Whenever Vice President Kamala Harris mentions Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s now-toxic blueprint for the next Republican administration — blood starts throbbing in the temples of certain conservative Heritage veterans. Like think tank leaders across the spectrum, the professionals are cringing at the tone-deaf naivete of an organization that touted such a polarizing document as an election-year gospel without realizing it might blow up on their own side.

“We now have a very good example of what not to do,” said Heritage alum Tim Chapman, who leads Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom nonprofit and is a former chief of staff to Heritage founder Ed Feulner.

“I cannot think of a study that has done more damage,” said Ken Weinstein, a one-time former President Donald Trump appointee and former head of the conservative Hudson Institute. “It’s the exact opposite of the Harris approach of don’t say anything about what you’re doing.”

Not long ago, the current Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, was triumphantly promising a “second American revolution” and darkly declaring that it would be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” Steve Bannon floated him as a possible White House chief of staff.

That was before Project 2025 was turned into a campaign issue by Harris — and disavowed by Trump. Last weekend, the 922-page playbook became quite possibly the first think tank paper in American history to appear in TV spots during NFL games, naturally via a scathing negative ad.

For the Heritage old guard, the bill of complaints against Project 2025 dovetails with broader gripes about Roberts, a culture-war intellectual who has dramatically reoriented the foundation in a populist, pro-Trump direction.

Instead of just sniffing about Roberts’ deviations on trade or foreign affairs, the bitterness these days focuses on a new house style that allegedly enabled the current embarrassment: an elevation of marketing over research; a chest-thumping tendency to assert dominance within the Trump-era right; an inability to distinguish partisan agitation from policy advocacy because “engagement on X, positive feedback from Slack channels or mentions in their news feeds” have become paramount, in the words of one conservative activist who watched Project 2025 take shape.

In this telling, the sequence of events that turned a white paper into a scarlet letter has little to do with the document’s contents. Think tanks across the spectrum propose stuff all the time that a crafty oppo researcher could use to rile up voters. Yet those other organizations somehow manage to avoid becoming millstones around the necks of their favorite pols.

To critics in the old Heritage diaspora, it’s all a byproduct of how the foundation operates under Roberts: While other policy outfits claim to be devoted to an abstract idea, Heritage has increasingly tied its image to a specific person. Roberts told an interviewer earlier this year that the mission was “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Heritage fundraising bragged about the large percentage of the think tank’s previous ideas that were implemented by Trump. Roberts also claimed Project 2025 spoke for the movement, boasting that “never before has the American conservative movement been this unified around a set of possible policy prescriptions.”

This vibe added up to a problem because no politician, especially Trump, enjoys being talked about like a trained monkey for some policy group, no matter how fervent its support.

“For six months before this came out, I knew more than several people who were nervous about the press that was out there,” one former Heritage staffer said, referencing Trump world’s anxieties about Project 2025’s media image. “They were like, ‘They’re not listening to the signals’” telling its sponsors to quit claiming to call the shots. “It’s in their DNA, a real desire to prove you’re at the center of things.”

Anyone who needs to raise money for a think tank, of course, knows that telling people you’re at the center of things is how you get folks to write checks. And it’s particularly important at Heritage, which is proud of not being funded by big corporate donors. When you solicit from the grassroots, you need to keep them excited — by, say, having a leader who makes ferocious statements about impending revolutions, or by larding your policy book with red-meat items that inflame the other side.

For the broader public, meanwhile, those very same imperatives helped turn Project 2025 into a big, fat “kick me” sign.

There was also the matter of timing. Notably, the hugely influential original version of Heritage’s quadrennial Mandate for Leadership, which laid out ideas for Ronald Reagan’s presidency and served as a model for Project 2025’s book of the same name, was published in January 1981 — after Reagan had won the 1980 election but before he’d taken over. That’s a logical timetable if you want to sway policy, but not if you’re trying to swagger around and play election-year kingmaker.

“Putting it out there as they did, as early as they did, is what allowed oppo researchers to create a brand around it as you saw in the DNC,” according to a former Heritage employee.

This is especially true in a year when neither campaign has offered a lot of detail. “It’s not been a policy heavy campaign cycle, to say the least,” said Abigail Ball, the executive director of American Compass, an economic policy organization associated with the populist right. “So I think that the Project 2025 thing filled that hole. Given the fact that there wasn’t a ton else to focus on, this was the thing to pin to the campaign. I don’t blame anyone — it’s just a strange quirk of history.”

A Heritage spokesperson told me that the notoriety around Project 2025 is the work of Democratic strategists.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Heritage and has everything to do with the Democrats and the left creating a bogeyman,” the spokesperson said. “They came up with a plan to lie about the project and say we call for a nationwide abortion ban or ending birthright citizenship, and then they went on to lie and say Trump’s behind it.”

As for the timing, Heritage says they released the blueprint early in order to shape the Republican primary campaign at a time when Trump’s renomination was not at all obvious.

Feulner, who founded Heritage in 1973, didn’t speak with me and hasn’t joined in any dissing of his successors. But his contribution to the public debate this summer was telling: In July, he and Pence co-wrote a Washington Post essay about the importance of defending Taiwan, saying that “we cannot give in to the isolationists.” Opposing China may be a widely shared cause, including within Heritage, but the subtext — an old-fashioned call for American global steadfastness — made for quite the contrast to the Trumpy rhetoric of the current Heritage leadership.

In a way, Heritage has already lost, at least in terms of the one currency Beltway policy shops most crave: influence.

When Trump rolled out his transition team soon after the scary Project 2025 headlines, Roberts and crew were not front and center. So much for Bannon’s chief of staff speculation: The effort will instead be led by Linda McMahon, board chair at the rival America First Policy Institute. Founded by Trump administration veterans, the organization is just as odious to lefties as Heritage — but considerably less of a campaign-season refrain. My colleagues Hailey Fuchs and Meridith McGraw reported last month that America First Policy Institute’s CEO, Brooke Rollins, is working closely on transition plans.

“If you compare and contrast the Project 2025 stuff with what the AFPI has done, you haven’t seen the same level of rhetoric being used against AFPI and Brooke Rollins,” said Avik Roy, the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity think tank and a longtime conservative policy wonk from the non-MAGA right. “Brooke Rollins had much more of a heads-down approach where they didn’t make those kinds of boasts and where they didn’t seek publicity.”

Like denizens of policy organizations right, left and center, Roy was bemused by the irony of the fracas: For any think tank chief, the idea of publishing a paper that three-quarters of likely voters have heard of would seem like a dream come true, not a PR disaster.

“AEI published one for 2020,” said Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, referring to his own think tank’s guide for whoever won that year’s election. A bulwark of non-Trumpy conservatism, the organization was unlikely to emerge as the agenda-setter for either of the candidates. And, in fact, it didn’t: “I don’t think you noticed it,” Levin joked.

But now that one wonky what-to-do compendium has become a campaign-season bludgeon, is he worried that some other think tank might be next? Not so much. “We were trying to persuade the candidates. We weren’t speaking for them,” Levin said. Heritage “always ran this risk, and they were warned of it, of seeming to lead him.”

Indeed, in conversations with think tank graybeards, one theme that emerged across the spectrum was a kind of professional amazement that any serious policy organization could put itself in a position of becoming the story.

“It’s not just that they were thumping their chest, but they were sticking out their chins,” said Patrick Gaspard, who runs the liberal Center for American Progress, an organization that was famously close to the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns — but never a household name that could be bogeymanned to a mass audience.

Gaspard told me he’s not worried about some future CAP project earning similar headlines. “None of us are calling for a second American Revolution at the point of violence,” he said. “We are working squarely in the space of crafting policy proposals, crafting theories of the case for how those policies can be communicated and might be able to take root. … That’s how the vast majority of think tanks work, on both the left and the right. And once upon a time, it’s how the Heritage Foundation used to work.”

In fact, the confounding thing about Project 2025 is that it actually is full of policy ideas about even obscure corners of the federal government. Some of them are shockingly radical, like the idea of replacing thousands of professional public servants with political loyalists, but many of them are familiar conservative boilerplate.

The problem is, the wonkery coexists with an organizational public image — complete with an aggressive stream of not-very-scholarly political-attack tweets and sketchy operative-style output like misleading election-fraud videos — that creates a dynamic more like a GOP political campaign than a conservative policy shop. Throw in the embrace of Trump and it helps create a situation where the candidate gets asked to answer for Heritage’s work.

“The best thing for us to do as conservative policy advocates is to discuss policies, build support and not get involved with any campaigns,” said Chapman.

In the long run, that’s probably good for the campaigns as well as the think tanks.

Mario Cuomo famously said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But the upshot of Project 2025 was that it managed to tie Trump to 922 pages of often radioactive prose right when the moment called for something lyrical.

“It was like a think tank equivalent of a neutron bomb,” one longtime conservative policy intellectual told me. “It left the campaign standing but it did a huge amount of damage.”

For a moment, it seemed like Donald Trump was using his Tucson, Arizona, rally to return to his typical immigration programming after a shaky debate performance. Then he went there — again.

Trump repeated the baseless claim that Haitian migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio — remarks that became the stuff of endless social media memes soon after his debate.

“A recording of 911 calls show that residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese. You know where the geese are? In the park, in the lake. And even walking off with their pets. ‘My dog’s been taken. My dog’s been stolen," Trump said Thursday night in Arizona.

The former president spent much of his campaign stop in the border state warning about an influx of migrants and the threats he says immigration poses to the country. He said he won in 2016 because of his message about the border — and that he knows it’s one of his top issues this year. He encouraged GOP candidates running in Arizona to talk about little else besides the border.

But after two days of unflattering headlines and Republicans squabbling over him pushing an anti-immigrant conspiracy theory, Trump once again couldn’t resist veering off into the outrageous.

Thursday marked Trump’s first rally since his Tuesday debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, during which he strayed from his usual talking points on an issue that has long been seen as a political sweet spot for the Republican, made all the more relevant by voters’ heightened concerns around border security. But instead of capturing headlines for his dominance on one of his more politically favorable subjects, the former president again elevated the false claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio.

And instead of reversing course, Trump is further attaching himself to the pet hoax. On Thursday, he posted five digitally doctored photos on Truth Social depicting cats supporting or being rescued by Trump — including a cat at a Trump rally holding a sign that read “Kamala hates me.”

Now, some Republicans say Trump’s embrace of a social media conspiracy about migrants is an example of how he could aid Harris on one of her greatest political vulnerabilities, while potentially turning off undecided voters he could capture with a consistent, steady message on immigration and crime. Prior to his pushing of the pet-eating hoax, Trump had begun to regularly mention the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter as he discussed immigration at his rallies.

Trump, said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona, “has an uncanny ability to take a popular issue that he can really score points on, and turn it into wild conspiracy theories that make voters scratch their head.”

“He just can’t help himself by veering into conspiracy theory territory,” Marson said, “when he actually has some really good examples that could scare people and make people question Harris’ commitment to a secure border.”

For some Democrats, Trump’s fixation on pets in Ohio this week has come as a relief. First, it allowed Harris to walk away mostly unscathed from Tuesday’s debate on an issue that has long vexed the Biden administration — and a topic Harris prepared for heavily during debate prep. Instead, she was able to hit Trump for his role in killing the bipartisan border deal, while mostly avoiding having to play defense on immigration. On Thursday, he raised it again, even as he appeared in a battleground border state.

“He just became so discombobulated from the get go that it wasn’t the challenge that I think we were all expecting it was going to be,” said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, speaking of the debate.

And “instead of being concise and direct on his strongest issue,” said Mike Madrid, a political consultant with expertise on Latino voting trends, who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, Trump is muddling the issue by “playing into this delusional area of a policy that he actually has a decided advantage on.”

In an acknowledgment of how challenging the issue remains for Democrats, Harris has been more aggressive on the border since the launch of her campaign, highlighting Trump’s role in the collapse of the border security bill, while also attacking some of the more controversial policies he supported as president, including family separation. It’s part of her team’s effort to lure in undecided voters worried about the border and eager for policy solutions, even as voters trust Trump more to handle immigration.

“[Undecided voters] see one candidate in Harris who is talking about bipartisan solutions, and they see another candidate in Trump who is just rambling about racist, unproven conspiracy theories. That doesn’t look very presidential to an undecided voter,” said Matt Barreto, president of BSP Research, which conducts Latino polling for the Harris campaign.

Still, Harris did not discuss immigration on Thursday as she kicked off her post-debate swing with two rallies in North Carolina. Instead, she dinged the former president on the economy, abortion and Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for the next Republican administration that Trump has sought to distance himself from. She said the candidates “owe it to the voters to have another debate,” as her opponent declared there won’t be another face-off.

