Politics

The Supreme Court on Monday seemed divided over whether a federal law that makes it a crime to encourage undocumented immigrants to stay in this country might be so broad it would jeopardize charitable groups that feed the hungry or a family’s plan to have a grandmother keep living nearby.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit found the decades-old law “overbroad and unconstitutional” because it potentially outlawed more free speech than needed to meet the law’s goals.

And during their nearly 1 1/2-hour hearing Monday, some justices had no trouble pinging Deputy Solicitor General Brian H. Fletcher, representing the Justice Department, with examples of who might fall on the wrong side of an immigration law that penalizes a person “who encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States.”

“I think we’re going to talk to the grandmother who lives with her family who’s illegal or who are noncitizens,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “The grandmother tells her son she’s worried about the burden she’s putting on the family, and the son says, ‘Abuelita, you are never a burden to us. If you want to live here — continue living here with us, your grandchildren love having you.’ Are you — can you prosecute this?”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wondered about charitable organizations that say there is a “threat of prosecution for them for providing food and shelter and aid and recommending people for scholarship and all the rest.” Kavanaugh, who has served meals to homeless people near the Supreme Court, added: “They seem to have a sincere concern about that and that it will deter their kind of everyday activities.”

Justice Elena Kagan also pressed Fletcher. “What happens to all the cases where it could be a lawyer, it could be a doctor, it could be a neighbor, it could be a friend, it could be a teacher, it could be anybody, says to a noncitizen, ‘I really think you should stay?’ What happens to that world of cases?”

Fletcher acknowledged there would be hard cases. But he said the 9th Circuit got it wrong by issuing a ruling on the case at hand — involving a man who defrauded the undocumented — and “giving the words ‘encourage’ and ‘induce’ their broadest possible meaning and sweeping in wide swaths of protected speech.”

“Our position here is that the statute need not and should not be read that way,” he added.

Instead, the words “encourage and induce” in the law should be read more like intentionally seeking to aid and abet a crime, Fletcher said.

The case the justices were considering provided Fletcher’s example. Helaman Hansen operated an organization called Americans Helping America Chamber of Commerce. Nearly 500 noncitizens who had overstayed their visas paid the organization between $550 and $10,000 on the false promise they could gain citizenship through adult adoption, which the law does not allow. The government charges that Hansen’s organization made more than $1.8 million from the scheme.

Hansen was found guilty in 2017 of mail fraud, wire fraud and two counts of encouraging or inducing unlawful noncitizens for private financial gain. The American Civil Liberties Union and a public defender represent him as he challenges those two convictions, saying the law violates the First Amendment.

If the court wants to make sure people aren’t wrongly prosecuted under the law, Fletcher said, justices should write in their opinion “that the statute has the limits that we say it has, in ways that we won’t be able to get around in the future.”

Some conservative justices said Hansen’s crimes were quite different from the examples of family members and well-meaning charities.

“It is a little awkward, tough, that this case comes up in a posture with Mr. Hansen, who I don’t think anybody could say he’s been chilled from speaking,” said Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. “I mean, he’s had no problem soliciting people here in this country and defrauding them to the tune of lots and lots of money … He has victimized these people, and it may be a poster child for a situation in which the underlying offense might be modest, but you might want to criminalize it because he’s taking advantage of very vulnerable people.”

Hansen’s attorney, Esha Bhandari, agreed Hansen victimized his clients, but said nothing about the case before the justices would disturb his fraud convictions and sentence of 20 years.

“But under the encouragement provision, the government did not have to prove that he lied to anyone, that he deceived anyone, that he engaged in any false speech,” she said. “All they had to show was that he encouraged or induced people.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett said that it was easy to come up with hypotheticals about how the law might inhibit speech but that there are few real-life examples.

“No one’s pointed out there are charitable organizations, to use Justice Kavanaugh’s hypothetical, that are not giving food and shelter and resources or that lawyers are afraid to give advice,” she said. “I mean, the statute’s been on the books for a long time. And … there’s an absence of prosecutions. There is also an absence of demonstrated chilling effect.”

Bhandari countered that the court has never required a demonstration that a law chilled speech to find it overbroad.

The Supreme Court took up a nearly identical case three years ago, also from the 9th Circuit. But the justices eventually decided the First Amendment question was not before them because it had not been raised by the parties in the case.

Monday’s case is United States v. Hansen.

ACCRA, Ghana — Vice President Harris began a week-long tour of Africa on Monday by announcing the United States plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the continent, but she found herself fighting a perception that Africa was simply the latest arena for America’s geopolitical game of chess with China and Russia.

Harris told reporters she had discussed that concern by some African leaders with Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo, assuring him that the Biden administration was sincere in its desire to stimulate economic development and bolster relations in Ghana — as well as with Tanzania and Zambia, where Harris travels next.

America’s interest in Ghana is not a case of global behemoths elbowing for position, she said. “The relationship between the United States and this continent and African leaders is an important one,” Harris said. “There’s a historical basis for this relationship — not to mention as we look forward, as all governments should, and recognize the unachieved as-of-yet opportunities that exist going forward.”

Still, the White House has made little secret of its concern that China is aggressively extending its military, economic and social influence throughout the globe, forcing the United States to respond. While numerous Biden officials are visiting Africa this year, the United States, in a sense, is playing catch-up, as Beijing has forged numerous connections in the continent in recent years, helping fund numerous roads, ports and other projects.

