Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Susie Wiles Acknowledges Trump’s ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions - The New York Times
Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions
"In interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, called JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” and said Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files.
President Trump’s chief of staff said she tried to get him to end his “score settling” against political enemies after 90 days in office, but acknowledged that the administration’s still ongoing push for prosecutions has been fueled in part by the president’s desire for retribution.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.
Ms. Wiles described her own reservations about certain policies in real time to Mr. Whipple, author of a well-regarded book on White House chiefs of staff, even as debates raged inside the administration. She said she urged Mr. Trump not to pardon the most violent rioters from Jan. 6, 2021, which he did anyway. She unsuccessfully tried to get him to delay his major tariffs because of a “huge disagreement” among his advisers. And she said the administration needed to “look harder” at deportations to prevent mistakes.
But she did not complain about being overruled and at various points said she “got on board” with the eventual decisions. “There have been a couple of times where I’ve been outvoted,” she said. “And if there’s a tie, he wins.”
The off-script comments felt reminiscent of a similar episode in President Ronald Reagan’s first term when his budget director, David A. Stockman, likewise gave a series of interviews to what was then called The Atlantic Monthly with candid observations that caused a huge stir.
While Mr. Stockman kept his interviews secret from the White House (and nearly got fired), the broader Trump team cooperated with Vanity Fair. Mr. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave interviews and along with top aides like Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt posed for glamour photographs by Christopher Anderson.
Ms. Wiles, a low-key Florida political strategist who ran Mr. Trump’s successful comeback campaign last year, has been the president’s most important aide this term, credited with running a more disciplined operation than he had in his chaotic first term. He has embraced her so much that he referred to her during a rally last week as “Susie Trump.”
But the White House under Ms. Wiles is chaotic too, just in a different way. Unlike John F. Kelly, the president’s longest serving chief of staff in his first term, who saw his job as trying to prevent what he considered radical, unwise or even illegal actions, Ms. Wiles does not view her role as constraining Mr. Trump. Instead, she makes clear that her mission is to facilitate his desires even if she sometimes thinks he is going too far.
She attributes her ability to work for Mr. Trump to growing up with an alcoholic father, the sportscaster Pat Summerall. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink,” she said. “And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” While Mr. Trump does not drink, she said he has “an alcoholic’s personality” and operates with “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
In a sign of how much her job revolves around the president’s big-personality, stream-of-consciousness public comments, she keeps a free-standing video monitor next to the fireplace in her West Wing office with a live feed of Mr. Trump’s social media posts.
The president’s fixation on payback against his enemies offers a case study. Ms. Wiles confided in Mr. Whipple in March that she had told Mr. Trump that his presidency was not supposed to be a retribution tour.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said then. When that did not happen by August, she told Mr. Whipple that “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour” but said that he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
Among the targets, she acknowledged, was Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who won a civil court verdict against Mr. Trump for business fraud with a penalty of nearly $500 million. “Well, that might be the one retribution,” Ms. Wiles said. Did she advise Mr. Trump to back off? “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money.” (An appeals court later threw out the penalty as excessive but left the verdict intact.)
As for Mr. James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director who was fired by Mr. Trump while leading an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ms. Wiles said, “I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” She added: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
The Trump administration has brought indictments against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, but both were dismissed by a federal judge. The administration has vowed to keep trying, but two grand juries have since refused to re-indict Ms. James and another judge issued a ruling that will make it harder to pursue Mr. Comey.
Reached for comment on Monday evening, Ms. Wiles played down Mr. Trump’s personal motivations in the actions against his enemies. “It’s not that he thinks they wronged him, although they did,” she told The New York Times. “He thinks that they wronged, and they should not be able to do to somebody else what they did to him and the way that you could cure that, at least potentially, is to expose what was done.”
She added that she wanted to get that over with early in the term. “You don’t want it to get in the way of the real agenda,” she said. “And so, loosely, let’s get it all going within 90 days. Which we did. Now, the justice system works slowly and so even if it was initiated in 90 days, it could be a long time before it’s done.”
