Inside Donald Trump’s Shadow Presidency
The New York Times
In the years since he left the White House, former President Donald J. Trump has remained a force in international politics, meeting with a number of foreign leaders and operating out of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
When Finland wanted to join NATO to ward off Russian aggression, it knew it had a friend living in the White House and could count on President Biden’s support. But to ensure that the U.S. Senate would ratify its membership bid, Finland’s government decided to also seek out the president living in Florida.
And so Mikko Hautala, the Finnish ambassador to the United States at the time, made a point of speaking privately with former President Donald J. Trump to persuade him of the merits of his country’s joining the alliance. The goal was to head off any opposition by Mr. Trump, who has long been openly hostile toward NATO.
The strategy worked. Mr. Trump, who potentially could have ignited Republican opposition with a single intemperate social media post, remained publicly silent, and the Senate voted 95 to 1 to approve Finland’s admission to the alliance in August 2022. Had Mr. Trump spoken out against the move, it would have taken only 34 votes to block the two-thirds supermajority needed for ratification.
In the nearly four years since he left the White House, Mr. Trump has acted as something of a shadow president on international affairs operating out of what he used to call the Winter White House at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Even before he kicked off a comeback bid to reclaim his old office, foreign governments realized that Mr. Trump was still a force in American politics and that they needed to take him into account in their dealings with the United States.
Now that he is the Republican nominee for president in next month’s election, foreign leaders have been playing up to Mr. Trump even more. A parade of world leaders has made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago or to Trump Tower in New York, including the leaders of Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Hungary, Argentina, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. The crown prince of Saudi Arabia rang up Mr. Trump’s cellphone. The newly elected prime minister of Britain dropped by last month for dinner.
“Very unusual for a former president,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who is now director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “I suppose it comes from his status as both a former and possibly future president, which is of course unique.”
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.