Harris is the highest-ranking Biden administration official to come to Africa so far, as the White House seeks to reset relations following the administration of former president Donald Trump, who never visited the continent and derided its nations with a vulgar epithet. Five Biden Cabinet secretaries have visited Africa, including Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

First lady Jill Biden crossed the Atlantic last month and President Biden has said he plans to come later this year. The United States also hosted an U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in December, where Harris met with several heads of state.

At that summit, Biden announced a $55 billion commitment to the continent over the next three years. He also announced his support for the African Union, which represents 55 states, to become a permanent member of the Group of 20, a long-sought prize on the continent.

On Monday, Harris announced that the administration plans to provide $139 million worth of bilateral assistance to Ghana in fiscal 2024, although that proposal needs the approval of Congress, which could be a tough ask given the parties’ sharp partisan divides over spending and foreign aid.

Separately, Harris said the administration would also seek more than $100 million in regional conflict prevention funds for Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Togo to help the nations address regional security, governance and development issues.

The vice president also announced U.S. support for programs intended to reduce child labor, improve weather forecasting, support local musicians and defend against disease outbreaks.

Harris called on foreign lenders to restructure Ghana’s debt, a far-reaching problem that has engulfed many countries throughout Africa. Both Ghana and Zambia are in the grips of a debt crisis, spurred in part by the soaring prices of food and other goods during the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. Treasury Department plans to dispatch a full-time adviser to Ghana to help its finance ministry develop a debt plan.

Akufo-Addo said his nation would need patience from lenders as it gets “back on track” with its debt repayment. He expressed gratitude for the U.S. investments, but emphasized that Ghana’s leaders do not see themselves as facing a choice between the U.S. and China.

“There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activity on the continent, but there is no such obsession here,” Akufo-Addo told reporters. “China is one of the many countries with whom Ghana is engaged. All the countries of the world are friends of Ghana and we have relationships of various intensity.”

The U.S.-Ghanaian connection, he said, “is a relationship that has its own dynamic. It is nothing to do with any other country.”

The Ghanaian president did express concern about the presence of troops in the region from Wagner, a Russian mercenary force. Wagner, which has also sent troops to fight against Ukraine, has begun operating in Mali, and African leaders worry it will soon send personnel to Burkina Faso, which borders Ghana.

The United States has also sent troops to Africa to help countries train their military forces.

That prompted Akkufo-Addo to express concern that the continent, repeating a role it has played for centuries, will begin to serve as a battleground for more powerful countries fighting for military and economic advantage.

“It raises the very real possibility of foreign influence in regional conflicts — and once again our continent is going to become the playground for bigger countries,” he said. “Because one group of people is coming, it’s not very difficult for another group of people to say, ‘Then we’ll come in.’ And before you know it, the issues and concern of us [not] keeping our country and continent free of great-power rivalry will be a reality.”

He added, “We want to be in a position to resolve our own security concerns ourselves, without the intervening of foreign troops.”

Harris said she chose Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia as destinations during her week-long trip because all three nations are striving to maintain democracy despite the economic turmoil that has gripped Africa in the aftermath of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. She sees her visits as an opportunity to continue the dialogues that she held with national leaders at the U.S.-Africa summit in Washington in December.

On Monday, Harris also visited Vibrate Space, a recording studio attached to a skateboard park, where she stressed the importance of the cultural bonds of music.

“For me to be able to come here during this trip on my first full day really is symbolic of the connection that we have as people and a nation,” she said. “The creative work that is happening on this continent, as represented by the work happening in Ghana, is extraordinary.”

Harris — accompanied by several artists and musicians, including Idris Elba and Sheryl Lee Ralph — lauded Ghana’s efforts to connect with members of the African diaspora, including a music festival that encouraged Black people from across the world to gather and celebrate on the continent of their origin.

Harris and Akkufo-Addo also discussed the intermittent conflicts in the northern part of Ghana and fears that cells of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda may be active there. “We’re spending a lot of sleepless nights trying to make sure we’re protected here,” Akkufo-Addo told the vice president before their bilateral meeting.

While Monday was largely policy-focused, the rest of the week may carry greater emotional resonance for the vice president. Harris on Tuesday will travel to Cape Coast Castle, one of dozens of large forts built along Africa’s Gold Coast that was a hub for the transatlantic slave trade.

Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton visited slave forts during their time in the White House, as did former president Barack Obama, the first Black commander in chief. Harris, the first woman to win a nationally-elected office in the United States, is of Jamaican and Indian descent.

Harris’s final stop this week will be in Lusaka, Zambia, where her maternal grandfather worked as a civil engineer and where she visited as a child.

For his part, Akufo-Addo tried to balance a message of welcome for U.S. investment and comity with an assertion that Ghana does not want to be bandied about by global powers.

“We always thought somehow or other we don’t feature too strongly in the area of private investment in America. More and more American companies are interested in Ghana, and we want that to be accepted,” he said during the news conference. “We’re looking forward to using this visit of yours as a springboard to renew these relationships and expand them.”

But later, during a toast to U.S. friendship and its historic vice president, he struck a more cautionary tone.

