Latest News and Articles

Four of South Dakota’s federally recognized Native American tribes have barred the state’s governor, Kristi Noem — a Republican whose name has been floated as a potential running mate for former President Donald J. Trump — from their reservations. The latest blocked Ms. Noem on Thursday.

Three of them barred Ms. Noem this month, joining another tribe that had sanctioned the governor after she told state lawmakers in February that Mexican drug cartels had a foothold on their reservations and were committing murders there.

Ms. Noem further angered the tribes with remarks she made at a town hall event last month in Winner, S.D., appearing to suggest that the tribes were complicit in the cartels’ presence on their reservations.

“We’ve got some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefiting from the cartels being there, and that’s why they attack me every day,” Ms. Noem said.

The tribes are the Cheyenne River Sioux, the Oglala Sioux, the Rosebud Sioux and the Standing Rock Sioux. Their reservations have a combined population of nearly 50,000 people and encompass more than eight million acres, according to state and federal government counts. Standing Rock Indian Reservation, the third tribal area to have restricted Ms. Noem’s access, extends into North Dakota.

The tribes have accused Ms. Noem of stoking fears and denigrating their heritage when she referred to a gang known as the Ghost Dancers while addressing state lawmakers and said that it had recruited tribal members to join its criminal activities.

The gang has the same name as the participants in the Native American ghost dance ceremony, a sacred ritual dating to the 19th century.

“Gov. Kristi Noem’s wild and irresponsible attempt to connect tribal leaders and parents with Mexican drug cartels is a sad reflection of her fear-based politics that do nothing to bring people together to solve problems,” Janet Alkire, the chairwoman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in a statement this week.

Ms. Noem stood by her comments in a statement to The New York Times on Friday.

“Tribal leaders should immediately banish the Mexican drug cartels that are responsible for murders, rapes, drug addiction and many more crimes on tribal lands,” she said. “The people in the communities live with unspeakable horrors and tragedy every day, but banishing me for telling the truth about the suffering does nothing to solve the problems. It may play well for the leftist media, but in reality, it’s pointless.”

When asked about Ms. Noem’s claims that tribal leaders were benefiting from the cartels’ presence on reservations, an aide pointed to her recent remarks to The Dakota Scout, an alternative and independent newspaper based in Sioux Falls, S.D., doubling down on them and criticizing the tribes’ response to the cartels.

“That tells me that they are tied to them or benefiting from them somehow, that they’re allowing them to stay in their communities,” she said.

The governor’s office provided photos to The Times that it said were from a gang promotion ceremony featuring several men wearing clothing adorned with Ghost Dancers patches. The Times was unable to verify the images independently.

It also released a recording of a conversation that it said was between the secretary of the South Dakota Department of Tribal Relations and a leader of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in which they discussed how a single Tribal Council representative from South Dakota had voted to bar Ms. Noem from its reservation. The remaining votes came from Tribal Council members who reside in North Dakota, according to the governor’s office.

Efforts to reach the Tribal Council member said to be in the recording were not immediately successful.

In a social media post on Thursday, Ms. Noem argued that her comments about cartel activity on the reservations were similar to remarks that Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, made last month before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

“We’ve got cartels in Indian country,” he said, using an expletive to say there was a lot of “bad” stuff going on.

Mr. Tester, a member of the Indian Affairs Committee, had been pushing for additional law enforcement resources for tribal lands, mirroring calls from tribal leaders in Montana for help from the federal government to address crime. His comments differed in tenor from Ms. Noem’s, and he did not level accusations that tribal leaders were complicit in the rise of the cartels on reservations.

A spokesman for Mr. Tester, who is running for re-election in a crucial contest for control of the Senate, declined to comment on Friday.

In November, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, citing a rise in drug-related offenses, assaults and homicides on its reservation, declared a state of emergency. It remains in effect.

Then, in January, the tribe accused the federal government in a lawsuit of failing to provide adequate funding as required by longstanding treaties for law enforcement coverage on the reservation, an area it said was larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The tribe said in its lawsuit that it receives only enough federal funding for 33 police officers and eight criminal investigators, which it said had contributed to an uptick in crime. But the tribe’s leader pushed back against Ms. Noem’s claims that the cartels were using the reservation to facilitate the spread of illegal drugs and said that the problem existed when Mr. Trump was president.

The cartels’ reach on tribal lands is gaining heightened attention on Capitol Hill, where at least two congressional panels recently focused on surging crime connected to the groups.

At a hearing on Wednesday, Jeffrey Stiffarm, a tribal leader from Montana, told a House oversight committee that “these drug cartels are specifically targeting Indian Country because of a dangerous combination of rural terrain, history of addiction, under-resourced law enforcement, legal loopholes, sparsely populated communities and exorbitant profits, and it is devastating tribal reservations.”