In the interviews published by Vanity Fair, Ms. Wiles faulted Ms. Bondi, one of her closest friends in the administration, for her early handling of the Epstein files, an issue that has been a cause célèbre for Mr. Trump’s right-wing base.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Ms. Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.” Mr. Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself was “a conspiracy theorist,” she said.
Ms. Wiles said she has read the Epstein documents and acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s name is in them. “We know he’s in the file,” she said. “And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
But neither, apparently, is Mr. Clinton. Asked about Mr. Trump’s claims going back years that Mr. Clinton had visited the Epstein island, Ms. Wiles said, “There is no evidence.” Asked if there was anything incriminating about Mr. Clinton in the files, as Mr. Trump has suggested, she said, “The president was wrong about that.”
She added that it was Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s idea to go interview Mr. Epstein’s convicted associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison and that the president did not know that she would be transferred to a minimum-security prison camp. “The president was ticked,” she said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
Ms. Wiles described frustration with Mr. Musk, the billionaire who early in the year was empowered to eviscerate federal agencies and fire employees en masse with almost no process. “He’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.” When he shared a post saying that Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions, their public sector workers did, Ms. Wiles said, “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” Asked what she meant, she said, “he’s an avowed ketamine” user.
Mr. Musk has acknowledged trying ketamine “a few years ago,” but denied reports of more recent use. In the interview with The Times on Monday, Ms. Wiles took issue with the quote attributed to her about his drug use. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But Mr. Whipple played a tape for The Times in which she could be heard saying it.
Mr. Musk’s demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development including its lifesaving aid to impoverished people around the globe upset Ms. Wiles. “I was initially aghast,” she told Mr. Whipple. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to U.S.A.I.D. believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
Mr. Musk’s approach was “not the way I would do it.” She said she called Mr. Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalled telling him. She said that Mr. Musk was a disrupter. “But no rational person could think the U.S.A.I.D. process was a good one. Nobody.”
She offered no objection to Mr. Trump’s saber rattling against Venezuela and bombing of boats carrying alleged drug traffickers, suggesting that regime change against President Nicolás Maduro was Mr. Trump’s real goal. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” she said. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
She acknowledged that Mr. Trump, who lately has talked about mounting “land strikes”in Venezuela or elsewhere in the region, would need congressional authorization for that. “If he were to authorize some activity on land, then you’d have to, then it’s war, then Congress,” she said.
Ms. Wiles expressed misgivings about how the roundup of immigrants has been carried out at times. “I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation,” she said. Criminals should be deported, she added. “But if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.” When two motherswere arrested and deported with their children after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings, she said, “I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.”
She acknowledged sharp internal divisions over Mr. Trump’s announcement of major tariffs last spring. “There was a huge disagreement over whether” tariffs were “a good idea,” she said. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it.’” But he announced them anyway and “it’s been more painful than I expected.”
Ms. Wiles confirmed that she wants Mr. Trump to talk more about the economy and less about Saudi Arabia. She denied that he would use the military to influence the midterm elections and ruled out him running again in 2028. His comments about seeking an unconstitutional third term are “100 percent” about “driving people crazy.”
As for the potential successors, Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio, she distinguished how each of them came around to supporting Mr. Trump after initially opposing him. “Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles,” she said. “He just won’t. And so he had to get there.” As for Mr. Vance, “his conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”
Mr. Rubio told Mr. Whipple what he has said publicly, that “if JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
Still, the underlying tension came through when Mr. Vance posed for the magazine’s photographer. “I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me,” Mr. Vance joked. “And $1,000 if it’s Marco.”
Susie Wiles Acknowledges Trump’s ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions - The New York Times
Monday, December 15, 2025
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Trump Officials Sue to Seize 2020 Ballots in a Georgia County
Trump Officials Sue to Seize 2020 Ballots in a Georgia County
The Justice Department escalated an effort to seize and inspect old ballots in Fulton County, where President Trump was booked in his criminal election interference case.
