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Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire said on Sunday that former President Donald J. Trump “absolutely contributed” to an insurrection and that Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were “absolutely terrible” — but that nothing, not even felony convictions, would stop him from voting for Mr. Trump because the economy, border security and “culture change” were more important.

The interview, on ABC News’s “This Week,” showcased Mr. Sununu’s transformation from Trump critic — while supporting Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, he said Mr. Trump was “worried about jail time” and “not a real Republican” — to loyal foot soldier.

It is a transformation that has repeated itself time and again within the Republican Party, and one that Mr. Sununu previewed in January, when he was campaigning for Ms. Haley but said he would support Mr. Trump if he won the nomination.

“No one should be surprised by my support,” he said on Sunday. “I think the real discussion is, you know, Americans moving away from Biden. That’s how bad Biden has become as president. There’s just no doubt about it, right? You can’t ignore inflation. You can’t ignore the border and say that these issues in the courthouse are going to be the one thing that brings Biden back into office.”

The interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, pressed Mr. Sununu on why he was supporting a man who he said had “contributed to the insurrection” on Jan. 6.

Mr. Sununu affirmed that he still believed that. But he said it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a Republican governor would support a Republican nominee, and suggested that Mr. Stephanopoulos was out of touch with public opinion if he thought concerns about democracy or felony convictions would sway voters.

“You believe that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again?” Mr. Stephanopoulos asked.

“As does 51 percent of America, George,” Mr. Sununu said. “I mean, really. I understand you’re part of the media, I understand you’re in this New York City bubble or whatever it is, but you got to look around what’s happening across this country.”

He went on: “It’s not about just supporting Trump. It’s getting rid of what we have today. It’s about understanding inflation is crushing families. It’s understanding that this border issue is not a Texas issue, it’s a 50-state issue that has to be brought under control. It’s about that type of elitism that the average American is just sick and tired of, and it’s a culture change. That’s what I’m supporting.”

Inflation has declined sharply from its 2022 peak, but was higher than expected in a report released last week.

Mr. Sununu said that Americans’ desire for “culture change,” a phrase he used eight times but did not concretely define, outweighed concerns about Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election or the four criminal trials he faces, the first of which begins this week.

While Mr. Trump as the Republican nominee wasn’t what he wanted, “we’ll take it if we have to,” Mr. Sununu said. “That’s how badly America wants a culture change.”

Mr. Stephanopoulos pushed back once more.

“So just to sum up, you would support him for president even if he was convicted in classified documents,” he said. “You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he’s lying about the last election. You’d support him for president even if he’s convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Sununu said. “Me and 51 percent of America.”

Don Wright, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist whose pointed work punctured duplicity and pomposity and resonated with common-sense readers, died on March 24 at his home in Palm Beach, Fla. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Carolyn Wright, a fellow journalist.

In a 45-year career, Mr. Wright drew some 11,000 cartoons for The Miami News, which folded in 1988, and then The Palm Beach Post, where he worked until he retired in 2008. But he reached a readership far beyond Florida: His cartoons appeared in newspapers nationwide through syndication.

Mr. Wright’s readers knew where he stood, and especially what he was against, whether it was the Vietnam War; Israel’s military support for the pro-apartheid regime in South Africa (he depicted a menorah with missiles in place of candles); sexual abuse by clergymen; the John Birch Society, the anti-Communist fringe group; and racial segregationists, notably the violent Ku Klux Klan.

The morning after winning his first Pulitzer, in 1966, Mr. Wright received a telegram from George C. Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. “Sometimes even the meanest cartoonists are unaccountably decorated for their work,” it said. “If the shoe fits, wear it.” Mr. Wright kept the telegram framed in his home.

That first prizewinning cartoon — published during the Cold War, when the world was on tenterhooks fearing nuclear Armageddon — depicted two men in tatters encountering each other on a barren landscape cratered by bombs. “You mean,” one asks the other, “you were just bluffing?”

His 1980 Pulitzer-winning entry depicted two Florida State prison guards carrying a corpse away from the electric chair. One asks, “Why did the governor say we’re doing this?” The other replies, “To make it clear we value human life.”

Mr. Wright was also a Pulitzer finalist five times and the author of three books, including “Wright On! A Collection of Political Cartoons” (1971) and “Wright Side Up” (1981).

His cartoons were syndicated first by The Washington Star, then by The New York Times and finally by Tribune Media Services.

For all the ink, graphite and crayon he would meticulously combine on an illustration board late into the night in his efforts to pierce celebrity blowhards in politics, sports and beyond, Mr. Wright often said the single cartoon that generated the strongest response from readers was a sentimental one that he drew after the death of Walt Disney in 1966. It depicted Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in tears.

Mr. Disney’s widow, Lillian Disney, requested Mr. Wright’s original drawing for the cartoon and, when she died in 1997, bequeathed it to the Library of Congress.

In 1989, The New Yorker reported that Mr. Wright was among several American cartoonists whose work had helped inspire Chinese intellectuals and businessmen in their support for the student uprising that year in Tiananmen Square.

Donald Conway Wright was born on Jan. 23, 1934, in Los Angeles to Charles and Evelyn (Olberg) Wright. His father was an airline maintenance supervisor, and his mother managed the household.

The family moved to Florida when Don was a child. He always enjoyed drawing, and, after graduating from Edison High School in Miami in 1952, he applied for a job in the art department of The Miami News. Instead, although he was already enamored of cartoons, the paper hired him for the photo department and gave him a camera.

He went on to capture classic images of a triumphant Fidel Castro entering Havana, a sizzling Elvis Presley, an imposing Cassius Clay in a Miami Beach gym before he converted to Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and an ambitious Senator John F. Kennedy in a hotel room wearing a suit jacket, a tie and boxer shorts.

Self-taught as both a photographer and an illustrator, Mr. Wright combined a photographer’s craftsmanship and eye for detail with an illustrator’s creativity.

“He was always drawing, he was always scribbling,” recalled Ms. Wright, his wife, who was a reporter at The Miami News when they met.

After serving in the Army, Mr. Wright returned to The Miami News and, when the paper’s editors became concerned that he would leave if he wasn’t transferred, began publishing some of his cartoons and assigned him to the art department as a graphics editor. By 1963 his cartoons were appearing regularly on the editorial page.

In 1989 he was hired by The Post, which was owned, as The News had been, by Cox Newspapers.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Knight’s survivors include a younger brother, David.

Mr. Wright acknowledged that not every cartoon of his was a home run.

“You’re on a deadline,” he told The Times in 1994, “and you have three ideas, and you throw out the first one, and you throw out the second, and you’re running out of time, and before you know it, the cliché is looking better.”

When he retired from The Post, he explained that although his cartoons often had a punchline, his goal was not to be humorous.

“I’m sometimes baffled by the number of readers who believe that cartoons should be lightweight and entertainingly ‘funny,’” Mr. Wright said. “Humor has a lot of relatives — wry, subtle, slapstick and even black — all aimed at the endless Iraq War, inept and corrupt politicians, rising unemployment, recession, Americans losing their homes, and on and on.”

“But think about it for a moment,” he added. “How funny are those?”

A group of major news organizations — including The Associated Press and the five big broadcast and cable networks — issued an unusual joint statement on Sunday urging President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump to commit to participating in televised debates before Election Day.

“General election debates have a rich tradition in our American democracy,” the group wrote. “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation.”

Media organizations rarely weigh in so explicitly on the campaign plans of presidential candidates. The statement underscores just how much uncertainty surrounds whether this year’s debates will occur.

Mr. Biden has declined to commit to the three debates scheduled for September and October. His allies have expressed concerns about the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan group that has organized the events since 1988, and its ability to enforce its rules when Mr. Trump participates.

Mr. Trump has promised to debate and regularly taunts Mr. Biden for not following suit. But in 2020, Mr. Trump forced the cancellation of the second scheduled debate by pulling out at the last minute. Last year, Mr. Trump refused to debate his Republican primary opponents, and he has accused the debate commission of pro-Biden bias.

If no debate is held in 2024, it would break a streak that dates back to the Jimmy Carter-Gerald R. Ford election of 1976. Presidential debates remain America’s largest mass gathering outside of sports: In 2020, an average of 68 million people tuned in for the two Biden-Trump debates, significantly more than watched the party nominating conventions.

The news outlets’ plans to issue a joint statement were reported by The New York Times last week.

In addition to ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox News, the following news organizations also endorsed the statement: The Associated Press, C-SPAN, NewsNation, NPR, PBS NewsHour, USA Today and Noticias Univision, the news division of the Spanish-language network.