South Dakota has nine federally recognized Native American tribes, which have at times sparred with Ms. Noem over issues related to their sovereignty, her support for the now-halted Keystone XL pipeline and access to their reservations at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, which in February became the first group to bar Ms. Noem from its reservation and had in 2019 lifted a previous barring of her, said that the governor’s political ambitions had motivated her actions.

In a statement posted at the time on Facebook, the tribe’s president, Frank Star Comes Out, said that “the truth of the matter is that Governor Noem wants the use of the so-called ‘invasion’ of the southern border as a Republican ‘crisis’ issue” to encourage Mr. Trump to use it as a campaign issue and to select her as his running mate.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference later in February, a straw poll showed Ms. Noem tied for the top choice to be Mr. Trump’s running mate.

The tribes’ criticism of Ms. Noem began after the governor addressed a joint session of the South Dakota Legislature on Feb. 2 about the tide of illegal border crossings.

“Make no mistake, the cartels have a presence on several of South Dakota’s tribal reservations,” she said. “Murders are being committed by cartel members on the Pine Ridge Reservation and in Rapid City, and a gang called the Ghost Dancers are affiliated with these cartels. They have been successful in recruiting tribal members to join their criminal activity.”

Ms. Noem said the state government did not have the jurisdiction to intervene and provide law enforcement support to South Dakota’s tribes.

On Thursday, Ms. Noem announced that South Dakota would begin offering training to tribal law enforcement officers, who currently must travel to New Mexico for it.

The top U.S. diplomat for East Asia will travel to China on Sunday, the State Department announced, just days after President Biden met with the leaders of Japan and the Philippines in Washington as part of a broad diplomatic outreach in the region to counter China’s aggression.

Daniel J. Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, will travel with Sarah Beran, Mr. Biden’s top China adviser on the National Security Council. They will be in China until Tuesday, meeting with officials “as part of ongoing efforts to maintain open lines of communication and to responsibly manage competition,” according to a statement from the State Department.

China’s moves in the Indo-Pacific region were a focus at the White House this week during a three-day state visit by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan that ended with a first-ever three-way summit with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines. That nation has borne the brunt of China’s intimidation campaign in the South China Sea.

Tensions between China and the United States have recently increased amid concern that China might begin a conflict over Taiwan, and because the United States is treaty-bound to defend the Philippines.

In a meeting at the State Department on Friday, Enrique Manalo, the foreign secretary of the Philippines, said that “China’s escalation of its harassment” continued to take a toll on the country, recently injuring four Filipino seamen. Also present at the meeting were Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state; Lloyd J. Austin III, the secretary of defense; Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser; and their three counterparts from the Philippines.

In the past several years, Japan has moved closer to the United States on countering China by increasing military spending and siding with Washington in global diplomacy on the world stage. That has included standing with Ukraine in its war against Russia, while China reaffirms ties with Russia.

The last high-level U.S. official to make a trip to China was Janet L. Yellen, the treasury secretary, who returned from Beijing this month with little to show for four days of top-level economic meetings.

Mr. Biden concluded the Thursday meeting with his counterparts from Japan and the Philippines by saying that America’s commitment to their defense was not in question.

“When we stand as one,” he said, “we are able to forge a better peace for all.”

For months, Western governments have provided military support for Israel while fending off accusations that their weapons were being used to commit war crimes in Gaza. But as a global outcry over the growing death toll in Gaza mounts, maintaining that balance is becoming increasingly difficult, as was clear on a single day this past week.

On Tuesday, in a United Nations court, Germany found itself having to defend against accusations that it was complicit in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza by exporting weapons to Israel.

A few hours later, in Washington, a top Democrat and Biden administration ally, Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, said he might block an $18 billion deal to sell F-15 fighter jets to Israel unless he was assured that Palestinian civilians would not be indiscriminately bombed.

And two miles away, at a media briefing at the State Department, Britain’s foreign minister, David Cameron, was pressed on what his government had concluded after weeks of internal review about whether Israel has breached international humanitarian law during its offensive in Gaza.

The governments of Britain, Germany and the United States remain the backbone of international military support for Israel. So far, the pressure has not swayed them, though President Biden this month went further than he ever had, threatening to condition future support for Israel on how it addresses his concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Mr. Cameron also equivocated, if only a bit. After defending Israel at the briefing and suggesting that the recent advice he had received did not conclude that arms exports should be halted, he said that the British government’s position reflected only “the latest assessment” of the issue, implying some flexibility.

Global outrage over a war that the Gazan health authorities say has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children, has already upended geopolitics and could help determine the outcome of the American presidential election in November. Increasingly, it also raises the threat of war crimes charges against governments that export weapons in conflicts where opponents argue international humanitarian law has been violated.

Such concerns were raised recently by more than 600 lawyers and retired judges who urged the British government to freeze weapons shipments to Israel, citing a “plausible risk” of genocide in Gaza.

Israel vigorously denies accusations of genocide, arguing that it needs to defend itself against Hamas, which led the Oct. 7 attack that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.