In the months since President Joe Biden’s clampdown on asylum, border crossing numbers are now lower than during Trump’s last month in office. This hasn’t fully broken through to voters, said Celinda Lake, who did polling for the Biden campaign. But it does help Democrats, she said, that the news isn’t filled with footage of an overwhelmed southern border, and that Republican governors aren’t busing migrants to Democrat-led cities. Instead, Trump is focusing the public on conspiracy theories.

While conservative media figures and some Republican elected officials have pushed blatant misinformation about Haitian migrants in Springfield stealing and eating local residents’ household pets, the city is, in many ways, facing a strain on resources due to an influx of immigrants.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine this week deployed state troopers to the city, where he said there has been a surge of traffic problems and “dangerous driving in Springfield by inexperienced Haitian drivers.” DeWine is also allocating $2.5 million in state funds to boost healthcare services in the city, while saying the “federal government has not demonstrated that they have any kind of plan to deal with the issue.” Local officials have welcomed the migrants, saying they are helping to revitalize the economy of what had been a shrinking city, while asking for help to pay for the strain on schools and other resources.

“There’s a place called Springfield, Ohio you’ve been reading about,” Trump said at his rally Thursday. “Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended upon the town of 58,000 people, destroying their entire way of life. This was a beautiful community, and now it’s horrible what’s happening.”

DeWine and local officials in Springfield have said there is no evidence, however, of Haitian migrants there eating dogs or cats — allegations that may have been conflated with the arrest of an Ohio-born woman in Canton after allegedly eating a cat, or a photo taken of an unidentified man in Columbus carrying a dead goose.

Instead of shouting about Haitians eating pets, Marson said Trump should stick to talking about things like the high-profile killings of innocent people by migrants in the country illegally — victims like Lakin Riley of Georgia and Rachel Morin of Maryland, whom Trump has repeatedly discussed.

“Besides there not being any evidence of this,” Marson said of the pet-eating claim, “it’s just weird and crazy to discuss. The normal people don’t want to talk about this.”

Some Republicans have continued to defend Trump and his running mate’s discussion of debunked claims, arguing that the actual details matter less than the overarching themes — including that some American cities are facing strain from illegal immigration.

“In broad terms, if you are talking about the immigration situation, if that is what people are talking about, then you are winning,” said Gregg Keller, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the American Conservative Union, speculating that some viewers at home Googled the city name when Trump mentioned there was a problem.

“There are now millions of Americans who are learning for the first time what’s going on in Springfield, Ohio,” Keller said.

Donald Trump will not debate Kamala Harris again, the former president said Thursday.

“THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!,” Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social, referencing the first as his June debate with President Joe Biden and the second as his debate with Harris on Tuesday.

Harris’ campaign, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, had challenged Trump to an additional debate immediately following their showdown earlier this week, and Fox News offered to host it.

“We owe it to the voters to have another debate,” Harris said Thursday at a rally in North Carolina minutes after Trump’s announcement.

But Trump on Wednesday told “Fox & Friends” he “probably” would not agree to another debate with the network and on Thursday confirmed he would not debate the vice president again at all, citing what he characterized as a decisive victory in a contest widely viewed as having gone favorably for Harris.

“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, “I WANT A REMATCH,”” Trump wrote Thursday.

Both campaigns claimed they won Tuesday’s face off, during which Harris largely managed to sidestep questions about the Biden administration’s records and her own past positions by getting under Trump’s skin, spurring the former president to go on meandering rants about crowd sizes and unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets.

Immediately following the debate, Trump told reporters in the spin room “this was my best debate.” But he has bashed ABC News for what he called “a rigged deal,” citing a handful of times moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis fact-checked him live. But even some Republicans acknowledged that Trump’s performance had been lackluster, with Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) calling it “a missed opportunity” and some GOP strategists telling POLITICO they were not impressed.

Asked Wednesday on “Fox & Friends” about Fox’s offer of a debate moderated by Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, he derided those anchors and offered Fox opinion pundits Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham instead.

Trump’s team was uncertain about whether or not the former president would be willing to commit to another debate.

On Wednesday morning, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump who helped with negotiations for the ABC News debate, told CNN the Trump campaign had already committed to a debate with NBC on September 25.

And later that day, Lara Trump, the RNC co-chair, said her father in law would be open to another.

“I think he’s very open, I think the American people deserve to see these two people and hear their ideas,” she told Fox News.

Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, released a memo after the debate claiming the former president actually received a boost after his debate performance, which was widely panned by Republicans as a missed opportunity.

“We found that despite the best efforts of Kamala Harris and media to portray the debate as some kind of overwhelming win for her, voters did not see it this way as support for her remained flat,” Fabrizio wrote in a “confidential memorandum” that was sent to reporters. “The only change we saw was a 2-point bump for President Trump in both ballot configurations.”

Harris’ campaign on Wednesday posted to X a full recording of the debate, calling it “our newest ad.”

JD Vance’s political career has been defined by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, Vance is a member of the upper echelon of America’s ruling elite — a graduate of Yale Law School, a New York Times best-selling author, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a United States senator. On the other hand, he has become a vociferous conservative critic of that same elite on behalf of disaffected Middle Americans, a role he can claim by virtue of his upbringing in post-industrial Ohio and his family’s roots in eastern Appalachia. At various points throughout his career, Vance has acknowledged this tension — without really trying to resolve it.

“It’s the great privilege of my life that I’m deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism,” Vance said in one of his first major interviews in 2016, on the heels of the publication on Hillbilly Elegy.

Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism?

But the deeper I’ve dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters.

In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts (many of which Vance has read and listened to). By forging an alliance between the elite “New Right” and the MAGA masses, Vance, according to this reading, could serve as the leader of a new movement to institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order. Though adopting the rhetoric of conservatism populism, this new order would be a fundamentally elitist one: It would expel America’s current ruling elite in order to replace it with a new, more conservative one, drawn from the ranks of the New Right.

The details of this plan differ between the various writers and thinkers that have influenced Vance — people like the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the internet philosopher Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But taken together, their prescriptions amount to a kind of three-step plan for the New Right’s project: Identify a member of the New Right elite who can tap into the energies of an ascendant right-wing populist movement, ride those energies to political power, and then carry out a top-down transformation of American society along illiberal lines. It is, in effect, a plan to accomplish through elite rule what even the MAGA movement has failed to accomplish through democratic control: The creation of a social order built around conservative values, even if those values remain broadly unpopular with the American people.

In fact, Vance has articulated his own political strategy in terms that closely echo those found in the pages of the New Right thinkers who have influenced him.

“One of the ways in which I’m very much populist is that I think people need to have elected representatives [who] try to channel their frustrations into solutions that will make their lives better,” Vance told me when I interviewed him in his Senate office in December 2023. “One of the ways I’m very much not a populist is that I think every populist movement that has ever existed has failed unless it’s captured some subset of the people who are professionally in government.”

He added: “You can’t just run a political movement purely with voters — you need voters, you need bureaucrats, you need lawyers, you need business leaders, you need the whole thing.”

As Vance hits the campaign trail, parsing this blueprint is essential for understanding his political trajectory — and what underlies his support for Trump. Given his past criticisms of Trump, Vance’s new-found affection for Trumpism and the MAGA movement has been chalked up to a “moral collapse” or rank opportunism. But read against the ideas found in the writings of the conservative intellectuals close to Vance, it begins to appear like something else: the first step in a much broader plan.

On a summer evening in 2023, Vance strode into a marble-lined ballroom at the Catholic University of America, where a crowd of 250 had gathered for the launch of a new book by the Catholic philosopher Patrick Deneen, a political theorist at the University of Notre Dame, hosted by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Vance, then just a few months into his first term as a United States senator, made a beeline for Deneen and wrapped him in a big hug, both men smiling as they greeted each other like old friends.

That hug served as a vivid metaphor for Vance and the New Right’s embrace of Deneen’s work as a kind of intellectual roadmap for their emerging political movement — a process that Deneen spoke to me about at length for a POLITICO Magazine profile in 2023.

In his breakout book Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018, Deneen argued that small-L liberalism is inevitably self-destructive; that a political system predicated on the expansion of individual rights and autonomy will eventually undermine the collective institutions — like family, organized religion and local communities — that make political life possible in the first place.

In his next book, Regime Change, Deneen doesn’t embrace the term “illiberal” but lays out a vision of an ideal “postliberal order” that would jettison liberalism’s protection of individual rights in favor of a social order that promotes “the common good” — a purportedly objective set of social conditions, borrowed from Catholic social teaching, that “undergird human flourishing.” According to Deneen, liberalism’s phony commitment to egalitarianism currently provides cover for a corrupt (and left-leaning) elite to pursue its own interests at the expense of the interests of the downtrodden (and right-leaning) masses. In Deneen’s postliberal order, by contrast, a new ruling elite would foster collaboration between “the few” and “the many” in pursuit of the common good. This new order would look the same and be governed by the same institutions as the current one, but it would be infused by a “fundamentally different ethos.”

In practice, Deneen’s policy prescriptions for fostering the common good would be even more far-reaching than Trump’s: sweeping protectionist trade measures to promote domestic industries; aggressive trust-busting of corporate monopolies; a robust “pro-family” welfare policy to promote the formation of traditional families; strict limits on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

The crux of Deneen’s book is his plan for the transition from the liberal order to the postliberal order. This “peaceful” transition, Deneen argued, would not happen on its own. It would require the creation of “a new elite” — a “self-conscious aristoi” (or aristocracy) who could enter the halls of government, academia and the media, take them over and repurpose them toward conservative and illiberal ends. While drawn from the upper echelons of society, this new elite would effectively act as class traitors: Having replaced the old, corrupt liberal elite, they would ally with and rule in the interests of the “many,” using their power to foster conservative values like “stability, order [and] continuity.” Deneen calls this political arrangement “aristopopulism” — an alliance between a “genuinely noble elite” (the “aristoi”) and the populist masses, working together to replace secular liberalism with a postliberal system grounded in a “forthright acknowledgment and renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.”

Vance — whose background and biography make him a living embodiment of Deneen’s “aristopopulist” vision — has not hid his interest in Deneen’s ideas. During a panel discussion at the launch event for Deneen’s book, Vance — appearing alongside Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts — identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right,” adding that he “sees[s] his role and his voice” in Congress as “explicitly anti-regime.”

In response to a question from the moderator about how he balances the interests of “the few” and “the many” in practice, he answered like a card-carrying member of Deneen’s new elite: “Things in American society are so tilted toward the ‘few’ that I just focus on the ‘many,’” he said, “and let the rest of it figure itself out.”

Curtis Yarvin’s ideas do not garner formal discussions in the marble-lined halls of America’s universities, but they are no less influential in the intellectual ecosystem that has shaped Vance’s worldview.

Yarvin rose to prominence on the online right in the early 2000s as the leading voice of the “neo-reactionary” movement — or what came to be called “NRx” — while blogging under the pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug.” The premise of the movement, which Yarvin unspooled in his signature meandering and irony-laden prose style, was that “democracy is bunk” — both as a philosophical system and as a principle for organizing modern society.

According to Yarvin, America in the 21st century is no longer a democracy in any meaningful sense. Instead, it has degenerated into a corrupt oligarchy run by an interconnected network of academics, media elites and government bureaucrats that Yarvin calls “the Cathedral.” Although most Americans have carried on believing the elections and the popular will continue to be the source of political power and legitimacy, Yarvin argues that the real decision-making in America — including the critical power to determine what is true and what is false — rests with the Cathedral, regardless of who occupies the White House or which party holds a majority in Congress. (At the National Conservatism Conference in 2022, Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” that was effectively a layman’s explanation of “the Cathedral.”)

To a point, Yarvin’s critique of this system can sound like a more traditional libertarian or conservative critique of the “administrative state” or “the deep state” — the notion that a set of unelected bureaucrats have usurped power from the sovereign American people. But unlike traditional conservatives, Yarvin does not advocate for a return to small or limited government. Instead, he argues that America needs a “national CEO, [or] what’s called ‘a dictator’,’’ who could implement a type of centralized American monarchy, run on the model of a Silicon Valley tech start-up. (Yarvin’s model for this style of leadership is, half ironically, FDR, whose presidency he as described as “a personal executive monarchy.”) Yarvin has laid out an extensive (though not always clear) playbook explaining how a democratically elected president could claim monarchical power — a process that would involve a smartphone app to organize voting, reinforced by police forces in red armbands.