“Great powers of whatever ilk, even friendly ones, trampling on small nations is not something we welcome,” he said. “And in our modest methods, we will register our disapproval of it.”

Former president Donald Trump opened the first mega-rally of his 2024 campaign by playing a recording of the national anthem sung by inmates charged in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In the 90-minute remarks that followed on Saturday, Trump repeatedly emphasized — even more than in last year’s rallies for the midterms — his false insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. But he added a new twist: that his political opponents were now bent on rigging the next election against him through the prospect of criminal charges.

“This is their new form of trying to beat people at the polls,” Trump elaborated to reporters on his flight home from the rally, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. “This is worse than stuffing the ballot boxes, which they did.”

Saturday’s speech by the early polling leader for the Republican nomination shows how Trump is seeking to adapt the stolen election myth, continually absorbing new allegations when old ones are debunked or obsolete — from supposed foreign plots to tamper with voting machines to alleged manipulation of social media and now potential prosecution. The latest version also underscores Trump’s continued determination to elevate conspiracy theories with inflammatory rhetoric that has already inspired violence by his supporters, which he continues to downplay or defend.

“President Trump has always sounded the alarm on election interference, but what is happening with these legal witch hunts is the updated version of that in 2024,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. “It’s an ‘us vs. them’ moment that harks back to his core message in 2016: They’re coming after us, but Trump is the only person standing in the way.”

Trump himself leveled a similar argument from the podium on Saturday, declaring: “When they go after me, they’re going after you.”

Trump’s choice to center Jan. 6 in his first big rally drew rebukes across the political spectrum. “Look, when it comes to running for president or any other office, people don’t want you to re-litigate all your grievances in the past. They want to know what your vision for the future is,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said Monday. “I don’t think it’s a formula for success.”

Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said Trump had hit “new depths” with the fresh glorification of Jan. 6 rioters. “I don’t know how much more disrespectful the former president can be when it comes to the men and women in law enforcement who were attacked and some lost their lives because of this situation,” said Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat.

But public opinion surveys suggest many Republicans agree with Trump’s denial. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken last week found 80 percent of Republicans viewed the investigations into Trump as a “witch hunt” (though only 41% of all Americans took that position.) Earlier this month, a CNN poll found 63 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters still said the 2020 election was illegitimate, even as about half of those voters acknowledged there was no “solid evidence” for that belief, and they were basing it on “suspicion only.”

“They’re really trying to frame him as a criminal and I don’t believe he is,” Brian Hundley of San Antonio said at Saturday’s rally.

“They’re all a bunch of lies,” echoed 91-year-old Charles Tooker as his grandson pushed him into the rally in a wheelchair. Tooker predicted Trump would prevail with a nod of his MAGA hat.

“Even Moses had his sins,” said Laura Wright, a retired schoolteacher from Denton, Tex. “God forgives and so do I.”

Trump’s rally came in the same week that he called on his supporters to take to the streets to protest his being arrested by the Manhattan district attorney — something that did not occur — and warned on social media of “potential death & destruction” if he’s charged. He held the rally in Waco, Tex., during the 30th anniversary of a deadly federal raid there that fueled the growth of the anti-government militia movement, though aides provided other reasons for the site choice, and Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said it was his idea.

Trump has long sought to discredit elections before and after they happen. In 2016, he said the election would be rigged and that he would only accept the outcome if he won. Not all rallygoers were entirely comfortable with Trump’s dwelling on the 2020 election and use of threatening language.

“It was not the best thing to say,” Alexander Zieglgansberger, a student at nearby Baylor University, said of the “death & destruction” post. Standing in a long line for food at the rally, he pushed back on a friend’s suggestion that Jan. 6 was largely peaceful and tried to steer the conversation elsewhere. “This is a little too controversial for my comfort,” Zieglgansberger said.

Ahead of the event, the campaign circulated talking points attacking the prosecution as “election interference,” alongside attacking the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, for contributing to Sen. Raphael G. Warnock’s (D-Ga.) campaign and for being supported by funding from Democratic megadonor George Soros — and being described as “woke.”

“The new weapon being used by out of control, unhinged Democrats to cheat on [the] election is criminally investigating a candidate,” Trump said at the rally. “It’s a rigged system. Like we had a rigged election. We have a rigged system.”

Many Republicans have blamed Trump’s frequent fixation on the 2020 election for discouraging turnout among his own supporters and putting off moderates and swing voters in the 2022 midterms. Even some of the ex-president’s allies have publicly urged him to focus on attacking President Biden and outlining an agenda for his second term rather than on old grievances.

Yet Saturday’s Trump rally featured more emphasis on election conspiracies than his campaign stops last year. A common refrain in the midterm rallies was: “I ran twice, I won twice and did much better the second time”; on Saturday, he was more explicit, saying: “We won in 2016. We won by much more in 2020, but it was rigged.” Last year’s events often featured a montage of right-wing media clips suggesting the Capitol riot was a government setup that played as part of the hours of preprogramming before Trump’s speech; this time, Trump began his speech with a tribute to Jan. 6 defendants.