A threatened Iranian strike on Israel in retaliation for the Damascus bombing that killed a number of high-ranking Iranian officers seems certain to shake up an already volatile situation.

Nevertheless, as the death toll has risen in Gaza, Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain have all halted arms deals with Israel. The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell Fontelles, has appeared to discourage sending more weapons, wryly noting in February that “if the international community believes that this is a slaughter, that too many people are being killed, maybe they have to think about the provision of arms.”

The hearings this past week against Germany, at the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, was the most recent chilling factor for Israel’s arms suppliers. And matters could grow even worse if Israel follows through on its plans to invade Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans are sheltering.

The case, brought by Nicaragua, highlighted concerns that foreign weapons sales to Israel have done as much to kill Palestinians as they have to help protect the Jewish state. Israel has strongly denied that it is committing genocide, but it was ordered by the court in February, in a separate case brought by South Africa, to take steps to prevent atrocities.

Germany is estimated to have approved about $353 million in arms exports to Israel last year, although officials have said most military aid provided since the war began was nonlethal. Accusations that its weapons might have contributed to genocide has stung Germany, given its World War II-era crimes, although public opposition to the war and concerns about being liable for atrocities have grown.

“This was such an emotional wave that went through parts of German society — so many people were taking sides,” said Christian Mölling, the research director for the German Council on Foreign Relations. But, he said, it is unclear if public antipathy toward Israel will ultimately cut off weapons sales, in part because “the overall amount of delivery is astonishingly low.”

Approving weapons exports to Israel is also landing its allies in local or national courts. That has ramped up anxiety for governments that assumed their arms shipments were too small to attract international rage.

In the Netherlands, a state court in February ordered the government to stop sending parts for F-35 fighter jets to Israel, calling it “undeniable that there is a clear risk” of the equipment being used “in serious violations of international humanitarian law.”

The Dutch government is appealing the decision, arguing that the jets are crucial for Israel’s security against regional enemies like Iran and Hezbollah. Total exports of military goods to Israel from the Netherlands in 2022, the most recent figures available, amounted to about $11 million, officials said.

In Italy, the government halted its arms trade with Israel only weeks after the war in Gaza began, in “a suspension that continues to this day,” Guido Crosetto, the Italian defense minister, told Parliament last month. Officials said that decision was made to ensure Italy was compliant with international humanitarian laws and a national policy against supplying arms to countries at war.

Although Italy delivered some weapons late last year to fulfill pre-existing contracts, Mr. Crosetto said they “do not concern materials that could be used with repercussions on the civilian population of Gaza.” Only about 2 percent of Israel’s imported weapons come from Italy, amounting to about $9.6 million in 2022. Yet Italy ranked as the third-largest foreign supplier of major weapons systems to Israel in the years leading up to the war, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms transfers.

By far the largest exporter of weapons to Israel is the United States, which committed in 2016 to a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package, including $5 billion for missile defense, with grants that underwrite Israeli purchases from American defense companies.

The Biden administration is assessing whether Israel has violated international law in Gaza and, as of last week, “we’ve not seen any indication they have,” said John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman. The government is required by law to cut off American military support to countries that restrict humanitarian aid deliveries, as Israel is widely accused of doing in Gaza.

More than one million Palestinians are facing famine and more than 200 aid workers have been killed, including seven killed this month in airstrikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy.

Over the past six months, President Biden has repeatedly proclaimed his “unwavering” support for Israel and its right to defend itself — not only from Hamas but also from Iran and allied militants in Lebanon and Yemen. “We’re going to do all we can to protect Israel’s security,” he said at the White House on Wednesday.

Yet Mr. Biden has gradually taken a tougher tone against Israel as the war wears on, and the bombing and invasion have sent civilian casualties spiraling. “They need to do more,” Mr. Biden said of Israel’s government during the same White House news conference. .

But that has not been enough to satisfy Americans who want Mr. Biden to use the threat of an arms cutoff to pressure the Israelis to accept a cease-fire. That sentiment is being echoed by some Democrats who worry about his re-election prospects and the dismal down-ballot effect it could have on the rest of the party.

In a recent flurry of letters, at least seven Democratic senators and more than 50 House Democrats, including Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California and a former House speaker, have urged Mr. Biden to halt all weapons transfers to Israel.

Adding to the pressure, a coalition of a dozen liberal organizations and labor unions that will be a key part of Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign demanded in a letter on Thursday that he end military aid to Israel until its government lifts restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza.

If not, he could risk losing support from reliable Democratic voters — particularly younger people, said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, which focuses on driving voter turnout and was part of the coalition.

“We are concerned with the humanitarian and moral implications,” said Ms. Tzintzún Ramirez, “and the political survival of the administration.”

Jason Horowitz and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.

Is President Biden gaining in the polls? There have been signs of it ever since his State of the Union address last month, and a New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday morning is the latest hint.

