Marooned at Mar-a-Lago, Trump Still Has Iron Grip on Republicans
The New York Times
The vilification of Liz Cheney and a bizarre vote recount in Arizona showed the damage from his assault on a bedrock of democracy: election integrity.
Locked out of Facebook, marooned in Mar-a-Lago and mocked for an amateurish new website, Donald J. Trump remained largely out of public sight this week. Yet the Republican Party’s capitulation to the former president became clearer than ever, as did the damage to American politics he has caused with his lie that the election was stolen from him. In Washington, Republicans moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of her House leadership position, a punishment for denouncing Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud as a threat to democracy. Lawmakers in Florida and Texas advanced sweeping new measures that would curtail voting, echoing the fictional narrative from Mr. Trump and his allies that the electoral system was rigged against him. And in Arizona, the state Republican Party started a bizarre re-examination of the November election results that involved searching for traces of bamboo in last year’s ballots. The churning dramas cast into sharp relief the extent to which the nation, six months after the election, is still struggling with the consequences of an unprecedented assault by a losing presidential candidate on a bedrock principle of American democracy: that the nation’s elections are legitimate.
The move was preceded by wave of resignations of prosecutors, each refusing to sign the motion and some criticizing the Justice Department order to do so in scathing terms.
Andrew D. Lester, a Kansas City resident in his 80s, was charged with felonies in the shooting of Ralph Yarl, a teen who went to the wrong address.
After a lawsuit filed last week by 19 attorneys general, a judicial ruling temporarily blocked Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency from accessing the information.
Before Senator Thom Tillis voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, he worked with accusers to make the case against him in a bid to get G.O.P. leaders to scrap the vote altogether.
An intense storm caused flooding and forced evacuations in areas burned by wildfires.
Bored troops are standing watch, shelters have emptied from McAllen, Texas, to Tucson, Ariz., and border patrols speed through miles of frontier, finding no one in sight.
Spending that the White House does not like is being labeled fraudulent. At the same time, President Trump is rolling back anticorruption efforts and ethical standards for himself and allies like Elon Musk.
The remains of Edwin Echevarria, 65, were found floating in the East River on Feb. 5. His roommate, Christian Millet, 23, has been charged with second degree murder.
Even as they praise the president’s unilateral actions to slash federal spending, G.O.P. lawmakers have quietly moved to seek carve outs or exemptions for their own constituents.
The mayor discussed options to run for re-election in the Republican contest as recently as Monday. Asked for comment, he said he was running as a Democrat.
A lawsuit appears to be the first challenge to the constitutionality of an executive order barring trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams.
The comptroller’s office, which first noticed the missing money, said that the federal agency had unilaterally taken the funds from the city’s accounts.
The executive order would ban citizenship for children born in the United States to foreign workers on visas that often lead to permanent residency.