Here and elsewhere, Yarvin’s plans diverge sharply from Deneen’s — and neither Deneen nor Vance have endorsed the explicitly monarchic parts of Yarvin’s vision. But they share one essential element: Like Deneen and Vance, Yarvin believes that the transition away from progressive liberal democracy will be led by a self-conscious cadre of conservative elites who gain power through an alliance with the popular masses — yielding, in Yarvin’s vision, to the rule of a single “national CEO.”

Yarvin’s description of this dynamic is much stranger than Deneen’s. Borrowing from the universe of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Yarvin describes American society as divided into several classes: “Elves,” (the highly educated ruling class); “hobbits,” (the average middle-class red-state American) and “dwarves, orcs and zombies” (the working- and lower-classes). These groupings, Yarvin has written, describe different roles in society, not races or fixed classes: The elves are the people who run the powerful institutions of politics and culture, while the hobbits just “want to grill and raise kids.” (“These roles tend to be hereditary, but do not need to be,” Yarvin has written.)

The elves are almost uniformly liberal, but Yarvin believes that mixed in among the elves are “dark elves” — reactionary elites like Yarvin who oppose “the regime,” sympathize with the plight of the hobbits and understand democracy for what it really is: a cover for a corrupt oligarchy. The only way to realize a “pro-hobbit” regime, Yarvin argues, is for hobbits to form an alliance with the dark elves to defeat the normal elves, and then to allow the dark elves — and eventually a single dark elf — to rule on their behalf.

This is, in effect, a more extreme description of Deneen’s “aristopopulism” in dorkier terms. On a popular conservative podcast in 2021, Vance cited Yarvin — whom he has called “a friend” — in support of his view that a second-term Trump should “fire every mid-level level bureaucrat and every civil servant in the administrative state and replace them with our people,” thereby allowing conservatives to “seize the administrative state for our own purposes.” (Yarvin has recently distanced himself from Vance, calling him “a random normie [politician] whom I’ve barely even met.”)

Vance’s citation of Yarvin has attracted much attention since he landed on the top of the Republican ticket — especially Vance’s suggestion that Trump should ignore the Supreme Court if they step in to block the mass firings. But the public scrutiny has overlooked one critical part of Vance’s plan. When Vance is talking about installing “our people” in the government, it’s fair to assume that he’s not talking about enlisting the hobbits. He’s talking about promoting the dark elves.

All of these threads come together in the thinking of Vance’s primary political patron and close personal friend Peter Thiel.

Thiel and Vance met in 2011 after Vance attended a talk by Thiel at Yale Law School — an encounter that Vance later called “the most important moment of my time at Yale.” Vance later went to work for Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital — the VC company is, fittingly, named after Lord of the Rings — and later founded his own fund with Thiel’s backing. Along the way, though, Thiel became a sort of tutor to Vance, introducing Vance to the intellectual influences shaping the politics of Silicon Valley’s right-leaning cohort.

One of those influences was the Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and two of his American disciples, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. That trio formed the core of a group of thinkers known as the “paleolibertarians”: For von Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe, real political freedom required shrinking — and eventually abolishing — the centralized state, making way for an “anarcho-capitalist” system governed exclusively by markets and the forces of social competition.

Even as libertarians gained political momentum and support throughout the 1970s, the paleolibertarians remained relatively marginal on the right, and their followers knew that the program wasn’t popular enough to gain widespread support. By the 1990s, Rothbard in particular had given up on building a broad-based electoral movement based purely on libertarian principles. Instead, he began calling for libertarians to devote their energy to a new style of “right-wing populism,” based on an alliance between libertarian intellectual elites and the middle- and lower-class masses who felt oppressed and disillusioned by contemporary American life. “This two-pronged strategy is (a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-government opinion-molders, based on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites,” Rothbard wrote in a 1992 essay titled “Right-Wing Populism,” which the writer John Ganz has called “the Ur-Text of Trumpism.”

Over time, this coalition would consolidate behind “inspiring and charismatic political leadership … who will be knowledgeable, courageous, dynamic, exciting and effective in mobilizing and building a movement,” Rothbard wrote. (The rabid anti-communist Joseph McCarthy offered one historical example of what this leadership might look like, Rothbard argued — but looking to the future, he pinned his hopes on Pat Buchanan.) Once this movement had concentrated power under its charismatic leader, it could seize political control from “the unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites,” dismantle the American state and usher in a new hyper-libertarian order.

Under this new order, Rothbard presumed, a natural elite — the people who could win out in a world of unfettered competition — would inevitably rise to the top.

Although the paleolibertarians’ goal was in theory the opposite of a strong centralized state or reactionary monarchy, it nevertheless proved attractive to thinkers with authoritarian inclinations, in part because it espoused a frank skepticism of liberal democracy. For the paleolibertarians, democracy existed to protect markets, and once it had ceased to do that, it became expendable. (Yarvin, for instance, has cited Rothbard and Hoppe as major influences, as have key figures on the alt-right.) This view had a decisive influence to Thiel, who has spoken at an organization founded by Hoppe, and who infamously declared in 2009 that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

On the surface, Deneen, Yarvin and Thiel want different things — a postliberal order grounded in Catholic social teaching; a monarchy styled after a tech startup; a stateless techno-libertarian paradise in which the only rights are property rights. But they are united both by their opposition to liberal democracy and by their fundamental elitism — their shared belief that America is and always will be run by elites, but that it is currently ruled by the wrong type of elite. Their goal is not to abolish elite rule but to replace America’s current elite with a purportedly different, more conservative one, and they share a blueprint for doing so. Implicitly recognizing that their ideas are not popular enough to win broad-based political support, they advocate for an alliance between reactionary elites and the alienated masses, channeling popular frustration against the democratic order they hope to eventually replace. The “hobbits” are the engine of this transformation, but they are never its leaders.

Forging this alliance, all these thinkers agree, will take time — but the crucial first step is identifying and cultivating a new conservative elite. This new elite must be made up of people who are steeped in elite culture and reactionary ideas but who understand “the people” and can credibly claim to govern on their behalf. They must have one foot in the world of the elite and one foot in the heartland. They must think like elves but be able to talk like hobbits.

In other words, they must look like JD Vance — and their first task is to build a bridge between the elite reactionary circles and the right-leaning masses.

“Maybe the most important role that I have to play from the New Right’s perspective is to help build institutions and to get people engaged in politics who weren’t previously engaged in politics,” Vance told me when we spoke earlier this year, referring to his role in founding a handful of new institutions devoted to the nationalist-populist cause.

“It’s definitely an interesting thing,” he said, “but it’s going to take a long time.”

For the first time, both major parties’ presidential candidates have families that have been knit together by divorce. It's a sign that politics is finally catching up with America.

The historic nature of the two first families-in-waiting comes after a half-century of dramatic shifts in American family life. And though there has been a long running tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats over which party is the most “pro-family,” that political fight is more heated than ever.

Many conservatives have embraced former President Donald Trump despite his personal life and family structure, rather than because of it; important figures on the right, including Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are pushing for a return to the traditional family structure as a salve for social ills, like declining birth rates, student achievement and crime. Democrats, meanwhile, are articulating a vision of families that includes same-sex couples, blended families, adoptive families and single parents or grandparents — one they argue is reflected in Vice President Kamala Harris’ family.

“It tells the honest story of America and that we’re doing the work of building a more just America where everyone can sit at this table, however you show up, in whatever kind of family model,” said Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who is among the two dozen members of Congress who are stepparents. “Whether you’re talking about two mommies, two daddies, bonus moms — this is reflective of today’s American modern family.”

Harris, herself a child of divorce, has a blended family that includes her husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and her stepchildren, Cole and Ella. Trump, who has been divorced twice, has five children, half-siblings with each other from three moms.

It’s a notable sea change since Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and subsequent remarriage helped sink his 1964 presidential bid. More than a third of children don’t live with two married parents, and nearly one in six kids live in a blended family household with stepparents, stepsiblings or half siblings, according to the Pew Research Center. And 78 percent of people now think single-parent households are acceptable, while 58 percent support married gay or lesbian couples raising children together, according to Pew.

Until Trump, Ronald Reagan was the only president who had ever been divorced. And, as recently as 2008, John McCain’s first “broken marriage” to Carol McCain, his first wife, was the source of media speculation and titillation. President Joe Biden also has a blended family, though because of the death of his first wife Neilia, not from divorce. (First Lady Jill Biden is stepmom to the late Beau Biden and his brother Hunter, and Ashley Biden is their half-sister.)

“We’re a long way from the nuclear family,” said Rick Davis, McCain’s presidential campaign manager, calling Harris' family the “classic new nuclear family.”

“That looks more like America these days than a traditional nuclear family that’s been married for 25 years and has two kids,” he added. “I don’t think that’s the America we live in anymore.”

For many communities of color, blended and extended families have long been a part of family life, said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

“The whole ‘Leave It to Beaver’ family structure has never been the family structure for many communities,” Brown said. The blended family structure “has always been the backbone of so many communities, that their greatest economic security and infrastructure was the way that we actually saw family.”

Affairs, which were once kryptonite to a presidential bid, also don’t appear to have the same impact they used to. Kerstin Emhoff, Doug's ex-wife, quashed an early attack on an affair he had during their marriage, calling him “a great father” and “a great friend,” and is a vocal Harris booster. And Democrats have attacked Trump for his felony convictions related to hush money payments — rather than the alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. (Trump denies the affair took place.)

Strategists on both sides of the aisle attribute the lack of stickiness of attacks on candidates’ marriages to changing standards about what’s fair game in a presidential campaign as cultural attitudes shift.

“Donald Trump is on his third marriage. Certainly, on my side of the aisle, I don’t see anything wrong with that — because that’s life,” said Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Still, as much as social norms have changed, Trump’s decision to pick Vance as his running mate has elevated the discussion about traditional families, which the New Right sees as the solution to many modern problems — with a populist twist. They argue that small-government programs have failed to beget traditional families and instead favor more government intervention, like the child tax credits and paid family leave Trump pushed as president.

“The marriage rate has come down to record lows, and fertility rates hit record lows last year," said Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. "Whatever was the kind of standard Republican agenda — limited government, low taxes — that hasn’t really done much to revise the fortunes of the American family.”

Vance's proposal to raise the child tax credit to $5,000 per child is an example of the kinds of pro-government intervention policies once more traditionally aligned with Democrats now being advocated for as part of a new conservative pro-family agenda. But Vance, who was raised by his grandparents and has a collection of half and stepsiblings, has said this policy would apply to all families — whether kids are being raised by same-sex couples, grandparents or heterosexual couples — suggesting a desire to help more than just traditional families.

“Senator Vance supports policies that will make life better for all kinds of American families: lower prices, a stronger economy, safer streets, and a closed border to stop the deadly flow of fentanyl,” said Luke Schroeder, a Vance spokesperson. “All kids in America, whether they’re raised in a ‘traditional’ family or a ‘nontraditional’ family as JD was, deserve to achieve their American dream.”

Trump, meanwhile, has pledged free in vitro fertilization treatments to all Americans, paid for either by insurance companies or the federal government. His campaign has defended the proposal — which is angering social conservatives and deficit hawks alike — as a necessary long-term investment in light of the country’s record-low birth rate.

The former president also suggested last week that the federal costs of making child care more affordable in the U.S. would be “small” compared to the money that would be generated through his proposed tariffs on imported goods to the U.S.

At the same time, Democrats see their bevy of social safety net programs as a means of pushing a “pro-family” platform. Harris has pitched restoring the expanded child tax credit, as well as adding an additional $6,000 tax credit for children in their first year of life, a variation on the proposal Vance has put forward — all regardless of family structure. Democrats have also couched proposals to offer paid parental leave and expand health care access as similarly “pro-family.”

It’s part of their effort to counter that there is more than one way to build a happy family in the 21st century. That sentiment was underscored by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s comments last month at the Democratic National Convention, highlighting his relationship with his husband, Chasten, and their two kids.

"The makeup of our kitchen table, the existence of my family, is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago," he said. “This kind of life went from impossible to possible, from possible to real, from real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime.”

NEW YORK — Business nearly tripled at Verdi cannabis dispensary, one of dozens of legal weed shops in New York, after state and city officials started cracking down on unlicensed retailers in May.

Then the operator of a nearby competitor cut the fresh padlock on its doors and got right back to selling its unregulated pot. Verdi immediately saw a 10 to 15 percent decline in sales, founder Ellis Soodak said.

“It’s really disheartening to see people flying in the face of the law,” Soodak said in an interview. “People assume these unlicensed stores are mom-and-pop shops. … Most of these stores are owned by conglomerates.”