Donald J. Trump led Mr. Biden by one percentage point among likely voters nationwide, 46 percent to 45 percent. It represents a modest improvement for the president since February, when Mr. Trump led our poll by four points among likely voters.

You can’t exactly call a one-point deficit the “Biden comeback,” but the result adds to a growing list of polls finding him inching up over the last month.

So far, 16 national pollsters (of varying quality) have taken polls before and after the State of the Union. On average, Mr. Biden is running about 1.4 points better in the post-State of the Union polls than in earlier surveys by the same pollsters.

A 1.4-point shift in the polls wouldn’t usually merit much attention. It’s small enough that it may not last, even if it’s real. But it carries greater significance against the backdrop of the last six months — and the doubts among some Democrats about Mr. Biden’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump has held an uninterrupted lead in the polling since October, even though a rising stock market and surging consumer confidence seemed to create the conditions for a Biden comeback. The president’s inability to capitalize on an improving economy against a candidate accused of several federal crimes was a powerful reason for pessimism about his chances. It seemed to raise the possibility that his age (81) was disqualifying for many voters, or even that a big part of the country had written him off.

The movement in Mr. Biden’s direction over the last month is slight, but it may be just enough to suggest that he’s beginning to benefit from improving political conditions. The last month was full of the kinds of events and news that seemed potentially favorable for him:

• The primaries are over. The reality of a Trump-Biden rematch could be setting in, possibly helping Mr. Biden.

• The State of the Union helped quiet Democratic concerns about his age, which dominated the political conversation in February.

• Abortion is back in the news. Over the last few weeks, a state court ruling allowed Florida’s six-week abortion ban to soon become law, and Arizona’s 19th-century ban was resuscitated. As calls were being made for the Times/Siena poll this week, Google searches for abortion reached their highest levels since the 2022 midterm election.

• The Biden campaign is underway. In the wake of the State of the Union, the campaign launched an aggressive and mostly uncontested early effort in the battleground states, both on the ground and in the air.

• Consumer sentiment is up. This was already true back in February, but it’s plausible to expect a lag between improved economic conditions and political gains for Mr. Biden.

Yet Mr. Biden still trails in the poll, despite these favorable trends. His approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, and just 41 percent say they have a favorable view of the president — far lower than four years ago, and lower than voters’ views of Mr. Trump now. Voters still believe the economy is poor, and disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy by nearly a two-to-one margin.

But if the last month hadn’t helped Mr. Biden at all, the doubts about his candidacy would have only grown. Instead, a slight shift his way makes it easier to imagine further gains ahead.

With seven months to go until the election, that’s not unrealistic to contemplate, even if it’s not at all assured. Many voters still aren’t tuned in — especially the less engaged, young and nonwhite voters who are currently propelling Mr. Trump’s strength in the polling.

On paper, an incumbent president running with a healthy economy should be favored to win.

You can read our full write-up of the poll here.

What about Kennedy?

We didn’t list Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an option in the presidential race. He has gotten on the ballot in very few states, and adding him makes it harder to compare our results with those from previous surveys.

That said, this could easily be the last time he’s omitted from a Times/Siena poll. For one, he may succeed in obtaining greater ballot access in the weeks ahead. For another, it’ll become less important to compare our surveys with our polls from 2023, and more important to facilitate a later comparison with our surveys in the fall, by which time Mr. Kennedy hopes to be on the ballot everywhere.

With that possibility in mind, we took a small interim step: We made it possible for the interviewer to record when respondents said they supported Mr. Kennedy, even though we didn’t list him as an option. Overall, just under 2 percent of respondents said they backed Mr. Kennedy when we asked them about the Biden vs. Trump matchup.

The federal judge presiding over Hunter Biden’s gun case in Delaware on Friday rejected Mr. Biden’s claim that he was being subjected to selective prosecution, saying it was “nonsensical” that the Biden Justice Department would target the president’s son.

Abbe Lowell, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, has filed a flurry of motions in the Delaware gun case and a separate indictment in California on tax charges, accusing the government of unfairly singling out his client at the instigation of Republicans and seeking to dismiss the charges. None of those challenges have been successful so far.

Judge Maryellen Noreika, who scuttled a plea deal reached between prosecutors and Mr. Biden last summer, said that Mr. Lowell failed to provide evidence that prosecutors had been motivated by animus against Hunter Biden.

The “defendant’s claim is effectively that his own father targeted him for being his son, a claim that is nonsensical under the facts here,” Judge Noreika wrote in her 25-page decision.

The judge also rejected Mr. Lowell’s claim that David C. Weiss, the special counsel and U.S. attorney in Delaware, had only decided to bring charges against Hunter Biden because of pressure from Republicans in Congress who claimed attempts to reach a plea agreement last year were a “sweetheart deal” intended to protect the Bidens.

“Regardless of whether congressional Republicans attempted to influence the executive branch, there is no evidence that they were successful in doing so,” she wrote.

