the last 30 years that you see on the left right. That says the economy has just not worked for middle, middle class America. And we need therefore, a kind of radical overhaul. And to the extent that there is strong kind of intellectual support for, let’s say, the huge Trump tariffs. It often comes out of this perspective. And tariffs being just the tip of the spear in a way. The really rigorous, thoughtful people envision some larger reordering of the American economy. But tariffs are kind of a symbol of this tariffs as right as an opening into dramatic industrial policy that presumably would go beyond what the Biden administration did. I personally think we may or may not get Trumpian tariffs. I don’t think you’re going to see a dramatic right wing restructuring of the American economy. I think the question is a little narrower than that. So take the vice President-elect of the United States, JD Vance, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. Who both have obviously strong associations with this administration. Musk himself was originally a Clinton Democrat. He was never a doctrinaire libertarian. But as he has moved. I think he has come to inhabit that libertarian space where he’s ended up in charge of a commission that’s supposed to figure out how to transform the federal trillions of dollars from federal spending. It is it’s not the Tea Party, but it has something in common with Tea Party ideas there. Whereas the Vance perspective in certain ways, it goes all the way to the deep structural critique you were talking about that you don’t agree with. But in part it’s just more based around, I think, the idea that, the working class in America needs certain forms help and support that it hasn’t gotten and that traditional Republican policymaking making hasn’t delivered. And I see that as the tension inside the Trump administration going forward. Like, are we returning to a kind of just dynamism oriented, libertarian government cutting, or is there again, some populist synthesis available. My vision and. I wonder how you react to this. We were talking about this idea of the right as the anti-left and what are the ideas that kind of occupy that space. What dominates my vision is that the thing that is healing ultimately is going to be the embrace of certain values, ideas, sensibilities, habits that contribute to human flourishing ultimately, and that the idea that you’re going to look to a tax credit or the idea that you’re going to look to the state to deliver this, it’s just not going to happen. You need the state to be competent within its domain, highly effective, capable and competent within its domain to create the conditions so that we can actually build these really families or networks of families or it’s a pluralistic vision for what the ultimate solution is going to look like to this discontent you’re describing. And the fantasy of government fixing these things is something that stems from this intense secularization and this kind of collapse of communal life. And so when I think about Musk, I guess my reaction is this seems very exciting, the idea of celebrating the energy of building and creating and the idea of unleashing wealth creation, these kinds of things can be good and healthy. What I see as kind of thinking about in a really impressive, earnest, genuine way, I think he’s that with problems that are really, really hard for government to solve. And I a lot of thoughtful people, including us in earlier eras, were kind of thinking about what can government do to affirm certain ways of life or what have you. And that’s just that stuff is just I guess I’ve come to find those things less tractable. But what I do find tractable is some of the zany dreams of terraforming Nevada as well as terraforming Mars stuff like that. My dream second Trump presidency would take big swings like that and hopefully not have them end in tears and kind of be laughable. I really want to think in big creative ways. How do we have a limited government that is highly effective and energetic within its limited domain, whether that’s crime control, whether that’s breakthrough scientific research, this kind of thing. But I just think that the kind of Game of inches of social policy, it’s just it’s ultimately going to be creating a culture that celebrates and allows families to thrive. So ultimately, ultimately, you have turned against some of the arguments in our book. Ross not turned against. Precisely but that was our original brief, right. Was that the Republican Party and conservatism needs to be working in the nuts and bolts of government to a degree that progressives take for granted and focused on, again, not sweeping policy interventions, but carefully tailored policy interventions that support work and family. And I do think that in your arc, the experience of watching Trump come along and sweep all that off the table with his Trumpian style, right, watching then the left come along and in my formulation, bring back the 1970s in certain ways, right, has brought you back around not to the Tea Party, but let’s say to Ronald Reagan I think you’re in a Reaganite space where it’s good for the government to support some big projects in science and innovation. But ultimately, if American society is going to heal, it’s not going to be government policy doing it. That’s not entirely unfair. I do think that remember, you have betrayed me. Clinton, Hillary Clinton, 2016, the Biden presidency, they were to their credit, let’s be fair to them. They were actually drawing on these ideas. Big, ambitious child credits and what have you. The Biden administration did do temporarily a version of the. Yes of the biggest, most ambitious version. And things that kind of and look, we could litigate specifics of this or that policy. But I think that was humbling for me, not because I now believe that, let’s jettison the child credit or what have you. But just it was humbling because these are things that they attempted to do. And look at that child credit, one year Yes Did it mechanically reduce poverty and did it have some salutary effects. Absolutely birth rates. Look, but even on the margins. But even and also, did working class and lower middle class people was this something that was this very, we’re going to have to fight for this. Was this something that created a groundswell? It did not. It did not have anything like the political effects that the Biden administration expected. I agree. And that’s right. And also, I think there is another element of the Grand new party argument. It was partly, a lot of it was. Reactive and a lot of it was, look, we’re not going to dismantle the New Deal era welfare state. There have been moments of actually government, but also a cultural elite can work together to create the conditions for flourishing families. And even now, I don’t think there’s specific recommendations there that I would jettison. Yeah, there’s a place for that, but I certainly am more taken with the idea that the kind of healing that I think you and I both want, the kind of that is ultimately going to have to be cultural change. And by the way, there are things government can do. I think about Thatcherism one of Margaret Thatcher’s things is that she wasn’t just laissez Faire. She was running an activist conservative government that wasn’t just targeting the size of the state, but it was also targeting civil society organizations, government bureaucracies and educational establishment that was hostile to what she saw as the vigorous virtues that families needed to thrive. Government could not instill those vigorous virtues. Government could fight against the cultural, institutional forces that were undermining those who manifested the vigorous virtues. I think that that’s exactly right. That is an activist agenda for the right. And I think that it relates to certainly crime and public safety, but it also relates to how we think about entrepreneurship and how we think about family policy. So there is a place for smart social policy, but it’s all about the lodestar is what can dollars and cents accomplish versus what can creating room for the cultural forces that we want to see thrive. So when I see someone like Musk, do I see him as an imperfect and flawed figure. Of course. But also he’s someone who represents a kind of cultural force. And I see that as healing. Yeah and I want to say that I’m in prodding you this way. I actually agree with what I take to be part of your evolution. And in part, I agree with it because I think the American economy overall just looks different in 2024 than it did when we were making a lot of these arguments earlier that we have in the run up to the financial crisis, the run up to the financial crisis, and then there was a period of real wage stagnation in American life, in a climate of low inflation, where there was room for government policy to be more activist. And that moment, in a way, gave us the first Trump presidency. And I think there’s a lot less room for that right now. I think the shadow of inflation hangs over. Fiscal consolidation looms. And the bill for entitlements is coming due. But then more generally, the Uc economy, while the Biden era inflation was dreadful for a couple of years, it’s actually done better by working class Americans who were the core constituency we were worried about then. Did the economy of George W. Bush the last 10 or 15 years have been better for working class Americans than were the Great Compression of wages. Yes, upper middle class professionals are no longer pulling away from the working class. So when you look at those forces, I think, Yes, I think there’s less reason to be quite as activist in public policy, in support of the working class relative to when we first started writing about these issues. And I agree with you that in the best version of Musk and dynamism, there is something that is the best kind of libertarianism. The worst kind of libertarianism is just the kind that is we don’t care how we cut the programs as long as we get to a balanced budget and so on. I am and always will be against that kind of libertarianism. The best kind of libertarianism is the kind that says, why shouldn’t we have self-driving cars and why shouldn’t we go to Mars. And all of these things. And there are various forms of government regulation that stand in the way. So I am at least somewhat optimistic about Musk and influence in those areas. But I do still wonder, and maybe this is where we can come to a conclusion is a political coalition that aspires to run the United States of America for an extended period of time, something both political coalitions have failed to do. Still at its heart, needs a basic economic agenda that says, here’s how we’re on your side, middle America. Here are the policy changes that we want to make to create growth and create fairness, both to create opportunity and to sustain the American dream. And I’m not sure. I’m just not sure I don’t think that the second Trump presidency that you could sit down and say, here is the Trump economic agenda that is an equivalent of even the Reagan agenda or before that, the Roosevelt agenda that most Americans would recognize. I think fundamentally Trump has built this new almost majority on, as you keep saying, anti-left sentiment. And I think that to actually get to the point where it is a durable majority under Trump or any other figure, you would need to be able to say to the average voter, this is what Republican policymaking looks like and here’s how it helps you. And I don’t know. I don’t think I don’t think we’re really close to being there. And I’ll give you I’ll give you the last word. Well, one strange bookend is that we began by talking about how we came to our obsessions with domestic policy in the shadow of 9/11. And when you’re looking at the political economy, debates of this moment and what will unfold in the Trump presidency, it is about another set of geopolitical crises surrounding decoupling, de-risking, how to meet the challenge of China, and our deep enmeshment with China and Chinese economic growth. And it could be that it’s not going to be primarily about our dreams for how we reorder the American class system, how we redress American stratification, but rather just how are we forced to remake the American economy in what could be a war time economy. That’s something that I stay up late thinking about a lot. And the other thing I’ll say about this coalition that I find interesting and exciting. We’ve talked about the changing ethnic character of the coalition I’m really interested in, and this is where our biographies diverge and what you might call the meritocracy voters. I’m really interested in these people who really care about opposing HINDI, let’s say, who really care about public safety, urban chaos, and who are people who are more important in their influence than their numbers. Will a Trump presidency consolidate support within this group, or will a reinvigorated center left be able to win them back. That to me is a really interesting question that intersects with a lot of what we’ve been talking about. Well, on that note, we’ve barely begun to consider the possibilities for a second Trump presidency. But then again, the second Trump presidency itself has not begun. So I’m sure that there will be opportunities for us to relive our misspent youth again again in the future. Reihan and for now, I just want to Thank you for joining me on matter of opinion. Thank you, sir.  Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam had a vision for how Republicans could reclaim the working class. They never expected Trump to fulfill it. On this episode of “Matter of Opinion,” Ross Douthat is joined by his good friend Reihan Salam, a former housemate and co-author and the president of the Manhattan Institute. As young conservatives, the two teamed up in the waning days of the George W. Bush era to write “[Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/42417/grand-new-party-by-ross-douthat-and-reihan-salam/).” After Donald Trump’s second election victory, the two look back at their prescriptions and debate what they got right and wrong about building a durable Republican majority. Below is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation. To watch the full episode, click the play button on the video above. To listen to this episode, click the play button below. **Ross Douthat:** The second election of Donald Trump didn’t just win a majority for Trump himself. It also solidified a remarkable transformation in the Republican Party, which has gone from being a party associated with the wealthy and the white suburban upper middle class to being a party that represents a much more diverse coalition — more blue collar, with fewer college-educated voters and, in this election, with a much more multiracial coalition as well. That’s quite a shift, and it’s quite remarkable that Trump himself would be the one to accomplish it. So to map out the recent history that brought us to this moment and some of the arguments that Republicans and conservatives have been having about their changing coalition, I’ve brought on a very special guest. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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On Thursday, former Rep. Matt Gaetz announced [he would be withdrawing his candidacy](https://www.vox.com/donald-trump/384967/matt-gaetz-donald-trump-attorney-general) to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general after facing a [furor over accusations of sexual misconduct](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cew2z48rp70o), including having sex with a 17-year-old minor. The accusations against Gaetz, who was the subject of a years-long investigation by the House Ethics Committee, as well as a separate, prior [FBI probe over sex trafficking allegations](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/20/senate-matt-gaetz-fbi-sex-trafficking-trump-doj.html) that never resulted in criminal charges, proved to be too much for the Florida Republican’s nomination. ([Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing](https://x.com/RepMattGaetz/status/1839341409582846196/photo/1).) But Gaetz is hardly the only one of Trump’s Cabinet picks to face such allegations. Indeed, a remarkable number of the people Trump is eager to position in his inner circle have been accused of some sort of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment to sexual assault to enabling a culture of exploitation. In addition to Gaetz, there’s also: * Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, who was [accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/police-report-sexual-assault-claim-hegseth.html) in his hotel room after an event for the California Federation of Republican Women. He later reportedly [paid for her to stay silent](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-allegation-payment/) as part of a confidential legal settlement. A recently released police report about the incident says the [accuser believes Hegseth may have drugged her](https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/politics/pete-hegseth-police-report-defense-secretary-trump/index.html). [Hegseth maintains the encounter was consensual](https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/17/politics/pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-settlement-agreement/index.html) and was never criminally charged. * Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who Trump has tapped for secretary of Health and Human Services, has been [accused of groping his teenage babysitter](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/21/rfk-jr-assault-accuser). Kennedy [sent a text apology to the accuser](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/12/rfk-sexual-assault-apology-eliza-cooney/) in which he said he had “no memory” of the incident. * Elon Musk, who Trump has charged with making the government more efficient, [was sued by former SpaceX employees](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/employees-toxic-lawsuit-spacex-sexual-harrasment-wrongful-termination/) who say he fired them when they protested the company’s culture of rampant sexual harassment. Musk does not appear to have publicly addressed the lawsuit. * Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for education secretary, who is the target of a recent lawsuit that alleges she [knowingly enabled the sexual exploitation of children](https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/business/linda-mcmahon-abuse-wwe-trump-education/index.html) at World Wrestling Entertainment by another employee when she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were at its helm, beginning in the 1980s. McMahon has denied the allegations through an attorney. Trump has long seemed to have an affinity for those who, like him, have been accused of sexual misdeeds. Before he became president, [he was close friends with notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein](https://www.vox.com/culture/382550/jeffrey-epstein-tapes-donald-trump-friendship). One of his Supreme Court picks, Brett Kavanaugh, [was accused of sexual assault](https://www.vox.com/explainers/2018/9/27/17909782/brett-kavanaugh-christine-ford-supreme-court-senate-sexual-assault-testimony) by multiple women ([Kavanaugh denied all the claims](https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/17906226/brett-kavanaugh-written-testimony-sexual-assault)), but Trump stood by him throughout his tempestuous confirmation hearings. Kavanaugh [later went on to help topple _Roe v. Wade_](https://www.vox.com/2022/5/3/23055125/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights-supreme-court-dobbs-v-jackson), setting back reproductive rights in the country for a generation. We know about Trump’s own cavalier attitude toward sexual assault in part because of the infamous _Access Hollywood_ tape, in which he can be heard bragging about sexually assaulting women for the benefit of a giggling Billy Bush. Trump talks about the assault as if it should hardly matter during their conversation: its primary importance seems to be [the social capital it will grant him](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07916035211034355) with another man. We can’t know exactly why Trump is surrounding himself with fellow accused sexual predators and those alleged to enable them, or why he’s chosen to pick these particular people for some of the most prestigious positions in the nation. Regardless of Trump’s intentions, though, his nominations are sending a clear message: that being credibly accused of sexual assault is not a serious impediment to ascending to the highest ranks of American government, nor to being granted authority over the bodies of millions of people. In short, [your body, _my_ choice](https://www.vox.com/politics/384792/your-body-my-choice-maga-gender-election). Gaetz ultimately had to withdraw his nomination, though it’s not clear how much that’s due to his alleged sexual misdeeds and how much it’s due to his longstanding penchant for [conflict with his Republican colleagues](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/msnbc-ari-melber-matt-gaetz-gop-beef_n_673efba0e4b0045528dbff74). The line for Cabinet members under Trump appears to be: Your colleagues can’t threaten to release a detailed report allegedly showing that you had sex with a minor, and you also cannot have personally feuded with the people whose votes you need to be confirmed. Otherwise, very little is off the table. After all, a credible accusation of sexual assault hasn’t doomed all of Trump’s picks: Republican senators [appear to be rallying around Hegseth](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/us/politics/pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-senate-republicans.html), even after the release of the graphic police report, although the confirmation process is still in its early days. Trump’s Cabinet picks are a sort of crowing of victory, a proof of the concept he already demonstrated when he was successfully elected president. The concept is: You can be accused of sexual violence — you can be found civilly liable of sexual violence — and still hold some of the highest and most powerful offices in the land. And you can use that power to strip away women’s rights to control their own bodies, repeating the individual violation on a massive scale. Hegseth, if confirmed, would be in charge of the Pentagon, which has for years publicly [battled a culture of rampant sexual violence](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/04/30/a-culture-that-fosters-sexual-assaults-and-sexual-harassment-persists-despite-prevention-efforts-a-new-pentagon-study-shows/). Gaetz, if his nomination had gone through, would’ve overseen a Justice Department charged with investigating and prosecuting federal sex crimes. In a country that frequently and fervently announces that [feminism is going too far](https://www.vox.com/culture/380789/historic-election-feminism-kamala-harris-first-woman-president), our newly elected president appears determined to demonstrate that it’s not the case. You’ve read 1 article in the last month Here at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country. Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change. We rely on readers like you — join us.  Swati Sharma Vox Editor-in-Chief See More: * [Culture](https://www.vox.com/culture) * [Donald Trump](https://www.vox.com/donald-trump) * [Gender](https://www.vox.com/gender) * [Life](https://www.vox.com/life) * [Politics](https://www.vox.com/politics)

[Donald Trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump)’s aides working on Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary have told the Trump transition team they haven’t yet counted three Republican senators as being categorically opposed to his confirmation, according to two people familiar with the matter. The president-elect’s pick to lead the Pentagon returned to Capitol Hill to meet with senators in an effort to shore up faltering support over allegations that he committed sexual assault, [drank to excess](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/03/pete-hegseth-defense-department-alcohol-use), sexually pursued female subordinates and was [ousted from two non-profits](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/pete-hegseth-non-profit-allegations). But Hegseth’s nomination team, which has met with senators themselves, have suggested to Trump’s orbit that he may ultimately prevail given that they have not hit the critical threshold of three “no” votes despite the slew of torrid headlines that have clouded the selection. The trickiest hurdle for Hegseth, the people said, appears for now at least to be [convincing Republican senator Joni Ernst](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/dec/05/trump-hegseth-defense-drinking-us-politics-latest-updates?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-6751c8548f08d291b219932b#block-6751c8548f08d291b219932b) to back his nomination or ensuring her resistance does not embolden her close colleagues in the Senate to vote against him. Ernst, an Iowa Republican and combat veteran who has spoken about being sexually assaulted herself, had a closed-door meeting with Hegseth on Wednesday but did not offer her endorsement when she emerged, as well as in an interview on [Fox News](https://www.theguardian.com/media/fox-news) the following morning. “For a number of our senators, they want to make sure that any allegations are cleared, and that’s why we have to have a very thorough vetting process,” Ernst told Fox News, agreeing with the host Bill Hemmer that she had not reached a “yes” on Hegseth. The continued resistance from Ernst sparked complaints from Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago, where the transition operation is headquartered, that Ernst was content to sink Hegseth’s nomination because she was interested in the job herself. [](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/pete-hegseth-confirmation-trump#img-2) Joni Ernst speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on 6 March. Photograph: Bonnie Cash/Reuters Ernst had briefly been in the running for the defense secretary position until she was passed over when Trump instead gravitated to Hegseth, partly because of what he regarded as his telegenic qualities and conversations with him on the campaign trail. But Ernst has spoken to Trump repeatedly in recent weeks and questioned his choice for Hegseth, the people said, giving rise to accusations that she was trying to position herself for the job. A spokesperson for Ernst said in a statement that she had no interest in being the defense secretary pick: “She is not seeking the position, full stop.” Still, that has not quelled the backlash against her inside Trumpworld with aides foreshadowing a war his other sherpa teams if she in effect forced Hegseth to withdraw his nomination for her own personal self-interest, the people said. Trump has told people close to him that Michael Waltz, the former Florida congressman he chose as his national security adviser, would face an easier path to Senate confirmation for defense secretary, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. But Trump has also said he wants to keep Waltz in the West Wing and his top replacement pick [would be Ron DeSantis](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/04/pete-hegseth-trump-keep-fighting), the Florida governor and his 2024 Republican primary rival. In Washington, Hegseth launched a public media campaign to bolster support for his nomination. He vowed to continue with his bid as he met with more Republican senators in Congress and said in a high-profile interview that Trump told him that he had his back. [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/pete-hegseth-confirmation-trump#EmailSignup-skip-link-15) Sign up to The Stakes — Presidential Transition We will guide you through the aftermath of the US election and the transition to a Trump presidency **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion Speaking to Megyn Kelly on Sirius XM, Hegseth dismissed the sexual misconduct and drinking allegations as fiction, comparing them with the similar negative headlines that dogged Brett Kavanaugh during his senate confirmation hearings for the US supreme court. “It is the classic art of the smear,” Hegseth said. “Take whatever tiny kernels of truth – and there are tiny, tiny ones in there – and blow them up into a masquerade of a narrative about somebody that I am definitely not.” He later told Kelly that if he ultimately became defense secretary, he would stop drinking altogether, likening it to when he followed the military directive prohibiting alcohol consumption on deployment. Hegseth was due to speak to Bret Baier on Fox News but swapped it for an appearance on Kelly’s show, with his team betting that speaking with a female journalist who had herself spoken out against sexual harassment in a long-form interview would be more beneficial, a person familiar with the matter said. The Hegseth team also thought doubling down on Fox News was overkill, the person said, after his mother earlier appeared on the Fox and Friends morning show to quell concerns about a 2018 email she sent her son that accused him of a pattern of abuse towards women. Penelope Hegseth said she regretted sending the email, in which she said her son “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around”, and urged senators to consider his nomination. “He’s redeemed, forgiven, changed,” she said.

