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This blossoming identity was an opportunity for any politician bold enough to take it. While trust in the police was dropping among Black and Hispanic Americans, it actually was rising for white Americans. Donald Trump was particularly well suited to take advantage of the rise of policing as identity politics. His entr... |
At the Republican National Convention in 2016, after Mr. Trump had captured the nomination, David Clarke, the Black sheriff of Milwaukee County, stood before the crowd, wearing a thin blue line flag pin on his uniform, and railed against the “anarchy” of the Black Lives Matter movement and the “collapse of social order... |
By the time Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign rolled around, the Black Lives Matter movement was resurgent in the wake of the death of George Floyd, given fresh urgency by the Trump presidency and a harder edge by the dislocation caused by Covid. The Trump campaign cast the Democrats as enemies of law and order who... |
At a rally in Waukesha, Wis., the thin blue line flag took center stage, hanging above the crowd behind the lectern at which Mr. Trump spoke, in the position traditionally occupied by the American flag. In Macon, Ga., it hung vertically behind the stage in a diptych with the Stars and Stripes. At a rally in Bullhead Ci... |
At the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence laid out the consequences of Mr. Trump losing the election in stark, personal terms: “The hard truth is you will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America. Under President Trump, we will always stand with those who stand on the thin blue line.” |
To defend Americans from what he said was the conspiracy to steal the election and destroy the country, Mr. Trump suggested that his supporters — the police, the military, bikers, construction workers — would confront his enemies in the streets, rhetorically deputizing his allies as a law unto themselves: “They’re peac... |
After Mr. Trump’s prophecy came true and the soft coup of representative democracy denied him a second term, when his supporters rallied for one last stand on the grassy field in front of the Capitol, it was inevitable that they would see themselves as bearing the mantle of law and order, a thin blue line smashing thro... |
In the aftermath of Jan. 6, when the nation saw that flag held aloft by the rioters who attacked the Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone (he says they literally beat him with it), the thin blue line flag has become increasingly controversial among police officers. In 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department banne... |
But it wasn’t opportunistic interlopers who turned a blue stripe on a flag into something that divides America. The idea, from the beginning, was woven right into the fabric. |
Patrick Healy: Katherine, the Iowa caucuses are 12 days away — the first chance some Americans will have to vote again for Donald Trump or decide if they want to go in a different direction. Trump has a lead of roughly 30 percentage points in several Iowa polls over Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. What do you see driving... |
Katherine Miller: This is the part of an election cycle where the stakes and ideas really get tangled up with who voters think has the best shot of winning, polls, money and so forth. If a candidate runs out of money, for instance, it’s hard to campaign for president. If you zoom out and look at polling and the apparat... |
Patrick: He looks like an incumbent president running for re-election, driving the conversation in the party about immigration, security, Biden’s flaws — and treating rivals like protest candidates he wouldn’t deign to debate. |
Katherine: A lot of Republican voters also just support Trump and what he’s promised: The Des Moines Register published polling before Christmas showing that, on the subject of his grim commentary about immigration or when he compares people to “vermin,” many likely caucusgoers either said that those remarks made them ... |
Patrick: A lot of Republicans really like Trump as he is. They already know he will do and say Trumpy things and don’t punish him for it. |
Katherine: Still: There really is still time for another candidate to seriously challenge Trump. It’s not inevitable. In January of presidential election years, each week starts to feel a lot longer, and the result of each caucus or primary can really shape the ones that follow. If you look at national polling, he’s do... |
Patrick: It definitely did for Hillary Clinton in 2008 and Howard Dean in 2004. |
Katherine: There are some people who feel Haley and DeSantis can lose Iowa and the Jan. 23 New Hampshire primary and still win the nomination. I am not one of them. The argument I’ve heard around this relates to the possibility that Trump will be convicted in the federal Jan. 6 trial or that those trials would depress ... |
Patrick: The political question I heard most over the holidays was, “Can she do it?” — can Haley beat expectations in Iowa and New Hampshire and have a shot to beat Trump for the G.O.P. nomination? But then came her answer about the cause of the Civil War, where she didn’t mention slavery. You’ve been watching her. Bef... |
Katherine: I’ve been wildly wrong before, but I do think Haley needs to win New Hampshire and then somehow hang on in South Carolina. If both of those things happen, that’s a very different race. |