A federal grand jury in Wilmington indicted Hunter Biden in September on charges that he lied about his drug use on an application for a Colt pistol in 2018.

In response to a question on the form about whether he was using drugs, Mr. Biden said he was not, an assertion that prosecutors concluded was false. Mr. Biden has publicly acknowledged his struggles with addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol and had been in and out of rehab around the time of the gun purchase.

If convicted, Mr. Biden could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines. But nonviolent first-time offenders who have not been accused of using the weapon in another crime rarely get serious prison time for the charges.

The decision to file criminal charges against President Biden’s troubled son was an extraordinary step for the Justice Department and Mr. Weiss after the last-minute collapse of a deal that would have granted Hunter Biden broad immunity from future prosecution on gun and tax charges without serving prison time.

In December, a separate federal grand jury in Los Angeles charged the president’s son with a scheme to evade federal taxes on millions in income from foreign businesses.

Hunter Biden faces three counts each of evasion of a tax assessment, failure to file and pay taxes, and filing a false or fraudulent tax return, according to the 56-page indictment.

Both trials are scheduled to begin in June, although the schedules are subject to change.

Former President Donald J. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson are expected to make a joint announcement on Friday about “election integrity,” a broad term often used by Mr. Trump and other Republicans to cast doubt on elections the party lost.

The remarks, scheduled to take place at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., will come as Mr. Johnson faces criticism from the right over his handling of issues such as aid to Ukraine, and a threat to his speakership from a top Trump ally, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Neither Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, nor Mr. Johnson has publicly elaborated on the subject of the announcement, but the former president has made his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him a major focus of his 2024 campaign.

At rallies and campaign events, Mr. Trump continues to declare falsely that he won in 2020, referring to the election as “rigged” or “stolen.” He repeatedly pushes baseless assertions of voter fraud and, without evidence, accuses Democrats of cheating.

In a statement released by the Biden campaign, Representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat of Mississippi, called the expected announcement a “sham” and criticized Mr. Trump for repeating his election lies.

“Donald Trump and Mike Johnson don’t care about election integrity,” Mr. Thompson said. “They care only about helping Trump’s campaign of revenge and retribution to regain power at all costs.”

Mr. Johnson played a significant role in supporting Mr. Trump’s false claim that he won in 2020, recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief that supported a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results. He repeated claims about voter fraud in interviews, and he provided Republicans with arguments that some used to object to certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

Well ahead of Election Day this November, Mr. Trump — who faces criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 race — has already tried to sow doubt about the 2024 election. He routinely insists at his campaign rallies that Democrats cannot possibly win in November without cheating and has more recently urged his supporters to turn out in droves to ensure that his vote total is “too big to rig.”

As he and his campaign took over the Republican National Committee earlier this year, Mr. Trump backed a new chair, Michael Whatley, who he believed held views about election fraud more in line with his own. Such fraud is exceedingly rare despite Mr. Trump’s insistence to the contrary.

Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, was chosen as the committee’s co-chair. Last month, she told NBC that she believed the party was ready to leave the 2020 election in the “past,” even as Mr. Trump continued to re-litigate it on the stump. And she has said that Republicans need to encourage supporters to vote early where legal, even as her father-in-law denounces the practice.

This year, Mr. Trump has encouraged the Republican National Committee to ramp up its investments in so-called election integrity initiatives, like training poll watchers and filing lawsuits over election procedures both before and after Election Day.

Republicans in key battleground states have also since 2020 pushed for increased restrictions on voting, including laws requiring identification at polling places and more limits on mail-in voting and early voting, practices that have tended to favor Democrats in recent cycles.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked both practices, arguing frequently that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and that elections need to be limited to “one-day voting.” Other prominent Republicans, particularly in battleground states, have said that the party needs to encourage the practice in order to chip away at Democrats’ advantages.

As speaker, Mr. Johnson has made a public show of his continued support for Mr. Trump, even as the former president has undermined some of his legislative efforts. His predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted after a right-wing rebellion, leading to days of chaos as House Republicans struggled to pick a replacement.

Shortly after congressional leaders met with Japan’s prime minister in Speaker Johnson’s ceremonial office in the Capitol on Thursday morning, the conversation turned to Ukraine aid.

Mr. Johnson was in the middle of another agonizing standoff with the ultraconservatives in his conference, after they had blocked legislation to extend a major warrantless surveillance law that is about to expire. His chief Republican antagonist, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, had intensified her threat to oust him. But on Ukraine, he offered his counterparts an assurance.

“We’re going to get this done,” he vowed.

His comments, confirmed by multiple people familiar with the meeting, were consistent with what Mr. Johnson has been saying for weeks, both publicly and privately: that he intends to ensure the House will move to assist Ukraine, a step that many members of his party oppose.

Even as right-wing Republicans have sought to ratchet up pressure on their speaker, Mr. Johnson has continued to search for a way to win the votes to push through a Ukraine aid. He is battling not only stiff resistance to the idea among House Republicans, but also mounting opposition among Democrats to sending unfettered military aid to Israel given the soaring civilian death toll and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.