(A spokesman for Newsmax volunteered to The Times last week that the right-leaning news channel was in agreement with the statement, although it is not an official signatory.)

The statement noted that dates and eligibility requirements for this year’s matchups were previously announced by the debate commission.

“Though it is too early for invitations to be extended to any candidates, it’s not too early for candidates who expect to meet the eligibility criteria to publicly state their support for, and their intention to participate in, the commission’s debates planned for this fall,” the statement reads.

President Biden and his team, hoping to avoid further escalation leading to a wider war in the Middle East, are advising Israel that its successful defense against Iranian airstrikes constituted a major strategic victory that might not require another round of retaliation, U.S. officials said.

The interception of nearly all of the more than 300 drones and missiles fired against Israel on Saturday night demonstrated that Israel had come out ahead in its confrontation with Iran and proved to enemies its ability to protect itself along with its American allies, meaning it did not necessarily need to fire back, the officials said.

Whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his government will agree to leave it at that was not immediately clear. Although damage from the attack was relatively light, the scope of the strikes went well beyond the small-bore tit-for-tat shadow war between Iran and Israel in recent years, crossing a red line by firing weapons from Iranian territory into Israeli territory. Had defenses not held, scores or hundreds could have been killed.

Emotions were running high among Israeli officials during phone calls with American partners late into the night, and the pressure to fire back was consequently strong. The U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions, stressed that the decision was ultimately up to Israel. Israeli jets early Sunday hit structures in Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah after the Iranian-backed militia sent two explosive drones into Israel, but it was not clear how related that was to the Iranian airstrike.

Mr. Biden spoke with Mr. Netanyahu on Saturday after the Iranian attack and repeated his “ironclad commitment” to Israel’s security. While the president did not publicly disclose any advice he offered, in a statement released after the call, he hinted at a desire for restraint.

“I told him that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks — sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel,” Mr. Biden said.

He vowed to convene the leaders of the Group of 7 major industrial democracies on Sunday to coordinate a “united diplomatic response,” a sign of his preferred path forward after the attack. The United Nations Security Council will also meet in an emergency session on Sunday.

“Taken together, @JoeBiden’s message is designed to gently persuade #Israel not to pursue further escalation,” Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote on social media.

That will generate criticism of Mr. Biden from conservatives, who quickly went public urging a powerful military reprisal against Iran — not only by Israel, but by the United States, as well. “We must move quickly and launch aggressive retaliatory strikes on Iran,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a statement posted online.

Speaker Mike Johnson blamed the Iran strike partly on the Biden administration because of its “undermining of Israel and appeasement of Iran” without mentioning that he himself has so far failed to permit a floor vote on bipartisan legislation passed by the Senate providing security aid to Israel and Ukraine. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican leader, said that “in light of Iran’s unjustified attack on Israel,” the House this week would consider aid to Israel, but he gave no details.

The eruption between Israel and Iran came at a time of great tension between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu. In a call only 10 days ago, the president threatened to rethink his support for Israel’s war in Gaza if Mr. Netanyahu did not do more to alleviate civilian suffering in the enclave, leveraging American backing for the first time since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel.

At the same time the two leaders clashed, Israel had just executed an airstrike against the Iranian Embassy complex in Damascus, Syria, killing seven Iranian officers involved in covert operations in a move that threatened the escalation Mr. Biden had long feared. Even so, the president made clear that his support for Israel’s security was still unwavering and warned Iran not to respond.

American and Israeli officials spent the past few days coordinating military operations in case Iran did act, and Mr. Biden ordered aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region. Administration officials were elated at the results on Saturday as U.S. and Israeli forces knocked down nearly everything thrown at Israel by Iran, including more than 100 ballistic missiles, a feat that one official said may be unmatched in military history. Jordan intercepted projectiles crossing its airspace, saying it was guarding its own security.

Even though Iran did little tangible damage, it signaled after Saturday night’s strike that it was ready to stand down — and clearly hoped to avoid direct engagement with the United States. “The matter can be deemed concluded,” the Iranian Mission to the United Nations said in a statement. “However, should the Israeli regime make another mistake, Iran’s response will be considerably more severe. It is a conflict between Iran and the rogue Israeli regime, from which the U.S. MUST STAY AWAY!”

While the number of drones and missiles fired at Israel was extraordinary, it did not go unnoticed that Iran telegraphed its intentions to attack for more than a week and announced the launch of the drones hours before they actually reached Israeli territory, giving plenty of notice for defenses. Some analysts interpreted that as meaning that Iran wanted to put on a show of force to save face after the killing of its officers, but did not want a full-fledged war with Israel or the United States.

The situation was reminiscent of when in 2020 President Donald J. Trump ordered an airstrike in Iraq to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, who led the powerful Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at well-defended U.S. bases in Iraq with relatively little damage, though about 100 U.S. military personnel were injured. It then sent a private message saying it was done. Mr. Trump chose not to retaliate, and fears of a cycle of escalation faded.

In the days leading up to Saturday’s attack on Israel, Mr. Netanyahu warned Tehran not to act, saying, “Whoever hurts us, we hurt them.” But because Israel was not especially hurt, Mr. Netanyahu may have some room to declare victory and move on. Israeli officials were not clear on their intentions.

“The campaign is not over yet — we must remain alert and attentive to the instructions published by the I.D.F. and Homefront Command,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “We must be prepared for every scenario. Having said this, we have thwarted the most significant wave” of the attack, “and we did so successfully.”

The American argument was that because Israel also successfully took out those senior Iranian officers in Damascus two weeks ago without paying a significant price, another round of military action could be deemed unnecessary.

Views of Donald J. Trump’s presidency have become more positive since he left office, bolstering his case for election and posing a risk to President Biden’s strategy of casting his opponent as unfit for the presidency, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

While the memories of Mr. Trump’s tumultuous and chaotic administration have not significantly faded, many voters now have a rosier picture of his handling of the economy, immigration and maintaining law and order. Ahead of the 2020 election, only 39 percent of voters said that the country was better off after Mr. Trump took office. Now, looking back, nearly half say that he improved things during his time as president.

The poll’s findings underscore the way in which a segment of voters have changed their minds about the Trump era, recalling those years as a time of economic prosperity and strong national security. The shift in views about his administration comes even as Mr. Trump faces dozens of felony counts and will appear in a New York courtroom on Monday for jury selection in one of his four criminal trials.

Many voters still remember Mr. Trump as a divisive and polarizing figure, giving him low ratings on race relations and unifying the country. Yet, a larger share of voters see Mr. Trump’s term as better for the country than the current administration, with 42 percent rating the Trump presidency as mostly good for the country compared with 25 percent who say the same about Mr. Biden’s. Nearly half say the Biden years have been mostly bad for the country.

Many of Mr. Trump’s key constituencies, such as white voters without a college degree, are particularly likely to have a fond view of his time in office. But a broad swath of the country — including Hispanic voters, voters over 30 and most lower- and middle-income voters — now see Mr. Trump’s years in office as more good than bad.

Maya Garcia, 23, described herself as a former “Trump hater.” But now, she says, she has come to believe that Mr. Trump’s contentious style helped control crime and maintain order in the country.

“When he was first running, I was, like, what is this guy even yapping about? Like, what is he even saying? Like, he’s saying all the wrong things,” said Ms. Garcia, a restaurant worker from Canoga Park, Calif. “But to be honest, if you look deep into his personality, he actually cares about the country.” She added: “You know at first I didn’t like it. But sometimes we need that type of person in our lives.”

Ms. Garcia voted for Mr. Biden four years ago but has been unhappy with his handling of the border, crime, mental health and the rising cost of living. She plans to back Mr. Trump in November.

The shift in the perception of Mr. Trump is not unusual: Presidents are typically viewed in a better light after leaving office. President George W. Bush’s average approval rating while in office was 49 percent; voters now give him a 57 percent approval rating for his time in the White House. And President Barack Obama received a 15 percentage point bump after leaving the White House, according to Gallup.

What’s unusual about the 2024 race is that Mr. Trump is running again, transforming sentiment about his presidency into a salient and potentially influential voting issue.

Some of the changed opinions about Mr. Trump may stem from his diminished visibility. Since leaving office, Mr. Trump has faded some from public view, spending the bulk of his time at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., and at court hearings. He dominated the Republican presidential primary without participating in any debates; his social media posts on his own platform get less attention than they did on Twitter; and while he still holds large rallies, they are not covered to the same extent as his previous campaigns.