[META+1.77%](https://qz.com/quote/META)[AMZN+0.26%](https://qz.com/quote/AMZN)[GOOGL\-0.07%](https://qz.com/quote/GOOGL) Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms ([META+1.77%](https://qz.com/quote/META)) has tapped Joel Kaplan to lead its global affairs team, putting the company’s most prominent Republican in a top job. The move comes just weeks ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration later this month and as big tech companies prepare for a shift in federal policy. Several major CEOs, from Zuckerberg himself to Amazon’s ([AMZN+0.26%](https://qz.com/quote/AMZN)) Jeff Bezos and Google’s ([GOOGL\-0.07%](https://qz.com/quote/GOOGL)) Sundar Pichai, [recently met](https://qz.com/donald-trump-tech-ceos-apple-google-amazon-cook-bezos-1851722093) with Trump to discuss his vision for his administration. Kaplan, Meta’s current vice president of global policy, worked for Former President George W. Bush as the White House deputy chief of staff. Last month, he [joined](https://www.threads.net/@joelkaplan/post/DDfF3djxuj_?xmt=AQGz2yHLJr_XHpuNCKNnspIGAdMYq4Hh_ONoSZhy3BT4Cg) Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump at the New York Stock Exchange, where Trump was [being honored](https://qz.com/donald-trump-nyse-stock-bell-bell-time-person-year-1851719423) as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. In 2018, he attended the Senate confirmation hearing for his “friend” Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which sparked an [internal backlash.](https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/05/tech/facebook-joel-kaplan-backlash/index.html) Semafor first [reported](https://www.semafor.com/article/01/02/2025/meta-will-appoint-joel-kaplan-to-lead-global-policy-team-replacing-nick-clegg) the shakeup, which was [confirmed on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/nickclegg/posts/pfbid02pYw3yki4jXbjns4ofN8XHnHL3t4CDrK8RSoxjkSjhWYfPh4yQBg3psUDNrKRtGfNl?amp%3B__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R) by Nick Clegg, Meta’s current president of global affairs. Clegg said he would continue representing the company throughout the first quarter of 2025. “My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector,” Clegg wrote. “I hope I have played some role in seeking to bridge the very different worlds of tech and politics – worlds that will continue to interact in unpredictable ways across the globe.” Before joining Meta as vice president of global affairs in October 2018, Clegg was a major politico in the United Kingdom. He served as Prime Minister David Cameron’s deputy prime minister, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, and a member of parliament. During his tenure, Clegg represented Meta in both Washington D.C. and London, often [speaking at events](https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/members-event/conversation-nick-clegg-can-democracy-survive-pace-technology) about the intersection of technology and democracy and [Congressional hearings](https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/members-event/conversation-nick-clegg-can-democracy-survive-pace-technology). He also helped guide Meta through the [fallout](https://www.politico.eu/article/facebook-nick-clegg-cambridge-analytica-scandal/) from the scandal revolving around Cambridge Analytica, the British data firm that illegally used social media data to target Americans during the 2016 presidential election. Meta, then known as Facebook, [paid a $5 billion fine](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49109624) to settle with the Federal Trade Commission. Clegg spoke favorably of Kaplan, writing that he was “thrilled” with his appointment and calling him “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time.” Former Federal Communications Commission Chair Kevin Martin, who was [nominated](https://www.fcc.gov/biography-kevin-j-martin) by Bush in April 2001, will become Meta’s vice president of global policy, Clegg wrote. Martin has been at Meta [since 2015](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-23/meta-scraps-search-for-democrat-to-lead-the-charge-in-washington?sref=P6Q0mxvj). “You’ve made an important impact advancing Meta’s voice and values around the world, as well as our vision for AI and the metaverse,” Zuckerberg wrote in a reply to Clegg. “You’ve also built a strong team to carry this work forward. I’m excited for Joel to step into this role next given his deep experience and insight leading our policy work for many years.”

Jan 10, 2025 3:48 PM While Supreme Court justices pressed both sides in Friday’s oral arguments, experts say it’s hard to see how TikTok gets enough votes to survive.  Photo-illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images The Supreme Court [heard oral arguments](https://www.wired.com/live/tiktok-scotus-live-coverage/) in a [landmark First Amendment case](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-ban-first-amendment-courts-challenge/) on Friday that will determine the fate of TikTok in the United States. For more than two hours, the nine justices questioned lawyers for TikTok, content creators, and the US government about a [law passed last year](https://www.wired.com/story/congress-tiktok-ban/) that, if left to stand, could result in a [ban of the popular video-sharing app](https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-us-tiktok-ban-would-actually-work/) on January 19. Speaking with WIRED, experts said it was unlikely that the court would side with TikTok and block the ban from going into effect. While the justices were concerned over the First Amendment implications of the law, they appeared convinced that the app poses a substantial [risk to US national security](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-nationa-security-threat-why/). TikTok’s lawyer, Noel Francisco, and Jeffrey Fisher, who represents the creators, argued that, as written, the law banning TikTok violates the rights their clients have to free expression; removing access to the TikTok algorithm, they claim, would remove a speech outlet for creators and the company itself. For the government, solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar argued that the law does not censor the defendants, but quarantines the app from parent company ByteDance and Chinese influence. “I don't think \[the law\] reflects Congress seeking to set out in advance what kind of speech we should have reflecting certain views on certain topics,” Prelogar said. “Instead, it's about trying to close off the vulnerability that our foreign adversary nation could exploit.” “This case boils down to speech. What we're talking about is ideas,” Francisco said in his rebuttal, dismissing national security concerns that the TikTok algorithm could be used to manipulate Americans. “That whole notion is at war with the First Amendment. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that the government cannot restrict speech, in order to protect us from the speech. That's precisely what this law does from beginning to end.” While many of the justices voiced concern over the law’s First Amendment threats, they also appeared amenable to the government’s argument that the law was more targeted toward severing TikTok’s connections with ByteDance than limiting its free-speech rights. For more than five years, US officials have warned that TikTok has the potential to influence American perception of the Chinese government. In public interviews and congressional hearings, officials like FBI director Christopher Wray have also suggested that TikTok gathers US user data that the Chinese government could weaponize [to surveil Americans online](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-nationa-security-threat-why/). TikTok has denied that it shares any US data with ByteDance or the Chinese government. Donald Trump was the first to [try banning TikTok](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-year-trump-ban-no-change-new-threats/) in 2020, when he issued an executive order that quickly got held up in litigation throughout the remainder of his presidency. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden rescinded the order and began negotiating with TikTok to reach a deal designed to satisfy the government’s national security concerns while allowing TikTok to continue operating, an effort that became known as [Project Texas](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/tiktok-tries-sell-project-texas-fights-survival-us-rcna67697). When no deal could be reached, [Congress responded by approving the ban-or-sell bill](https://www.wired.com/story/congress-tiktok-ban/), titled the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, setting the January 19 deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a suitable buyer or be removed from US app stores. The law allows for Biden to extend that deadline an additional 90 days. Soon after Biden [signed the bill to ban TikTok in April](https://www.wired.com/story/biden-sign-tiktok-ban/), the company and a consortium of its users retaliated by filing lawsuits accusing the federal government of violating their First Amendment rights. In December, [a federal appeals court](https://www.wired.com/story/doj-tiktok-constitutional-lawsuit/) upheld the ban law, leaving TikTok with only one legal pathway left to save itself: an appeal to the Supreme Court. Many of these same arguments were made at Friday’s hearing. Justice Brett Kavanaugh called the government’s data security rationale “strong.” Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch called into question the government’s assertion that the app could host “covert” Chinese manipulation operations, arguing that TikTok’s algorithm was just as opaque as those belonging to other social media companies. “We all now know that China is behind it,” Kagan said. Fisher, who represents the creators involved in the case, argued that the justices did not have to answer questions related to security, which would be better resolved by broader data privacy legislation. “If Congress, in this very law, regulated data security in other ways with the data brokers, that's perfectly permissible,” Fisher told the court. “But the question before you today was narrower. The question is, is this law before you sustainable on security grounds? And that answer has to be no,” Fisher told the court. Justices expressed some doubt as to whether the law actually limits TikTok’s freedom of expression, given the option to divest. “TikTok can continue to operate on its own algorithm on its own terms, as long as it's not associated with ByteDance,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. If the ban goes into effect, Apple and Google would be required to remove TikTok from the US versions of their app stores, [preventing any new downloads from happening in the country](https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-us-tiktok-ban-would-actually-work/). Internet hosting and data storage providers will also be forbidden from offering their services to the company. Users with TikTok already downloaded onto their devices may still continue to have access, at least for a short period of time after the ban goes into effect. Once removed from app stores, users won’t be able to download updates to TikTok, and the app could become [more buggy and difficult to use](https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-us-tiktok-ban-would-actually-work/) over time. TikTok’s lawyer told the justices that the app would go dark after January 19. Blake Reid, a tech law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said that the justices seemed to target TikTok’s corporate structure, leaving the app’s counsel little time to argue the merits of the data security argument. “I'm not sure that Tiktok will lose that argument, but because they spent so much time on it, they didn't get to make the arguments about the national security stuff and the privacy and security stuff, which I think is the weakest part of the government's case.” The justices seemed more sympathetic to the government’s security concerns, says Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor and former national security adviser to the Justice Department. “It's very plausible that Tiktok picks up a couple of votes,” Rozenshtein says. “I think the three most likely are justices Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and maybe Kagan, but I struggle to see TikTok getting five votes, which is what it needs to strike down this law.” In a press conference following the hearing on Friday, Francisco said the argument went “really well” and that the justices “vigorously questioned both sides.” It’s unclear when the court would issue its decision, but Rozenshtein and Reid believe it will come sooner rather than later. TikTok’s lawyer, Francisco, suggested that the justices could issue a stay or an injunction to stop the ban from going into effect as scheduled, but they gave no signals as to whether they would consider it. Trump also pleaded with the nation’s highest court to stop the ban from going into effect in an amicus brief filed last month, promising to find a “political” solution to save TikTok once he retakes power. “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing national security concerns,” Trump lawyer D. John Sauer wrote in [the filing.](https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-656/336151/20241227163400981_2024-12-27%20-%20TikTok%20v.%20Garland%20-%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20President%20Donald%20J.%20Trump.pdf) The court has not yet responded to the brief. If the justices uphold the ban, a deal with Trump might just be TikTok’s last shot at survival.