Mr. Johnson has yet to make any final decisions on how he plans to structure a new round of American military assistance to Ukraine.

Some Republicans have increasingly expressed interest in structuring the aid as a loan, an idea that Mr. Johnson has publicly floated and that former President Donald J. Trump previously endorsed. Mr. Trump raised again the idea again after a private meeting with Mr. Johnson at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Friday.

“We’re thinking about making it in the form of a loan instead of just a gift,” Mr. Trump said. “We keep handing out gifts of billions and billions of dollars and we’ll take a look at it.”

Mr. Johnson earlier this month floated bringing up the $95 billion emergency national security spending package for Ukraine and Israel passed by the Senate in February — and moving it through the House in tandem with a second bill containing policies endorsed by the conservative wing of his party, according to people familiar with the discussions.

That plan envisioned two consecutive votes — one on the Senate-passed bill, and another on a package of sweeteners geared toward mollifying Republicans who otherwise would be infuriated by Mr. Johnson’s decision to push through a bipartisan aid package for Ukraine. The second bill could include the REPO Act, which would pay for some of the aid by selling off Russian sovereign assets that have been frozen, as well as a measure forcing President Biden to reverse a moratorium on new permits for liquefied natural gas export facilities. It could also include some kind of border security measure.

Mr. Johnson’s task at hand is to cobble together an increasingly elusive coalition of mainstream Republicans and Democrats who will support the Senate-passed bill.

Some liberal lawmakers have signaled opposition to approving additional aid for Israel after a strike by the Israeli military that killed seven aid workers in Gaza. At the same time, a growing number of Republicans view approving another aid package for Kyiv as toxic with their voters.

Mr. Johnson is toiling to navigate those dynamics with his own job on the line. Ms. Greene has long said she would seek to oust him were he to bring up legislation to aid Ukraine without securing sweeping policy concessions from Democrats on the border. And ultraconservatives were enraged at him on Friday when he broke with custom and cast a decisive vote to kill a proposal that would have required U.S. officials to obtain warrants before searching the messages of Americans swept up by the warrantless surveillance program.

Mr. Johnson nodded to the challenges at a news conference on Wednesday, saying he was sifting through “a lot of different ideas” raised by his colleagues for aiding Ukraine.

“It’s very complicated matter, and a very complicated time,” he said. “And the clock is ticking on it and everyone here feels the urgency of that. But what’s required is that you reach consensus on it.”

When members of Congress return to Washington from their home districts, they often trudge to Capitol Hill for a tally known as a “bed check,” a low-stakes vote series that is mostly aimed at taking attendance.

On Tuesday night, even though Republicans ostensibly control the House, more Democrats were actually present in the chamber for both of those votes — making the exercise a temporary reminder of just how painful this moment is for Speaker Mike Johnson.

The majority led by Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, keeps shrinking. Restive members of the far-right Freedom Caucus frequently derail his plans. And he is on a collision course with former President Donald Trump and a broader swath of the Republican rank and file over issues like aid to Ukraine, while Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene dangles a threat to oust him.

“The Lord Jesus himself could not manage this conference,” Representative Troy Nehls of Texas, a Republican, said on CNN this week. “You just can’t do it.”

Amid the tumult, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago on Friday in an apparent effort to shore up his support from the former president. The hope, it seemed, was that the two could see past their differences if they united around something that fires up the Republican base: stoking unfounded distrust in the election.

During the joint appearance, Johnson said he would introduce a bill that would “require proof of citizenship to vote” and baselessly claimed that undocumented voters could tip American elections, even though voting by people who are not citizens is exceedingly rare. And he got what he had most likely come for: a full-throated endorsement from the former president.

“I stand with the speaker,” Trump said.

I spoke with my colleague Catie Edmondson, who covers Congress for the The New York Times, about Johnson’s delicate dance with Trump as the speaker faces his most precarious moment yet in a tenuous term.

JB: Let’s start with a simple question. What is the fundamental problem facing Johnson as speaker?

CE: The ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October showed that, regardless of who is the leader of the Republican conference, it is an unwieldy group of people that is, in some ways, ungovernable.

It’s not a functioning majority. There are members of the Freedom Caucus preventing Johnson from even bringing legislation to the floor for a vote, which is what we saw Wednesday as he attempted to extend a key surveillance tool. Greene is using the threat of ouster to torment him. It’s a world of hurt for him right now.

JB: Johnson cut a deal to reauthorize that surveillance law this morning. He says he is looking for a way to advance Ukraine aid after refusing to put the issue to a vote. He has also kept government open with the help of Democrats. These are all the kinds of things he generally would have voted against as a rank-and-file member, as you’ve observed. How has being the speaker shifted his priorities?