Images from a pro-Trump mob’s storming of the U.S. Capitol loomed over the audience as they stood for the “Justice for All” song, which mixes Trump’s recitation of the pledge with a rendition of the national anthem by prisoners facing charges in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack. “Our people love those people,” Trump declared when the song finished, making sure to note that it hit No. 1 on iTunes. Behind him, supporters held up signs distributed by the campaign that read “WITCH HUNT.”

In his speech, Trump sought to connect the Bragg investigation — which is believed to involve hush-money payments made to an adult-film actress before the 2016 election — to the long string of scandals that hounded his presidency: the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election; the first impeachment he faced over pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden; the second impeachment over inciting the insurrection at the Capitol; the House committee that formed to investigate the attack; the federal criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, and the parallel probe into the top-secret documents found at Mar-a-Lago (now both overseen by special counsel Jack Smith); a civil case against his company by the New York attorney general; and an investigation by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., into Trump’s pressure on state officials to overturn the election results there.

“For seven years, you and I have been taking on the corrupt, rotten and sinister forces trying to destroy America,” Trump said at Saturday’s rally. “They’re not going to do it. But they do get closer and closer with rigged elections.”

While Trump is trying to look forward with attacking the Bragg prosecution as election interference, he did not completely forgo glances back to 2020 either. Throughout Saturday’s speech, he criticized the Supreme Court for not overturning the results, falsely claimed that ballot-stuffing had been caught on tape, praised people detained on Jan. 6-related charges and promoted Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s airing of Capitol surveillance footage purporting to downplay the day’s violence.

“Prosecutorial misconduct is their new tool and they are willing to use it at levels never seen before in our country,” Trump said. “We must stop them and we must not allow them to go through another election where they have yet another tool in their tool kit.”

While much of the speech focused on Trump’s legal troubles and rivalry with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), some of his biggest applause came when he turned to policy issues that many Republicans are focused on, such as classroom instruction on gender and diversity. Trump closed with repeating his promise, first offered at this month’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, to use his second term for “retribution.”

“When this election is over, I will be the president of the United States,” he added on Saturday. “You will be vindicated and proud. And the thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited, and totally disgraced.”

Knowles reported from Waco, Tex. Liz Goodwin in Washington and Jack Douglas in Waco contributed to this report.

It’s one of the more jarring charts you’re likely to see this week: A new poll released by the Wall Street Journal shows a precipitous decline in Americans’ views of certain values, including patriotism.

While 70 percent of Americans in 1998 said patriotism was “very important” to them, that number dropped to 60 percent in 2019 and to just 38 percent today — about half of where it was a quarter-century ago. We’ve also seen sharp drops on views about religion, having children and community involvement.

A couple thoughts. One is that the chart is a little misleading, even as these values are rather evidently at a low point. And two is that the biggest drop — on patriotism — is clearly a byproduct of polarization. That’s for a host of reasons, including some that are especially relevant now as former president Donald Trump pitches the Jan. 6 insurrection as if it were an event to be proud of.

The Journal’s write-up features only polls from those three years — 1998, 2019 and 2023. But when the newspaper has highlighted this data in the past, it has mentioned another poll, asking the same question, in 1976 and 1977.

The results then? Not too far afield from today’s. At the time, just 43 percent said patriotism was “very important” to them.

The Vietnam War probably colored those numbers, as presumably did fallout from the Watergate scandal and the high inflation of the time. (For example, in 1976, Lt. William Calley Jr. was still appealing his highly publicized conviction in the Vietnam War’s My Lai Massacre; many Americans had soured on their government after the pardon of former president Richard M. Nixon in 1974; and people still remembered the severe gas shortages of the early-1970s, which had made it hard to fill the tanks of their quintessentially huge American cars.)

That history reinforces the idea that this dip isn’t simply a matter of Americans always having been quite patriotic until just now. It’s difficult to know for sure what people have in mind when they answer such a question — and these surveys don’t define or invite people to define patriotism for themselves — but the evidence suggests that answers tend to be responsive to real-world events. And the contrast between 1998 and today is likely more stark because the late-1990s were boom times; in fact, rarely have Americans been as happy with the state of affairs as they were back then.

But to the extent that there has been a decline in “patriotism,” that value, like so much else, has fallen victim to polarization.

The new Wall Street Journal poll shows 59 percent of Republicans saying that “patriotism” is very important to them, compared to just 23 percent of Democrats. You might notice more than a few conservatives highlighting that disparity.

It wasn’t always this way. The Pew Research Center has asked a similar question over the decades, querying people on whether they would describe themselves as “very patriotic.” And for many years, there was relatively little partisan difference. Democrats were generally about 10 to 15 points less likely to describe themselves that way, but it was nothing like the 36-point gap of today.

The gap began to yawn 20 years ago, with the start of the Iraq War. Even before the war’s launch, its GOP advocates began questioning the patriotism of Democratic critics. Soon, opposing the war was pitched as tantamount to opposing the troops, or at least not supporting them — with obvious parallels to the “love it or leave it” slogan of the Vietnam era. Democrats’ patriotic feelings initially stayed about the same, while the GOP’s increased even beyond post-9/11 levels. But soon we saw the patriotic feelings fall away on the left.

Gallup data shows patriotic feelings were somewhat steady after that, until we arrived at the biggest gap in recent history: the Trump years. Again, there was a rhetorical premium on patriotism on one side, while the other side grew disillusioned with the state of affairs.