Cannabis companies have been eyeing the Empire State as a potentially massive market since the state legalized marijuana in 2021. But more than three years later, there are only 182 licensed dispensaries in a state of 20 million people. Michigan, with half the population, has more than 800 dispensaries.

Without enough licensed dispensaries to serve demand, thousands of unlicensed sellers stepped in, often flouting rules by popping up near schools and selling weed in colorful packaging. In response, lawmakers granted state and local authorities more enforcement power earlier this year to close these shops.

The ensuing crackdown is yielding results: The New York State Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force has padlocked at least 345 locations across New York, while New York City authorities have shuttered about 1,000 locations in the city alone.

But New York City was home to an estimated 4,000 unlicensed sellers before the crackdown started, so there are likely thousands more still operating, and legal challenges are threatening to derail enforcement efforts.

Illicit Chains

One reason why enforcement agents don’t immediately punish unlicensed cannabis retailers is because it takes time to investigate connected ownership groups, explained Dan Haughney, the director of enforcement for the state’s Office of Cannabis Management.

“If we know that there’s an operator that has a store on one corner and another one three blocks away, we’ll try to hit those stores that are connected at the same time,” Haughney said in an interview on a recent August afternoon while his team was inspecting stores in Queens.

State enforcement officials are also responding to changing practices of illicit sellers. Some are altering their operating hours — for example, only opening up in the evenings, prompting the state to send investigators out at night. Many storefronts are keeping their inventory elsewhere so that they’re carrying less cannabis that can be seized during an inspection.

The majority of unlicensed cannabis sellers that the task force inspects are also conducting some sort of processing on site. This could be anything from making cannabis pre-rolls to manufacturing weed-infused gummies, Haughney said.

These activities would not be allowed in licensed cannabis dispensaries, since they’re prohibited from holding processing licenses in New York.

Haughney wishes consumers could see the “unsanitary and disgusting” conditions that some of these products are manufactured in.

His other main concern is illicit products with packaging that would appeal to children: bright colors, bubble fonts and cartoon characters.

“When they have the cartoon characters on there, that would entice a kid to grab it,” Haughney said. “When I see this stuff … we’re going to do everything we can to padlock.”

Haughney’s team also frequently sees cannabis products from brands like Stiizy and Jeeter that have seemingly been diverted from California’s regulated market.

Haughney said that Stiizy executives have told him that those products are illicit cannabis in counterfeit packaging. But he believes the Stiizy products he sees are actually sourced from the legal California market, which he has traced back there by collaborating with his counterparts on West Coast investigations.

Stiizy and other California brands are also facing multiple lawsuits about its involvement in the illicit market in California and the rest of the country.

Stiizy did not respond to a request for comment.

But Stiizy’s illicit market presence is certainly helping its brand recognition. It’s the number one request of customers at Mighty Lucky, a licensed dispensary in Lower Manhattan, said founder Beau Allulli.

Mighty Lucky has seen steady revenue growth since its opening in May, and it hasn’t seen a big sales spike coinciding with tougher enforcement in its neighborhood. But the dispensary has seen an increase in customers who seem to come from the unlicensed market because of their brand requests and expectation to be able to pay with a credit card.

Customers who have frequented licensed dispensaries already know that they won’t be able to pay with credit cards, but unlicensed cannabis sellers will simply classify credit card transactions as other items.

Out of Mighty Lucky’s hundreds of five-star reviews on Google, the only three bad reviews were for the high fees surrounding payment processing.

They think “that we’re keeping the fee and upcharging [them],” Allulli said. “We try to explain it’s federally illegal.”

Enforcement Challenges

The crackdown on illicit sellers has had consequences beyond the shops shuttered by city and state officials: The state task force has found that 136 unlicensed retailers closed up shop on their own as a result of the increase in enforcement.

“Particularly in the city, I think people can see the change in the landscape,” Haughney said.

But it’s clear that the enforcement efforts have a long way to go.

Recently, New York City Mayor Eric Adams stood before four tons of cannabis that the city had seized from illicit operators, which was poised to be incinerated.

Out of the thousand dispensaries the city has been able to close, at least a couple dozen have opened back up, including the one near Soodak’s Verdi dispensary.

Soodak reported the reopening. Less than a week later, city officials were padlocking the location again, he said. It was still closed as of Monday.

And despite a state audit that found issues with OCM’s licensing process in May, said Joe Rossi, head of Park Strategies’ cannabis practice, it’s critical that the pace of licensing has not picked up.

“You can’t just have [182 licensed] stores and thousands of illicit shops,” he said.

In addition, New York City is facing legal challenges over the way it has gone about its cannabis crackdown. A judge recently ruled that a convenience store that was shuttered as part of the ongoing enforcement effort must be allowed to reopen because officers did not follow proper procedures when closing the store.

Lance Lazzaro, the attorney who represented the convenience store, has managed to win a few reopening decisions for his clients in court. Now, he’s setting his sights on the state.

Last week, he filed a similar legal challenge against the OCM, alleging that the sealing order against Shopsmart Convenience in Manhattan violated the business’s due process rights.

“It’s unconstitutional,” Lazzaro said of both the state and city’s new enforcement powers.

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — At least 10 university faculty members across Florida have been terminated with dozens more put on notice to improve their work since the state adopted post-tenure review policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to data compiled by POLITICO.

The results of initial tenure reviews across the state’s public universities show that most faculty in Florida — 91 percent — either met or exceeded the expectations set by their universities, a performance that earned them bonuses or raises. But the outcome was more damaging for a small minority. More than 60 faculty members statewide didn’t meet expectations and were given one year to course correct or else face termination, in addition to the 10 that were shown the door this year.

The reviews are just a part of DeSantis' and Florida Republicans’ goal of reshaping the state’s higher education system. The governor has installed GOP allies in top university and college posts and pushed laws that changed tenure — which DeSantis said was necessary to counteract “unproductive” tenured faculty who were the “most significant deadweight cost” facing universities. Florida Republicans also limited how university professors can teach lessons on race — which is being challenged in court — and even changed how Florida higher education institutions are accredited.

“Governor DeSantis expects universities to focus on pursuing truth and preparing students to be citizens of this republic. Professors who exceed expectations should be proud of their contributions,” DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern said in a statement. “However, there must also be accountability to ensure that professors at universities continue to perform and contribute to their university's academic success.”

“These audits show that the system is working as designed,” he concluded.

Faculty tenure previously emerged as a banner issue for state Republicans fighting against what they consider a liberal bias or “ideological indoctrination” in higher education, leading to a 2022 law that ushered in significant changes for schools.

A key piece of that law required universities to perform post-tenure reviews for faculty every five years through a process that was carried out for the first time in 2024, reviewing 20 percent of professors statewide.

These faculty members, under a rule crafted by the Board of Governors in charge of Florida’s university system, were graded by school officials based on their level of accomplishment and productivity — judged on “assigned duties in research, teaching, and service” — while also being evaluated for instances of noncompliance with state law, unapproved absences and substantiated student complaints.

Faculty unions fiercely opposed the tenure review law, arguing that it would turn tenure into a 5-year revolving contract and push professors away from Florida. The United Faculty of Florida claims that the policy effectively ends tenure while eroding academic freedom in the state.

Tenure is meant to be a guardrail protecting free speech for faculty that studied, taught and researched for years to earn it, said Robin Goodman, a professor at Florida State University who leads the school’s United Faculty of Florida chapter.

“People outside don’t know how hard it is to get tenure,” Goodman said. “By the time you get it, it’s a way of life.”

In the first year of Florida’s post-tenure review, more than half of professors — 437 out of 861 — exceeded expectations in the eyes of their universities, the data shows. These results earned some faculty one-time bonuses ranging from $10,000 at University of Florida to $5,000 at Florida A&M University and Florida Atlantic University.

Another 350 faculty met expectations according to their schools, a performance mark that is on par with the expected contributions in a professor’s area that nets smaller bonuses or pay increases.

A significantly smaller number of tenured faculty members across Florida — 64 — failed to meet expectations, which requires them to develop “performance improvement plans” with school leaders to ratchet up production or hone their teaching skills over the next year. The state’s post-tenure rule spells out that faculty who don’t meet the requirements detailed in those plans must receive a notice of termination from the university’s chief academic officer.

Further, 10 faculty members were determined to have “unsatisfactory” performance, resulting in automatic notices for termination. The tenure review data does not specify the fields taught by faculty at any performance level.

Some faculty members fear that tenure reviews could be used more as a cloak for political retaliation than rooting out unproductive professors as claimed.

Since the reviews are tied to compliance in state law, a wrinkle some unions attempted to bargain out of faculty contracts, there are concerns professors could face heightened scrutiny in areas broaching instruction on race and gender — culture war issues targeted by Republicans. One key law touted by the GOP, the so-called Stop Woke act meant to prohibit faculty from teaching lessons over issues like “white privilege,” has been blocked by courts for more than two years with an appeal pending. State officials this year have also called upon the university system to review courses that delve into topics including Israel, Palestinians and Zionism on the heels of campus protests.

For faculty members, they worry that if they say or research the wrong thing, it could mean their jobs.

“If I’m a professor and that’s a piece of my course, of course I’m going to be apprehensive going into the process,” said Samique March-Dallas, a professor at FAMU and the president of the school’s UFF chapter. “If my scholarship is focused on an area that’s pretty much under attack, how does that work?”

Faculty unions in some cases are helping terminated professors file grievances — formal complaints alleging collective bargain violations — including two at the University of Florida, the school that was most aggressive in its reviews.

Under recently resigned president Ben Sasse, UF determined that 34 faculty members failed to meet expectations and five were unsatisfactory. Comparatively, 12 professors at University of South Florida didn’t meet expectations and one was unsatisfactory. There were eight professors put on notice to improve and two terminated at University of Central Florida and none of either reported at FSU.

The tenure decisions at UF were not political, nor made because faculty had controversial ideas, according to Scott Angle, who stepped down as the university’s provost last month. Those faculty members who were terminated either fell behind as researchers or teachers and in some cases “should have been fired 10 years ago,” Angle said.

Angle contends that Florida’s budding review policy will ultimately make tenure stronger by rooting out abuses where some faculty are using it to hide poor performance.

“When post-tenure review came along, it gave us the opportunity to clean up the system,” Angle said.

Republican strategist Mike Murphy is the kind of guy who might have been calling the shots if anyone other than Donald Trump had won in 2016.

Murphy’s roster of former clients includes John McCain, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lamar Alexander. Which is to say, a lot of the guys who got pushed aside when Trump took over.

For a while now, Murphy has been a Trump-skeptical wiseguy working private sector gigs in deep-blue Los Angeles.

But fortunately for us, he’s also giving some of the sharpest political commentary out there.

You may recognize Murphy as David Axelrod’s partner on the podcast “Hacks On Tap.” If you’ve heard him there, then you know his skill in blending his personal feelings about Trump’s politics with incisive criticisms about Kamala Harris’ campaign and Murphy’s trademark wit.

I caught up with Murphy on Thursday to talk about what’s coming next in an election that has been, in a word, surprising.

We talked about Tuesday’s debate and why some very strong winds are still at Trump’s back; how Murphy would tweak Kamala Harris’ message; what might become of the Republican Party after Trump and how he, Mike Murphy, almost killed JD Vance’s dream of being a senator back in 2017.

Vice President Kamala Harris is circulating her first detailed goals for rural America in a bid to woo voters the party has been hemorrhaging support among for decades — and who will help determine the outcome of the November elections.

The new document is the furthest Harris has gone in her career to outline how she would approach policy for rural communities and comes as her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who has been tapped as a sort of special envoy to more rural areas of battleground states in the final sprint, is set to visit Wausau, Wisconsin, Friday. Harris herself is venturing into some of Pennsylvania's largely rural, red counties Friday as part of her battleground blitz over the next few days.

As part of her broad plans, the campaign promises significant new federal investment for rural communities under a Harris-Walz administration and warns that Trump’s policies “will leave rural America behind,” according to the new two-page outline obtained by POLITICO. The document, like similar campaign materials, is meant to help engage and organize voters on the ground with just weeks to go.

The campaign’s new rural outline also pledges to scale up programs to help rural communities access federal funding while expanding small-business financing and other aid. It also attempts to beef up Harris’ limited ties to agriculture and small-town voters, with the document noting both she and Walz are from top agricultural-producing states and “that rural communities are essential to the success and character of our nation.” Harris has yet to release a full policy platform for rural communities, as some Democrats are pressing the campaign to do. Her campaign said the new document isn’t a whole new policy plan for rural America, but is part of their aggressive rural organizing efforts.