CE: Johnson has described the experience of receiving classified briefings about intelligence and volatile situations abroad as sobering. He’s no longer solely responsible for representing his very conservative district. He is second in line to the presidency. He has to make sure government functions in a smooth fashion. He’s also responsible for protecting frontline Republicans in politically vulnerable districts. I think all of that has changed his worldview on some of these big decisions.

JB: How much sway does Trump hold over Johnson, and the House Republican conference writ large? What is the dance that Johnson has to do with Trump right now?

CE: Trump’s real power on the Hill, with House Republicans, has always been destructive in nature. He’s someone who blocks things from happening rather than someone who builds consensus. So far, Johnson hasn’t really brought up anything that Trump really cares about. But any vote on Ukraine aid will be a major test of this dynamic.

Many of Johnson’s members, particularly in the Freedom Caucus, are averse to voting for anything that can be signed into law by a Democratic president, so Johnson knows he will have to rely on Democrats to pass basic governance measures. At the same time, he has to make sure he’s right with the base, right with the Freedom Caucus and, of course, right with Trump.

JB: Is Johnson’s speakership really hanging in the balance?

CE: Every vote that the Freedom Caucus feels like they’ve been betrayed on just ratchets up the anger and the frustration a little bit more. I don’t anticipate this getting better for him.

If Greene calls a motion to vacate, the question becomes what Democrats will choose to do. We’ve seen a lot of Democrats openly weigh the idea of saving him if he puts a Ukraine package on the floor for a vote. But if he survives for that reason, it would cut the legs out from under him. He would be viewed as the speaker only because the opposition party decided to save him.

JB: Is there any sign that voters care about Congress being so dysfunctional?

CE: I would assume Republicans in swing districts have a lot of agitation over the fact that chaos dominates the headlines every day, and it’s laid at the feet of their party.

But if you talk to Democratic strategists about what their message is, I think it’s going to rely less on Republican chaos, and it will be more about Republican extremism, especially on abortion.

ON THE MAp

The Nebraska Republicans who still want to tweak the map in 2024

For President Biden, the simplest recipe for re-election might be this: Win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and add a single electoral vote from Nebraska. That, plus other states that have gone blue in recent years, would get Biden to exactly 270 electoral votes, just enough to clinch a victory.

Nebraska is one of two states that allocate some of their electoral votes by congressional district, and the district containing Omaha went blue in 2020. (The other state that does this is Maine.) But after a push by the conservative media personality and activist Charlie Kirk, Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, says he is open to calling a special legislative session to convert the state to winner-take-all when there are sufficient votes to pass such a bill. Lawmakers there blocked a similar measure this month.

My colleague Astead Herndon, a friend of this newsletter and the host of the Times’s excellent politics podcast, “The Run-Up,” spoke with State Senator Merv Riepe, a Republican, as part of his episode about the matter, which you can listen to here.

Riepe supports switching to winner-take-all and told Astead that was because it was a “risk” to let Omaha remain a “blue dot” that could potentially tip an election. Here’s an edited excerpt from their conversation:

AH: What do you mean by risk? I get what you’re saying, that it does create the possibility that this one congressional district could back someone different than the state overall. But why is that necessarily all that bad?

MR: Well, Nebraska is a conservative state. If it makes a difference in who gets elected president, that’s an incredibly big difference.

AH: Why isn’t it just that the people of that district, you know, are having their voices heard?

MR: Let’s turn it on its heels. If you took it by district, California is not going to get all Democrats and leftists. So, same story here. The Omaha area is what I would call a very purple district. That one vote could swing the entire election. And if the other states aren’t going to play by the same rules, Nebraska shouldn’t either.

Reporter notebook

A war mobilizes the left

President Biden avoided a bruising primary fight, but his party is divided over the Gaza war and American support for Israel in the conflict. My colleagues Katie Glueck, Katie Benner and Sheera Frenkel took a deep look at the sprawling protest movement that reflects some of that angst. I asked Katie Glueck to tell us how it has grown.

Initially, the protest movement comprised organizations including campus groups, left-wing Jewish organizations and hard-line groups heavily involved in street protests, which in many cases blamed Israel for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israelis — a position broadly denounced at the time.

But as Israel’s military retaliation intensified and casualties in Gaza mounted, opposition to its war effort increasingly became a central tenet of the Democratic left in America, as a broad constellation of advocacy groups, activists and some voters pushed Biden to take a harder line against Israel.

“These are all groups that I would describe as part of the Democratic coalition,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and Biden ally. “They helped President Biden win.”

Convincing those disillusioned, often younger, progressive voters to mobilize for Biden again will be one of his campaign’s central challenges this year.

—Katie Glueck

Bennett Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist whose diagnoses of repressed memories involving horrific abuse by devil worshipers helped to fuel what became known as the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and ’90s, died on March 20 in Lauderhill, Fla., north of Miami. He was 83.

Jane Braun, one of his ex-wives, said the death, in a hospital, was from complications of a fall. Dr. Braun lived in Butte, Mont., but had been in Lauderhill on vacation.