The Trump administration sued Fulton County, Ga., on Thursday in an effort to seize and inspect old ballots from the 2020 election, as the administration continues to question President Trump’s loss in that race to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump has for years fixated on his defeat in that election and has continued to promote his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Since returning to office in January, he has embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to settle scoresrelated to his effort to overturn the 2020 election — most prominently issuing a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fulton County, which is largely nonwhite and voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden, was one of the main focuses of Mr. Trump’s effort to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. After leaving office, Mr. Trump and some of his allies were criminally charged with election interference in Georgia, and the former president was booked at the Fulton County jail.
Some discrepancies in Fulton County’s recount process did emerge after the 2020 election, but the state’s Republican leadership ultimately affirmed Mr. Biden’s victory there with a manual recount. Mr. Trump then pressured Georgia’s top elections official to “find” him enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, a strident Trump supporter and conservative activist who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, subpoenaed Fulton County’s 2020 ballots in October, but the county resisted turning them over. In the lawsuit filed on Thursday, the Justice Department accused county officials of violating the Civil Rights Act by not handing over the ballots.
Democrats fear that a new inspection of 2020 ballots may be used to stoke suspicions of ballot fraud if the 2026 elections do not go Republicans’ way. The Trump administration has repeatedly argued, without reliable evidence, that the 2020 election was affected by mass voter fraud.
The Justice Department also sued four more states on Thursday — Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Nevada — in an escalating effort to obtain the personal and private information of voters. The administration is effectively trying to establish a national voting database in a quest to bolster an unsubstantiated claim from President Trump that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.
On the same day that the Justice Department delivered its broadside of election lawsuits, Mr. Trump announced that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. However, the president has no ability to pardon the state crime that Ms. Peters was convicted of, and therefore no legal power to free her from a state prison.
Ms. Peters’ supporters have sought to convince Mr. Trump that she is an important potential witness for the administration’s pursuit of evidence of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. The pardon that Mr. Trump issued last week was broadly worded, including offenses “related to election integrity or security” from January 2020 to December 2021.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.“
In Trump’s Justice Dept., Failing in Court Might Be Better Than Bucking the Boss - The New York Times
In Trump’s Justice Dept., Failing in Court Might Be Better Than Bucking the Boss
"Thursday demonstrated an emerging reality for President Trump: Commanding the Justice Department is not the same as controlling the justice system.
Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served with evidence.
On Thursday, federal grand jurors in Virginia rejected the Justice Department’s push to indict Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on mortgage-related charges for the second time in a week. It handed a humiliating loss to President Trump, who has publicly demanded the prosecution of enemies he has singled out for retribution.
It was a moment worth marking. Federal grand juries almost never decline to bring an indictment once, much less twice. Such rejections, known as “no true bills,” have been exceedingly rare, a misfire that often stigmatizes the prosecutors involved.
They are becoming more common, and accepted, in a department where face-planting in court might be preferable to facing down the boss.
The rejection in the James case was not the only notable legal rebuke that day of actions demanded by the White House. A few hours earlier, a federal judge in Maryland freed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, dealing a blow to the department’s monthslong effort to prosecute and deport an immigrant in a test of Mr. Trump’s claim that he can expel whomever he wants, wherever and whenever he wants, with minimal or no due process.
“I think many of these cases are nationalized for the public and there is a pushback on Trump and his targeting of individuals,” said John P. Fishwick, who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017.
“This is a major shift,” he added.
Thursday demonstrated an emerging reality for Mr. Trump and his aide Stephen Miller, a driving force behind the maximalist approach to presidential power: Commanding the Justice Department is not quite the same as controlling the justice system.
Increasingly, federal juries and judges have rejected cases presented by the department for lack of sufficient supporting evidence, or because prosecutors committed major procedural or legal errors in their scramble to appease the White House.
In recent months, grand jurors in Washington spurned efforts to indict or ultimately convict anti-Trump activists: a woman who posted a threat against Mr. Trump on Instagram and, most famously, a Justice Department employee who tossed a sandwich at federal officers.