Those kinds of details, even small, from Harris’ campaign are critical. Harris, who recently hired her own campaign rural engagement director, is now trying to win over skeptical undecided voters and Democratic-leaning residents in rural regions and small towns who may not otherwise vote. In doing so, she might be able to shave off a few percentage points from Trump’s margins in battleground states in what’s shaping up to be an incredibly tight race.

But Harris is facing steep challenges in driving turnout in rural counties in swing states where Trump threatens to run up the score against her. Some Democratic lawmakers and local organizers fear Harris will do worse than President Joe Biden in rural and rural-adjacent counties, after he managed to claw back some ground in 2020 after Trump’s 2016 blowout.

Harris has grown her lead against Trump in Wisconsin to 5 points among likely voters, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other third-party candidates on the ballot, according to a pre-debate Marquette University Law School poll. Though, that’s just outside the poll’s margin of error, indicating an incredibly close race. Kennedy is still trying to remove his name from the state’s ballot, after dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump in late-August.

Wisconsin is already among the top states in the country for voter turnout, so it’s hard for either Trump or Harris to make significant gains at this point.

“We’re talking about a game of inches, rather than yards,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll.

“Walz coming to Wausau makes a lot of sense,” Franklin added, as Democrats are trying to “lose by less” in rural regions. The city of 40,000 people sits in a red county Trump won by 18 points in 2020.

But, Franklin noted, as Trump’s support has fallen off in Wisconsin’s traditionally red, suburban strongholds, the former president is making a more concerted effort to shore up his support in rural counties. The former president recently held a rally in Mosinee, just to the south of Wausau where Walz will be Friday.

The Biden-Harris administration and congressional Democrats have poured billions in federal investments into rural communities, but have had mixed results in rebuilding support among voters there.

Walz is from a small town in Nebraska and represented a largely rural, conservative-leaning congressional district in southern Minnesota. But he’s so far had limited direct interactions with rural voters since Harris tapped him as her running mate, beyond visiting a family farm during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania.

While Walz appears more in-tune with small-town voters than other national Democrats, campaign officials understand he too runs the risk of facing less-than-welcoming receptions from Trump supporters in rural areas.

Walz will meet with volunteers in Wausau Friday, where Democrats see several key opportunities to mobilize support among a growing population of Hmong and Native residents in the region, with many being small farmers.

On Saturday, Walz will hold a rally at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, in the port city that largely relies on mining and manufacturing industries and borders Minnesota.

NEW YORK — State Sen. Jessica Ramos is entering the race for mayor of New York — the latest Democratic challenger to take on a weakened Eric Adams next year.

Ramos, a progressive Queens politician, has been among the most outspoken critics of the embattled mayor as his inner circle is embroiled in federal investigations.

But what she boasts in media and political skill she lacks in campaign advantage: She has low name recognition and no money in her city account. Other contenders — Comptroller Brad Lander and his predecessor, Scott Stringer — have already won citywide races and have been raising donations for months.

Ramos says her mayoralty would turn the page on Adams, a centrist Democrat at odds with the political left.

“You’re not going to find me at Zero Bond,” she said in an interview, referring to the mayor’s preferred private club. “You’re not going to find me doing any shenanigans. You’ll find me on the street, talking to New Yorkers. You’ll find me in City Hall in meetings with agencies. And making sure that I am recruiting and hiring the top talent of New York City and trusting them to do their job.”

She filed to open a campaign account Wednesday and will launch with a video Friday and a rally outside City Hall the following day.

Ramos said she began to consider running last year, and reached her decision as she watched “dysfunction at an all time level from City Hall.”

“The city overwhelmingly is in desperate need to feel faith in their institutions again,” she said. “All of the scandals aside, the basic functions of government need to be executed.”

Ramos would make history as the first woman, Latina and mother to become mayor. She was born to undocumented immigrants from Colombia. She would also be the first Queens-born mayor since the 19th century.

She is also the first progressive mayoral hopeful to openly feud with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose coveted endorsement could shape the mayoral primary.

Ramos sniped at Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter in 2022, saying the progressive icon was absent from their shared Western Queens district. In the surprising social media screed, Ramos said her fellow Democrat didn’t return calls and texts.

That was two years ago. Asked if they have a relationship now, Ramos replied, “I wouldn’t say so,” and noted Ocasio-Cortez still doesn’t have a district office in Queens. (Her staff, instead, take constituent appointments out of Tiffany Caban’s City Council office.)

Ramos’ relationship is famously tense with other New York progressives. Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, who shares a district with her, notably posted a photo on X Thursday night drinking with mayoral rival Zellnor Myrie, a state senator, ahead of Ramos’ launch.

“I feel like every politician is divisive by definition. Some people vote for you, and some people don’t,” she said in the interview. “I get that I’m an outspoken woman. I am aggressive in my legislative approach. I try to convey the urgency that my constituents feel in resolving issues.”

Once a communications aide for former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Ramos was elected to the state Senate in 2018, ousting incumbent José Peralta in a progressive wave that unseated a group of Albany Democrats who partnered with Republicans.

She chairs the influential Labor Committee, and has pushed to raise the minimum wage and passed bills extending pandemic-era government benefits to undocumented workers and banning employers’ anti-union “captive audience” meetings.

PHOENIX — The day after Labor Day, swing-state polls were showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris locked in a “dogfight” or a “showdown” or even a “knife fight in a phone booth,” depending on the news outlet. That morning, a young Harris surrogate named Hadley Duvall was in the battleground state of Arizona, having breakfast with some staffers, looking friendly and serene. She’d been deployed there — as she has to several swing states since delivering a stunning speech to the Democratic National Convention — to tell her story as a survivor of incest.

Three times that day, she would repeat matter-of-factly, in front of different sets of strangers far from her Kentucky home, a secret she’d kept for 10 years as a child. “From the age of five years old,” she would say, “I was sexually abused by my stepfather at the time. When I was 12, I was impregnated from him.” She would explain being told, with Roe v. Wade then still in effect, that she had options and would have had an abortion had she not miscarried. In three different rooms in three different towns, she would offer proof that debates over abortion restrictions, especially ones like Arizona’s that prohibit the procedure after 15 weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest, are not abstract or theoretical exercises.

Before all that, at breakfast in a Phoenix restaurant festooned with owl-related decor, Duvall, now 22, explained to me why she had launched herself into the middle of one of the most divisive issues at the center of an exceptionally divisive election. She wanted to show people, she said, “I could be your neighbor. … Nobody’s safe. And no matter what type of [laws] your state has, no matter what you think is good for your state, no matter how much you feel like this abortion topic doesn’t matter to you or doesn’t affect you, it does.”

Duvall has proven herself particularly effective among the small world of assault survivors who have spoken out against laws that restrict or ban abortion. She is credited with helping lift one Democrat, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, to reelection in a red state with the viral television ad in which she first stepped into politics after Roe fell. Her story is as shocking as she herself is ordinary. She’s just a recent graduate of a Christian college with a boyfriend and a dog named Honey — “she’s a golden retriever-wiener dog-lab-aussiedoodle” she says proudly, showing a photo of a little mutt in a pumpkin Halloween costume on her phone. She’s got a pleasant Kentucky accent and sports a gold necklace with the letter “H” on it; she is warm and largely at ease discussing one of the most disturbing topics imaginable because, she says, “I’ve already been through the worst.” Thus the Harris campaign’s eagerness to send Duvall to swing states — including places like Arizona with upcoming referenda to protect abortion — hoping to turn out a base motivated by abortion and also try to persuade voters across party lines.

“What we’ve seen is that Hadley’s story, as well as abortion rights, resonates strongly with Democrats, Independents and Republicans across the board,” said Jen Cox, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign in Arizona. Given the state’s narrow margins — Biden won it by less than a percentage point in 2020 with roughly 11,000 votes, and Trump is leading there now by a percent or less in multiple polling averages — Cox said, “in Arizona, we have to do everything. We have to make sure that Democrats and younger voters and voters of color, especially Latino voters, are energized about the campaign, are turning out to vote. We also need to reach out to more moderate voters, Republicans and independents, especially folks in the suburbs.” (In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Harris alluded to Duvall when she assailed Donald Trump for saying people wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. “A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”)

Still, it’s a strange place for Duvall to be, repeating something she once thought she’d never be able to say out loud in a sentence, trying to get a president elected. “I used to always say, like, I don’t argue politics because I don’t know enough about it. I’ve always known my place,” she said at breakfast. But something snapped after Roe fell, and she published the social media post about her abuse that caught the attention of the Beshear campaign, which led to the ad, which led to the DNC speech, which led here.

“I know my place now, and that’s why I’m speaking up now,” she said. “It is my place.” It wasn’t just about politics, either — when she was younger, it would have meant a great deal to her to see someone like the adult version of herself, speaking out and telling her she wasn’t alone. “If not me,” Duvall said, “then who?”

She then walked to an adjacent venue to talk to some Republicans.

Specifically, these were “Republicans for Harris,” some of the aisle-crossing women (and they were all women at the podium) who could help put Harris in the White House. “We are coming together,” Duvall remarked, “not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans, because there is too much at stake. Trump brags about overturning Roe v. Wade. He says he’s proud to be responsible for each and every one of the cruel abortion bans, including the one in effect here in Arizona.”

Arizona’s current abortion ban is not among the country’s most restrictive — the 15-week limit is within the time frame that more than 90 percent of abortions take place, according to CDC data and it includes exemptions after that to protect the life and health of the mother. Cindy Dahlgren, the communications director for It Goes Too Far, which opposes Arizona’s upcoming abortion referendum, told me later that “my heart goes out to [Hadley], of course, and every rape victim,” but that current law allows for almost four months to decide whether to have an abortion. “Voters here in Arizona are not voting for either abortion or no abortion,” she said. “They’re voting for abortion at 15 weeks and beyond for qualified medical emergencies … [versus] unlimited and unregulated abortion.”

Yet this spring, the state Supreme Court sparked chaos when it upheld an 1864 law, passed before Arizona was a state and the age of consent was 10 years old, that banned abortion almost entirely. In the political uproar that followed, the state’s Republican-led legislature repealed that ban, with some arguing it would hurt the party in November.

“It is a hot-button issue that certainly paints a picture of Republicans being on the wrong side of it,” said Paul Bentz, an Arizona pollster who is a Republican himself. “It’s basically two-thirds would prefer legal, safe abortions; only about a third or less want criminalization.” And Bentz said the issue was a big factor in the Senate race two years ago, when Democrat Mark Kelly defeated Republican Blake Masters — who called abortion “demonic” and advocated federal limits — for the seat formerly held by Republican John McCain.

In a race that could swing by a few thousand votes, of course, any number of factors could be decisive — and Bentz pointed to election denialism as a particular turnoff for otherwise Republican-leaning voters. But the key swing demographic, Bentz said, is “a portion of crossover individuals, independents and Republicans, generally female, generally higher education attainment, generally higher wage, that are the ones that sort of pick and choose the outcomes of these races.”

Witness the “McCain Republicans,” a fair chunk of whom put a Democrat in the senator’s old seat, and just enough of whom, with Cindy McCain’s backing of Joe Biden in 2020, helped swing the presidential election to the Democrats that year. While the Republicans for Harris event was ongoing, in fact, the late senator’s younger son Jimmy set off a bit of a scramble among the comms staff by endorsing Kamala Harris himself. And Bettina Nava, who worked for McCain for nearly two decades, including as his state director and his presidential campaign manager for the southwest, was among those standing with Duvall at the podium to advocate for Harris.

I caught up with Nava afterward; she called Duvall a “hero.” “I just met her today,” she said. “I care even more than an election, win or lose, that this young woman gets to have a voice, and tell her story, and normalize the fact that what happened to her is not acceptable.”

The Republican Party in its current form, Nava said, was no longer her party. “I’m in no-man’s land, no-woman’s land,” she mused. Then something occurred to her. “Actually, I found a woman” in Kamala Harris, she said. “I’m in woman’s land. And you know what? It’s about time.”

Up in the college town of Flagstaff a few hours later, the heat dissipated with the higher elevation, and Duvall stopped at a community center to address a group largely comprising students, retirees and Democratic leaders. Greeting a young activist by the door, Duvall remarked warmly how much she liked Arizona, and the woman laughed. “You say that to all the swing states.”

Duvall is very much still a youth herself — she just got her degree in psychology with a concentration in drug and alcohol counseling and had been thinking about clinical social work. She had no background in public speaking prior to taking the DNC stage to address millions of people; she doesn’t even do karaoke. But earlier that morning, one former Arizona state representative had urged her to run for office.