In some ways, the secretary of Defense nomination of [Pete Hegseth](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/pete-hegseth) was always meant as a domination exercise, a way of making Senate [Republicans](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans) humiliate themselves for [Donald Trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump)’s approval. Hegseth has white supremacist tattoos and what is reportedly a pretty severe drinking problem: one friend told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that they once saw him order [three gin and tonics](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-pressure-campaign-to-get-pete-hegseth-confirmed-as-defense-secretary) at a breakfast meeting. In 2017, a woman went to the emergency room – and then the police – after what she said was a rape by Hegseth; he later paid a settlement and had her [sign an nondisclosure agreement](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/trump-defense-pick-pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-allegations). (Hegseth claims the encounter, which took place while he was married to his second wife and had just had a child with the woman who would become his third, was consensual and denies all wrongdoing.) He wrote a book, The War on Warriors, which seems to consist mainly of his gripes about the presence of women in combat roles and his objections to the fact that American service members are required by abide by the Geneva conventions. “From what I can tell,” said Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both her legs while serving in combat in Iraq, “the manager of your local Applebee’s has more experience managing a bigger budget and more personnel than [Pete Hegseth](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/pete-hegseth).” That’s not entirely fair: the manager of your local Applebee’s probably has a good deal more dignity. > Trump, and the money behind him, have already proved themselves stronger than the separation of powers And so it should be no surprise that on Tuesday, when Hegseth appeared before the Senate armed services committee for his confirmation hearings, the assembled Republicans had nothing but kind, even effusive things to say about Hegseth. This is not because they are unaware of his character. It is because they are slaves to Donald Trump’s will, and have abandoned their advice-and-consent role – to say nothing of their self-respect – in order to please him. In case there was ever any doubt about the slavish obedience of the Republican Senate caucus, it appears that allies of Trump and Hegseth have been working overtime to ensure that the confirmation process is not a fair fight. Witnesses who might cast Hegseth in an unflattering light – including the [woman who accused him of rape](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/trump-defense-pick-pete-hegseth-sexual-assault-allegations) and several whistleblowers who exposed his [drunkenness](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/01/14/us/hegseth-confirmation-trump#pete-hegseth-drinking-alcohol) and alleged [financial mismanagement](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/14/pete-hegseth-testimony-congress-secretary-defense) as the leader of two veterans’ non-profits – have been smeared in the rightwing media and threatened with lawsuits and public ruin; they have ultimately made the reasonable, and intended, decision not to testify. Senators like Susan Collins and Jody Ernst – a veteran and rape victim who has been an outspoken advocate for victims of sexual assault in the military – have refused to meet privately with Hegseth’s accuser. An FBI background investigation seems to have been almost comedically superficial and perfunctory, as it was in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Meanwhile, the money behind Trump is being used to intimidate Republican senators into toeing the line, regardless of their advice-and-consent duties: Elon Musk has reportedly pledged to fund primary challengers for any Senate Republicans who do not vote to confirm Hegseth. What is happening in the Hegseth confirmation, then, is not merely the nomination of an unqualified and dangerously incompetent man to a position of authority that he can’t handle and does not deserve. It is something more like the buckling of constitutional checks and balances in the face of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions – and Elon Musk’s money. A senator who cannot meaningfully weigh a candidate without facing impossible reprisals is one who cannot fulfill the duties of their office. A raped woman or abused employee who cannot tell the truth of what happened to her without facing ruinous lawsuits and life-altering public harassment is one who does not have a full or actionable right to freedom of speech. We often speak of what Trump _threatens_, what he _might_ do to our system of government. This vocabulary suggests that the danger is in the future. But the constitutional order is substantially impaired and dysfunctional right now: Trump, and the money behind him, have already proved themselves stronger than the separation of powers. Hegseth’s appointment is largely a foregone conclusion, if for no other reason than the fact that the Republicans have neither the spine nor any real opportunity to vote against him. But his remarks gave some clue as to how he will run the American military once confirmed. [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/pete-hegseth-confirmation-hearing#EmailSignup-skip-link-11) Sign up to Fighting Back Big thinkers on what we can do to protect civil liberties and fundamental freedoms in a Trump presidency. From our opinion desk. **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion Hegseth leaned hard into the Musk project of ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and reducing the number of women and minorities in positions of leadership. “This is not the time for equity,” he said, repeatedly casting women’s presence in the military as a threat to readiness. He seems determined, too, to loosen American soldiers’ obligations to international law in ways that would enable them to kill more civilians and torture more prisoners. He said he would use the military to facilitate mass deportations; he said he would not give soldiers stationed in Republican-controlled states funding to travel for abortion care. But what was perhaps most notable about Hegseth’s testimony was what he did not say: he did not say, though he was asked several times, that he would refuse to carry out an unconstitutional order by Donald Trump. That, too, might be why the president chose him. Our system of government is already broken. But the president-elect seems determined to break it more. * Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

_Alexandra Sifferlin, a health and science editor for Times Opinion, hosted an online conversation on Wednesday with the Opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci and the Opinion writers David Wallace-Wells and Jessica Grose about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first of two confirmation hearings for secretary of health and human services._ **Alexandra Sifferlin:** A challenge for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this hearing was convincing senators that he is not a conspiracy theorist who is going to take away everyone’s vaccines. In his opening statement, he stated that he was not “anti-vaccine,” though numerous examples were provided of his longtime vaccine criticism — including [a fiery exchange](https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009957725/rfk-jr-confirmation-hearing-sanders.html) with Senator Bernie Sanders over Kennedy’s [former nonprofit](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/22/rfk-money-vaccines-salary-trump/ac398118-d91f-11ef-85a9-331436ec61e9_story.html) selling anti-vaccine baby onesies. Did Kennedy succeed in offering that assurance? **Jessica Grose:** I’m going to have to agree with Senator Ron Wyden, [who said](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyEaKsYYjXs), “The receipts show that Mr. Kennedy has embraced conspiracy theories, quacks, charlatans — especially when it comes to the safety and efficacy of vaccines.” Kennedy’s responses did not do much to quell the profound doubts that anyone paying close attention would have. It was especially bad when [he had to admit](https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/29/politics/video/sen-bennet-grills-rfk-jr-hhs-secretary-hearing-digvid) that he “probably did” once say that Lyme disease was a “military-engineered bioweapon.” **David Wallace-Wells:** I don’t think he persuaded anyone of much, though I don’t think he really set out to, either. He was working from the playbook of Pete Hegseth and Brett Kavanaugh — defensive, standoffish, evasive and ready to be [memed](https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1884678471000957038). He didn’t really repudiate past statements, just deflected and counterpunched. More striking to me: He said almost nothing about how to actually make America healthy again. **Grose:** David, I also found it telling that he was already referring to President Trump as his “boss” and saying there’s nothing wrong with loving Big Macs. We know that Trump likes fighters. Kennedy has an audience of one that he really cares about. **Zeynep Tufekci:** He is obviously good at punting the questions and came prepared to do so. When he was asked if he was a conspiracy theorist, for example, he just said no and claimed that he was called a conspiracy theorist for saying Covid vaccines don’t prevent transmission. But that’s not the real reason. For example, he has [falsely claimed](https://x.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1618279143468306435) that the H.P.V. vaccine increases rates of cancer — and he even stands to [potentially benefit](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/health/rfk-merck-hpv-vaccine-crapo-warren.html) from a lawsuit against that vaccine. Meanwhile, the evidence shows that the H.P.V. vaccine is eliminating deaths from cervical cancer. But he didn’t get pushed on that. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and [log into](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F01%2F30%2Fopinion%2Frfk-jr-robert-kennedy-confirmation-hearing.html&asset=opttrunc) your Times account, or [subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F01%2F30%2Fopinion%2Frfk-jr-robert-kennedy-confirmation-hearing.html) for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? [Log in](https://myaccount.nytimes.com/auth/login?response_type=cookie&client_id=vi&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F01%2F30%2Fopinion%2Frfk-jr-robert-kennedy-confirmation-hearing.html&asset=opttrunc). Want all of The Times? [Subscribe](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=89WYR&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2025%2F01%2F30%2Fopinion%2Frfk-jr-robert-kennedy-confirmation-hearing.html).

A new book describes how in confirmation hearings in 1991, the future supreme court justice Clarence Thomas said he had “no agenda” to change free speech protections established by [New York Times v Sullivan](https://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/educational-resources/supreme-court-landmarks/new-york-times-v-sullivan) – the landmark 1964 ruling Thomas now says should be reconsidered. “We should protect our first amendment freedoms as much as possible,” Thomas said 34 years ago, in [exchanges](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-CHRG-THOMAS/context) long obscured by history. Now, however, as influential rightwing figures push for Times v Sullivan to be overturned by a court tipped decisively right under Donald Trump, Thomas has changed his mind. In opinions released in 2019, 2021 and 2023, he has questioned Times v Sullivan, bemoaning how the ruling supposedly allows media organizations to “cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity”. Thomas’s evolving views are described in [Murder the Truth](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/murder-the-truth-david-enrich?variant=42734343421986): Fear, the First Amendment and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful, by David Enrich, a New York Times reporter, which is to be published on 11 March. The Guardian obtained a copy. Enrich focuses on recent rightwing attacks on the press, prominently including the wrestler Hulk Hogan’s [victory](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jun/10/gawker-media-bankruptcy-auction-hulk-hogan-lawsuit) over the website Gawker in 2016, in a case concerning a sex tape and [bankrolled](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/15/peter-thiel-gawker-bankruptcy-lawsuit-hulk-hogan-sextape) by the rightwing tech billionaire Peter Thiel, and a [settlement](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/12/melania-trump-accepts-damages-and-apology-from-daily-mail) won by Melania Trump against the Daily Mail in 2017, over claims she once worked as an escort. Those were victories for the plaintiff but in general, Times v Sullivan stands as a bulwark in support of press freedom. The case concerned an ad, paid for by civil rights groups, which proved to contain factual inaccuracies. The police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, sued the Times and won. The paper took the case to the [US supreme court](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-supreme-court), which ruled unanimously in its favor. The ruling established the “actual malice” standard for defamation suits, under which plaintiffs must show a statement was published “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth”. As defined by [Protect Democracy](https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-actual-malice-standard-explained/), which campaigns to defend press freedom, plaintiffs must prove four things: that a defamatory statement conveyed facts, not opinion; that those facts were false; that the statement was delivered to others; and that the plaintiff was harmed. The resulting protection of press freedom has long been the subject of rightwing ire. As Enrich shows, however, Thomas did not initially join in. During his confirmation hearings, he was asked by Patrick Leahy, a Democratic senator from Vermont, if Times v Sullivan “set too high a bar for public figures to win libel cases”. Thomas said: “I guess I haven’t looked at it from that standpoint.” Asked if he saw “any need to change that standard”, Thomas said: “I at this moment certainly have not thought about changing that standard and have no agenda to change that standard. My view, as I’ve attempted to express here, is that we should protect our first amendment freedoms as much as possible.” That Thomas no longer espouses such support is a shift widely held to have been formed by his own experiences at the hands of the press. As Enrich writes, as Leahy questioned Thomas, Thomas had already been subject to “journalists … prying into \[his\] career and life story”, with “less comfortable territory” including his leadership of the US Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, “the church he and \[his wife\] Ginni attended, and his sister’s disclosure to reporters that she’d once had an abortion”. Despite that, in the hearing room, Thomas indicated that “even though he felt like he was getting raked over the coals, a free press – as articulated by the court in Sullivan – was paramount”. “And I believe that even as I was going through it and even as I am going through it,” Thomas said. “I think what the court was attempting to do there \[in Sullivan\] was of course to balance the first amendment rights, the freedom of the press as we know it, and to not have that in a way impeded by one’s abilities to sue the media or intimidate the media. “That is something of course that one could debate, but I think it is a clear demonstration on the court’s part that the freedom of the press is important in our society, it’s critical in our society, even though individuals may at times be hurt by the use of that right.” Supreme court nominees often adopt evasive or careful language in confirmation hearings, as evidenced when the three justices Trump nominated in his first term were [asked](https://www.factcheck.org/2022/05/what-gorsuch-kavanaugh-and-barrett-said-about-roe-at-confirmation-hearings/) if they supported the removal of the federal right to abortion. All three dissembled; all three eventually voted to remove the right. [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/clarence-thomas-times-sullivan-precedent-book#EmailSignup-skip-link-18) Sign up to First Thing Our US morning briefing breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it matters **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion But Thomas has emerged as a particular lightning rod for liberal anger, including calls for his [impeachment](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/10/aoc-articles-of-impeachment) and removal. In 1991, as Enrich writes, Thomas was about to find himself at the center of a historic political fight. Less than three weeks after his exchange with Leahy, “word leaked to reporters at Newsday and National Public Radio that one of Thomas’s former EEOC subordinates, Anita Hill, had accused him of sexual harassment”. Thomas vehemently denied Hill’s claims but endured further, tempestuous hearings, complaining of a “[high-tech lynching](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZURHD5BU1o8)” but being confirmed by a historically narrow margin. Enrich notes that Michael Luttig, a conservative lawyer detailed to shepherd Thomas on to the court (now a prominent anti-Trump conservative), described the nominee “‘crying and hyperventilating’ about how ‘these people have destroyed my life’”. More recently, Thomas has been the subject of extensive reporting, [led by ProPublica](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/02/clarence-thomas-justice-department-request), about his failure to declare lavish gifts from rightwingers with business before the court. Perhaps concurrently, Thomas’s publicly expressed views on Times v Sullivan have changed. In 2019, as the court rejected an appeal by a woman who accused the comedian Bill Cosby of sexual assault, Thomas said Times v Sullivan should be reconsidered, [writing](https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Justice-Clarence-Thomas-Calls-for-Reconsideration-of-Landmark-Libel-Ruling-The-New-York-Times.pdf): “New York Times and the court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.” He restated that position in 2021. In a 2023 [case](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-1125_c07d.pdf) brought by a West Virginia mining executive turned Republican political candidate, Thomas said press protection under Times v Sullivan “comes at a heavy cost, allowing media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity’”. Such comments have been widely noted, particularly in light of Trump’s oft-stated wish to “[open up](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2024/oct/27/trump-press-freedom-stakes)” US libel laws and as Thomas forms part of a 6-3 rightwing majority that has handed Trump major wins, not least in ruling that presidents have some legal immunity. Enrich’s book appears at the start of Trump’s second term, as the administration takes a sledgehammer to governmental norms and structures. Attacks on Times v Sullivan have proliferated. Only last week, the casino mogul Steve Wynn, a close Trump ally, [asked](https://www.reuters.com/legal/casino-mogul-wynn-asks-us-supreme-court-revisit-times-v-sullivan-defamation-rule-2025-02-07/) the supreme court to revisit Times v Sullivan regarding his defamation suit against the Associated Press. Neil Gorsuch, one of three rightwingers confirmed to the court in Trump’s first term, has [joined](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/us/supreme-court-libel.html) Thomas in calling for Times v Sullivan to be reconsidered. [Reporting](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/supreme-court-libel-precedent.html) suggests other rightwingers, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh among them, are not ready to attack Times v Sullivan. Nonetheless, rightwing threats to press freedom of the kind Enrich examines may soon focus attention on the court once again.

First, before Elon Musk came for everyone, [Donald Trump](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump) came for the US Senate. When he returned to office, the House of Representatives was already under his heel. Many of the House Republican leaders had been his sidekicks during January 6, and one, Mark Johnson, had since become the speaker. The Senate, however, still retained, for the most part, its club-like atmosphere where the members considered themselves powers unto themselves. Senators with a toga complex have always looked down on House members as rabble. Trump viewed the independent character of the upper body as a thorn in his side. The subservience of the House of Representatives was the model that Trump envisioned for the Senate. It could no longer pretend to be the greatest deliberative body of legislators in the world, but a vassal fiefdom subject to his whims. Trump’s opportunity to crush the Senate appeared at once. As soon as he made his nominations for his cabinet, the Senate would hold confirmation hearings. His misfit nominees gave him his chance. In any previous time, just a tincture of the alcoholism, serial sexual abuse, playing footsie with a Russian-backed despot, hawking of snake oil, doodling enemies lists and bilking non-profit organizations, quite apart from plain incompetence, would have been enough to knock them out before they ever approached a seat in a hearing room. The senator John Tower, of Texas, very much a member of the club of his day, but a drunken sexual harasser of the old school, groping in elevators, was exposed when George HW Bush nominated him as secretary of defense, and dropped out. But shame in the Trump orbit is as antiquated a notion as virtue. The patent unfitness of Trump’s nominees put the senators on the spot. It was the senators, not the obviously disqualified nominees, who had to pass the test. They were not the ones sitting in judgment; they were in Trump’s dock. If Trump could break the lords of the Senate over his cabinet of curiosities, he could reduce them to being his serfs. By transforming their duty to advise and consent into shut up and obey, Trump would trample more than unstated norms. He would be obliterating a constitutional responsibility of the Senate and removing a further check and balance on his power. Subverting the institution was not an abstract exercise. If individual senators looked like they might stand in the way, it was not enough that they be defeated on a roll-call vote. They had to be personally violated. The part of themselves that they held to be at their core both as public officials and private persons had to be soiled. They had to be made examples before the others. Their humiliation had to be performed as a public demonstration. By voting in favor of nominees they knew in their bones should never be approved, whose disqualifications crossed the senators’ deepest principles, their intimidation made them Trump’s subjects. Once the method of defilement was established, it would be applied again and again. It would loom as an ever-present threat over any others’ wavering. Trump’s degradation would be sufficient to cow the rest. But he would not stop. After the first victim, then there was the next, and the next, one after another, until Trump was the master of the Senate. Trump began with one senator whose vulnerability he could twist to make her writhe. That senator was Joni Ernst, of Iowa. [](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/16/donald-trump-us-senate#img-2) Joni Ernst during a confirmation hearing in Washington DC on 23 January 2025. Photograph: Laura Brett/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock After attending Iowa State University, where she joined ROTC, Ernst enlisted in the army, served during the Iraq war in Kuwait in charge of a transport unit, and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. Running for the [US Senate](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-senate) in 2014, she said she had been sexually harassed in the military and pledged that, if elected, she would make independent investigation and prosecution of sexual crimes her signature issue. Once she entered the Senate, Ernst was for the most part a down-the-line conservative Republican, yet was also among the few [Republicans](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicans) who consistently sponsored and voted for bills to protect victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, especially focusing on women in the military. When Ernst divorced in 2019, her painful story of emotional and physical abuse became public – her husband’s dalliance with a babysitter, his long-term affair with a mistress and, after she confronted him, how he suddenly “grabbed me by the throat with his hands and threw me on the landing floor. And then he pounded my head.” Her husband responded by accusing her of having an affair herself, which she said was a “lie”. She also revealed at that time that she had been raped as a college student, reported it to the counseling service, but chose not to go to the police, and had kept it a secret. “I couldn’t stomach the idea that my rape would become public knowledge,” she [wrote](https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/12/10/ernst-hegseth-nomination-allegations/) in a memoir published in 2020. “I was sure my boyfriend would find a way to blame me.” Ernst’s divorce complaint disclosed for the first time that she had turned down candidate Donald Trump’s offer to be his vice-presidential running mate in the 2016 campaign. She attributed her refusal as vaguely not being “the right thing for me or my family”. It is uncertain whether Trump ever made the actual offer. He took Mike Pence, who was pressed on him by his campaign manager Paul Manafort to represent the evangelical right. When Trump nominated Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense, stories instantly surfaced that the Fox News weekend host had been accused of rape, paid hush money, had a history of sexual abuse in two of his marriages, impregnated a girlfriend and was a raging alcoholic who drank on the job. He also opposed women serving in combat roles in the military, as Ernst had. “I am a survivor of sexual assault,” Ernst said in her initial response to Hegseth’s nomination. She insisted that she wanted “to make sure that any allegations have been cleared, and that’s why we have to have a very thorough vetting process”. But the “vetting process” was warped. Witnesses were hesitant to come forward, afraid they would be subject to the reign of terror that Christine Blasey Ford endured when she publicly testified in Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing to be on the supreme court he had sexually assaulted her. But the woman who claimed that Hegseth had raped her was willing to speak privately with Ernst. So were two other witnesses, both female soldiers who would also talk to her in private about his drunkenness and sexual harassment. Ernst was then subjected to waves of “Maga” attacks. Facing re-election in 2026, she was threatened with a primary challenge from a local rightwing talkshow host, Steve Dease, who posted: “Joni Ernst sucked as a Senator long before this … I am willing to primary her for the good of the cause.” Elon Musk forked over a half-million dollars to blast ads that wallpapered Iowa TV, hailing Hegseth as a “patriot” and “warrior”, and warning that the “deep state” (ie Ernst) opposed him. Donald Trump Jr unleashed a storm on social media against Ernst, saying that if any senator criticized Hegseth, “maybe you’re in the wrong political party!” An online squadron of winged monkeys swarmed her. The phrase “She’s a Democrat” trended. Ernst succumbed to the smear campaign. She refused to meet with the alleged rape victim, according to a [report](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-pressure-campaign-to-get-pete-hegseth-confirmed-as-defense-secretary) by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. She also would not see the other women with first-hand accounts. Ernst hid. The witnesses, however, told their stories to Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat of Illinois and a combat veteran who lost both of her legs. From her isolation, Ernst finally released an announcement that she would support Hegseth. Duckworth said that Ernst and other Republican senators had refused to put “the national security of America over their own political survival”. Then came the turn of Thom Tillis, the senator of North Carolina. He, too, was wary of Hegseth. He heard first-hand from a witness about his drunken behavior. Tillis [told](https://www.wsj.com/politics/pete-hegseth-thom-tillis-senate-confirmation-1974dd47) Hegseth’s former sister-in-law that if she provided an affidavit about Hegseth’s abuse, he would vote against him. So, she came forward despite the slings and arrows of the Trump mob. The evening before the vote, Tillis quietly told the Republican leader John Thune he would oppose Hegseth. Tillis [spoke](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/us/politics/hegseth-trump-tillis-senate.html?searchResultPosition=1) with both JD Vance and Trump. Unlike Ernst, none of his drama was conducted in public. When the time came to vote, Tillis, who faces a tough re-election in 2026, voted “yes”. Tillis turned on a dime. [skip past newsletter promotion](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/16/donald-trump-us-senate#EmailSignup-skip-link-17) Sign up to Fighting Back Big thinkers on what we can do to protect civil liberties and fundamental freedoms in a Trump presidency. From our opinion desk. **Privacy Notice:** Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our [Privacy Policy](https://www.theguardian.com/help/privacy-policy). We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google [Privacy Policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy) and [Terms of Service](https://policies.google.com/terms) apply. after newsletter promotion [](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/16/donald-trump-us-senate#img-3) Pete Hegseth in Warsaw, Poland, on 13 February 2025. Photograph: Aleksandra Szmigiel/Reuters Then they came for Bill Cassidy, the senator of Louisiana. Cassidy is a physician who has devoted much of his career to public health and educating people about the importance of vaccinations. He was the decisive vote on the Senate finance committee on the nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr to become secretary of health and human services, the leading vaccine skeptic who has made millions off his crank conspiracy theories and whose cousin, Caroline Kennedy, called him “a predator”. Cassidy attempted to coax Kennedy into committing to the scientific truth that vaccines work. “I’m a doc, trying to understand,” Cassidy said. “Convince me that you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn the old information so that there’s never a conclusion.” No matter how many times he tried, Kennedy would not give him a straight answer. Cassidy was already vulnerable. He had voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection. A far-right primary opponent, the representative Clay Higgins, was preparing to run against him. After Cassidy’s questioning of Kennedy, the winged monkeys descended on him. And Higgins posted on X: “So, vote your conscience Senator, or don’t. Either way, We’re watching.” Cassidy replied with a biblical quotation: “Joshua said to them: ‘Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Be strong and courageous. This is what the LORD will do to all the enemies you are going to fight.” But when the vote came, Cassidy crumpled. They came for Todd Young, the senator of Indiana. He is something of Hoosier Republican royalty, married to the niece of former vice-president Dan Quayle. Young was poised as the decisive vote on the Senate intelligence committee on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence. In addition to “parroting false Russian propaganda”, as the former senator Mitt Romney put it, and visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad, whom she declared was not a “torturer” and “murderer”, she had urged a pardon for “brave” Edward Snowden, who stole massive amounts of data from the National Security Agency and absconded to Russia. When Young asked her whether Snowden had “betrayed the American people”, she acknowledged he had broken the law, but would not go beyond that formulation. Young appeared edgy about her nomination. “Todd Young is a deep state puppet,” posted Elon Musk. His ears had pricked up when he had learned that Young was on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, created by Ronald Reagan and funded through USAid to promote the rule of law and democracy around the world. Musk tweeted that the NED was “an evil organization \[that\] needs to be dissolved”. The Trump X mob swarmed. Besieged, Young spoke with JD Vance. The US vice-president arranged a call with Musk. Young announced he would back Gabbard. The noise disappeared. The novel Advise and Consent, by a Washington reporter, Allen Drury, published in 1959 and produced as a movie in 1962, described a cold war melodrama in the Senate over the confirmation of a nominee to become secretary of state who had a left-wing background in his youth. One senator, with a secret gay past, caught up in the fight, fearing exposure, commits suicide. (The scene depicting a gay bar was a movie first.) But the suicide was not over any great principle. The victim was collateral damage. And the president in Advise and Consent was not attempting to use the process to coerce the Senate into vassalage. Hegseth, Kennedy and Gabbard are now all confirmed. The advise and consent responsibility of the Senate was twisted. The senators came to kneel before Trump – and Musk. Musk praised Young, the former “puppet”, as “a great ally”. Cassidy posted: “After collaborative conversations with RFK and the White House, I voted yes to confirm him.” Tillis gave a floor speech extolling Musk and Doge: “Innovation requires pushing the envelope and taking calculated risks.” Ernst wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled USAid Is a Rogue Agency. Meanwhile, the $2bn in USAid purchases of agricultural products for humanitarian aid were suspended. The Iowa Soybean Association, dependent on a $95m grant supporting more than 1,000 farms that was now not being paid, protested. Ernst, a member of the Senate agriculture committee, was silent. “I was embarrassed,” Ernst told the Des Moines Register about speaking about being raped. “I didn’t know how to explain it. I was so humiliated. And I’m a private person, when it comes to those things.” After that incident, she found herself in an abusive relationship and the victim of domestic violence. As a senator, she used her position to break with her past of victimhood and established herself as a champion of those who had been victimized as she had been. But then she found herself in another abusive relationship, with Donald Trump. She was threatened with being completely stripped of everything she had striven for and her status as a senator destroyed. She had a choice to stand up against her transgressor or to subject herself to him. She decided to submit to the humiliation. And afterward she became the enabler of the abuser.

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Since the inauguration, we've experienced a dizzying onslaught of actions from the Oval Office. So we're devoting this President's Day to understanding the scope of President Donald Trump's power as he continues to break laws, use billionaire Elon Musk to dismantle the government and circumvent Congress. Since taking office, President Trump has issued dozens of executive orders, memos and proclamations to change policies in immigration law. He's expanded on the record of his first term and is acting on the promises he made during his campaign, actions that will redefine the United States, like taking away birthright citizenship, urging millions of federal workers to resign and dismantling efforts to prevent foreign influence in our elections. Legal scholars and experts agree that we are in a constitutional crisis. We explore what that is and what power Congress and the American people have against President Trump's executive authority. Our guest today, Charlie Savage, has studied and written about presidential power for two decades. His 2007 book, "Takeover: The Return Of The Imperial Presidency And The Subversion Of American Democracy," is about the Bush-Cheney administration's efforts to expand the president's power. Savage is also a constitutional scholar and wrote in 2015 "Power Wars," an investigative account of national security and legal policymaking under President Obama. Savage is a staff writer for The New York Times, where he writes about national security and legal policy. We recorded this conversation with Savage last week. Charlie Savage, welcome back to FRESH AIR. CHARLIE SAVAGE: Thank you for having me. MOSLEY: OK, Charlie, so today will be kind of like a civics lesson and hopefully a grounding to understand the scope of presidential power and what actions are legal or illegal. Many legal experts, as I mentioned, agree that we are in a constitutional crisis. Some have even used stronger language. From you, what makes this a constitutional crisis and what's happening now that points to one? SAVAGE: A constitutional crisis, obviously, it's a strong phrase. And it's one that doesn't have a clear definition. My colleague Adam Liptak wrote recently that it's more of a sliding scale than a on or off, and I think that's right. So I think the reason people are saying that now is that Trump is brazenly, openly breaking laws left and right in his assault on basic structures of the federal government. He's firing people without obeying laws that set certain limits on when that can be done or how it can be done, from members of independent agencies to inspectors general, to civil servants. He's basically shut down an agency - United States Agency for International Development - and folded its remnants into the State Department in the face of a law passed by Congress that says USAID will exist as an independent entity that's not part of a department. And in many other ways, he is kind of rolling through legal constraints. And this has in turn engendered a blizzard of lawsuits that are piling up now. I think we're approaching 70 as you and I record this, and there's already been more than a dozen court orders telling him to stop doing this and stop doing that. And he's saying he will obey those and appeal them, but there's already mounting evidence that agencies are not obeying, especially court orders telling them to unfreeze funds that Trump had ordered blocked. And so the prospect of a president openly violating laws and then not obeying court orders I think would clearly be a constitutional crisis. Trump is saying he's going to obey these and just appeal them and try to get higher courts to let him do what he wants. And it's not 100% clear that the agencies that are nevertheless jamming up certain funds are doing so because of White House orders, as opposed to just sort of confusion and chaos that have been unleashed by this onslaught. So I'm not 100% sure myself that I would say this is yet a constitutional crisis. I think the moment Trump says, I see the judge has ordered me to do this, but I don't care - I'm going to act contrary to that order, not just try to get a higher court to overturn it - I think that would be unambiguously in the zone we're talking about. MOSLEY: But can you remind us - this is kind of the civics lesson - how the three branches of government are supposed to interact with each other as stated in the Constitution and how President Trump, of course, in violating these laws, but also just in the way that our three - the legislative branch, the judicial branch and the executive branch are actually supposed to work in concert with each other? SAVAGE: Sure. And I want to preface this by saying, yes, he is openly violating these statutes enacted by Congress about how agencies should be structured or when you can and can't fire a federal worker. It appears that his legal team wants to set up test cases that would allow the Supreme Court to declare those laws unconstitutional. And the only way to get something like that into court is to violate it, have a lawsuit and then fight about whether the law is constitutional or not. And so there's this gloss over this of the prospect that down the road, the Republican appointees, at least on the Supreme Court, who have a supermajority, will say that he had constitutional authority to do these things despite those laws. As far as the basic structure of government. The founders of the United States mistrusted concentrated government authority, sort of all the power in the hands of the king. They did not want to have a country that was subject to that much unaccountable, concentrated power. They divided the powers of government up among three separate but equal branches, the presidency, the Congress and the courts. MOSLEY: Right. SAVAGE: And there's these overlapping checks and balances that are supposed to prevent any one branch or one person from having too much concentrated, accumulated and therefore unaccountable power. That's how the United States is supposed to work. MOSLEY: Can you remind us, as it relates to the Supreme Court, how over the last few years, executive power has been redefined by the Supreme Court? SAVAGE: Yes, this Supreme Court now has six Republican appointees out of the nine justices, and five of those six are former executive branch attorneys from the Reagan administration or the George W. Bush administration. And the executive branch legal teams in those two administrations both were pushing at the limits of presidential power. And even before the second Trump administration began, that new majority bloc, especially with his appointees, which added three, but even before then, had started chipping away over the last 10 or 15 years on some of the ability of Congress, through statutes, to place limits on presidential authority. In particular, they clearly wanted to advance the idea that presidents must have exclusive control of the executive branch, and therefore, they must be able to fire anyone in the executive branch at will in order to exert control over how those subordinates are exercising executive authority. And so the Supreme Court has been saying, no, the president can fire this kind of person or that kind of person regardless of job protections that Congress has created for them. And, of course, most importantly, last summer, the Republican appointees on the court granted, more or less invented out of thin air, not out SAVAGE: out of thin air, not out of clear text or history, that the Constitution makes presidents presumptively immune from prosecution for crimes they commit using their official powers. And as part of that, they also went further when it came to the president's authority over law enforcement in the Justice Department and said he is absolutely immune for anything he does with the Justice Department, based on the idea that he is supposed to be the chief law enforcement officer under the Constitution. And so these rulings before Trump comes back into office have already clearly created momentum for a unfolding reinterpretation of the Constitution that would - and is already resulting in much greater concentration of power in the White House and a reduced role for Congress and the courts, and opening of the throttle on something that has been moving gradually up until now. MOSLEY: One very contentious act that the president has made in the last few weeks is birthright citizenship. If birthright Citizenship makes its way to the Supreme Court, what do we know about how the justices might rule? I was actually reading one scholar who said Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch - both who are Trump appointees - may disagree with Trump on this one. SAVAGE: They may. I really don't like the prediction game, especially when there's something novel like this. I'm pretty confident that some of these job protection statutes this court would eagerly strike down just based on their momentum and already doing so for sort of parallel provisions elsewhere. The birthright citizenship thing is a different animal, and it may be that this, you know, the sort of far-right legal scholars, think tankers have kind of developed this idea that they've convinced themselves of that the 14th Amendment can be reinterpreted from the way it's always been interpreted. And it's all based on this very sort of contorted theory that there's an exception in that amendment for people who are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and that's always been understood just to be diplomats, people who are here with diplomatic immunity. You can't charge them with crimes, you just have to sort of send them home, etc, and their children do not become citizens. And the idea is, well, let's