The prosecutors in the James case do not even hold the administration’s swing-and-miss record. That distinction appears to belong to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, whose office failed three times to obtain an indictment against a woman who pushed an F.B.I. agent against a wall during a protest over the summer.
Even when Ms. Pirro’s subordinates changed course and moved forward on misdemeanor charges that did not require an indictment, a trial jury shut them down again, acquitting the woman altogether.
It is hard to know how many no-true-bill decisions have been rendered because grand jury deliberations are shielded by secrecy laws. But in cases brought in other citieswhere Mr. Trump has flooded the streets with federal officers, grand jurors have also declined to bring charges. In Los Angeles, a MAGA-aligned prosecutor failed to obtain charges against an activist who had protested the administration’s immigration enforcement.
Mr. Trump’s political appointees at the department have publicly lashed out at “activist” judges and groused about anti-Trump bias among jurors in the Democratic-dominated capital.
But there is also a sense inside the department, less openly articulated than tacitly understood, that the system provides a pressure valve for marginal cases — allowing prosecutors to prove they made a good-faith effort to execute the president’s orders, regardless of the outcome.
Nor is it entirely clear that successful prosecutions are the only goal. One top official, Ed Martin, who leads the so-called weaponization working group responsible for investigating those who investigated Mr. Trump, has suggested that naming and shaming targets is a legitimate end in itself.
If the president’s opponents have celebrated recent setbacks as a sign of his diminishing power, Mr. Trump does not seem to have gotten the memo. If anything, he has accelerated his use — or abuse, in the view of critics — of clemency powers to negate the verdicts of juries and judges on behalf of political allies.
And the Justice Department continues to investigate several high-profile Trump targets, including Senator Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat. In recent weeks, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida has expanded a nebulous and far-reaching investigation into what the president’s most fervent loyalists have described as a “grand conspiracy” by officials in the Obama and Biden administrations to destroy Mr. Trump.
The Justice Department has a longstanding policy of not commenting on grand jury proceedings. But two people with knowledge of the situation said the White House was still pushing to indict Ms. James, and that Justice Department officials were considering other options to fulfill Mr. Trump’s demands. The people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
Some of those pressing for Ms. James’s prosecution blamed the failure to secure an indictment on resistance from career prosecutors, and a judge’s ruling that Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had been illegally appointed.
“Two grand juries didn’t ‘reject the evidence,’” wrote Sam Antar, a felon-turned-activist who has been among Ms. James’s most vocal critics. “They heard a presentation from the same career prosecutor who never wanted to bring the case in the first place. If you want a non-indictment, you present a non-case.”
Nonetheless, career prosecutors and Trump-appointed department officials who reviewed the evidence thought the case was far too weak to present to a grand jury. Ms. Halligan’s predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, found insufficient evidence to bring charges against her, and had raised similar concerns about a potential case against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
Mr. Trump forced him out, and hastily replaced him with Ms. Halligan, a former insurance lawyer with no prosecutorial experience. She quickly obtained indictments against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, before they were tossed out by a judge who ruled she had been illegally appointed.
The release of Mr. Abrego Garcia, which came after the White House vowed that he would never walk free on U.S. soil, capped an extraordinary 10-month legal saga that embroiled the Justice Department in countless hours of writing briefs and attending court hearings.
And in the end, the order letting him out of custody was based, at least in part, on an embarrassing technicality. The initial immigration judge who handled the case had never issued a formal order to remove him from the country, and the Justice Department had not bothered to check.
But the decision, issued by Judge Paula Xinis in Federal District Court in Maryland, also took the Trump administration to task for something much more serious: holding Mr. Abrego Garcia in immigration detention for months but never following through on its repeated promises to re-deport him. Judge Xinis found the administration’s failures particularly troubling because Mr. Abrego Garcia had agreed to be sent to Costa Rica but officials refused to let him go there, proposing instead to expel him to a series of African countries to which he had no ties.
Andrew Rossman, one of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, hailed Judge Xinis’s ruling as an example of the court system doing what it was designed to do.