And now for her third speech of the day, Duvall was more relaxed and informal, ad libbing off her prepared paper, throwing in improbable moments of levity despite the subject. She got to the part about this election being the “most impactful of our lives” and paused. “I know that the politicians say that every year, but I’m not a politician, so really listen when I say it,” she said to some knowing chuckles. She had a specific appeal to young people as well: “There is not a better time to get educated in politics, especially if you are young. … We’ve seen the power of youth and we need the older generation to help with that. We need the guidance. We need the wisdom. But we also, you know, just need to be taken seriously.”

Sarah Benatar, the Democratic Coconino County treasurer, is a youth in politics too, having been elected the youngest county treasurer in the state 10 years ago at the age of 27. She’s also among those advocates who now get up in front of audiences to tell intensely personal stories about why she feels abortion access is necessary — in her case, she and her young daughter both survived a dangerous pregnancy involving a blood clot in her placenta that necessitated an emergency C-section. She did not contemplate getting an abortion at the time, but given the risks, she is avoiding another pregnancy until Arizona law changes. She tells this story more often than she’d like, she told me later. She believes Duvall will shape the election in her state. “This is a state that does not vote party line,” she said. “We are a state that votes for values. … And so that’s where Hadley coming here is hugely impactful.”

It’s also a state with higher-than-average youth turnout, a figure that’s jumped substantially from a decade ago. A recent study from Arizona State University found that Gen Z voters are even more independent than their over-30 counterparts — nearly half were registered independent. And 70 percent of these voters said they were more likely to vote with an abortion referendum on the ballot.

At the community center in Flagstaff, an older voter told Duvall after the speeches that she’d worked to register college students, some of whom declined, telling her, “You know better than me” about politics. “Like, what do you say to that?” she asked in exasperation. Duvall advised: “Tell them you might know better than they know, but MAGA people do not. …That’s what I tell ’em.”

Donald Trump pitched himself as a “leader” on in vitro fertilization during his Tuesday debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. His plans are angering swaths of the Republican Party.

The former president, eager to deflect attacks that his election would threaten fertility care, has gone so far as to pledge free IVF treatments to all Americans, paid for either by insurance companies or the federal government.

It’s a pitch designed to win back the moderate women who have moved away from Trump and neutralize Democratic attacks on his record on reproductive health that have dogged the GOP since the fall of Roe v. Wade more than two years ago. Harris, during Tuesday’s debate, said that “couples who pray and dream of having a family are being denied IVF treatments” because of state restrictions that she frequently refers to as “Trump abortion bans.”

But heading into the final weeks of the election, the proposal is alienating two pillars of the Republican Party: small-government deficit hawks outraged by the idea of a sweeping new federal mandate and religious conservatives who oppose IVF as commonly practiced in the U.S.

“Though we share his desire for Americans to have more babies, Trump's plan to fund in vitro fertilization for all American women is in direct contradiction with that hope,” said Pro-Life Action League President Ann Scheidler. “Hundreds of thousands of embryos — each of them as fully human as you or me — are created and then destroyed or frozen in IVF procedures.”

Trump and the GOP have been on the defensive ever since the Alabama Supreme Court thrust IVF into the spotlight earlier this year with a ruling that frozen embryos should be considered people, citing the Dobbs decision — causing some fertility clinics in the state to suspend treatments until the legislature passed a bill restoring access nearly two weeks later. Trump immediately came out against the Alabama decision, to the dismay of many conservatives.

Trump’s campaign is defending the universal IVF policy as a necessary long-term investment given the country’s record-low birth rate. And aides credit the policy for an increase in support from independents in some battleground states while arguing it has not caused a decline in support from anti-abortion voters.

“We want more babies, to put it very nicely. And for the same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes,” Trump said in a statement.

The former president’s embrace of IVF comes as he and other Republicans grapple with an issue that has plagued them since the fall of Roe two years ago. He has tried to pitch himself as moderate by arguing that abortion should be decided by states — leaving the procedure accessible in some of the country, and banned in other parts — while stressing his support for rape and incest exceptions, IVF and, more broadly, “reproductive rights.”

“I've been a leader on it. They know that and everybody else knows it. I have been a leader on fertilization, IVF,” he said during the debate.

Many conservatives are outraged — or at least highly skeptical — of his free IVF plan because of its potential cost to taxpayers, what it would mean for the expansion of government involvement in health care, and what they see as an implicit endorsement of practices like the disposal of embryos that they see as morally abhorrent. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, wrote the forward to a 2017 collection of essays from the Heritage Foundation that, among other things, raised concerns about IVF. He also joined earlier this year with nearly all Senate Republicans in blocking consideration of a bill to federally protect access to IVF and other fertility treatments.

The Pro-Life Action League and other anti-abortion groups are calling on Trump “to walk back this IVF funding scheme,” while the editor of National Review Online is arguing that it’s hypocritical for the party that went after the Affordable Care Act to now support additional federal health care mandates. Some conservatives liken Trump’s IVF proposal to former President Barack Obama’s 2012 contraceptive mandate, which was broadly panned by the same conservatives and repeatedly challenged in court.

“There are still bona fide limited-government conservatives in the Republican Party who look at this and say: ‘Think about how expensive IVF is!’” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “This could be billions of dollars for something that we think has significant moral complications. What is conservative about that?”

The proposal, which would need congressional approval, has divided Republicans on Capitol Hill, nearly all of whom support Trump. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has said that he is open to the idea, while Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the House GOP conference chair, has said the former president’s IVF proposal should be “applauded by the pro-life community as it will further promote the culture of life.”

Other GOP lawmakers have met the idea with a mixture of uncertainty about what Trump is proposing and skepticism about whether he’s serious — and, if so, how much it will cost. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who is running to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell as leader of the Senate Republican caucus, told Axios he was unsure “whether or not that's something that you would want to mandate on insurance companies.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was blunter, telling ABC “there's no end” to the cost of the policy, and pitching a means-tested tax credit as an alternative.

According to a person familiar with the plans, Senate Democrats plan to highlight these divisions in the coming weeks by holding another vote on legislation from Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who had two children through IVF, that would federally protect access to fertility treatments and guarantee public and private insurance coverage.

Nearly all Senate Republicans voted to block the bill when it first came to the floor in June, arguing that it was too sweeping in its scope. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) drafted an alternative bill that would strip federal Medicaid funding from states that ban IVF services but allow restrictions on how embryos are stored, implanted and disposed, but it has yet to move forward.

Despite the party's struggles to unify around a position on IVF, GOP pollsters and strategists believe that with the upcoming election likely to be decided by a relatively small group of people in a half-dozen battleground states, Trump's policy pitch could help him peel off enough votes to make a difference.

Trump’s former senior counselor, Kellyanne Conway, who remains in close contact with the campaign, has also urged Republicans to support IVF, pointing to polling her firm conducted, which found broad support, including among GOP voters, for “candidates who prioritize increasing the availability of contraceptives and fertility-related treatments.” That survey found that IVF had 78 percent support among self-identified “pro-life advocates” and 83 percent among evangelical Christians.

“Look, he’s never going to win on this issue but if he can chip away at the margins, that’s a potential path for him,” said Stephen Lawson, a Republican strategist in Georgia, a key swing state President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020 where Harris and Trump are neck-and-neck. “For swing voters who are genuinely undecided or going back and forth, it’s another potential policy tool in the toolkit for them to get comfortable pulling the lever for him.”

Democrats, sensing an opportunity to paint the GOP as extreme, have honed in on the Alabama decision, arguing that IVF access everywhere could come under threat if Trump is elected. That’s prompted Republicans to try to shore up their pro-IVF bona fides — much to the chagrin of many anti-abortion advocates.

Duckworth, who was in the debate spin room Tuesday night in Philadelphia, argued Trump, by helping bring about the fall of Roe, is the only reason IVF access is in jeopardy. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has also made his own use of fertility treatments a regular part of his stump speech.

Trump’s attempt to neutralize the attacks from Harris, Walz, Duckworth and others with his own pro-IVF plan may, however, undercut his support with some white evangelicals who were already uneasy about voting for Trump this year. Though many of them see the former president as far better on abortion than Harris, some have expressed substantial frustration at Trump’s shifting rhetoricin recent weeks, including his criticism of Florida’s six-week ban on the procedure.

While evangelicals and self-identified “pro-life advocates” remain overwhelmingly supportive of IVF, the tide may be starting to turn, as many social conservatives see opposing the procedure as the next frontier of the “pro-life movement.” The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted at their convention in June to oppose IVF, a move that could open the door for other denominations to follow suit.

“Listen, I’m a realist here. I know my position is so unpopular. … But what I found myself just scratching my head at was this idea that there would now be an IVF mandate required by insurers,” said Andrew Walker, a professor of Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who opposes IVF and co-authored the resolution Southern Baptists voted on. “I mean, that’s basically somewhat of a facsimile from what Obama was doing with the HHS mandate. You’re going to require faith-based organizations to carry insurance that covers IVF against their conscience?”

“Even if you are for IVF, you ought to be able to say you shouldn’t force an organization to carry insurance coverage that they don’t want to carry,” he added.

Strategists from both parties estimate Trump can’t win without the support of 80 percent of white evangelicals nationally. In 2020, Biden won the second-highest percentage of white evangelicals of any Democrat of this century, behind only Obama in 2008, according to CNN exit polls — and in a close race, those votes could be the difference.

Prominent evangelical leaders have warned that despite Trump’s seeming course corrections after his recent abortion stumbles — particularly his declaration that he would vote against a Florida ballot measure that would expand access — he remains on thin ice with many rank-and-file voters as the Republican Party increasingly abandons socially conservative issues, like abortion and gay marriage. While white evangelicals have for decades been a core Republican constituency, those leaders argue there’s no guarantee that Christians will remain as engaged in politics as they have been in the past.

“Maybe he pays a political price for November,” Brown said. “It's going to be a tight election, and even a handful of demotivated pro-lifers in key swing states can make a difference.”

Liz Cheney is hitting the campaign trail with millions of dollars at her disposal to defeat Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans, aggressively taking on the MAGA movement that dominates a party where she, and her father, are no longer welcome.

Cheney has pledged to do anything she can to help Kamala Harris, and has resources to back that up — including a PAC that raised more than $3 million in the first six months of the year, according to FEC records.

It’s part of an unprecedented effort by one of the party’s former highest-ranking leaders to not only take down Trump but purge any trace of him from the Republican Party. GOP strategists and elected officials who share her opposition to the former president say Cheney’s campaign — including her and her father’s endorsement of Harris — could pave the way for members of their party to join their cause. A critical mass could be enough to move the needle in a tight election.

“It’s a true reflection of how bad Donald Trump is — to think about a Dick Cheney, who is as time-tested of a conservative Republican as anybody in the roster, to come out and take a stance to support, like myself, Kamala Harris,” said former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican Harris supporter. “Look, the Republican Party loses no matter what. If Donald Trump gets beat by Kamala Harris — like I think is going to happen — the Republican Party loses. But if Donald Trump wins, the Republican Party loses even more: We’ll lose any and all credibility that we’ve got.”

Broadly, there doesn’t appear to be a deluge of Republicans flocking to Harris. An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 93 percent of likely Republican voters still prefer Trump over Harris — similar margins to where Trump stood in 2020. Yet the campaigns are chasing any movement at the margins in what promises to be among the closest elections in modern political history.

“I think Dick Cheney’s voice is incredibly important, because I think it will draw some more traditional conservatives to pause for a second and kind of take that in,” said former Trump national security official Olivia Troye, a Republican surrogate for Harris who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. She will also be near Mesa, Arizona, Thursday, leading a phone banking operation with Republican Mesa Mayor John Giles.

Cheney, who emerged as a prominent Trump critic in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and served as the vice chair of the House select committee that probed the riot, has in recent days renewed her war against Trump, saying that he “represents unrecoverable catastrophe” and promising in a series of high-profile interviews to do whatever it takes to defeat the former president in order to stamp out the fires of Trumpism. It’s also a bit of payback after Trump and his political operation helped orchestrate the primary that led to Cheney’s ouster from Congress.

In an interview at the Texas Tribune Festival last week, Cheney endorsed Democratic Texas Rep. Colin Allred, and said she would be “in many key battleground states very much focused on how important it is that we defeat him in this cycle,” though she said she wouldn’t be an official Harris campaign surrogate.

“I will continue to be doing everything I can over the course of the next two months here to make sure that people realize, understand, recognize who Donald Trump is and what he did and why he’s so dangerous,” Cheney said.