Dr. Braun gained renown in the early 1980s as an expert in two of the most popular and controversial areas of psychiatric treatment: repressed memories and multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder.

He claimed that he could help patients uncover memories of childhood trauma — the existence of which, he and others said, were responsible for the splintering of a person’s self into many distinct personalities.

He created a unit dedicated to dissociative disorders at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago (now Rush University Medical Center); became a frequently quoted expert in the news media; and helped to found the what is now the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, a professional organization of over 2,000 members today.

It was from that sizable platform that Dr. Braun publicized his most explosive findings: that in dozens of cases, his patients discovered memories of being tortured by satanic cults and, in some cases, of having participated in the torture themselves.

He was not the only psychiatrist to make such a claim, and his supposed revelations keyed into a growing national panic.

The 1980s saw a vertiginous rise in the number of people, both children and adults, who claimed to have been abused by devil worshipers. It began in 1980 with the book “Michelle Remembers,” by a Canadian woman who said she had recovered memories of ritual abuse, and spiked following allegations of abuse at day care centers in California and North Carolina.

Elements of pop culture, such as heavy metal music and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, were looped in as supposed entry points for cult activity.

Such stories were fodder for popular TV formats that reveled in the salacious, including talk shows like “Geraldo” and newsmagazines like “Dateline,” which broadcast segments that promoted such claims uncritically.

The psychiatric profession bore some responsibility for the growing panic, with respected researchers like Dr. Braun giving it a gloss of authority. He and others ran seminars and distributed research papers; they even gave the phenomenon a quasi-medical abbreviation, S.R.A., for satanic ritual abuse.

Dr. Braun’s inpatient unit at Rush became a magnet for referrals and a warehouse for patients, some of whom he kept medicated and under supervision for years.

Among them was a woman from Iowa named Patricia Burgus. After interviewing her, Dr. Braun and his colleague, Roberta Sachs, claimed that she was not only the victim of satanic ritual abuse, but was also herself a “high priestess” of a cult that had raped, tortured and cannibalized thousands of children, including her two young sons.

Dr. Braun and Dr. Sachs sent Mrs. Burgus and her children to a mental health facility in Houston, where they were held apart for nearly three years with minimal contact with the outside world.

By then Mrs. Burgus, heavily medicated, had come to believe the doctors, telling them she recalled torches, live burials and eating the body parts of up to 2,000 people a year. After her parents served her husband meatloaf, she had him get it tested for human tissue. The tests came back negative, but Dr. Braun was not convinced.

Dr. Braun kept other patients under similar conditions at Rush or elsewhere. He persuaded one woman to have an abortion because, he convinced her, she was the product of ritualistic incest; he persuaded another to undergo tubal ligation to prevent having more children within her supposed cult.

The satanic panic began to wane in the early 1990s. A 1992 F.B.I. investigation found no evidence of coordinated cult activity in the United States, and a 1994 report by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect surveyed over 12,000 accusations of satanic ritual abuse and found that not a single one held up under scrutiny.

“The biggest thing was the lack of corroborating evidence,” Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who wrote the 1992 report, said in a phone interview. “It’s the kind of crime where evidence would have been left behind.”

Many people distanced themselves from their earlier enthusiasms; in 1995, Geraldo Rivera apologized for his episode covering the falsehood. However, even in 1998, “Dateline” ran an episode on NBC claiming to show widespread satanic activity in Mississippi.

Mrs. Burgus sued Rush, Dr. Braun and her insurance company over claims that he and Dr. Sachs had implanted false memories in her head. They settled out of court in 1997 for $10.6 million.

“I began to add a few things up and realized there was no way I could come from a little town in Iowa, be eating 2,000 people a year, and nobody said anything about it,” Mrs. Burgus told The Chicago Tribune in 1997.

A year later Dr. Braun’s unit at Rush was shut down, and the Illinois medical licensing board opened an investigation into his practices. In 1999, he received a two-year suspension on his license — though he did not admit wrongdoing.

Bennett George Braun was born on Aug. 7, 1940, in Chicago, to Thelma (Gimbel) and Milton Braun, a professor of orthodontics at Loyola University. He graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1963 and earned a master’s in the same subject in 1964. He received his medical degree from the University of Illinois in 1968.

Dr. Braun was married three times. His marriages to Renate Deutsch and Mrs. Braun both ended in divorce. His third, to Joanne Arriola, ended in her death. He is survived by five children and five grandchildren.

After temporarily losing his medical license in Illinois, Dr. Braun moved to Montana, where he received a new license in that state and opened a private practice.

But in 2019, one of his patients, Ciara Rehbein, sued him for overprescribing medication that left her with a permanent facial tic. She also filed a complaint against the Montana Board of Medical Examiners for allowing him a license, despite knowing his past.

Dr. Braun lost his license to practice medicine in Montana in 2020.