“Today’s decision granting Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release is a victory not just for one Maryland man but for everyone,” Mr. Rossman said on Thursday. “We’re gratified by the court’s ruling upholding due process and the rule of law.”
But the administration, taking the position it often has when rulings do not go its way, attacked Judge Xinis personally.
“The White House, the administration oppose this activism from a judge who is really acting as a judicial activist, which unfortunately we have seen in many cases across the country,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said.
The Trump administration has rarely been willing to live with adverse rulings, almost always pressing forward aggressively with appeals or other attempts to undo a negative decision.
In Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, officials immediately fixed the lack of an order to remove him from the country by obtaining one overnight from an immigration judge.
Then the administration instructed Mr. Abrego Garcia to show up for an appointment with immigration officials on Friday morning — a move that so worried his lawyers that they convinced Judge Xinis to issue a new order forbidding the authorities from simply rearresting their client.
In the end, while their concerns were real, the consequences were less than dire. Mr. Abrego Garcia left his appointment without so much as a hitch.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump."
Friday, December 12, 2025
A Cinnabon Worker Was Fired for a Racist Slur. Her Supporters Have Raised $130,000.
A Cinnabon Worker Was Fired for a Racist Slur. Her Supporters Have Raised $130,000.
“A white Cinnabon worker in Wisconsin was fired after a video surfaced showing her using a racial slur against two Black customers. Despite the company’s condemnation, a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign for the worker raised over $130,000, with some donors expressing support for her and promoting white supremacy. This incident follows a similar pattern seen earlier this year, highlighting the ongoing debate surrounding race, social media, and public backlash.
On a video that went viral, the worker, who is white, can be seen calling two Black customers an epithet. The campaign to give her money echoes the reaction to a similar incident this year.
When video of an argument between a white worker at a Cinnabon store and two Black customers began to circulate online last week, it seemed to fall into a troubling but familiar genre.
The employee at the northern Wisconsin shop can be heard calling the customers a racial slur. She makes an obscene gesture. “I am racist,” the worker declares. Cinnabon soon fired the worker, saying her actions and statements were “completely unacceptable.”
But what happened next veered from the way many viral moments of outrage play out online: While many on social media condemned the worker’s words, others leaped to her defense. And for at least the second time in recent months, donors offered money to someone caught being racist. By Tuesday, a campaign for the fired employee, who was not named by Cinnabon, had raised more than $130,000.
That crowdfunding page is hosted on GiveSendGo, a website that says it aims to “share the Hope of Jesus through crowdfunding to everyone who comes to our platform.”
The person who created the page describes the former Cinnabon worker as a hard-working mother, adding that “No White person should lose their job for refusing to be harassed by Somalians.”
Some who donated offered notes of encouragement to the woman, whom they saw as being singled out unfairly. They also promoted white supremacy and condemned immigrants.
The woman believed to be the fired employee did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Alex Shipley, communications director for GiveSendGo, said that the company did not celebrate harmful speech but was providing a space for expression. “Our role is not to be a place of judgment, but to allow people to turn to their communities for support.”
A rival page on GoFundMe, created by a woman who said on that site that she was the cousin of one of the Somali customers, is seeking contributions to help the Somalis pursue legal action. It has raised about $6,400 so far. The person hosting that campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
GiveSendGo is also the platform for a crowdfunding page to raise money for a woman in Rochester, Minn., who called a child of Somali descent a racial epithet on a playground earlier this year. That incident was also recorded on video, and it appears to show the woman, Shiloh Hendrix, who is white, acknowledging that she used the slur.
Ms. Hendrix was cited by the city in August for disorderly conduct in the incident; the prosecuting attorney said a court date was pending. The fund-raising campaign for her has totaled more than $800,000.
Ms. Hendrix’s attorney, Brian Karalus, said that incident was different than the one at Cinnabon. “My client, in my opinion, was the victim in that case, despite her language,” he said, adding that she was upset at the time because she thought the person filming was trying to instigate a fight. That’s not the same, he said, as someone working in the customer service industry.
“You should treat the client with kindness even if they’re rude,” said Mr. Karalus, who added that he thought the disorderly conduct complaint would be dismissed.