Her PAC in 2022 spent hundreds of thousands of dollars opposing Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem.

Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio talk show host in Wisconsin who is now anti-Trump, said the “one-two punch” of Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement gives conservatives wavering on Trump consent to back Harris. And while others in Trump’s administration who have broken with the former president have been reluctant to endorse a liberal Democrat, including former Vice President Mike Pence, the endorsement of someone like Dick Cheney carries significant weight.

“Both living Republican ex-vice presidents are now saying they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump. And one of them, a two-term Republican vice president, is saying he’s going to vote for Kamala Harris,” Sykes added. “That clearly creates this permission dynamic.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Other Republicans are more skeptical of the impact someone like Cheney could have on the election. The Cheneys’ support is, for instance, unlikely to move the needle with social conservatives for whom abortion remains one of the top issues — if not the top issue — in the election. While Trump has wavered on his views on abortion rights, anti-abortion advocates and their voters still see the former president as better on the issue than Harris, who they fear would uphold the status quo or possibly do more to expand abortion access in the U.S.

Pence, for instance, has said he won’t endorse Trump but hasn’t ruled out voting for him. But even if he does, Republicans who oppose Trump think it’s unlikely that he would make the leap to voting for Harris. (Pence previously said he would “never” vote for President Joe Biden.)

“She certainly appeals to the Never Trumpers,” said Barrett Marson, an Arizona-based GOP strategist. “But they are already in the column.”

The Cheneys’ support for Harris comes as Trump continues to rebuff the support of those who have previously rejected him. Earlier this year, Trump threatened to blacklist donors to Nikki Haley’s campaign, and he said he didn’t want the support of voters who “came back to” him during a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last week.

“They say you should take everybody, but that’s not the way I’m built,” he said during the town hall.

The Harris campaign isn’t claiming that the Cheneys’ endorsements — or the support of any one Republican — will make a significant difference in the election. But the campaign has been making a concerted appeal to Republicans.

The campaign in August launched a “Republicans for Harris” organizing program, hired a former GOP congressional staffer as its national Republican engagement director and has been targeting anti-Trump Republicans, as well as other conservatives and independents, through paid media and a grassroots digital campaign. The Democratic National Convention also prominently featured several GOP officials, including former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham and Duncan.

And a group of 10 retired top military officials endorsed Harris on Monday, calling Trump a “danger to our national security and democracy,” criticizing his previous comments on the military and deriding his “chaotic approach” in Afghanistan before the U.S. withdrawal.

Her campaign has used that support — or at least, opposition to Trump — to get under the former president’s skin. A new ad released in the run-up to Tuesday’s debate features clips of former Trump administration officials — including Pence, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley — talking about their concerns about a second Trump term or their decisions not to endorse him. The ad specifically aired in Palm Beach, the home of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

There have long been signs throughout the cycle that Trump’s GOP support could be softer than advertised. Nikki Haley consistently attracted upwards of a third of Republicans in various primaries weeks and months after she dropped out. In Maryland, Republican Senate candidate Larry Hogan even ran an ad hitting Trump on his involvement in Jan. 6.

Cheney is giving these kinds of Republicans a permission structure to back Harris, said pollster Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump outlet The Bulwark and CEO of Longwell Partners.

“They are people who want to vote for a different Republican, and so they’re always frustrated they don’t have a different Republican to vote for. And so they know they don’t want to vote for Trump, but the question is, can they affirmatively get there on Kamala Harris?” Longwell said. “And that’s where Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney are helpful, because they set the stakes.”

Still, Republicans working to oppose Trump acknowledge that Harris — who tacked to the left on several issues during her 2020 presidential bid — is a harder sell for many Republicans than Joe Biden was. But they say the positions she is taking on a number of economic issues and her backtracking from progressive policies is giving many on the right the comfort they need to consider voting for her.

“Positive messaging on Kamala, not just negative messaging on Trump, showing people how neoconservative she sounded in her acceptance speech, sharing her talking points about small business tax breaks and getting rid of red tape — you can’t argue with that,” said Emily Matthews, co-chair of the Haley Voters Working Group, which has met multiple times with the Harris campaign to talk about how to get Republicans’ support. “It’s on paper.”

Former President Donald Trump would not commit to vetoing a national abortion ban. Vice President Kamala Harris would not say which restrictions she would support on the procedure.

Tuesday night’s debate offered a sharp contrast between the two candidates and their approaches on abortion. But what both had in common — a fear of alienating their bases.

The exchange highlighted the tightrope both candidates feel they must walk — appearing moderate so as not to alienate middle-of-the-road voters who support abortion access with some restrictions, without saying anything that could cause their most ardent supporters’ enthusiasm to wane. It’s been a particular problem for Trump, who has angered anti-abortion-rights advocates on several occasions by suggesting that the federal government has no more role to play in legislating abortion.

Harris used her time to excoriate Trump for appointing the Supreme Court justices key to overturning Roe v. Wade. And she tried to undercut one of Trump’s most-used arguments — that ending Roe and returning it to the states is what most people wanted.

“You want to talk about, this is what people wanted?” Harris said. “A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. They don't want that.”

It was the starkest and clearest answer Harris has given on the implications of the fall of Roe and emblematic of the way her campaign has used the stories of women — including at the Democratic National Convention last month — to make that argument.

Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his support for his leave-abortion-to-the-states approach, which he said was only possible because of the “great courage” of the Supreme Court. But he wouldn’t weigh in on a veto of a national abortion ban — something Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has said that the former president would do — saying that he “didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness.”

“They can never get this approved so it doesn’t matter,” Trump said. “I’m not signing a ban and there’s no reason to sign a ban.”

The two also had a back and forth on abortions later in pregnancy, with Trump suggesting incorrectly that Harris favors allowing abortion in the “8th or 9th” month of pregnancy. The vice president, who declined to say what limits she would favor on abortion, supports restoring Roe, which would protect abortion access until fetal viability, which is around the 22nd week of pregnancy. States could still restrict abortion beyond that point, though not all do so.

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” Harris said. “That’s not happening, that’s insulting to the women of America.”

Harris also highlighted the ripple effects of the fall of Roe, nodding to an Alabama Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that said that frozen embryos are people, briefly halting some IVF services in the state. She said women were being denied such services because of “Donald Trump’s abortion bans.”

“Another lie, it’s another lie,” Trump said, calling himself “a leader on IVF.”

Trump has expressed support for IVF, and announced late last month that he would make IVF treatments free, paid for by the government or health insurance companies.

Donald Trump’s sons want to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project's troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president.

Trump’s eldest sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — have been teasing their plans to unveil a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial for weeks. But the launch has been marred in recent days by a series of apparent scams that have redirected fans to fake pages and compromised the social media accounts of other Trump relatives.

The incidents have begun to rattle some of Trump’s allies within the crypto world. They’re warning that his family should shelve a project that they say creates unnecessary political risks and reflects poorly on the industry.

“This is a huge mistake,” said Nic Carter, a Trump supporter who is a founding partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures. “It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.”

The drama illustrates the risks associated with Trump’s growing embrace of the crypto community, which he’s promised to give a sweeping set of supportive policies if elected. Government watchdogs have also warned the intertwining of politics, policy and the Trump family business poses new conflict of interest concerns as Democrats try to paint him as a “con artist” in the home stretch of the presidential campaign. It comes as major crypto firms face ongoing criticism that the market is rife with scams and consumer abuse.

While the details of the Trump brothers’ crypto project haven’t yet been announced, Trump began promoting World Liberty Financial’s forthcoming launch on social media last month after it opened an official channel on the messaging platform Telegram.

Shortly after, it appeared that fraudsters began to pounce. The X accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump were compromised late Tuesday, when allegedly unauthorized users posted links to a hoax website for the crypto project featuring fake details about it. World Liberty wrote on its official Telegram channel that the accounts were “hacked” and warned against visiting any links from the posts. Tens of thousands of Telegram users have been lured to a separate unofficial channel posing as World Liberty Financial.

A representative for World Liberty, Zak Folkman, said in an interview that the group is “building a world-class decentralized finance platform with the absolute best of the best in the industry.” He said the unauthorized X posts and the fake Telegram channel were reported to the two platforms. Folkman confirmed that Lara, who is Eric Trump’s wife, and Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter, are uninvolved in the project.

“We take security very seriously and put it first and foremost, above anything,” he said, adding that World Liberty works “with the top auditing firms and security specialists in the world.”

But experts say the way the crypto project was rolled out left it susceptible to scams.

“It’s a very typical playbook of smaller operators or more amateur operations in the crypto space to try to generate a lot of hype before revealing the details,” said Austin Campbell, an adjunct professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business who previously led the risk and portfolio management operation at the crypto firm Paxos. “That makes them susceptible to all sorts of nonsense.”

Official details about World Liberty remain scarce. The crypto news outlet CoinDesk reported this week that a white paper for the project describes “a borrowing and lending service strikingly similar to Dough Finance, a recently hacked blockchain app built by four people listed as World Liberty Financial team members.” The Trump brothers' venture is poised to launch a new crypto token, according to CoinDesk.

Folkman, the World Liberty representative, said the startup is creating a "protocol that gives power to the average person to be able to take control of all of the amazing opportunities decentralized finance offers." He declined to answer specific questions about the service.

The early signals haven’t reassured skeptics, including crypto advocates.

One crypto industry representative in Washington, granted anonymity because of sensitivities around criticizing Trump, described having “a laundry list of concerns." A big worry is that that it could reflect poorly on the industry as it pushes for policy changes that would help legitimize the sector.

“Maybe it doesn’t move the needle for most people, but if this thing is hacked or regular folks lose money on it or it opens up the door for the SEC to investigate the team, it only looks like it has downside risk,” Carter said. “It looks to have very little upside risk.”

Pop megastar Taylor Swift said she's supporting Kamala Harris for president this fall following Tuesday night's debate with Donald Trump.

"I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election," Swift wrote in a post to her Instagram account. "I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos."

The singer made her post alongside an image of her holding her cat, Benjamin Button, and signed her post “Childless Cat Lady.” That’s an apparent reference to Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance's derisive comments about the country being led by "a bunch of childless cat ladies." (Swift has three cats who are all named after movie or TV characters: Benjamin Button, Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey.)

Swift, arguably the largest celebrity on the planet, said “it’s much easier to vote early” and that she would share information on how to register and vote early on her accounts. She boasts an astounding social media reach with 283 million Instagram followers, and her post received more than 2.4 million likes within the first 30 minutes of it going up.

It’s not the first time Swift has waded into electoral politics. She endorsed President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and supported the Democratic challenger to Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s (R-Tenn.) successful 2018 Senate bid.

Her endorsement of Biden did not come until early October.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz hailed the endorsement in an interview on MSNBC following the debate.

“I'm grateful to Taylor Swift, and I say that as a cat owner,” the Minnesota governor said. “This will be the opportunity for Swifties. Get on over and give us a hand and get things going."

Taylor Swift's "The Man," a song about women facing double standards in their careers, played on the speakers after Harris gave a speech at a debate watch party — minutes after the singer's endorsement.

In her post, Swift referenced Trump’s recent use of AI imagery of her on his social media site Truth Social falsely suggesting she would support him.

The singer wrote it “really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation.” She said it convinced her to be “very transparent” about her voting plans.

The endorsement comes as Swift has drawn online criticism from liberals for her friendship with Brittany Mahomes, the wife of Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is a teammate of Swift’s boyfriend Travis Kelce.

Brittany Mahomes appeared to like an Instagram post from Trump last month, and last week, the former president praised her on Truth Social for defending him. Swift was photographed hugging Brittany Mahomes last weekend when the two were at the U.S. Open.

Trump’s campaign bashed the endorsement as “more evidence that the Democrat party has become the party of the wealthy elite.”

Kierra Frazier and Ally Mutnick contributed to this report. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday he disagrees with former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Rep. Liz Cheney on many topics, but not on their belief that Donald Trump should never become president again.

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," the Vermont senator said, "What I think Dick and Liz Cheney are saying is that in this existential moment in American history, it's not just issues. Cheney and I agree on nothing — no issues. But what we do believe in is that the United States should retain its democratic foundations."

Sanders added: "I applaud the Cheneys for their courage in defending democracy. Obviously, on all the issues we have very different points of view."

Last week, the Cheneys both said they would cross party lines to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris as president, rather than Trump.

“As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” Dick Cheney said in a statement Friday. Speaking Sunday on ABC's "This Week," former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) referred to Trump as "somebody who was willing to use violence in order to attempt to seize power."