The most improved views of Mr. Trump center on the economy, with several voters saying they have struggled to keep up with higher costs and increased inflation during Mr. Biden’s presidency.

Marecus Maupin, 41, said he now looked back at the Trump years as a time of economic prosperity, even though he is making more money with Mr. Biden as president. He voted for Mr. Biden and now plans to back Mr. Trump.

“We all had a little bit more money in our pockets when he was in office. I think he gave out more money than any other president that I have had in my lifetime,” he said of Mr. Trump. “It now feels like, although I’m making more, I’m not seeing it.”

When asked the one thing they remembered from Mr. Trump’s time in office, a vast majority of positive comments referred to the state of the economy. Many specifically remembered the stimulus checks with his signature printed on them that were sent to tens of millions of Americans during the waning days of his presidency.

Still, large segments of the electorate’s recollection of Mr. Trump’s presidency remain unchanged. Views of his handling of the Supreme Court are nearly identical to 2020, and Mr. Trump’s low approval ratings for unifying the country remain fairly similar. The bulk of negative comments about Mr. Trump’s time in office from participants mentioned the former president’s personality and behavior.

“He’s horrific. He’s a narcissist. He’s dishonest. He’s a misogynist,” said Dodee Firestone, 74, a Biden supporter from Boca Raton, Fla. “I could never, ever, ever vote for Trump.”

But other voters said that while they disapproved of Mr. Trump’s inflammatory style, they wondered whether they had placed too much emphasis on his personality in past elections.

While 70 percent of participants said that Mr. Trump had at one point said something they found offensive, those statements were a distant memory for many. Nearly half of that group said he had not said anything offensive recently. Young voters were especially likely to say it had been a while since Mr. Trump said something they found offensive.

President Biden has devoted a significant portion of his campaign to reminding voters of some of Mr. Trump’s most inflammatory statements and failed policies, particularly regarding his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and controversial comments about Black and Hispanic voters.

And while the issue of abortion rights has been front and center in the general election campaign, less than 2 percent of voters mentioned abortion or Mr. Trump’s role in the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade as the main thing they remember from his presidency.

Some of the visceral fear about Mr. Trump’s presidency also seems to have faded. In October 2016, 40 percent of voters said they were scared of what Mr. Trump might do if elected. Now, 31 percent say they are scared.

Nearly identical shares of voters also say both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden would be a risky choice for the country.

Angie Leon, a 23-year-old Mexican American, said she never liked how Mr. Trump talked about Latinos. But looking back, she wonders whether Mr. Trump’s incendiary remarks about immigrants and building a border wall were just a political tactic to bolster his campaign. After backing Mr. Biden in 2020, she plans to switch her vote to Mr. Trump in November.

“I felt like it was just his marketing, in the way that he would get the attention of people,” said Ms. Leon, a human resources recruiter from Gilroy, Calif. “The country was better when he was running it, despite his comments toward the community.”

Camille Baker contributed reporting.

Here are the key things to know about how this Times/Siena poll was conducted:

• We spoke with 1,059 registered voters from April 7 to 11, 2024.

• Our polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. More than 95 percent of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for this poll.

• Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic chara cteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For this poll, we placed nearly 127,000 calls to more than 93,000 voters.

• To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. You can see more information about the characteristics of our respondents and the weighted sample on the methodology page, under “Composition of the Sample.”

• The poll’s margin of sampling error among registered voters is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When computing the difference between two values — such as a candidate’s lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.

You can see full results and a detailed methodology here. If you want to read more about how and why we conduct our polls, you can see answers to frequently asked questions and submit your own questions here.

As former President Donald J. Trump sifts through potential running mates, he has peppered some advisers and associates with a direct question: Which Republican could best help him raise money for the rest of the presidential campaign?

That inquiry reflects the evolving calculations of Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential search — and how his scramble to keep up with President Biden’s colossal fund-raising totals may be weighing on his mind as he considers his options.

Mr. Trump’s selection process, which is still in its early stages, has largely revolved around conventional questions like who could step in as president if needed, political calculations including contenders’ position on abortion rights, and more Trumpian curiosities like whether a politician physically resembles his idea of a vice president.

But Mr. Trump has asked several people about the fund-raising prowess of possible running mates, according to three people with direct knowledge of the conversations, signaling a fresh angle in his search for a running mate.

The initial feedback has pointed him toward a handful of members of Congress with strong donor connections and at least one deep-pocketed governor. One long-shot possibility with a proven record of raising piles of cash — former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina — was only recently a bitter presidential rival, and her name can spark outrage from Mr. Trump.

“Trump is going to want a team player, and this is going to be about adding value to the ticket,” said former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who remains close with Mr. Trump and set records for Republican fund-raising. “It’s also going to be about someone who understands the job — who understands the Senate and the House — because he’s not going to want to waste one minute in office.”

This article is based on interviews with nearly a dozen Republican operatives and politicians who are familiar with Mr. Trump’s deliberations, some of whom have ties to the possible contenders and all of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

In some cases, Mr. Trump is still getting to know potential contenders.

After a recent meeting at Mar-a-Lago with former Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democrat-turned-independent who has become popular among conservatives, he made clear to advisers that she should be on his list of options.

In other cases, Mr. Trump has fixated on the whimsical over the practical. He has asked several people about running with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying he is intrigued by the branding potential of a “Trump-Kennedy” ticket despite his recent attacks on Mr. Kennedy and the unlikelihood of such a scenario. Mr. Trump’s campaign team remains adamantly opposed to the idea, and Mr. Kennedy, who is already running for president as an independent, has said he would not consider such an offer.

It is also unclear among Mr. Trump’s advisers whether he ultimately intends to give considerable weight to a contender’s fund-raising ability, or whether his recent focus is a consequence of his overall concerns about cash. That fixation has permeated both his presidential bid and his costly legal defense in his four criminal cases — and further blurred the line between the two.

The former president relied on one of his political fund-raising vehicles, the Save America PAC, to pay for roughly $50 million in legal expenses last year. He has started replenishing that fund with help from the Republican National Committee, where recently installed Trump loyalists now control the purse strings.

Mr. Trump’s campaign team, meanwhile, has acknowledged that it expects to be outspent by Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump has responded with a furious pace of fund-raising, despite his typical prickliness at the idea of having to ask wealthy donors for cash.

“There is no shortage of immensely qualified people President Trump can choose from,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman. “He’ll make his decision when he is ready and at the appropriate time.”

If fund-raising concerns further influence his vice-presidential search, that path could lead toward a pair of former Republican presidential primary opponents, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and Ms. Haley, and a coterie of members of Congress, including Representative Elise Stefanik of New York and Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina and J.D. Vance of Ohio.

Mr. Trump has signaled interest in all of them as potential running mates, except for Ms. Haley. To some people, he is said to have shown indifference when asked about Ms. Haley’s joining his ticket. To others, he has savaged her with brutal and personal criticisms.

Still, one of the truisms of Trump World is that no one is ever completely cast out unless they want to be left out. For her part, Ms. Haley said during the campaign that she would not serve as anybody’s No. 2.

But when it comes to supplementing Mr. Trump’s own fund-raising ability, Ms. Haley could prove a compelling choice. Ms. Haley’s presidential campaign and allied groups collected more than $146 million, according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign fund-raising.

Of that total, $14.3 million came in small contributions collected mostly online — an impressive sum considering that her team needed to find email addresses and phone numbers for donors not already supporting Mr. Trump.

Mr. Burgum, for his part, did not raise much for his presidential campaign, but he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars due largely to the sale of his computer program business to Microsoft in 2001.

Mr. Trump also has a history of populating his inner circle with wealthy businessmen. Mr. Burgum attended a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago this month and, at Mr. Trump’s request, addressed the crowd of about 100 donors, as did Mr. Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who ran for president this year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Mr. Rubio built a formidable fund-raising operation for his own presidential bid in 2016. And while many of those donors, such as Isaac Perlmutter, the former chairman of Marvel Entertainment, are already supportive of Mr. Trump, others are not.

Norman Braman, a billionaire South Florida auto dealer, and Paul Singer, the founder of the Elliott Management hedge fund, two key financial backers of Mr. Rubio in 2016, both put money behind presidential primary opponents of Mr. Trump this year. Mr. Braman supported Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and Mr. Singer donated to Ms. Haley.

One complication for Mr. Rubio’s vice-presidential prospects is that he and Mr. Trump are both residents of the same state, which could run afoul of a constitutional rule.

While Mr. Trump maintains additional homes in New Jersey and New York, and switched his residency as president, he has told people Mr. Rubio would have to legally move to another state to join the ticket.