The effect of that appears to linger. Trump is out of office, but views of patriotism continue to be colored by his four years. Trump’s nationalistic “America First” mantra took hold on his side of the aisle, but his vision alienated a clear majority of Americans.

Perhaps most tellingly, it’s not just Democrats who feel less patriotic; the numbers among independents have declined right alongside them and aren’t that much higher. That’s true across the Pew data, the Gallup data and the Wall Street Journal data. The latter shows just 29 percent of independents saying patriotism is “very important” to them, compared to 23 percent of Democrats.

It’s unlikely we’ll see everyone come together in patriotic unity anytime soon. That’s because Trump has begun more outwardly playing up the Jan. 6 riot as something akin to a patriotic act. There’s a receptive audience there, with a poll last year showing that nearly half of Republicans regarded the events at the Capitol that day as “patriotism” and 56 percent describing them as “defending freedom.” (Just 21 percent labeled it an insurrection.) Another poll showed 61 percent regarded it as a “legitimate protest,” with views clearly trending in a more positive light.

We’ve seen before how people can sour on the concept of patriotism when they intuit that it’s being wielded in a jingoistic manner. Throw on top of that the economic concerns and our growing lack of faith in institutions, and these numbers probably shouldn’t be too surprising.

It is fair to assume that some significant part of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s high-profile, combative policy moves over the past two years have been undertaken with an eye toward the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Some part, certainly, is a reflection of his political views. But the guy who won the Republican gubernatorial primary in his state in 2018 by drawing over-the-top comparisons between himself and Donald Trump might be assumed to also be thinking about the political utility of his efforts.

There’s just one catch: New polling suggests that those policies get mixed reviews from Republicans, including Republicans who support DeSantis. What’s more, for a candidate whose central value proposition to primary voters might be that he is more electable in a general election, his policies get broadly negative views from Americans overall.

YouGov recently conducted a national poll for Yahoo News looking at a number of DeSantis’s most prominent policies and proposals.

Before asking about each idea, the pollsters asked respondents whether they might vote for DeSantis or Donald Trump in 2024. Overall, respondents were slightly more open to supporting DeSantis than Trump, though, among Republicans, the figures were similar.

Then the pollsters presented eight different proposals without mentioning DeSantis. For seven of the eight, more Americans said they opposed the ideas than said they supported them. The only exception was a proposal to ban transgender women from playing on women’s or girls’ sports teams at public schools.

Republicans only supported six of the ideas on net, the exceptions being allowing concealed carrying of firearms without a permit and allowing political appointees to fire tenured university staff. Even those who indicated that they planned to vote in the Republican primary for DeSantis disagreed with those policies. A proposal to mandate screening of books in school libraries was viewed about evenly by DeSantis backers.

Interestingly, Trump primary supporters were more enthusiastic than DeSantis supporters on four of the policies — including the one about firing tenured staff. Of course, we’re talking about small slices of the electorate here, so the margins of error are wide. It’s also worth noting that part of DeSantis’s presumed intent here is to peel away Trump supporters.

After asking about this battery of proposals, the pollsters did something very useful: They again asked whether respondents would be willing to back DeSantis.

This is how polling works in campaigns. The pollsters measure initial support, present rhetoric for or against a candidate and then measure support again. The goal is to get a sense of how much particular arguments move support for a candidate.

In this case, there was some movement. Unfortunately for the Florida governor, it was among his supporters — away from him.

Respondents were given several options when asked if they would vote for DeSantis in a hypothetical general election contest including if they’d definitely vote for him, if they might vote for him or if they would definitely not vote for him. Among most groups, there wasn’t much change in the percentage of who said they would definitely vote for him and only a small shift away when the “might vote for” group was added in. Among DeSantis supporters, there was a big chunk of movement from “will vote” (down 11 points) to “might vote” (up 8 points).

It’s somewhat surprising that his overall support didn’t change after hearing the battery of proposals. It suggests, perhaps, that such positions are baked into existing views of DeSantis. In other words, the idea that his views would damage him in the general election might already be reflected in his poll numbers.

But the effect on those who planned to vote for him is remarkable. Whatever DeSantis’s motivations for his proposals, it’s safe to assume that his goal was not to have the enthusiasm of his supporters drop after hearing about them.

Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.), who represents the Nashville district where the Covenant School is located, said Monday in a statement that he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting that left six people dead, including three children.

Gun-control advocates and Democrats highlighted another post from Ogles — a 2021 Christmas photo of his family posing with firearms.

After news of the Nashville shooting broke, Ogles said in a statement that he and his family “are devastated by the tragedy that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville this morning.”

“We are sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost,” he said. “As a father of three, I am utterly heartbroken by this senseless act of violence. I am closely monitoring the situation and working with local officials.”

The 2021 photo, which Ogles shared on Facebook, showed him, his wife and two of his three children holding weapons and smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Ogles wrote, adding a line that is often — and dubiously — credited to George Washington: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”

Ogles is a strong proponent of the Second Amendment and gun ownership. On his campaign website, he said: “Disarming the people is the most effective way to enslave them, and we must remain vigilant when anyone seeks to erode our civil liberties. The rights of the people to keep and bear arms, protect themselves and their families, and prevent tyrannical rule is a fundamental liberty of our constitutional republic.”