Patrick: That reminds me of John Kerry in 2004. The Massachusetts senator needed a big combo victory, too — more than just winning the next-door New Hampshire primary. Kerry won Iowa and New Hampshire, and it gave him momentum he needed to triumph over Dean. |
Katherine: Right. So with this in mind, I think Haley needs to come in second in Iowa, presumably behind Trump, and she would need that second-place result to be better than expected. What does “better than expected” mean? That’s kind of nebulous. She can’t just narrowly beat Ron DeSantis by a point or something, thoug... |
Haley has tried to imply contrasts — that she is more temperate, that she is more electable against Biden — and some of it is about policy. Her viewpoint involves a much more expansive American foreign policy than Trump wants and a return to the fiscal austerity of the 2010s, in addition to a more kitchen-table approac... |
Patrick: I’m a little torn, and this is why: Second place for Haley in Iowa would give her momentum and knock against the image that she has only narrow appeal with moderates and independents. But if DeSantis comes in a humiliating third place in Iowa, I could see him dropping out a day or two later, and a lot of his s... |
Katherine: Her campaign and the affiliated groups have spent a lot of money the last few weeks on TV ads in Iowa and in New Hampshire and are reserving more. She’s also campaigning a lot. |
Patrick: Iowa is famous for late surges — Kerry 2004, Obama ’08 and Mike Huckabee ’08, Rick Santorum ’12, Cruz ’16. |
Katherine: Only two of those people won the nomination, though. But go on. |
Patrick: True. And right now, the odds are long that Haley will win the nomination. I am curious to see if Republican voters will be affected by Haley’s comments about the Civil War. I doubt that any large numbers of voters will move away from her simply because she didn’t say right away that the cause of the war was s... |
Katherine: I don’t know, it was just a depressing, bad answer. The cleanup also had some confusing parts about freedom in it, as well; she should have just stopped at, “By the grace of God, we did the right thing, and slavery is no more.” Maybe it’s partly a reflexive impulse from the days when she was running for gove... |
Patrick: Then there’s Ron DeSantis, who has really thrown himself into Iowa, visiting all 99 counties. Last spring, he started off in the Iowa polling at around 28 percent, according to the Real Clear Polling average; today, he’s around 19 percent. He seems like the example of, “The more you get to know him, the less y... |
Katherine: I think it’s still a little unclear what exactly the problem is. On a pure affect level, he’s definitely intense in person, he speaks at a pretty relentless pace, and he’s not a politician with a natural affinity for mixing it up with voters. |
Our colleagues in the newsroom mentioned in a story last month how, in Iowa over the summer, he interrupted a 15-year-old who was asking about mental health and the military by making a joke about her age. I was actually there for that exchange. The person had self-deprecatingly mentioned that maybe her question didn’t... |
Patrick: All caps. I know you — you’ve seen a lot over the years — that’s bad. |
Katherine: So I think the persona is probably part of it. But I also really wonder about the policy platform itself. The idea is supposed to be “getting all the meat off the bone,” as DeSantis puts it, and turning all the stuff Trump talks about into a reality. I think there’s a theory of the case that people just don’... |
Or maybe it’s that people who love Trump love Trump and don’t need an alternative. What do you think? |
Patrick: DeSantis has a high opinion of himself and started off the race amid great expectations for his candidacy, and I think he’s sort of the classic candidate who doesn’t live up to the billing. He won a big re-election victory in 2022 against a very weak Democratic opponent and looked like a guy who relished picki... |
In our most recent Times Opinion focus group, two voters said they were interested in DeSantis early on but found him too conservative and too stilted in the end. Now maybe Iowa Republican caucusgoers will surprise us, but DeSantis came in wanting to beat Trump and now is trying to hang on against Haley. |
Katherine: With DeSantis, the perception that he’s too conservative, when in many ways he’s promising almost exactly what Trump promises is this weird feature of politics right now. There’s very little daylight between them, for instance, in their actual approaches on foreign policy or the idea of an administrative/dee... |
The thing is, there clearly was some space for a challenger to make a run at Trump. Who knows? Maybe we’re about to witness a stunning last-minute surge by DeSantis. The hard part was and is that candidates needed to be critical of Trump in a way that meant something to voters, that also created a choice for them versu... |
Patrick: See you next week in Iowa, Katherine! |
It’s been just over two weeks since the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump from holding the office of president of the United States. It stayed the effect of that ruling until this week. Pending further action from the Supreme Court of the United States — which T... |