Mr. Trump has told these people that it would probably be difficult for Mr. Rubio to move his family but that Florida voters would be too upset to lose the former president as a resident.

Mr. Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, has already started helping Mr. Trump raise money.

Ahead of a Trump fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago this month, he called several donors to urge them to pitch in. He was also one of the hosts of a fund-raiser in Greenville, S.C., held days before the state’s presidential primary, that netted a reported $6 million for the former president.

As Mr. Scott ran for president last year, donors plowed $45.9 million into his campaign and allied groups, about two-thirds of which came from large donations, according to Open Secrets.

Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and a longtime Scott supporter, has lobbied Mr. Trump to add the South Carolina senator to his ticket. Mr. Ellison’s involvement was first reported by Puck, which has also described Mr. Trump’s interest in contenders who are strong fund-raisers.

Ms. Stefanik’s network of donors comes from across the conservative spectrum.

A former aide in President George W. Bush’s White House, Ms. Stefanik has received support since her first House victory a decade ago from several wealthy establishment donors, including Cliff Asness, a billionaire founder of AQR Capital Management, who backed Ms. Haley’s presidential bid, and Mr. Singer. She met with recently with Mr. Singer and laid out why she thought Mr. Trump would win in November, and Mr. Asness hosted a small group meeting for her at his office where she did the same.

Since vigorously defending Mr. Trump against his first impeachment in 2019, Ms. Stefanik has also developed relationships with donors affiliated more closely with his conservative movement. Mr. Perlmutter has hosted fund-raisers for her along with Steve Wynn, the casino mogul, who has privately urged Mr. Trump to consider Ms. Stefanik.

Ms. Stefanik, who replaced former Representative Liz Cheney as the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, has also drawn interest more recently from donors compelled by her push to investigate antisemitism on college campuses. In the first three months of the year, she collected $7.1 million for her own re-election and other Republican causes, her campaign announced this month.

Mr. Vance is close with Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s eldest son and a key political adviser, and the pair helped raise money to pay for a Trump rally in Ohio to benefit Bernie Moreno, the Republican nominee for Senate in the state.

Mr. Vance also has ties to Silicon Valley from his time working as a venture capitalist in San Francisco for Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal. Mr. Thiel was one of Mr. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016 and spent roughly $35 million on Republicans in 2022 but has said he does not plan to be involved in the presidential contest this year.

One of Mr. Thiel’s close associates, David Sacks, gave more than $1 million to political causes in 2022. He was involved with the announcement of Mr. DeSantis’s primary challenge against Mr. Trump but was also spotted at a fund-raiser Mr. Vance held his year for Mr. Moreno, where Mr. Sacks spent time chatting with the younger Mr. Trump.

Mr. Vance and Blake Masters, an Arizona House candidate and fellow Thiel acolyte, are exploring a Silicon Valley fund-raiser for the elder Mr. Trump, although a person familiar with the matter said the event was still in the planning stages.

Heat pumps, which both warm and cool buildings and are powered by electricity, have been touted as the answer to curbing greenhouse gas emissions produced by homes, businesses and office buildings, which are responsible for about one-third of the emissions in New York State.

But how do they work? How much do they cost? Is New York ready for them? And can they really help solve the climate crisis? Here are some heat pump basics.

Why are heat pumps better for the environment?

Currently, we mostly burn fossil fuels to produce heat. This causes pollution. Heat pumps are all-electric.

Even though most electricity still comes from combustion, the United States is slowly transitioning to renewable power like hydro, wind and solar. As this shift occurs, heat pumps will help eliminate greenhouse gases.

A heat pump moves heat.

It consists of a boxy component outside and a sleek-looking blower inside. A thermostat controls the temperature. During warm weather, a pump works just like an air-conditioner by rerouting indoor heat outdoors.

When it’s cold outside, the process is reversed: Heat from the chilly outdoor air is extracted and delivered indoors with the help of refrigerants and a compressor.

Will heat pumps overburden the electricity grid?

New York City’s transition to renewable energy and electrification is happening gradually, involving many projects and moving parts. Con Edison is making investments in the grid to prepare it for an increase in demand, said Jen Hensley, a senior vice president at the company. But for the time being, the grid is ready for heat pumps, she added.

The devices are highly efficient, which should help limit the growing burden on the grid, said Rohit T. Aggarwala, the city’s climate chief.

Miguel Modestino, the director of the sustainable engineering initiative at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University, explained the pumps’ efficiency: They move heat, they don’t create it. Using the same amount of electricity, a heat pump can provide three to four times more warmth than a plug-in space heater.

Is there more than one kind of heat pump?

Yes. Air-source heat pumps are the most common. Geothermal pumps, another kind, take in heat from below the ground, where the temperature is more stable, Dr. Modestino said.

Geothermal systems, which tend to be more expensive to install, can provide energy for large buildings and even entire communities. But in New York City, where the real estate underground is jammed with pipes, cables and subway tunnels, geothermal pumps, with a few notable exceptions, can be difficult to install. So air-source pumps work better in the city.

What kinds of buildings can use the pumps?

Small buildings (one- to four-family homes and some businesses) are ideal.

New constructions are using larger-scale heat pumps, which can be placed on roofs or across entire floors, said Greg Elcock, vice president for energy efficiency at Con Ed.

It’s the older, larger buildings that are the problem, he said. “We call them the hard-to-electrify stock.”

Installing heat pump pipes across more than 12 stories of a building is still a major challenge, said Pallavi Mantha, an associate at Arup, a global sustainable-development company.

The large buildings are the worst polluters. How can they reach New York’s climate goals?

City law states that properties larger than 25,000 square feet — of which there are about 50,000 — must curb their emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

A state program is helping several city properties, like the Empire State Building, develop heat recovery systems and partial electrification plans. But “there are still technical advances that are happening and we don’t have all the answers yet,” Ms. Mantha said.

Until then, buildings can take an incremental approach by replacing windows, improving insulation, and reducing consumption, Ms. Mantha said.

“If you do all this, it creates an enabling path for electrification,” she said. “It’s buying time until the technology and policy evolve.”

Are people really buying heat pumps?

They are starting to. In New York City, Con Ed customers have completed more than 30,000 installations since 2020. And across the state, nearly 23,000 heat pump projects were installed in 2022, a threefold increase from the year before.

In the United States, shipments of heat pumps outpaced those of gas furnaces by over 15,000 units in January, according to the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, a trade association for manufacturers.

“I’m an evangelist,” said James Rosenthal, who owns an apartment in a 29-unit co-op in Lower Manhattan. Although his building runs on gas, which he still uses for cooking and heating water, he converted his home to rely on heat pumps in 2022. Since then, he has convinced six other neighbors to do the same. Their units were installed either at the base of the building or on its roof.

Aren’t they expensive?

Yes. Installing a heat pump in a single-family home can cost upward of $20,000.

There are financing options, however. Through 2032, a federal tax credit of up to $2,000 is available for installation, and New York State’s Clean Heat program offers rebates through utility companies that can amount to between $8,000 and $12,000 in savings, according to a Con Ed spokesman. There is also financial assistance available specifically for low- and middle-income households. And Mr. Rosenthal said his electricity bills were about 30 percent less in the summer, spring and fall.

Later this year, the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to release more funding for New Yorkers, state officials said.

Is it a pain to install one?

Like any home project, the experience can vary. “It’s major surgery,” said Mr. Rosenthal, who compared the weekslong construction to a renovation. “It was surgical,” said Robert Montalvo, a homeowner in the Bronx, whose pump system was installed in one day.

The level of disruption and duration of the project depends on the space and the piping work involved, said Victor Rodriguez, whose Brooklyn company, Ice Age Mechanical, installs heat pumps in small buildings and homes.

But the steps are always the same, he said, adding that sometimes the process can slow down if a building’s electrical system needs to be upgraded.

“This is the new way forward,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “We are kept pretty busy.”

Two days before his first criminal trial was set to begin in Manhattan, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday again framed the charges he faces as a broad attempt by Democrats to keep him from the White House, and he criticized a gag order placed on him by the judge in the New York case.

“Two days from now, the entire world will witness the commencement of the very first Biden trial,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in eastern Pennsylvania, alluding to his frequent and false assertion that President Biden orchestrated the New York case.

The case, which Mr. Trump also called a “communist show trial,” was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and has nothing to do with Mr. Biden.

As he often does, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cast himself as a victim of political persecution who is protecting his followers from a similar fate.

“I’m proud to do it for you,” he said of going on trial, speaking to a large crowd of his supporters who had waited for hours before gathering in a windswept field in Schnecksville, Pa. “Have a good time watching.”