interpret that phrase as encompassing anyone who's not here permanently or lawfully. But the problem is that tourists who are here on tourist visas or illegal immigrants who are here without documentation are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. If they commit a crime, they can be prosecuted. And it seems like a real reach to take this sort of odd reinterpretation of that and totally change the meaning of something this important. MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with New York Times staff writer Charlie Savage about the scope and limits of executive power under President Donald Trump. Savage writes about presidential power, security and legal policy for the Times. We will continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF PARRIS BOWENS' "STAY") MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today we're talking to New York Times staff writer Charlie Savage. I spoke with him in December of 2023 about how Trump would push the bounds of executive power should he become president. In his first days of office, Trump has already executed some of what he promised during the campaign, like granting clemency for anyone charged with the January 6 attack on the Capitol and overhauling the government, as we know it, by moving to get rid of federal employees. Savage writes about presidential power, security and legal policy for The New York Times, and our conversation was recorded last week. Executive orders historically have been kind of controversial and sort of, like, seen as a last resort after a president is unable to get legislative support. SAVAGE: So the essence of an executive order per se is not controversial. What becomes controversial is when a president has tried to get something through Congress and failed, and then tries to do it unilaterally anyway. On his own, especially using contested theories of his power. So it's not really the issuing of executive orders, but it's what particular orders say and what the legal theory is behind it. There's never been quite as intense a flurry of executive orders as we're seeing at the start, have seen at the start of the second Trump administration. We know they had a huge number of them pre-written and ready to go, and this is part of the novelty of someone who had been in and the people around him, lost power, thought about what they should have done with that power if they ever got a second chance. MOSLEY: You told me the last time we spoke in December of 2023, that Trump had made clear during the campaign that he would get rid of federal employees and replace them with Trump loyalists. And you told us that these plans were in the making even during the last Trump presidency because back then he issued an executive order that would have altered civil service protection rules for any employee of the government who was deemed to have some sort of influence over policy-making, which would open them up to be fired, I guess, like a political appointee. Now, those rules never went into effect because President Biden was then elected and rescinded that executive order. Is what we're witnessing now potentially a part of Trump's plan to streamline and replace those federal workers with loyalists? SAVAGE: So the order you're talking about that Trump put in at the end of his first term and Biden revoked before it took effect was called Schedule F, and one of the dozens of orders that Trump signed on his inauguration night this time was to restore a version of that, which is - they changed the name. It's no longer Schedule F. It's Schedule Policy/Career or something like that. Basically, yes, it takes senior civil servants who exercise some control over policy, and it says they can be summarily dismissed at will. It's been almost overlooked that that got put back because the second administration's assault on the federal bureaucracy has been so much bigger than that. Trump is firing swaths of people, purging government employees in ways that go wildly beyond the category of senior policymaking civil servant that that directive addresses. He's firing all Justice Department prosecutors that had anything to do with the cases against him or the cases against January 6 rioters. Simply, he - I said he is firing. He has fired. No notice, no hearings before a Merit System Protection Board. Pack up your office. You're gone. Your paycheck is cut off. He fired 17, now 18, I think, inspectors general who are not supposed to be fired unless Congress has gotten 30 days' advanced notice and a detailed written rationale of some case-specific reason to remove them. He didn't provide that notice or have any specific rationale. He just fired them, took away their email, phones, computers, locked them out of their buildings. They have filed a lawsuit now challenging that, some of them. He's fired members of independent agencies, like the National Labor Relations Board, who are not supposed to be removed unless there's a particular cause, like misconduct or neglect of office, just fired them anyway, shutting down that and other agencies 'cause they now lack a quorum of members to take any official action. There's a lawsuit over that, too. He's fired senior executives at the Justice Department and the FBI and other places also summarily without going through these protections. And the list goes on, and every day there's more, in fact. And so the sort of thing that we used to call Schedule F is certainly foreshadowing of the notion of a mass purge of people who work for the government trying to do various things. But it's turned out to be minor compared to what's actually happening right now. MOSLEY: What is Congress' power in objecting to these removals? SAVAGE: The current Republican Party is controlled by Trump. All of the people who are more traditional Republican conservatives, let's say Reagan-Bush-style conservatives, who sometimes in Trump's first term stood up to him, objected to him - think of John McCain types, Liz Cheney types, Adam Kinzinger types - wouldn't go along with everything he wanted, have been either purged from the party through primary challenges or have been cowed into submission by the threat of primary challenges, or in some cases - people are talking more and more about this - fear for their own physical safety from Trump supporters. And therefore, there has been barely a peep out of this Congress in defense of the laws that they passed. MOSLEY: Funding for the government expires on March 14, right? What power does that wield, I guess, for Democrats in particular? SAVAGE: Well, this is a little different than executive power. The issue is that there's very thin majorities for the Republican Party in both chambers, and there is a sizable faction of Republicans, especially in the House, who want draconian spending cuts, but also appear not to be willing to raise taxes to close the deficit that they're worried about, in fact, want to make permanent and expand large tax cuts from the Trump era that are about to expire. It means that the Republican Party, on its own, will have great difficulty passing a budget and lifting the debt ceiling. And that means if they can't reach some internal agreement, then they would need the votes of Democrats to get a majority to keep the government from shutting down and keep a debt ceiling crisis from happening. So that could give Democrats leverage to do something. The problem is that normally, if there's a political deal to be made across party lines like that, Democrats would be asking for spending on something they cared about. But how can they make a deal like that when you have a president who is freezing funds, refusing to spend it even when Congress has appropriated it and said he wants a fight over whether the Supreme Court will let him not spend money that Congress has appropriated on things he doesn't like? And so even if Democrats wanted to help, it's not clear that there's - Republicans are capable of offering something to Democrats that Democrats can count on. MOSLEY: Our guest today is New York Times staff writer Charlie Savage. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And if you're just joining us, I'm talking to New York Times staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage about how President Trump is actively working to expand executive power. Savage writes about presidential power, security and legal policy for The New York Times. In 2007, Savage wrote a book titled "Takeover: The Return Of The Imperial Presidency And The Subversion Of American Democracy," about the Bush-Cheney administration's efforts to expand presidential power. In 2017, he wrote a book called "Power Wars: The Relentless Rise Of Presidential Authority And Secrecy-Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency." We recorded our conversation last week. Charlie, we have already seen significant changes to the Justice Department. Some of the things we expected, like President Trump overhauling the leadership and appointing his own person, Pam Bondi, as attorney general. But there are several other things that are questionable. Recently, the FBI was told to hand over a list of employees who worked January 6 cases, not the agent's names, but a list to the Justice Department. And the department says this is part of a review process to end what it calls the weaponization of the justice system. What are some of the bigger concerns around disclosing that information, even if these names are being blacked out in documents? SAVAGE: So to get into that, I have to talk about what was happening at the Department of Justice before attention turned to the FBI. Right away when the administration came in, of course, the Biden political appointees resigned on January 20. And Trump put in his own acting people while his nominees were going through the Senate, including a guy named Emil Bove, who was one of his criminal defense attorneys. And he became the acting deputy attorney general and essentially was running the show, although there was a career person briefly as acting attorney general. So here's an extraordinary situation where a criminal defense attorney who was facing off with prosecutors in court suddenly is put in charge of those prosecutors. And in the first couple weeks under Bove, there was a scourging of the Justice Department. Many of the most senior leaders, career officials with decades of experience who were in charge of various sections and divisions across the department, were either fired or moved to a sort of humiliating assignment, to work on a task force that didn't even exist that was going to look at sanctuary cities. You know, these were not people who are immigration law experts. They were national security law, environmental law, criminal law. And they were sort subbed over here. The obvious effort was to make them resign, as many of them did. Then all the prosecutors who worked on the Trump cases were summarily fired, as I mentioned earlier. And then a huge swath of the prosecutors who worked on the ordinary January 6 rioter cases were also summarily fired. And as this is happening, then Bove's attention turns to the FBI. And he does the same thing. He fires or tells the most senior leaders in charge of several of the major field offices, but also all of the major divisions at FBI headquarters - cyber, national security, intelligence, criminal, et cetera - they must resign within a couple days or they will be fired. People like this are always from one time or another moving on, but there's never been just a decapitation across the board of all of the most senior, important, experienced leaders, who are in the middle of working on cases and overseeing things and so forth. And then Bove demands this list. The acting head of the FBI director turns over the list and hides the names, just gives the employment numbers, which Bove considers insubordination. And now they do have the names as well. And so the question has been, what are they going to do with those names? Is the intent to fire all those FBI agents as well, just as all the prosecutors who worked on the J6 cases were fired? In the case of the FBI, that would be thousands of people because the rioters went home after January 6, and they went home to their homes all around the country. And as the FBI was figuring out who they were through face recognition and social media posts and other things, agents all around the country were being assigned to go find this guy and arrest him. And so it would just be a decimation of the FBI workforce. And, of course, no one at the FBI chooses what they're assigned to do, just as the prosecutors didn't. They were just doing their jobs. But this sort of revenge scourging is nevertheless sending the message, even if you touch this through no will of your own, your career is over. MOSLEY: It's astounding. And I think we could play out in our mind what the potential ramifications are for this. But what are some more immediate things that you're concerned about as you watch this unfold? SAVAGE: Well, I don't like to put it in terms of what I personally am concerned about. But I can tell you that there's been a lawsuit now that has resulted in a court order that for now is preventing the Trump administration from making public the names of all those agents. And the plaintiffs have raised concerns that the agents' personal safety and that of their families might be put at risk. Of course, one of the first things Trump did was pardon 1,600 or so people who were convicted of crimes as part of the January 6 riot, including people who physically assaulted police officers, very far-right militia types. And those people are all now free. And they might want to come after an FBI agent that was responsible for arresting them if they knew that person's name and can find their address and so forth. And advocates for the FBI, you know, lawyers who've brought those cases and Democrats are also raising the prospect that public safety in general right now has been put in increasing jeopardy - you know, the FBI is taking its eye off the ball of terrorism cases and drug cartel cases and everything else they might be working on because they're so consumed by, am I going to have a job tomorrow? The foreign aid spending freeze that Trump put in has meant that all kinds of counternarcotics and counterterrorism programs with partner forces in Latin America or the Middle East, where we're training them and equipping them - and they are doing work there that is helpful to public safety here in terms of trying to stop terrorist groups from operating or drug cartels from moving fentanyl and other drugs towards our borders - has ceased. And in many ways, just the work of the federal government across the board right now has been severely disrupted by the effort by the new administration to dismantle the administrative state. MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with New York Times staff writer Charlie Savage about the scope and limits of executive power under President Donald Trump. Savage writes about presidential power, security and legal policy for the Times. We will continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF REGINA CARTER