I spent way too much of my holiday vacation reading the legal and political commentary around the decision, and as I did so, I found myself experiencing déjà vu. Since the rise of Trump, he and his movement have transgressed constitutional, legal and moral boundaries at will and then, when Americans attempt to impose c... |
There is already a surge in violent threats against the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court. The Yale Law School professor Samuel Moyn has argued that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.... |
This is where we are and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we ho... |
Enough. It’s time to apply the plain language of the Constitution to Trump’s actions and remove him from the ballot — without fear of the consequences. Republics are not maintained by cowardice. |
To understand the necessity of removing Trump, let’s go first to the relevant language from the 14th Amendment and then to some basic rules of legal interpretation. Here’s the language: |
“No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state l... |
You don’t have to be a lawyer to comprehend those words. You simply need some basic familiarity with American civics, the English language and a couple of common-sense rules of thumb. First, when interpreting the Constitution, text is king. If the text is clear enough, there is no need for historical analysis. You don’... |
Second, it’s crucial to understand that many of the Constitution’s provisions are intentionally antidemocratic. The American republic is a democracy with guardrails. The Bill of Rights, for example, is a check on majoritarian tyranny. The American people can’t vote away your rights to speak, to exercise your religion o... |
So when a person criticizes Section 3 as undemocratic or undermining democracy, your answer should be simple: Yes, it is undemocratic, exactly as it was intended to be. The amendments’ authors were worried that voters would send former Confederates right back into public office. If they had believed that the American e... |
‘The Crown’ and What the U.K. Royal Family Would Like Us to Forget |
Moreover, you’ll note that the plain text of the amendment doesn’t require a court conviction for insurrection or rebellion. Again, this is intentional. The 14th Amendment originally applied to countless Confederate soldiers and continued to apply to them even after they were pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 186... |
Which brings us to Donald Trump, who is currently facing a host of federal and state criminal charges related to his plot to overturn a lawful election and retain power illegitimately. He wasn’t merely involved in legal subterfuge, including by pressuring public officials to alter vote totals. He summoned the mob, told... |
Yes, he also asked the crowd to protest “peacefully and patriotically.” But as the Colorado Supreme Court affirmed, this “isolated reference” does not “inoculate” Trump, given “his exhortation, made nearly an hour later, to ‘fight like hell’ immediately before sending rallygoers to the Capitol.” |
What do you call the effort to overthrow a lawfully elected government through a combination of violence and legal subterfuge? In its ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court reviewed a variety of colloquial and legal definitions of insurrection and reached a common-sense conclusion “that any definition of ‘insurrection’ for... |
I have respect for those who argue that Jan. 6 was merely a riot and not a true “insurrection or rebellion,” but the clear and undisputed aims of the Trump scheme are what elevate his misconduct to rebellious status. The effort to steal the election wasn’t a mere protest. It was an effort to change the government of th... |
It’s true that Trump wasn’t declaring a breakaway republic, but he was attempting to seize and hold far more than the Capitol. He was trying to illegally retain control of the executive branch of the government. His foot soldiers didn’t wear gray or deploy cannons, but they did storm the United States Capitol, somethin... |
There are also respectable arguments that the reference to “any office, civil or military, under the United States” does not include the president. As Kurt Lash wrote last month in The Times, “It would be odd to stuff the highest office in the land into a general provision that included everything from postmasters to t... |
But is it, really? As Steven Portnoy wrote in an excellent piece for ABC News, the question of whether the section applied to the president and vice president was raised in the ratification debates, and Senator Lot Morrill of Maine provided the answer: “Let me call the senator’s attention to the words ‘or hold any offi... |
Remember, when reading the Constitution, words still retain their ordinary meaning, and the president is an officer under the United States by any conventional meaning of the term. In many ways, it would be fantastical to conclude otherwise. Is it really the case that insurrectionists are excluded from every office exc... |
Moreover, it’s important to note that none of the legal analysis I’ve offered above relies on any sort of progressive or liberal constitutional analysis. It’s all text and history, the essence of originalism. In fact, the most influential law review article arguing that Trump is disqualified is by William Baude and Mic... |
So no, it would not be a stretch for a conservative Supreme Court to apply Section 3 to Trump. Nor is it too much to ask the court to intervene in a presidential contest or to issue decisions that have a profound and destabilizing effect on American politics. In 2000 the Supreme Court effectively decided a presidential... |