There will not be television cameras in the courtroom. But Mr. Trump has sometimes held news conferences after his court dates, using them as an extension of the campaign trail, and he is expected to continue holding rallies on weekends, as he has for months.

Mr. Trump’s rally on Saturday began as Iran was launching an aerial attack on Israel in retaliation for a deadly Israeli airstrike two weeks ago.

The former president, who often portrays himself as Israel’s staunchest ally, offered prayers and support for the country. Then, as he often does, Mr. Trump effectively blamed Mr. Biden for the conflict in Gaza and insisted it would not have happened if he had won in 2020.

“They’re under attack right now,” Mr. Trump said of Israel. “That’s because we show great weakness.”

Several minutes later, members of the crowd began chanting, “Genocide Joe,” a phrase more commonly associated with progressives protesting Mr. Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that he backed Israel’s right to defend itself after a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7. But, as the chants died down, he seemed to agree with them. “They’re not wrong,” he said.

Mr. Trump repeated his false claims that he won the 2020 election and that Democrats cheated him out of a victory several times. Mr. Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020 by more than 80,000 votes.

“They cheat like hell,” Mr. Trump said of his political opponents, an allegation of voter fraud that has not been supported by evidence. He continued by sowing doubts about the integrity of the election in November, telling his supporters: “When you see them cheating, you get out there and start screaming. Start screaming.”

Mr. Trump also criticized a gag order imposed on him in the Manhattan case, in which he has been accused of covering up a sex scandal surrounding the 2016 campaign.

That order prevents Mr. Trump from publicly attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff and prosecutors, though not the judge or Manhattan’s district attorney.

“I will be forced to sit fully gagged. I’m not allowed to talk,” Mr. Trump said. “Can you believe it? They want to take away my constitutional right to talk.”

For tens of millions of years, Australia has been a playground for evolution, and the land Down Under lays claim to some of the most remarkable creatures on Earth.

It is the birthplace of songbirds, the land of egg-laying mammals and the world capital of pouch-bearing marsupials, a group that encompasses far more than just koalas and kangaroos. (Behold the bilby and the bettong!) Nearly half of the continent’s birds and roughly 90 percent of its mammals, reptiles and frogs are found nowhere else on the planet.

Australia has also become a case study in what happens when people push biodiversity to the brink. Habitat degradation, invasive species, infectious diseases and climate change have put many native animals in jeopardy and given Australia one of the worst rates of species loss in the world.

In some cases, scientists say, the threats are so intractable that the only way to protect Australia’s unique animals is to change them. Using a variety of techniques, including crossbreeding and gene editing, scientists are altering the genomes of vulnerable animals, hoping to arm them with the traits they need to survive.

“We’re looking at how we can assist evolution,” said Anthony Waddle, a conservation biologist at Macquarie University in Sydney.

It is an audacious concept, one that challenges a fundamental conservation impulse to preserve wild creatures as they are. But in this human-dominated age — in which Australia is simply at the leading edge of a global biodiversity crisis — the traditional conservation playbook may no longer be enough, some scientists said.

“We’re searching for solutions in an altered world,” said Dan Harley, a senior ecologist at Zoos Victoria. “We need to take risks. We need to be bolder.”

The extinction vortex

The helmeted honeyeater is a bird that demands to be noticed, with a patch of electric-yellow feathers on its forehead and a habit of squawking loudly as it zips through the dense swamp forests of the state of Victoria. But over the last few centuries, humans and wildfires damaged or destroyed these forests, and by 1989, just 50 helmeted honeyeaters remained, clinging to a tiny sliver of swamp at the Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve.

Intensive local conservation efforts, including a captive breeding program at Healesville Sanctuary, a Zoos Victoria park, helped the birds hang on. But there was very little genetic diversity among the remaining birds — a problem common in endangered animal populations — and breeding inevitably meant inbreeding. “They have very few options for making good mating decisions,” said Paul Sunnucks, a wildlife geneticist at Monash University in Melbourne.

In any small, closed breeding pool, harmful genetic mutations can build up over time, damaging animals’ health and reproductive success, and inbreeding exacerbates the problem. The helmeted honeyeater was an especially extreme case. The most inbred birds left one-tenth as many offspring as the least inbred ones, and the females had life spans that were half as long, Dr. Sunnucks and his colleagues found.

Without some kind of intervention, the helmeted honeyeater could be pulled into an “extinction vortex,” said Alexandra Pavlova, an evolutionary ecologist at Monash. “It became clear that something new needs to be done.”

A decade ago, Dr. Pavlova, Dr. Sunnucks and several other experts suggested an intervention known as genetic rescue, proposing to add some Gippsland yellow-tufted honeyeaters and their fresh DNA to the breeding pool.

The helmeted and Gippsland honeyeaters are members of the same species, but they are genetically distinct subspecies that have been evolving away from each another for roughly the last 56,000 years. The Gippsland birds live in drier, more open forests and are missing the pronounced feather crown that give helmeted honeyeaters their name.

Genetic rescue was not a novel idea. In one widely cited success, scientists revived the tiny, inbred panther population of Florida by importing wild panthers from a separate population from Texas.

But the approach violates the traditional conservation tenet that unique biological populations are sacrosanct, to be kept separate and genetically pure. “It really is a paradigm shift,” said Sarah Fitzpatrick, an evolutionary ecologist at Michigan State University who found that genetic rescue is underused in the United States.

Crossing the two types of honeyeaters risked muddying what made each subspecies unique and creating hybrids that were not well suited for either niche. Moving animals between populations can also spread disease, create new invasive populations or destabilize ecosystems in unpredictable ways.

Genetic rescue is also a form of active human meddling that violates what some scholars refer to as conservation’s “ethos of restraint” and has sometimes been critiqued as a form of playing God.

“There was a lot of angst among government agencies around doing it,” said Andrew Weeks, an ecological geneticist at the University of Melbourne who began a genetic rescue of the endangered mountain pygmy possum in 2010. “It was only really the idea that the population was about to go extinct that I guess gave government agencies the nudge.”

Dr. Sunnucks and his colleagues made the same calculation, arguing that the risks associated with genetic rescue were small — before the birds’ habitats were carved up and degraded, the two subspecies did occasionally interbreed in the wild — and paled in comparison with the risks of doing nothing.

And so, since 2017, Gippsland birds have been part of the helmeted honeyeater breeding program at Healesville Sanctuary. In captivity there have been real benefits, with many mixed pairs producing more independent chicks per nest than pairs composed of two helmeted honeyeaters. Dozens of hybrid honeyeaters have now been released into the wild. They seem to be faring well, but it is too soon to say whether they have a fitness advantage.

Monash and Zoos Victoria experts are also working on the genetic rescue of other species, including the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum, a tiny, tree-dwelling marsupial known as the forest fairy. The lowland population of the possum shares the Yellingbo swamps with the helmeted honeyeater; in 2023, just 34 lowland possums remained. The first genetic rescue joey was born at Healesville Sanctuary last month.

The scientists hope that boosting genetic diversity will make these populations more resilient in the face of whatever unknown dangers might arise, increasing the odds that some individuals possess the traits needed to survive. “Genetic diversity is your blueprint for how you contend with the future,” Dr. Harley of Zoos Victoria said.

Targeting threats

For the northern quoll, a small marsupial predator, the existential threat arrived nearly a century ago, when the invasive, poisonous cane toad landed in eastern Australia. Since then, the toxic toads have marched steadily westward — and wiped out entire populations of quolls, which eat the alien amphibians.

But some of the surviving quoll populations in eastern Australia seem to have evolved a distaste for toads. When scientists crossed toad-averse quolls with toad-naive quolls, the hybrid offspring also turned up their tiny pink noses at the toxic amphibians.

What if scientists moved some toad-avoidant quolls to the west, allowing them to spread their discriminating genes before the cane toads arrived? “You’re essentially using natural selection and evolution to achieve your goals, which means that the problem gets solved quite thoroughly and permanently,” said Ben Phillips, a population biologist at Curtin University in Perth who led the research.

A field test, however, demonstrated how unpredictable nature can be. In 2017, Dr. Phillips and his colleagues released a mixed population of northern quolls on a tiny, toad-infested island. Some quolls did interbreed, and there was preliminary evidence of natural selection for “toad-smart” genes.

But the population was not yet fully adapted to toads, and some quolls ate the amphibians and died, Dr. Phillips said. A large wildfire also broke out on the island. Then, a cyclone hit. “All of these things conspired to send our experimental population extinct,” Dr. Phillips said. The scientists did not have enough funding to try again, but “all the science lined up,” he added.