It’s unclear what started the confrontation at the Cinnabon in Ashwaubenon, Wis., a suburb of Green Bay. But the company said in a statement that the video was “deeply troubling” and that the employee “was immediately terminated by the franchise owner.”
Jennifer Chudy, an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College, said fund-raising efforts like these reflect the conservative backlash to the nationwide protests about race that followed the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
“The political winds have changed so undeniably that these kinds of things can happen, and not only happen but receive validation,” she said.
Steven Hahn, a history professor at New York University, said that the funding campaigns show that viral videos and social media can be harnessed by people of varying political beliefs.
“The amazing thing about this is some of the ways in which social media transformed the whole landscape,” Dr. Hahn said. “We wouldn’t know about so many of the brutal assaults on Black men and women by the police and other law enforcement were it not for phone recordings.”
But social media also allows people to organize and financially support the politics of racial resentment, Dr. Hahn added.Some white people, he said, feel that they’re the ones who’ve been discriminated against. “Now they have platforms.”
Video of the slur directed at the Somali pair comes at a time when Somali immigrants have experienced increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. Last week, President Trump went on a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants while launching a new ICE operation primarily targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, saying he did not want them in the country.
Dr. Chudy said views expressed by officials about protecting one group of people and rejecting another can have a noticeable effect.
“There’s a lot of political science research that suggests when elites say things, people follow,” she said.
Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.“
Republicans Undercut Johnson, Circumventing Him to Force Votes
Republicans Undercut Johnson, Circumventing Him to Force Votes
“Speaker Mike Johnson’s control over the House is weakening as rank-and-file Republicans increasingly use discharge petitions to bypass his leadership and force votes on legislation he opposes. This tactic, once rare, has been used three times this year, including a recent vote to overturn a Trump executive order. The maneuver has given Democrats significant influence over the legislative agenda, highlighting Johnson’s difficulties in maintaining party unity.
The speaker has repeatedly lost his grip on the House floor thanks to a once rare parliamentary maneuver that G.O.P. members are increasingly using to force action on legislation.
In the House of Representatives, the speaker controls everything, from office space to what legislation can get a vote on the House floor. But lately, time and again, Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have lost his grip.
It happened on Thursday, when Mr. Johnson was forced to stand by, powerless to stop a group of breakaway Republicans from teaming up with Democrats to pass what amounted to a rebuke of President Trump, delivered by a legislative body run by his own party.
In a 231-to-195 vote, the House approved a bill by Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative Democrat, that would overturn a Trump executive order that stripped union protections from scores of federal workers.
The measure faces long odds in the Senate. But its success in the House was the latest indication that Mr. Johnson’s hold on his razor-thin majority has become increasingly slippery, as rank-and-file Republicans flout his wishes.
They are doing so not just by refusing to vote for the party position on important bills, but also, increasingly, by using a once-rare parliamentary maneuver to steer around the speaker and commandeer the House floor to bring up legislation that he does not want considered at all. The tactic has undercut Mr. Johnson’s leadership and diminished his power over the chamber’s agenda at a time when some rank-and-file Republicans are questioning his approach and complaining that he is disregarding the will of his members.
That has led more and more Republicans to resort to what is known as a discharge petition, a procedural tool that allows lawmakers to bypass House leaders and force legislation to the floor if a majority of the chamber’s members — 218 of them — sign on.
Mr. Golden used one on Thursday to get his labor bill to the floor, where 20 Republicans joined Democrats in supporting it, and more are pending on other issues that Mr. Johnson has yet to address.
Discharge petitions were once rare and had little chance of success, especially since signing one is one of Congress’s more publicly visible acts. When members launch such an effort, they place physical copies of the petition on the House clerk’s desk at the front of the chamber. Even as Congress has become increasingly digitized, lawmakers must sign their names in person, and their signatures are reported online.
Historically, members of the majority hesitated to embarrass their party’s leaders, and lawmakers feared retaliation for publicly supporting efforts to subvert the speaker. The petitions were viewed more as public statements of discontent than viable legislative vehicles.