On Monday, Ogles’s critics shared the congressman’s statement about the shooting along with the Christmas photo.

“How much more bloodshed will it take?” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.) wrote in a tweet featuring Ogles’s photo. “It’s. The. Guns.”

Fred Guttenberg, who advocates for gun control after his 14-year-daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Parkland school shooting in 2018, said the tragedy “is listening to Tennessee politicians who refuse to call it a shooting but who engaged in behavior that caused this to be more likely when they glorify guns.”

Ogles, a freshman congressman, represents Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, which includes the school. On Monday, a 28-year-old armed with two rifles and a handgun killed at least three children and three adults at the private grade school, where the shooter had been a student, authorities said. The shooter is also dead after being “engaged” by police.

Ogles’s office had no immediate comment to the criticism on Monday.

Three children who woke up in their beds on Monday morning, who had some breakfast and maybe fussed with their parents over what they’d have for lunch or what they would do after school — three kids whose futures their parents had envisioned with hope or dread hundreds of times — were shot and killed at the Covenant School in Nashville.

In 2020, for the first time, more children in the United States died from firearms than any other cause. This is in part because the number of children dying in car accidents has decreased, thanks to decades of focus on keeping children safe and on new regulations aimed at ensuring that vehicular crashes are less dangerous. It is also in part because more children are being shot to death each year, like those three on Monday in Tennessee.

Over the past four decades, the number of children in the United States who are dying has fallen. That’s largely because the number of deaths from accidents has declined.

In 1981, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that nearly 16,000 Americans ages 1 to 18 died in accidents. About 9,000 of those — more than half — were car accidents. The number of young Americans who died in accidents related to firearms was much smaller, a bit over 500.

Since that time, both numbers have dropped significantly. In 2020, the most recent year for which these data are available, fewer than 3,000 children died in car accidents and only a bit over 100 died because of firearm-related accidents. Both figures were up over 2019, but the long-term trend has been positive.

In both cases, of course, changes in public understanding, better manufacturing and laws have made a difference: Mandated car seats and awareness about proper firearm storage. More information about where children should sit in cars. Legislation covering trigger locks. More kids kept alive as a result.

But deaths from accidents are only a small portion of firearm deaths in this age group. Most of the deaths from firearms for those ages 1 to 18 are homicides, with about a third being suicide. In 2020 in particular and in recent years more generally, the number of firearm homicides within this age range spiked.

That’s the reason that gun deaths passed deaths from automobile accidents in 2020: more kids being slain.

But this is not a statistical fluke. In other peer countries, firearm deaths aren’t even in the running as a leading cause of death. Analysis from KFF shows that firearms are only the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, behind car accidents, cancer, congenital disease and other types of accidents. In every other comparable country KFF considered, firearms didn’t rank in the top five.

If we consider firearm deaths as a function of population, the United States’ status as an outlier becomes obvious. In peer countries, the rate of firearm deaths each year is 0.3 per 100,000 children. In the United States, it’s more than 18 times as high.

As you might expect, more of these deaths occur among older children. From 2017 to 2020, there were still more than three times as many deaths from car accidents among those ages 1 to 10 as there were deaths from guns. But there were more than 250 deaths in that age group in 2020 alone, more than 1½ times the combined number of firearm deaths for those ages 1 to 19 that same year in peer countries.

I have two children under the age of 10. This dry consideration of the data is how I channel my fear and heartbreak at the deaths of other young kids. It’s how I deal with the pang of guilt I get from my joy at welcoming them home Monday afternoon.

In situations like this, I remember an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book “Between the World and Me,” a book dedicated to his own son. In it, he describes the death of a friend at the hands of police through the lens of being a parent.

“Think of all the love poured into him,” Coates wrote, delineating specific ways in which parents invest in and show their love for their children: music lessons, wear on family cars, birthday parties and kids’ books. Then, he adds: “And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.”

Three times on Monday alone.

As Donald Trump seeks to mobilize his base against a potential indictment, a big question is: Just how big is Trump’s true-believer base? How many people are willing to stand by Trump no matter what?

This matters both when it comes to any backlash against an indictment — around which Trump has increasingly alluded to the prospect of violence — and for Trump’s 2024 presidential prospects.

The answer: Die-hard support remains substantial. But the number has clearly shrunk. And it’s apparently not a majority of the Republican Party.

This is a somewhat subjective exercise, but there are a number of measures we can isolate.

One of the best ways to look at the question is to focus on how many Republicans view Trump not just favorably but “very” or “strongly” favorably.

And by this measure, Trump’s support has declined significantly since his 2020 defeat. While Fox News polling in October 2020 showed that 7 in 10 Republicans had a “strongly” favorable opinion of him, by December 2022, that 69 percent had dropped to 43 percent.

Unfavorable views of Trump have increased from around 1 in 10 Republicans to around 2 in 10 over that span, but nearly as significant is the movement from “strongly” favorable to merely “somewhat” favorable.

And the movement has been steady.

While few pollsters have regularly broken down perceptions of Trump in this way, data from those who have done so echoes Fox’s data.

An AP-NORC poll from January showed just 14 percent of Americans overall viewed Trump “very favorably.” That was Trump’s lowest number on record — and it was half what it was in 2019.