Advancing science could make future efforts even more targeted. In 2015, for instance, scientists created more heat-resistant coral by crossbreeding colonies from different latitudes. In a proof-of-concept study from 2020, researchers used the gene-editing tool known as CRISPR to directly alter a gene involved in heat tolerance.

CRISPR will not be a practical, real-world solution anytime soon, said Line Bay, a biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science who was an author of both studies. “Understanding the benefits and risks is really complex,” she said. “And this idea of meddling with nature is quite confronting to people.”

But there is growing interest in the biotechnological approach. Dr. Waddle hopes to use the tools of synthetic biology, including CRISPR, to engineer frogs that are resistant to the chytrid fungus, which causes a fatal disease that has already contributed to the extinction of at least 90 amphibian species.

The fungus is so difficult to eradicate that some vulnerable species can no longer live in the wild. “So either they live in glass boxes forever,” Dr. Waddle said, “or we come up with solutions where we can get them back in nature and thriving.”

Unintended consequences

Still, no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, organisms and ecosystems will remain complex. Genetic interventions are “likely to have some unintended impacts,” said Tiffany Kosch, a conservation geneticist at the University of Melbourne who is also hoping to create chytrid-resistant frogs. A genetic variant that helps frogs survive chytrid might make them more susceptible to another health problem, she said.

There are plenty of cautionary tales, efforts to re-engineer nature that have backfired spectacularly. The toxic cane toads, in fact, were set loose in Australia deliberately, in what would turn out to be a deeply misguided attempt to control pest beetles.

But some environmental groups and experts are uneasy about genetic approaches for other reasons, too. “Focusing on intensive intervention in specific species can be a distraction,” said Cam Walker, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Australia. Staving off the extinction crisis will require broader, landscape-level solutions such as halting habitat loss, he said.

Moreover, animals are autonomous beings, and any intervention into their lives or genomes must have “a very strong ethical and moral justification” — a bar that even many traditional conservation projects do not clear, said Adam Cardilini, an environmental scientist at Deakin University in Victoria.

Chris Lean, a philosopher of biology at Macquarie University, said he believed in the fundamental conservation goal of “preserving the world as it is for its heritage value, for its ability to tell the story of life on Earth.” Still, he said he supported the cautious, limited use of new genomic tools, which may require us to reconsider some longstanding environmental values.

In some ways, assisted evolution is an argument — or, perhaps, an acknowledgment — that there is no stepping back, no future in which humans do not profoundly shape the lives and fates of wild creatures.

To Dr. Harley, it has become clear that preventing more extinctions will require human intervention, innovation and effort. “Let’s lean into that, not be daunted by it,” he said. “My view is that 50 years from now, biologists and wildlife managers will look back at us and say, ‘Why didn’t they take the steps and the opportunities when they had the chance?’”

Dr. Cameron Clifford, a dentist in Edmond, Okla., said his son Cal, 9, has been infatuated with octopuses since he was 3 years old. “Every birthday, every Christmas, every holiday, he would always say: ‘All I want is an octopus,’” Dr. Clifford said.

For a while, the family nurtured Cal’s interest by buying him octopus toys and octopus T-shirts, dressing him as an octopus for Halloween and taking him to aquariums to see live octopuses.

Then, last October, Dr. Clifford sprang for the real deal.

He ordered his son a California two-spot octopus to keep as a pet in a tank in his bedroom. It arrived via UPS in a bag of water packed inside a cardboard box on Oct. 11, Cal’s ninth birthday. Cal named it Terrance.

Unbeknown to the family, Terrance was a female, who released what Dr. Clifford described as “a chandelier” of puffy little eggs in December. He assumed the eggs were unfertilized until one night in February, when, while cleaning the tank, he picked one up and examined it closely.

“I accidentally popped it, and this droplet comes out and spreads out these tiny tentacles and does three swim strokes across my viewpoint,” he said. “It was absolutely shocking.”

Over the next week or so, 49 more hatchlings emerged from their eggs, setting off a rush by the family to keep the tiny octopuses alive and find them homes. Dr. Clifford has been documenting the experience on TikTok, where some of his videos have received more than two million views. Viewers have responded with crying and heart emojis.

“It’s expensive, wet chaos,” said Dr. Clifford, 36, who has spent thousands of dollars on tanks, water filters, water chillers, crabs, snails and clams in an expanding cephalopod aquarium that briefly took over part of a bathroom in the family home. Among other challenges, he has had to contend with a small electrical fire and about 10 gallons of saltwater that spilled on the carpet of his son’s bedroom.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said. “A lot of work and emotion and money and time.”

It is also rewarding, he said. The family loves to pet Terrance, Dr. Clifford said, and makes her “puzzles” by putting a crab in a clear container for her to pull out and eat. Terrance is “one social cephalopod,” as one TikTok calls her, showing her extending a tentacle over the top of the tank as if to say hello.

Many scientists discourage people from keeping octopuses as pets, noting that most require live food, carefully calibrated aquatic conditions and frequent stimulation. They also try to escape from their tanks and generally live for less than two years.

Paul Clarkson, director of husbandry operations at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, Calif., said that when he first heard about the Clifford family, he thought they had “no business caring for an octopus.”

But after watching Dr. Clifford’s TikTok videos, he was “pleasantly surprised.”

“It’s a delightful story and it seems like they have done a pretty remarkable job as home aquarium keepers, caring for that animal,” Mr. Clarkson said. “They obviously went to great lengths and expense.”

Still, he cautioned that most pet owners are not equipped to care for an octopus.

“They don’t make good pets and, as that family documents in their story, the effort, the time, the money involved in caring for that animal is tremendous and is, at times, kind of a 24/7 job,” Mr. Clarkson said. “My recommendation is: Don’t try this at home.”

Jordan Baker, senior aquarist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, said the California two-spot octopus, known as a bimac, can lay up to 800 eggs, “so this family lucked out by having 50 or so by the end of their experience.”

“Managing water quality, husbandry and a short life span for sensitive animals like octopuses can turn into a full-time job, especially with hatchlings involved,” she said. “It can be done, but for an average octopus enthusiast, the cost involved in both dollars and labor would be high.”

Dr. Clifford said that he ordered Terrance through a broker he found through the Octopus News Magazine Online, which calls itself “an online community and news resource for anything and everything pertaining to octopuses, squids and cephalopods.” He said he was told the octopus came from a diver with a fishing license in California, which permits people to catch octopuses in areas that are not state marine reserves.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife website calls California two-spot octopuses “welcome aquarium pets” and says they are among the most common species used to study octopus genomics, development and evolution.

But some object to keeping octopuses as pets, and Dr. Clifford said he had faced some backlash on social media. Octopuses have attracted widespread attention for their intelligence since the film “My Octopus Teacher,” about a South African naturalist’s daily interactions with a small octopus, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2021.

“Octopuses are wild creatures whose habitat is the ocean and coastal marine waters,” said Barbara J. King, a professor emerita of anthropology at William & Mary, who has written about octopuses. “There, they live in dens, may use tools as they go about daily life and, in some places, express complex social behaviors. They don’t belong in human homes, full stop.”

Dr. Clifford said he has managed to keep about 24 of the octopus hatchlings alive, with the help of a friend who is keeping them at a property he owns. Even in the wild, scientists say, very few hatchlings survive.

Dr. Clifford said he had hired an intern to reach out to aquariums and research institutions to ask if any were willing to take the hatchlings. At least two have expressed interest, he said.

“I don’t know that we’ve been fully prepared for any of these challenges, but the hope is to re-home as many as we can,” he said. “And those that we can’t, we will figure out a way to keep them alive and be responsible. It’s not a real concrete plan, but we’re doing pretty good so far.”

President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president despite lingering doubts about the direction of the country, the economy and his age, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are now virtually tied, with Mr. Trump holding a 46 percent to 45 percent edge. That is an improvement for Mr. Biden from late February, when Mr. Trump had a sturdier 48 percent to 43 percent lead just before he became the presumptive Republican nominee.

Mr. Biden’s tick upward appears to stem largely from his improved standing among traditional Democratic voters — he is winning a greater share of voters who supported him in 2020 than he did a month ago. Then, Mr. Trump had secured the support of far more of his past voters compared with the president — 97 percent to 83 percent — but that margin has narrowed. Mr. Biden is now winning 89 percent of his 2020 supporters compared with 94 percent for Mr. Trump.