But Thursday was the third time this year that Republican leaders, who with a slim majority can afford only a few defections, have been forced to contend with runaway discharge petitions that they could not stop. When they succeed, they can be particularly painful for leaders of the majority, teeing up politically tricky votes on matters that divide the party.
“I am not a fan of discharge petitions,” Mr. Johnson told reporters this week. “It is typically used as a tool against the majority.”
The highest-profile example was the bipartisan push that forced a vote that Mr. Johnson had toiled for months to avoid on legislation to compel the Justice Department to release its investigative files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It sailed through the House and Senate and quickly became law.
“Luckily, it doesn’t happen often,” said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican. “But the times it has happened, I have not been a fan of that process being used.”
Thursday’s vote came as Mr. Johnson has been grappling with other signs of discontent from within his conference. At least twice this month, Republicans have struggled to secure the votes necessary to bring bills to the floor, forcing leaders to negotiate as lawmakers threaten their agenda. Last week, a bill to address oversight of college sports was removed from consideration after it became clear that Republicans did not have the votes to pass it.
On Wednesday, a procedural vote to bring a defense policy bill to the floor stalled for nearly an hour short of the support it needed. Mr. Johnson was in the House chamber haggling separately with two holdout factions — hard-line conservatives like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and a small band of moderate lawmakers — before finally getting enough of them to relent.
The episode highlighted Mr. Johnson’s difficulties in corralling his restive rank and file even on a procedural vote on which party unity is generally considered mandatory. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, said she would not tolerate defections on such a measure, known as a rule, when she was in charge.
“Every now and then, somebody would say, ‘I’m not for the bill, so I’m not for the rule,’” she said, before describing her response: “You know what? Go on the other side of the aisle, because that’s not the way it works. You don’t want the bill? Vote against the bill.”
But discharge petitions have been the most visible and public threats to Mr. Johnson’s control of the House. The maneuvers seem to be a kind of legislative hydra: Each time Republican leaders put one behind them, three more seem to spring up in its place.
Even now, with just one week left to go before they depart for the year, Republican lawmakers are affixing their names to three different discharge petitions that would force votes on bills that Mr. Johnson does not want to consider.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who already found some success with a discharge petition earlier this year aimed at allowing members of Congress to vote by proxy after the birth of a child, is now trying to force a vote on a measure that would ban lawmakers and their family members from trading stocks. As of Thursday afternoon, 14 of her 58 signatures have come from Republicans.
And as G.O.P. lawmakers debate the best way to address rising health care costs, some Republicans have signed on to two separate discharge petitions — one by Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and another by Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey — that would tee up votes on extending Affordable Care Act subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of the year.
Both petitions have enough support from Republicans that they would succeed if Democrats united to endorse either of them, something they are unlikely to do because they are holding out for a longer-term extension than either bill would provide. But the number of G.O.P. signatures — Mr. Fitzpatrick has 10 and Mr. Gottheimer has 11 — indicates how eager some Republicans are to go around Mr. Johnson and hold a vote, which has given Democrats remarkable power over the direction of a major legislative debate.
Mr. Fitzpatrick said the maneuver was a last resort to get action on a policy issue that his party was refusing to quickly address.
“You try to do things through the normal course, you try to do things through normal order, you know,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said. “When all of those remedies are exhausted, then you’ve got to go this route, unfortunately.”
Mr. Johnson said he understood his colleagues’ decisions, pointing to the “situation in their districts.” But others view the petitions as a needed check on the leadership’s grip on the House floor.
Ms. Greene, the Georgia Republican who is set to resign in January, said on Wednesday that she was weighing supporting every discharge petition that is introduced before she leaves, regardless of her views on the measure it supports.
Doing so would give her a lasting impact. Even if they resign or die in office, members’ signatures remain on discharge petitions until they are formally replaced, a process that can take months.
In a social media post, Ms. Greene said that she thought that every representative “deserves the right to represent their district and receive a recorded vote on their bills.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.“