Similarly, the Pew Research Center has employed something it calls a “feeling thermometer” on Trump — basically asking people to assign a number to how they view the former president. The percentage of Republican-leaning voters who gave him a “very warm” number (between 76 and 100) was 41 percent. That was his lowest mark since the 2016 campaign, and it was down from 61 percent in April 2020.

Another telling measure is how many Republicans view themselves as Trump-first rather than party-first. NBC News has asked this question frequently, gauging whether GOP-leaning voters view themselves more as supporters of Trump or supporters of the party.

NBC’s most recent poll, in January, showed 33 percent viewed themselves as Trump-first. That’s compared to a majority who often said so while he was in office.

Related to the above is the percentage to profess to be 2024 dead-enders — that is, those who would want Trump to run as an independent if he was denied the GOP nomination. This is an instructive measure, because it represents a scenario that would in all likelihood cost the GOP the presidency (whether its advocates realize that or not). It would effectively be a protest vote.

In a Monmouth University poll last month, 27 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they would want Trump to run as an independent (vs. 67 percent who wouldn’t). In another poll, 28 percent said they would actually vote for Trump in that scenario, even if Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the GOP nominee.

Which brings us to the possible indictment.

Marist came out with a new poll Monday that also sheds some light. What’s perhaps most interesting about it is that it shows a majority of Republicans acknowledging that Trump has done something unethical related to the various investigations of him.

The percentage who think he’s done “nothing wrong,” by contrast: 45 percent.

So 45 percent say he’s done nothing wrong, 41 to 43 percent have a strongly favorable opinion of him, 33 percent view themselves as Trump-first rather than party-first, and nearly 3 in 10 at least profess a willingness to back him as an independent.

These are all different measures suggesting varying degrees of true devotion, but none are approaching a majority right now. And most used to be majority views in the GOP.

That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a rallying effect among GOP-leaning voters if Trump is indicted; Trump retains substantial goodwill among Republicans, and perhaps enough Republicans will buy into his claims of persecution that it will resolidify his base. In addition, we’re still talking about significant numbers — even in their depressed state — that could just about be enough to deliver him the nomination again, or cause major problems if we see the unrest Trump is clearly toying with.

But Trump has also been harping on these themes for a long time, and he’s continued to see his base erode despite that.

One of the remarkable aspects of the lengthy investigation conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III from 2017 to 2019 is that it changed basically no one’s mind.

At the edges, yes, the details uncovered by Mueller and his investigators fleshed out our understanding of how Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and how Donald Trump’s campaign welcomed that interference. Mueller’s final report documented the scale of both of those efforts and articulated areas where questions still loomed. And, after the report came out, Americans generally viewed the whole thing precisely as they did at the outset.

This wasn’t an accident. Trump was calling the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” before it existed. He worked furiously as news trickled out to cast the whole thing as a partisan attack on his still-young presidency, and that narrative stuck. In fact, it became a defining theme for Trump: they — the “deep state,” liberals, elites, the lot — were out to get him and would do anything to take him down. Never mind that there were real legal questions at play and never mind that Trump’s arguments were often debunked or obviously false from the outset. This frame that Trump was unfairly targeted was a get-out-of-jail-free card for the former president, perhaps literally.

With that in mind, new polling by Marist conducted for NPR and PBS NewsHour should not be a surprise. Asked generally about investigations Trump is currently facing, 4 in 5 Republicans dismissed them as a “witch hunt.”

Again, this is in reference to “investigations.” Not simply the possibility that a grand jury in Manhattan will indict Trump on felony charges related to allegedly cooking the books at the Trump Organization to hide an affair with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. This is a blanket question that includes his efforts to undercut the 2020 election results in Georgia and his multipronged effort to reject his national loss that year, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

All of that, it seems, is just authorities out to get Trump.

Mind you, it’s not that Republicans don’t think Trump did anything wrong. It’s not entirely that they excuse his actions, since nearly half told Marist’s pollsters that they think Trump did something unethical. They just say they don’t think he broke the law, a finely sliced hair that allows them to both dismiss their opponents as biased and to recognize the obvious reality that Trump’s behavior was abnormal, at best.

This, too, is not a new divide.

Pollsters from YouGov, doing research for the Economist, asked people specifically about the situation reportedly under consideration in Manhattan. Asked if it was a crime to fail to report spending aimed at covering up negative information before an election, most people, including most Republicans, said it was. (As, in fact, it is.)

Republicans, though, were much less likely to say this was a crime. In fact, that’s a big change from earlier this month, when three-quarters of Republicans said such actions were criminal. Over the span of a week, the percentage of Republicans saying that unreported payments were a crime dropped from 76 percent to 62 percent. Some of that is statistical noise, but much of it is unquestionably an increase in awareness about the legal threat Trump faces.

Then YouGov simply asked if Trump should face criminal charges for making such a payment. More than 6 in 10 Republicans said he should not.

In other words, there were respondents who both believed that such a coverup is criminal and that Trump shouldn’t be charged for the coverup. This may be a function of the bank-shot nature of the potential charges in Manhattan, which reportedly focus on the Trump Organization’s documentation of the payment. It may also just be a function of Trump’s Republican base having spent years viewing his actions as unworthy of accountability.