The tightening poll results are the latest evidence of a 2024 contest that both campaigns are preparing to be excruciatingly close. The last two presidential elections were decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, and this one could be just as tight. In a nation so evenly divided, even the tiniest of shifts in support could prove decisive.

Beneath the narrowing contest, many of the fundamentals of the race appear largely unchanged.

The share of voters who view the nation as headed in the wrong direction remains a high 64 percent. Almost 80 percent of voters still rate the nation’s economic conditions as fair or poor, including a majority of Democrats. And both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump remain unpopular, for familiar reasons. Most voters think Mr. Biden is too old. A majority believe Mr. Trump has committed serious federal crimes.

“Just blah,” said Beth Prevost, a 59-year-old hairdresser and independent voter in Windsor Locks, Conn., summing up the feelings of so many about the rematch. She said she was leaning toward Mr. Biden as “the lesser of the two evils.”

“You can recover from bad policies, but you can’t recover from a bad heart,” Ms. Prevost said. “And Donald Trump has a bad heart.”

The survey comes just before Mr. Trump’s history-making criminal trial in New York City, the first for a former American president. He faces charges related to falsifying records related to a hush-money payment to a porn star. The case is one of four involving felony indictments against Mr. Trump, but it is the only one so far with a trial set to begin before the election.

Yet despite the potential for the Republican nominee to face jail time, only one in four voters said they were yet paying very close attention to the former president’s legal travails.

The Biden campaign, which has already begun advertising in battleground states, has hoped the reality of a potential second Trump term will snap reluctant Democrats back toward their typical partisan posture. There is some initial evidence of that happening.

In the last month, Mr. Biden’s support among white voters remained flat, but it has inched upward among Black and Latino voters, even if it still lags behind traditional levels of Democratic support. Mr. Biden was faring better than he had been a month ago in suburbs and among women, though he was weaker among men. Younger voters remain a persistent weakness, while older voters provide a source of relative strength for the Democratic president.

The poll’s overall margin of error was 3.3 percent. But the results among subgroups are less statistically reliable because there are fewer respondents in them. Still, this poll showed Mr. Biden with his strongest performance among nonwhite voters among the last three Times/Siena surveys since December.

Age, however, remains a political albatross for Mr. Biden.

A full 69 percent of voters still see the 81-year-old Democrat as too old to be an effective president. Mr. Trump, who turns 78 in June, would also be the oldest president in American history if elected. But voters do not have the same doubts about his capacity to serve, with only 41 percent viewing him as too old.

There was one notable shift in the last month. Among voters who are over 65, the share who view Mr. Biden as too old has dropped significantly.

Russell Wood, 67, a Democratic retiree and a veteran who lives in Los Angeles County, said he had noticed a marked change in Mr. Biden’s energy levels. He was disappointed Mr. Biden had skipped the traditional pre-Super Bowl interview but was pleased with the performance he had seen since.

“He did a really great job at the State of the Union, and since then it’s like he’s been a different Joe Biden,” Mr. Wood said, adding: “I know he’s on the campaign trail day in and day out. I have no complaints there.”

The economy also continues to be a drag for the president, who has tried to frame his “bottom up and middle out” job agenda under the banner of “Bidenomics.” Young voters are especially sour, with more than 85 percent rating the economy poor or fair.

Voters in the poll gave Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy almost perfectly inverted ratings: 64 percent approved of Mr. Trump’s handling of the issue as president and 63 percent disapprove of Mr. Biden’s job on the issue now.

Immigration gave Mr. Trump his other biggest edge among a host of issues voters were asked about in the survey. Border crossings hit record highs at the end of last year. A slim majority approved of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration as president, while 64 percent of voters disapproved of Mr. Biden’s job on those matters.

Luis Campino, a 50-year-old independent voter who immigrated from Colombia and now lives in Highland, N.Y., said there were “dangerous” people crossing the border. “They’re coming in like nothing,” he added.

Mr. Campino said he had voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but was planning to vote for Mr. Trump as the “lesser of the evils,” a decision driven in part by his concerns about crime and immigration.

In the poll, Mr. Biden was given better ratings than Mr. Trump on his ability to unite the nation and his handling of both race relations and the pandemic.

But with the war in Ukraine dragging into its second year after Russia’s invasion and the civilian death toll rising in Gaza after Israel’s assault after the terror attack by Hamas, voters gave Mr. Trump significantly higher marks on his handling of foreign conflicts.

Only 36 percent approve of Mr. Biden’s managing of those conflicts, with especially glaring weaknesses among younger voters. Only 4 percent of voters under 45 strongly approve of his job on such international matters.

Danny Ghoghas, 23, a bartender and server who lives in Burbank, Calif., is strongly considering staying home on Election Day to protest Mr. Biden’s response to the conflict in Gaza.

“I really don’t like Donald Trump and would not like him to be in office again,” said Mr. Ghoghas, a Democrat. “That’s why I would vote for Biden again. But other than that, I can’t really think of a good reason to vote for him.”

The generational differences on foreign affairs were notable. While voters of all ages viewed Mr. Trump similarly, Mr. Biden received far worse ratings from voters under 45, 70 percent of whom disapproved. Among those who are 45 and older, a slimmer 53 percent majority disapproved.

Mr. Biden has made Mr. Trump’s potential to undermine democratic rule after the riot of Jan. 6, 2021, a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. But so far, equal 31 percent segments of respondents said that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump were “good for democracy.” The number who said Mr. Trump was “bad for democracy,” 45 percent, only slightly outpaced those who said the same of Mr. Biden.

Also in the poll, nearly equal shares of voters labeled Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden a “risky choice” for the country.

The survey did not ask about potential third-party candidates. But roughly 5 percent of voters seemingly unhappy with the Trump-Biden choice volunteered the names of other candidates they planned to vote for, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democrat-turned-independent who is battling to get on ballots nationwide.

It is not clear yet what effect the looming criminal trial will have for Mr. Trump, with 37 percent saying they were paying little to no attention at all.

Still, a 58 percent majority of voters view the charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money payments made to the porn star Stormy Daniels as either very serious or somewhat serious. Opinions fractured predictably along partisan lines, though a majority of independents notably view the charges as at least somewhat serious.

More interesting was the gender gap on that question.

Women were twice as likely as men, 40 percent to 20 percent, to see the charges related to the porn star as very serious; men were twice as likely as women to see the charges as not serious at all, 30 percent to 15 percent.

Ruth Igielnik, Alyce McFadden and Camille Baker contributed reporting.

Here are the key things to know about how this Times/Siena poll was conducted:

• We spoke with 1,059 registered voters from April 7 to 11, 2024.

• Our polls are conducted by telephone, using live interviewers, in both English and Spanish. More than 95 percent of respondents were contacted on a cellphone for this poll.

• Voters are selected for the survey from a list of registered voters. The list contains information on the demographic characteristics of every registered voter, allowing us to make sure we reach the right number of voters of each party, race and region. For this poll, we placed nearly 127,000 calls to more than 93,000 voters.

• To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. You can see more information about the characteristics of our respondents and the weighted sample on the methodology page, under “Composition of the Sample.”

• The poll’s margin of sampling error among registered voters is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points. In theory, this means that the results should reflect the views of the overall population most of the time, though many other challenges create additional sources of error. When computing the difference between two values — such as a candidate’s lead in a race — the margin of error is twice as large.

You can see full results and a detailed methodology here. If you want to read more about how and why we conduct our polls, you can see answers to frequently asked questions and submit your own questions here.

Two days before former President Donald J. Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail on his fourth indictment, he held an event at his golf club in New Jersey for another group of people facing criminal charges: rioters accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Standing next to a portrait of himself portrayed as James Bond, Mr. Trump told the defendants and their families that they had suffered greatly, but that all of that would change if he won another term.

“People who have been treated unfairly are going to be treated extremely, extremely fairly,” he said to a round of applause at the event last August in Bedminster, N.J. “What you’ve suffered is just ridiculous,” he added. “But it’s going to be OK.”

That private event was emblematic of how Mr. Trump has embraced dozens of Jan. 6 defendants and their relatives and highlights how he has sought to undermine law enforcement when it suits him, while he also puts forth a law-and-order campaign.

Recently, however, his celebrations of the Capitol riot and those who took part in it have become more public as he has promoted a revisionist history of the attack and placed it at the heart of his 2024 presidential campaign.

Despite the nearly 1,000 guilty pleas and convictions that have been secured in criminal cases stemming from Jan. 6, Mr. Trump has repeatedly described the rioters who broke into the Capitol as “hostages” and has started to open his campaign events with a recording of riot defendants singing the national anthem from their jail cells.