Knowing that Sanders was set to appear after him on "Meet the Press," North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum suggested that host Kristen Welker ask Sanders about the endorsements, given that Dick Cheney in particular had long been the target of mockery and scorn from liberals. "Now, overnight, they're embracing him," said Burgum, a Republican who is backing Trump.

Welker said she would ask.

Trump mocked the Cheneys last week, writing on Truth Social: “Dick Cheney is an irrelevant RINO, along with his daughter, who lost by the largest margin in the History of Congressional Races!”

While officially listed as an independent when it comes to the Senate, Sanders remains perhaps the most progressive voice in that body. Speaking Sunday, Sanders said that while he has some specific policy differences with Harris, he does still consider the Democratic nominee to be progressive as well.

Sanders also told Welker that "maybe the most important issue" remains the need to reduce the influence the wealthiest Americans have on the government.

"Look, you have one vote. The average American has one vote," he said. "But billionaires could start a super PAC and put hundreds of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars into defeating the people they don't like and supporting the people they do like. That is not democracy. That is oligarchy."

A six-year federal investigation into Hunter Biden will culminate this week as the president’s son faces trial for a second time.

He was convicted this summer on gun charges. Now he faces allegations of criminal tax evasion — and a judge has excluded one of his key lines of defense.

During the trial in Los Angeles — where jury selection is scheduled to start on Thursday — prosecutors plan to tell a story about greed, decadence and entitlement. Biden’s lawyers, meanwhile, will argue it’s actually a tale of addiction and redemption.

The political stakes of the trial, expected to last about two weeks, have lessened now that Joe Biden is no longer running for reelection. But evidence in the case is expected to highlight his son’s foreign business dealings — an issue that became a centerpiece of Republican attacks on the Biden family.

The trial also will revisit the younger Biden’s past struggles with drug abuse. Prosecutors intend to argue that, while he was dodging his taxes, Biden was spending lavishly on drugs, strip clubs, sports cars and other trappings of a lifestyle filled with partying. Some of the details of his drug addiction emerged during the gun trial three months ago, and reliving them has been a source of pain to the president and the rest of the Biden family.

In the courtroom, Biden’s defense lawyers may face an uphill battle. The judge overseeing the trial, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, has issued a series of pretrial rulings unfavorable to the defense. Perhaps most critically, Biden wanted to tell jurors that, after he got sober, he belatedly paid all the taxes he owed. But Scarsi has blocked the defense team from making that argument.

The president said in June that he would not pardon his son or commute an eventual prison sentence. Biden is scheduled to be sentenced in November in the gun case, where federal sentencing guidelines recommend up to 21 months in prison. If he is convicted in the tax case, he could face up to 17 years in prison, according to the Justice Department.

Here’s how we got here and what to expect.

The allegations against the president’s son

Federal prosecutors led by special counsel David Weiss, who also brought the gun case, have charged Biden with three tax felonies and six tax misdemeanors. The charges include evading a tax assessment, filing a false tax return and failing to file and pay taxes.

In a 56-page indictment, prosecutors said that he intentionally avoided paying $1.4 million in taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019. During that time, prosecutors say, Biden earned more than $7 million, including for work with the controversial Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings Limited, a now-bankrupt Chinese energy company, and a Romanian oligarch facing bribery allegations.

Also during that time, Biden was grappling with addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine and grieving the 2015 death of his brother, Beau. In his memoir, Beautiful Things, Biden described partying with drug dealers and strippers at a series of Los Angeles hotels and Airbnbs in the spring and summer of 2018. But when he worked with an accountant to settle his tax affairs in 2020, he allegedly identified some of those hotel stays as business expenses — resulting in a tax write-off.

He also claimed that a $1,248 payment to fly a stripper from LA to New York was a business expense, as was a payment of $3,852 to rent a Lamborghini, according to prosecutors.

His lawyers have argued his addiction hamstrung his ability to manage his personal affairs, including his taxes. They wanted to introduce an expert witness to testify about the link between trauma and addiction. But prosecutors asked Scarsi to block that person from testifying, and the judge did so.

Prosecutors also retort that Biden’s addiction wasn’t so debilitating as to keep him from earning millions of dollars. And, they argue, if he was capable of making and spending all that money, he was also capable of paying taxes.

How investigators built their case

The federal probe of Biden stretches back to late 2018, when an IRS agent began investigating him for apparent financial crimes, according to congressional testimony.

As his father was preparing to challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 election, IRS and FBI agents drilled down on Biden’s finances. The probe, which had not yet become public, found a home base in the office of Weiss, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Delaware.

As the investigation proceeded in secret, Trump urged the Ukrainian government to open its own investigation of Biden, citing his presence on the board of Burisma, the scandal-dogged Ukrainian energy conglomerate. Trump’s pressure campaign, which included thinly veiled threats to withhold military aid if Ukraine didn’t publicly announce a probe, led to Trump’s first impeachment.

In December 2020, a few weeks after his father defeated Trump in the presidential election, the Biden investigation became public. Biden confirmed on Dec. 9, 2020, that the feds were investigating his tax affairs. But Weiss’ probe eventually expanded to include other matters, including Biden’s purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was frequently using crack cocaine.

Two and a half years later, prosecutors announced they had reached an agreement with Biden to resolve the allegations of tax and gun crimes: Biden would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and receive a deal related to the gun that was intended to ultimately result in charges being withdrawn. Biden would also get protection from future potential charges. But after a judge questioned its details at a hearing in July 2023, the plea deal fell apart.

Just a few weeks later, Attorney General Merrick Garland named Weiss a special counsel, empowering him to bring criminal cases anywhere in the country. Later that year, Weiss secured two indictments of Biden: one in Delaware for owning a gun as a drug user and lying about his drug use on a gun-purchase form; the other in California on the tax allegations.

The gun case went to trial in June. It showcased the destruction caused by Biden’s addiction, including with testimony from his ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle. His brother’s widow, Hallie Biden, also testified that he introduced her to crack cocaine and that she became addicted to the drug. First Lady Jill Biden and numerous other members of the president’s family attended much of the trial. A jury convicted him on all charges, and he is set to be sentenced on Nov. 13.

Key defenses taken off the table

In the tax case, Biden’s main lines of defense have been twofold: first, that he was debilitated by his addiction when he allegedly committed the tax crimes, and second, that after he got sober, he paid off his tax debt with penalties and interest.

Biden’s lawyers said in court filings that they wanted to cite the belated payment of his tax debt to undermine prosecutors’ argument that he willfully failed to pay. But Scarsi wasn’t convinced, and on Aug. 27 granted prosecutors’ motion to bar Biden from citing the payment.

“In tax cases, courts routinely exclude evidence that a defendant untimely filed tax returns or untimely paid outstanding tax debts,” he wrote.

That ruling wasn’t the Biden team’s first difficult episode with the judge, a Trump appointee and former patent lawyer. Earlier in the summer, they tried to have the case thrown out, citing Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling in the Florida-based prosecution of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith. Cannon ruled that Smith’s appointment as a special counsel was unconstitutional, and Biden’s legal team, helmed by Mark Geragos and Abbe Lowell, made a similar argument. In doing so, they wrote that Weiss waited until he became a special counsel to bring criminal charges against Biden.

But, without prompting from prosecutors, Scarsi threatened to sanction Biden’s lawyers for making false statements. The noted that Biden had faced criminal charges before Weiss was made special counsel — namely, in court documents filed in Delaware as part of the failed 2023 plea deal.

“This Court has little tolerance for lack of candor from counsel,” Scarsi wrote in a document ordering Biden’s lawyers to show why they shouldn’t be punished for lying.

In their response, Biden’s lawyers said that they “never tried to mislead the Court,” that their wording was inartful and that they should have said Weiss waited until he was made special counsel to bring “indictments,” rather than “charges.”

Scarsi replied that he doubted “the veracity of that explanation,” because changing the word “charges” to “indictments” wouldn’t have made sense. But, acknowledging that Geragos was new to the Biden case, he said he wouldn’t order sanctions.

Ultimately, Scarsi rejected the defense’s constitutional argument that the case should be tossed.

New allegations of influence peddling

In another unwelcome development for the president’s son, prosecutors revealed in pretrial skirmishes that they have evidence indicating that Biden agreed to lobby the U.S. government for Romanian oligarch Gabriel Popoviciu.

Biden’s team had moved to block the prosecutors from introducing evidence of alleged corruption, and prosecutors replied that they plan to call one of Biden’s former business associates as a witness. That person — unnamed in court papers — is expected to testify that, while Biden’s father was vice president, Popoviciu looked to hire Biden to get the U.S. government to investigate Romanian authorities who were investigating the Romanian. But Biden worried that lobbying would damage his father’s political career. So instead, prosecutors say, his associate signed a deal with Popoviciu to provide real estate management services — when, in fact, Popoviciu knew the associate would funnel money from that deal to Biden and expected Biden to lobby the U.S. government for him. That deal resulted in a $3.1 million payment to the associate, who passed on roughly a third of it to Biden, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors added that Biden also worked with CEFC China (a Chinese energy conglomerate) and Burisma. But, they emphasized, they are not charging him with illegal lobbying.

“Rather,” they wrote, “the evidence will show the defendant performed almost no work in exchange for the millions of dollars he received from these entities.”

The court filing about Popoviciu, made public less than three weeks after the president bowed out of the 2024 campaign, showed just how bruising the trial could have been for Biden’s reelection campaign. It was the first public statement from the Justice Department alleging that the younger Biden made money — around $1 million — from a client who was led to believe that the then-vice president’s son would work to shape U.S. government policy on his behalf.

Painful personal details

Beyond their focus on Biden’s finances, prosecutors also plan to highlight episodes that have been painful and embarrassing for the Biden family.

Lunden Roberts, an Arkansas woman who is the mother of one of Biden’s children, is under subpoena and is expected to testify next week, according to her lawyer. Biden initially disputed that he was the child’s father, and the president did not publicly acknowledge the grandchild until last year, when she was 4. Roberts sought child support in court, and those proceedings delved into how Biden managed his finances, including his tax affairs.

Hallie Biden, Beau’s widow, was also subpoenaed to testify and was granted immunity. Her sister, Elizabeth Secundy, has been subpoenaed and granted immunity as well. Prosecutors have not revealed any significant detail about the women’s anticipated testimony. But congressional Republicans have said they obtained financial documents showing Biden paid tens of thousands of dollars to both of them.

And a court filing on Aug. 29 indicated that Biden’s sexual history could also be a focus. The document listed names and entities that prosecutors and defense lawyers believe could come up in the trial so that the court stenographer could confirm their spellings. The list included a strip club, a members-only sex club, the sex club’s founder, and an entity called “Emerald Fantasy Girls.” It also named two lawyers who have helped Biden’s ex-wife navigate her divorce. One of those lawyers previously wrote that Biden’s profligate spending, including on prostitutes, drugs and alcohol, created financial hardship for the family.

Biden has said he got sober in the summer of 2019. He has remarried and has a young son, and he credits his sobriety to his wife and family.

“What I’ve been through — what I’ve done — is something I can never purge, never forget,” he wrote in his memoir. “But I’m learning to live in the moment without constantly feeling guilt or shame.”

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney said Wednesday that she will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for president because of the “danger” she believes former President Donald Trump poses.

Her remarks, during an appearance at Duke University, came after the Wyoming Republican briefly flirted with her own third-party bid for president. Once the No. 3 leader of the House Republican Conference, Cheney has long warned of the threat she says the former president poses to American democracy.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said to applause and a standing ovation from the audience.

The former Wyoming representative, who had not previously said how she planned to vote in November, said that voters in swing states, like North Carolina, who dislike Trump need to do more than just not vote for him — but actively cast their ballots for Harris.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize not only is what I’ve said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” she said.

Her announcement comes after more than 200 staffers for four Republican presidential nominees — former President George H.W. Bush, former President George W. Bush, former Arizona Sen. John McCain and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney — last week endorsed Harris for president.

Cheney, a fierce Trump critic, was ousted from her seat after she refused to temper her criticisms of Trump following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. She served as the vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee, which probed the attack.

The former president’s political operation was crucial to Cheney’s 2022 primary defeat. Her opponent ran with Trump’s support, was advised by those in his camp and was funded by his donors.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, criticized Cheney on Wednesday night during an event in Arizona, accusing her of “sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts and her ridiculous ideas.”

“Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney make very, very interesting partners,” he said. “They get rich when America's sons and daughters go off to die.”

In a statement, Harris’ campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, praised Cheney as a patriot and said the vice president is proud to have her vote.

In December, Cheney published a book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” which details how her former Republican colleagues, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, laid the groundwork for the events that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.