The term “witch hunt,” of course, is meant to suggest a delusional, hyperactive attempt to target obviously innocent individuals. Most Republicans don’t even think that Trump is entirely innocent, according to the Marist poll, and the various “witch hunts” he has alleged in the past have resulted in a lot of different criminal indictments.

But that branding may have been the most effective in Trump’s long marketing career. A huge slice of the country stands ready to give him a pass against these purported “witch hunts” — and even to rally to his side in the face of them.

Yet again.

Donald Trump walked down the steps from his private jet and onto the stage at his rally in Waco, Tex., on Saturday, the sound system blaring Lee Greenwood’s treacly jingle, “God Bless the U.S.A.” The crowd, some of whom had been waiting hours to see the former president, cheered enthusiastically.

Before Trump began to speak, however, there was one other bit of patriotic business at hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” an announcer told the MAGA-bedecked assembly, “please rise and place your hand over your heart for” — and here’s where you expect the disembodied voice to say “the Pledge of Allegiance,” but that is not what he said — “the number one song on iTunes, Amazon and the Billboard charts: ‘Justice for All,’ featuring President Donald J. Trump and the J6 choir!”

One Billboard chart, actually, but that’s not the point. The point is first that Trump turned the pledge — which, in “Justice for All,” he intones over voices singing the national anthem — into a salable commodity. Second, and more importantly, this particular presentation of the pledge is about valorizing and celebrating the violent actors who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — an effort focused on overturning the results of the 2020 election and helping Trump retain power. The voices singing the anthem purportedly belong to people jailed for their roles in the riot that day.

As Trump stood on that stage in Waco, hand over his heart, large screens showed the video created to accompany the song. At first, the video is standard D.C. monuments and waving flags, though with a healthy dose of Trump. But then, halfway through, it shifts. Now, the imagery is of the Capitol on that grim day, but not of rioters pushing back law enforcement and beating police. Instead, the imagery is of police using tear gas and pushing back the rioters. It’s a clumsy inversion of the day’s narrative, one befitting an attempt to turn the rioters into the day’s victims.

That effort isn’t new for Trump or his allies such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). From the first days after the riot, there’s been an effort to depict the arrests of those who participated as politically motivated, as an attempt by an overbearing government to mistreat and exact revenge on political opponents.

This is a useful narrative for a number of people on the fringe right. For Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, the argument helps erode viewer confidence in anyone not named Tucker Carlson. For Trump, the argument is more directly self-serving: If government investigators are in the habit of punishing right-wing actors because they are right wing, then clearly that’s what all of these investigations of Trump are about, too.

Once Trump started speaking, that was his central theme. He spent as much time as he could railing against the possibility he might get indicted by the federal government or local prosecutors like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “The Biden regime’s weaponization of law enforcement against their political opponents is something straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show,” he said at one point. “From the beginning it’s been one witch hunt and phony investigation after another.” His campaign printed and distributed signs that read “WITCH HUNT.”

“Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” he said at another point. This isn’t subtle, starting a rally by intertwining sympathy for people who’d tried to violently attack government leaders with patriotic verbiage and then castigating government leaders anew. But relative to the prior few days, it was fairly understated.

Last week, Trump disparaged the possibility of an indictment from Bragg’s office as leading to “potential death & destruction.” He insisted that “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL,” obviously suggesting that the opposite is warranted. On Friday, Bragg’s office received an envelope including white powder — which NBC News reported, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, was accompanied by a message reading, “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

We’ve seen this pattern before, and not just on Jan. 6. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s Florida home, for documents with classification markings last year, Trump pilloried the bureau. A few days later, a Trump supporter showed up at a field office near Cincinnati with a rifle. That man, Ricky Shiffer, was shot to death by law enforcement.

Also on Friday, Greene — who spoke before Trump at the rally — led other legislators in a tour of the D.C. jail where prisoners awaiting trial for alleged Capitol riot crimes are being held. Greene’s framing has long been that the conditions in the jail are dire, and intentionally so; that the Capitol riot defendants are being mistreated because of their alleged crimes. Others (including people who joined her Friday) have responded by noting that Greene is taking a valid complaint — that jails and prisons are often unacceptably grim — and overlaying politics.

But, again, the message: The fringe right will defend you and protect you if you engage in pro-Trump violence. Trump has pledged to pardon those convicted or accused of Jan. 6-related crimes if he retakes office. Why wouldn’t a person who engaged in other threats against Trump’s opponents assume they’d earn the same response? (Should someone think so, they might want to remember that a president can pardon only federal crimes.)

Thirty years before Trump’s rally this weekend, Waco was in the news for another reason. A federal law enforcement effort to arrest a religious leader at a compound near the city had gone bad, leading to multiple deaths and a weeks-long standoff. The raid on the Branch Davidian compound became a symbol of government overreach by the fringe right, inspiring, among other things, the April 19, 1995, bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

This was the nexus on Saturday. Trump hinting unsubtly that an indictment would not be met with a peaceful response. Trump insisting that “demonic forces” were afoot in the nation, telling his amassed supporters that the “deep state” — government agencies and officials — needed to be destroyed. Celebrating people who’d attacked the Capitol on his behalf in song from a location associated with anti-government violence by the fringe right.

As was the case before Jan. 6, Trump is putting all of the elements into place and hoping something sparks.