Moreover, in decisions ranging from Brown v. Board of Education to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court has been quite willing to issue sweeping rulings that both inflame dissent and trigger political backlash. Fear of a negative public response cannot and must not cause the Supreme Court to turn its... |
Indeed, the principal reason the fear of negative backlash is so strong and so widely articulated is the seditious nature of the Trump movement itself. When the Supreme Court ruled against Gore, there was no meaningful concern that he’d try to engineer a violent coup. But if the court rules against Trump, the nation wi... |
Republicans are rightly proud of their Civil War-era history. The party of Lincoln, as it was known, helped save the Union, and it was the party of Lincoln that passed the 14th Amendment and ratified it in statehouses across the land. The wisdom of the old Republican Party should now save us from the fecklessness and s... |
I’m glad New York City is about to start charging vehicles for crowding the streets of Manhattan, and I say that as a New Jersey resident — a member of the bridge and tunnel crowd — who will be paying a fat toll whenever I drive into the congestion zone in Manhattan. |
I take a bus to work in the city via the Lincoln Tunnel, but I also drive into Manhattan at times, mostly on weekends. So I’m one of the perpetrators of vehicular congestion. I get why it’s a bad thing, and I get why charging for entering the zone will achieve multiple goals. |
It will make Manhattan’s streets less jammed, which will make driving in the city less agonizing. Buses will become more popular because they will move faster. Ambulances and fire trucks will get to their destinations sooner. There will be less air pollution. |
And the money raised from the congestion charges — estimated at about $1 billion a year — will be enough to cover interest and principal payments on about $15 billion of capital improvements to the city’s subways and buses and regional train lines. |
New York is the first city in the United States to create a congestion zone, so its experience will be watched closely in other cities with serious vehicular congestion. According to Inrix, a data collector, New York is only the fourth-worst North American city in terms of traffic delays — not as bad as Chicago, Boston... |
Over the New Year’s weekend, I interviewed Kathryn Wylde, a mover and shaker in New York who is the president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization representing many of the city’s biggest employers. She is a member of a blue-ribbon panel, the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s... |
Empty streets are a sign of trouble in a city, Wylde said, but ”there is a point at which traffic goes from being a healthy thing to being a great cost.” New York, she said, is past that point. |
Wylde said she’s heard a lot of complaints about the congestion plan and warnings that it won’t work. She said she wasn’t worried: “In every city that’s imposed congestion pricing there’s been great opposition before the fact. And a year after it’s implemented, people say, ‘Why didn’t we do this long ago?’” |
In Stockholm there was opposition to a test of congestion pricing that began in 2006. But after it succeeded in cutting traffic in the central city by 22 percent, voters made the system permanent in a referendum later that year. |
If the Traffic Mobility Review Board proposal is adopted, the congestion charge will apply to vehicles entering Manhattan south of 60th Street, with the main exception of vehicles that stay on the F.D.R. Drive along the East River and the West Side Highway along the Hudson River. For vehicles using E-ZPass, it will be ... |
The full tolls will be charged from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends under the panel’s proposal. The plan calls for toll rates to be 75 percent lower in off hours. |
Let’s step back from the details. The basic idea of congestion pricing goes back to some giants of economics, including Arthur Pigou of England and William Vickrey of the United States. The concept is simply that by driving into a congested area, you are harming the other people who have to deal with that congestion an... |
A city’s streets, parking spaces and sidewalks are the municipal government’s most important assets, and it makes perfect sense to charge for them, both to make sure that they are used by the people who value them most highly and to raise money to cover the cost of their construction and upkeep, Todd Litman, the execut... |
“Motorists all want free roads and free parking,” Litman said. “But they’re never really free. The choice is between paying for them directly and paying for them indirectly. Paying for them directly is the best way to reduce congestion. If you oppose that, you’re saying you support congestion and parking problems.” |
New York’s plan isn’t perfect from the perspective of economic theory. A first best solution, in economists’ lingo, would precisely match the toll to the social cost in every case. It would vary minute by minute and street by street, depending on local conditions. People who drove a lot once they were inside the zone w... |