SONG, "TRAMPIN'") MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today we're talking to New York Times staff writer Charlie Savage. Savage writes about presidential power, security and legal policy for The New York Times, and our conversation was recorded last week. There is a new office within the DOJ focusing on immigration enforcement, right? So based on what we've seen in your reporting, what are their priorities? SAVAGE: Well, there's certainly a major reprioritization of the new administration. And one of the things they want to do more of, clearly - there's no secret about this - is more aggressive immigration enforcement. And a lot of the early executive orders were about pulling on various levers and pushing on various buttons to try to speed up the expelling of people from the United States, to try to shut down aspects of the deportation process that can take a long time, curtailing people's right to seek asylum and have hearings, expand a form of due-process-free removal for people who can't prove they've been in the United States for more than two years. They clearly have other innovations underway. We see now that Trump is sending migrants to Guantanamo, which is going to raise new and novel legal issues. I'm just touching the surface of it. There's myriad things that are going to raise legal issues that they're going to need lawyers to work on in the coming months and years. MOSLEY: That expedited removal allows the U.S. to deport someone undocumented without a court hearing. That's something we've never seen before, but is it legal? SAVAGE: Well, we'll find out. This is not a case where the administration is violating a statute Congress has passed, because Congress, long ago, passed a statute that said expedited removal is available for anyone who hasn't been in the country for more than two years - anywhere in the country. But it's a very aggressive thing to do because people in the United States, even if they're here without documentation and they entered unlawfully, are protected by the Constitution. And so they have due process rights against arbitrary government action. And the denial of the full hearings process is obviously a curtailing of due process. And so previous administrations of both parties, even the Trump administration, use this technique sparingly. They used it just near the border for people who were just captured, after they, you know, had crossed the river, and they sort of plunk them back on the other side of the border. They did not try to use it for people who had been here for a long time. And Trump wanted at the end of his first administration to do this, and it got jammed up in court and never went into effect. MOSLEY: President Trump has also threatened to revoke all federal funding to states and localities that are deemed to be sanctuary jurisdictions. What is the president's scope of power to do that? SAVAGE: President Trump has in myriad ways been trying to establish that he, or any president going forward, can withhold money that Congress has authorized at will if he doesn't like it. And that is a technique called impoundment that previous presidents sometimes did in the 19th and 20th century, not very often, and then started to be used much more aggressively in the Cold War when there were disputes between Congress and various presidents over big-ticket, military, you know, weapons systems. Congress wants this thing to be built 'cause the factory's in that guy's district. And then Nixon really took it to a new level and was using it all over the place to cancel programs on the environment and roads and stuff that he just didn't like. And Congress reacted to this by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which makes it a crime to not spend money that Congress has authorized after a certain while, unless you follow a certain process, which basically lets Congress make the decision. The president can send a list to Congress, and they can vote it up or down. So Trump has been ignoring that process and simply holding money. And he himself openly said during the campaign, with people around him, he thinks that law is unconstitutional, and he wants the Supreme Court to knock it down. So it's clear where this is going. They want a legal fight over his power to withhold funds. So first of all, can he freeze money that these states were supposed to get because he doesn't like something that's happening in those states is a subset of this bigger question of whether this challenge to the power of the purse that has been long understood to be maybe the core power of Congress. And the separation of power systems we have is going to erode under this onslaught. The more specific question within, you know, can I withhold funds from California because I don't like that San Francisco is not cooperating with immigration authorities, is something that would seem to be unconstitutional under relatively recent Supreme Court jurisprudence. There's a Supreme Court case from the '90s which says the federal government can't force states to enact certain laws they may not want to enact or to do its bidding. It's called commandeering. It's part of the federalism part of our Constitution, where states have their own sovereignty. And so the notion that the federal government would say, here's this pot of money that you're otherwise entitled to, but because you have a local ordinance that says your police will not work with ICE agents, you will not get this money - that would seem to be a example of the federal government example of the federal government commandeering the state governments in contravention of how the Constitution has been understood to work. And that used to be something at least that conservatives who were interested in states' rights were very strongly in favor of, this limit on the power of the federal government. MOSLEY: Last question for you. Trump is in office because he was elected. These congressional members are in office because they were elected. But as we start to see things unfold, where does this leave people as things evolve, as people maybe change their minds or they want to embolden support for it? SAVAGE: You know, one thing about our system of government, unlike most democracies, is that we have this rigid election schedule. In a parliamentary system, when the government starts to really annoy people and Parliament, you know, can have a vote of no confidence in the prime minister, and within a month or something, there's a new national election to sort of settle the matter, and so the country can move on. We have congressional elections every two years, presidential elections every four years, and in between, there's not a lot of things the public can do directly if they decide that even though a majority of them voted someone in that they don't like what that person is doing now other than wait. Obviously, people can do protests, and they can let their elected members of Congress know that they want some pushback. And if they have some specific grievance - their particular grant was frozen or whatever - they can file a lawsuit and try to get into court. MOSLEY: All of which is happening. Right. SAVAGE: All of which is happening. But - well, I'm not sure the pressure on lawmakers, if there is any, has resulted in any visible sign of life yet on the Republican side, but partially, we're all just kind of watching. MOSLEY: Charlie Savage, thank you, as always. SAVAGE: Thank you. MOSLEY: Charlie Savage is a staff writer for The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Coming up, our TV critic David Bianculli looks at two different offerings from beloved long-running franchises, "Planet Earth" and "Star Trek." This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. 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David Enrich is a keen observer of the intersection of money, power and politics. In his first book, [Dark Towers](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/16/dark-towers-review-deutsche-bank-donald-trump), the New York Times business investigations [editor](https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-enrich) plumbed the relationship between Donald Trump and Deutsche Bank, Trump’s lender of last resort. In the process, Enrich drew further attention to the triangle between Trump, the supreme court justice Anthony Kennedy and his son, a former Deutsche Bank officer, and Brett Kavanaugh, the former clerk who replaced Kennedy on the court. Next, in [Servants of the Damned](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/16/dark-towers-review-deutsche-bank-donald-trump), Enrich homed in on Jones Day, the Cleveland-based law firm that represented Trump in his first run for president, and later played an outsized role in staffing the White House and justice department. Now Enrich is back with [Murder the Truth](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/12/clarence-thomas-times-sullivan-precedent-book): Fear, the First Amendment and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful. It is a granular and disturbing read. Enrich focuses on Trump, pliant members of the federal bench, and the ultra-rich. Together, they seek to overturn New York Times v Sullivan, the unanimous 1964 supreme court decision that made it difficult for public figures to successfully sue for defamation. Since Sullivan, those alleging defamation must demonstrate that a defendant acted with “actual malice”, meaning deliberately lied or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. [](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/16/murder-the-truth-review-david-enrich#img-2) Trump’s war on the media is no secret. As a first-time candidate, he used the press as a punching bag. Photograph: HarperCollins Publishers Trump’s war on the media is no secret. As a first-time candidate, he used the press as a punching bag. At a meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post, he marveled at how Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan had joined forces with lawyer Charles Harder to [close down](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/aug/18/gawker-to-close-univision-sale) Gawker. Enrich reports that during that same meeting, Trump refused to be pinned down on his view of Times v Sullivan. In August 2016, after the Daily Mail had published a story that said Melania Trump had “once been a high-end escort”, to quote Enrich, Melania reached out to Harder. He took the case, and extracted a [settlement](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/12/melania-trump-accepts-damages-and-apology-from-daily-mail). In an email to Enrich, Harder assumed the referral came from Thiel. Thiel refused to respond. Once in office, Trump threatened the author Michael Wolff with a pre-publication injunction against his blockbuster Fire and Fury. [It didn’t work](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/04/trump-lawyers-book-steve-bannon-white-house). Trump also unsuccessfully sought to strip Jim Acosta of CNN of his White House pass, and looked to the courts to block a book by John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser. Trump threatened to jail Bolton too. Bolton stayed free, of course. But now Trump is back, and the song remains the same. The White House [excluded](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/briefing/donald-trump-press.html)the Associated Press, because it refused to reclassify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, according to Trump’s whim. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether CBS operated in the public interest, because Trump didn’t like an interview with Kamala Harris. Bolton, reportedly targeted by Iran, has seen his security detail withdrawn. Enrich devotes pages to [Clarence Thomas](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/clarence-thomas), the supreme court justice at the hard core of Trump’s 6-3 rightwing majority. Enrich reminds the reader that during his confirmation hearings in 1991, Thomas said he had “no agenda” to change free speech protections established by Times v Sullivan. “We should protect our first amendment freedoms as much as possible,” Thomas declared. But a media frenzy over Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment left Thomas scarred. Enrich notes that Michael Luttig, then a justice department official detailed to shepherd Thomas on to the court (now a prominent ex-judge and anti-Trump conservative), described the nominee “‘crying and hyperventilating’ about how ‘these people have destroyed my life’”. Now Times v Sullivan is under attack, Thomas is leading the charge. In a 2019 ruling, McKee v Cosby, the supreme court [declined to review](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-1542_ihdk.pdf) the dismissal of a defamation lawsuit against Bill Cosby, whose state conviction for sexual assault was overturned on appeal. In a concurring opinion, Thomas branded Sullivan and its aftermath “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law”. As recounted by Enrich, the late Laurence Silberman, an appeals court judge and close friend to Thomas, played an outsized role in Thomas’s life and thinking. In a dissent in Tah v Global Witness Publishing, [a case decided in 2021](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/19-7132/19-7132-2021-03-19.html), Silberman declared war on Times v Sullivan. Because the media was overrun with liberals, Silberman said, the actual malice standard needed to be undone. As he saw it, “the increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions”. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal seemed to escape his notice. Whose rights were purportedly being trampled directly correlated to the degree of Silberman’s indignation. Decades earlier, a divided panel of the DC circuit held that Congress could not enact legislation designed to target a single news publisher as revenge for having heaped ridicule upon the conduct of a particular senator. Silberman voted with the panel’s majority. Rupert Murdoch was the publisher, Ted Kennedy the senator. More recently, Murdoch’s Fox News invoked Times v Sullivan as it sought to avoid liability in a defamation action brought by Dominion Voting Systems, a case eventually settled for $787m. In 1984, Robert Bork, a judicial conservative who would later be denied a supreme court place, wrote approvingly of Times v Sullivan, warning that without it, “a freshening stream of libel actions, which often seem as much designed to punish writers and publications as to recover damages for real injuries, may threaten the public and constitutional interest in free, and frequently rough, discussion”. Time passes – and attacks on Times v Sullivan proliferate. In February, the casino mogul Steve Wynn, a close Trump ally and former deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, asked the supreme court to revisit Times v Sullivan, regarding a defamation suit against the Associated Press. Among the US media, all eyes are on the justices once more. * Murder the Truth [is published](https://bookshop.org/p/books/murder-the-truth-threats-intimidation-and-a-secret-campaign-to-protect-the-powerful-david-enrich/21543213?ean=9780063372900&next=t) in the US by HarperCollins