He has highlighted the work of the so-called Freedom Corner, a vigil of activists and rioters’ family members who have gathered nearly nightly for almost two years outside the jail in Washington where some of the most violent rioters are being held. This year, when it seemed as if Mr. Trump would go on trial in Washington on charges related to Jan. 6, his aides discussed the idea of him visiting that jail, according to a person familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to speak publicly. The plan was put off after the trial was delayed.

By doing all of this, Mr. Trump has risked radicalizing his most die-hard supporters even further, encouraging them to repeat events like those that unfolded on Jan. 6.

“It normalizes violence as a legitimate solution to political grievances,” said Robert Pape, a scholar at the University of Chicago who has studied American political violence in the wake of the Capitol attack. “And so it makes it more likely that politically angry people will resort to it.”

Trump Makes the Capitol Attack a General Election Issue

Most politicians would likely have avoided focusing on an episode that shocked the nation as Jan. 6 did, and that polling consistently has shown alienates swing voters. But Mr. Trump has paid increasingly more attention to Jan. 6 in his general election campaign.

Mr. Trump’s attention to Jan. 6 has provided President Biden with apolitical opportunity. Mr. Biden recently invited two Capitol Police officers who were attacked by the mob to speak at one of his own campaign events. As part of his message of seeking to protect democracy, he has repeatedly described the assault on the Capitol as one of the country’s darkest days.

“Trump said that there was ‘a lot of love’ on January the 6th,” Mr. Biden said in a January speech at Valley Forge, Pa. “The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence.”

Still, Mr. Trump has a long history of creating alternate versions of reality when it works to his advantage. And as he has struggled to expand his voting coalition over three campaigns, he seems to have recognized that issues surrounding Jan. 6 motivate his base. The subject has helped him strengthen the bond he shares with his supporters by painting them as he likes to paint himself — as victims of a federal law enforcement system run amok.

“I do think he is sincerely concerned about us and our families, and I don’t think he’s doing it just for political reasons,” said Will Pope of Kansas, who attended the Bedminster event and has been accused of, among other things, jamming a flagpole into the Senate carriage doors as the police were trying to close them.

“He’s picked up on the growing concern about the Justice Department and the government in general going hard against American citizens,” he added.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said the Justice Department under Mr. Biden had spent more time prosecuting Jan. 6 defendants and Mr. Trump than “criminals, illegal immigrants and terrorists.” She added, “President Trump will restore justice for all Americans who have been unfairly treated by Joe Biden’s two-tier system of justice.”

How Trump Has Flipped on the Capitol Riot

Mr. Trump hasn’t always embraced Jan. 6 — at least not openly.

Prodded by his advisers, he publicly disavowed the attack within days of the Capitol being stormed, even though behind closed doors he strongly resisted saying the election was over, according to the House select committee that investigated the attack.

Soon, however, Mr. Trump began to echo the growing attempts to revise the history of the Capitol attack. In doing so, he often followed the lead of far-right lawmakers, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who were in turn following the lead of a small but vocal group of right-wing journalists and activists.

Mr. Trump’s embrace of Jan. 6 not only has meant describing the attack in which more than 100 police officers were injured as a “love fest.” It also has led him to tell a journalist that he wanted to march to the Capitol that day but that his team had prevented him from doing so.

At a rally in Texas in January 2022, Mr. Trump, while teasing his eventual presidential bid, said he would consider pardoning those involved in the assault if he were re-elected — a promise he has often repeated.

A pivotal moment in Mr. Trump’s reversal on the attack came six months later.

In July 2022, one of his aides, Liz Harrington, reached out to Julie Kelly, a conservative journalist who has written extensively about the Capitol attack and the defendants charged with taking part in it.

Ms. Harrington asked what Mr. Trump could do “to bail these people out,” Ms. Kelly recalled. She replied that while there was little he could do about their bail, Mr. Trump should educate himself about the larger legal issues surrounding Jan. 6. Ms. Kelly proposed a meeting with Cynthia Hughes, the founder of the Patriot Freedom Project, a prominent Jan. 6 legal defense fund.

Mr. Trump’s aides initially balked at the idea of sitting down with Ms. Hughes, Ms. Kelly recalled. Ms. Hughes’s nephew, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, was facing charges stemming from the Capitol attack, but he was also an avowed Nazi sympathizer who liked to take pictures of himself dressed as Hitler.

In the end, however, Ms. Kelly and Ms. Hughes were granted an audience with Mr. Trump at Bedminster in September 2022. Ms. Kelly said that she told the former president he was not doing enough to support the Jan. 6 defendants and that they felt abandoned by him. The two women also told Mr. Trump that some of the federal judges he had put on the bench were “among the worst” when it came to handling the hundreds of criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack.

After the meeting, Mr. Trump gave $10,000 to Ms. Hughes’s organization. Around the same time, he told the conservative radio host Wendy Bell, “I’m financially supporting people that are incredible, and they were in my office actually two days ago.” Mr. Trump later gave a video statement of support at one of the organization’s fund-raising events at a hotel in Washington.

“People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said in the video.

Mr. Trump also called Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police lieutenant on Jan. 6 and who is viewed by many on the right as a kind of political martyr.

“He said he talks about Ashli and he thinks about Ashli and that he has her on his heart,” Ms. Witthoeft said in an online video, in which she recounted the call with Mr. Trump at one of her nightly protests at the Freedom Corner.

Mr. Trump’s aides and congressional allies, like Ms. Taylor Greene, also got him interested in what they described as the poor conditions that Jan. 6 defendants were living under in the Washington jail. But those conditions long preceded the arrival of the rioters, and at this point the jail houses only about 15 or 20 them.

By that point, Mr. Trump had hired Joanna Miller Wischer, a former aide to Peter Navarro, who was previously Mr. Trump’s White House trade adviser and is now in prison for contempt of Congress because he defied a subpoena from the Jan. 6 House committee. She began a job with Mr. Trump’s political action committee and soon became an advocate of sorts within the campaign for Jan. 6 rioters.

Another issue helped to shape Mr. Trump’s thoughts on the Capitol attack and those who took part in it: the spectacle of the televised hearings that were held throughout that summer and fall by the Jan. 6 House committee. Mr. Trump was furious, according to a person with direct knowledge of his thinking, as he watched several of his former aides testify in public about his inability to admit defeat in the 2020 election and his inactivity in the face of the violence on Jan. 6.

How the Jan. 6 Prisoners Became ‘Hostages’

Mr. Trump’s use of the term “hostages” to describe those charged with taking part in the Capitol attack has been one of his most outlandish attempts to alter the history of Jan. 6. The word, at least as he has used it, expresses little beyond a baseless and distorted view that anyone who has been touched by the criminal justice system because of their roles in the riot has been treated unfairly.

During the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, the number of defendants jailed before their trials has tended to hover around 5 or 10 percent of the total number charged. But that number has decreased significantly in recent months.

And the defendants jailed before their trials were among the most violent rioters, accused of shooting a pistol in the air while standing on scaffolding above the mob, plotting to murder the F.B.I. agents who investigated them and other serious crimes.

One of Mr. Trump’s associates said they realized that the former president started to use the term “hostages” in the months after he recorded a version of the “Star-Spangled Banner” with the so-called Jan. 6 Choir, a musical group composed of rioters serving time in a Washington jail. Mr. Trump has insisted on playing the song at some of his rallies and has also played it at times at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, where, in some cases, all the diners on the patio rise during the display and put their hands over their hearts.

One of the recording’s producers was Kash Patel, a close aide to Mr. Trump who served in a top Defense Department role in the final days of his administration. Through a spokesman, Mr. Patel denied that he had any role in persuading Mr. Trump to use the word “hostages” in his speeches.

Last month at a campaign event in Ohio, Mr. Trump stood by as an announcer asked the crowd to rise for “the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” Then, after saluting as a recording played, Mr. Trump repeated the word.

“You see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s where they are, is hostages,” Mr. Trump said, adding that the men were also “unbelievable patriots.”

Several critics, including some federal judges who have handled Jan. 6-related cases, have said that legitimizing the events of that day increased the risk that something similar could happen again.

A prominent judge in Washington, Royce C. Lamberth, earlier this month, while sentencing a man who assaulted the police on Jan. 6 to more than seven years in prison, worried aloud about Jan. 6 becoming “a precedent for further violence against political opponents or governmental institutions.”

“This is not normal,” Judge Lamberth said. “This cannot become normal. We as a community, we as a society, we as a country cannot condone the normalization of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.