A first best plan would also get rid of the sharp boundaries between inside the zone (expensive) and outside it (free). While prices would be highest in Manhattan below 60th Street, there would be tolls for driving in other parts of Manhattan, other boroughs and the suburbs — indeed, everywhere that congestion is a pro... |
Two problems with the first best solution: It would take a big investment in technology, and it would raise concerns about invasion of privacy. That issue has come up in Singapore, which is switching to a system that will allow for distance-based road pricing. (The government says charging by distance traveled is “stil... |
New York opted for a simpler system that is easier to carry out and provides rough justice, said Matthew Tarduno, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “I think New York’s plan is great,” said Tarduno, who has studied congestion pricing. “I don’t see any gaping hole.” |
One advantage Manhattan has — and a city such as San Francisco lacks — is that relatively few vehicles simply pass through Manhattan on the way to somewhere else. They mostly enter Manhattan to be in Manhattan. The reason this is an advantage is that the toll will cause drivers to make fewer trips, not just take longer... |
The standard rap against congestion pricing is that it will harm the poor and working class. New York’s blue-ribbon panel dealt with that in part by proposing a 50 percent discount — open to people with household incomes under $50,000 — on the daytime auto toll after the first 10 trips made by a vehicle in a calendar m... |
More important, lower-income workers will benefit from improvements to public transportation, especially the subway, which they use extensively. On average, richer people drive into Manhattan more than poorer people do. |
Devansh Jalota, a doctoral candidate in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford, told me about a paper he wrote with professors and colleagues at Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that shows how redistributing the revenue raised by congestion pricing by refunding the collected money ... |
New York, of course, isn’t redistributing the revenue in this way. It’s putting it into public transit. That’s not a bad option, either, Jalota said. It may be more politically acceptable than redistributing it to drivers. |
As a New Jerseyite, I do have one gripe about the blue-ribbon panel’s plan, which is that none of the money raised is to go toward improvements in public transit in New Jersey, even though people from New Jersey will be paying a lot of the $1 billion. When I asked Wylde about that, she said commuters and visitors from ... |
On the whole, I see congestion pricing as the wave of the future. Prices ration supply and prevent shortages. We pay more for hotels and airline seats when demand is higher. Why not roads? |
Claudine Gay’s resignation this week as Harvard University’s president marks the end of a shameful chapter for the institution. The debacle’s architects promise to make America’s elite institutions great again. They say they pushed out Dr. Gay and, nearly a month ago, the University of Pennsylvania’s president as a war... |
Dr. Gay’s resignation comes nearly a month after the presidents of M.I.T., Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testified before Congress. (Columbia University was also invited. It declined. As the kids say, Columbia understood the assignment.) These particular schools were chosen not because of their academic bo... |
You do not have to take my word for it. You can believe Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who was one of the architects of the debacle, who celebrated on X this week for having “SCALPED” Dr. Gay. Distinct from the campaign waged against Penn’s former president Elizabeth Magill, the attacks against Dr. Gay have been c... |
Rufo explained his plan for ginning up controversy about higher education’s most prestigious universities in an interview on the heels of Dr. Gay’s resignation, explaining that it was a coordinated, strategic attack that used narrative, financial and political leverage. His partners included members of Congress, wealth... |
The three legs of Rufo’s strategic stool are basic organizing tools — creating a message, attracting financial patronage and forging political alliances. It is notable that he can pull these levers. But that may say more about our times than about Rufo himself. The financial donors who wanted to exert control had the m... |
Rufo says he smuggled a narrative into “the left-wing media.” That narrative rests on a critical discursive link — D.E.I. is synonymous with “lacking merit.” It is a neat trick. Harvard’s endowment has been valued at nearly $50 billion. Yet the Rufo messaging strategy successfully painted the institution’s president as... |
The specter of D.E.I. made her presidency sound like a voucher program for a welfare recipient and not the internal promotion of a long-term employee to leadership. When you hear someone from the reactionary crowd talk about D.E.I.’s undue influence over an institution like Harvard, he sounds like a royal who finds him... |
It plays on the latent but powerful idea that government — big government — unfairly helps undeserving people, many of them women and people of color, who drain the pool of opportunity for deserving people. D.E.I. is “bad” because it supplants merit for diversity and it empowers the racialized federal government to sti... |
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