Linda Feldmann/The Christian Science Monitor

Nancy Cooke, president of the Weston Republican Club in Florida, addresses the group's monthly meeting at the Wings in Weston restaurant on Jan. 4, 2022. “I want Donald Trump to run [in 2024]," she says, "but I can see both sides of that issue.”

It’s a Tuesday night at Wings in Weston, a chicken joint in a tony suburb of Fort Lauderdale, and the Weston Republican Club is holding its monthly meeting. Some 40 people have gathered to hear from candidates for City Commission and have a bite to eat. 

Images of Donald Trump dominate a makeshift stage along one wall. To the left stands a cardboard cutout of the grinning former president. Another cutout of his face glowers from the center. Below that, a banner proclaims: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Trump.”

Which makes it all the more surprising that, when asked about a possible Trump campaign in 2024, many here are notably unenthusiastic. 

“I want Trump’s policies without Trump,” says one man. “If he didn’t run,” offers another, “that would take a big argument away from the Democrats.”

“I really don’t think it’s Trump’s time any longer,” says Peggy Brown, a Republican who’s currently serving in the nonpartisan role of Weston mayor. She would prefer to see Mr. Trump transition into more of “an elder statesman. He could be a mentor to whoever comes in.”

Make no mistake: These Republican activists all still love the former president. And if he wins the nomination in 2024, they say they’d move mountains to return him to the White House. “Without question,” says Mayor Brown. “I’m unapologetic.”

But on the question of whether he should jump in, many have reservations. Some worry Mr. Trump is too controversial, too polarizing. That perhaps his time has come and gone. At least one attendee expresses unhappiness with the former president’s full-throated endorsement of COVID-19 vaccines. Some note that the party has a wealth of potentially strong alternatives waiting in the wings – including their own governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who leads polls of potential 2024 GOP candidates if Mr. Trump doesn’t run.

To be sure, it’s still early in the 2024 election cycle. Most voters, even activists, have yet to focus much on the next presidential race. While Mr. Trump has hinted strongly that he plans to mount another campaign, he’s said he won’t reveal his decision until after the November midterms.

Nationally, polls show that most Republican voters do want Mr. Trump to run again. A Quinnipiac poll released this week found 69% of GOP voters favor another Trump run. Still, that was down from 78% in October.

A Marquette University Law School poll in November found that just 60% of Republicans wanted Mr. Trump to run again, while 40% did not. The same poll showed 73% of Republicans holding a favorable view of Mr. Trump. 

That 13 percentage point gap between those who view Mr. Trump favorably and those who want him to run again – “there’s the interesting slippage,” says Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette poll. “Give it time, and we’ll see what happens.” 

It all suggests a Trump-GOP relationship that is perhaps more complicated than conventional wisdom would dictate. Last November’s election of Republican Glenn Youngkin as governor of Virginia – a state that voted for President Biden by 10 percentage points – demonstrated that the GOP can be competitive in seemingly blue states when Mr. Trump isn’t on the ballot. Notably, Mr. Trump did not stump with Mr. Youngkin during the race. 

The next Grover Cleveland?

In modern times, defeated one-term presidents have typically retired into a life of quiet public service. None has sought his party’s nomination again since Herbert Hoover in 1940. The only U.S. president to serve nonconsecutive terms was Grover Cleveland, back in the 1800s. 

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters/File

Former President Donald Trump looks on during his first post-presidency campaign rally at the Lorain County Fairgrounds in Wellington, Ohio, June 26, 2021.

Yet Mr. Trump clearly remains the dominant Republican in the country today. Even elected Republicans who have openly opposed him concede the point. 

“There’s no other option right now in the Republican Party,” Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan – one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach then-President Trump over the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol – said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” 

Republicans’ views of the former president’s role going forward, however, are nuanced. One poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last September found that two-thirds of Republican voters – including independents who lean Republican – want Mr. Trump to remain “a major national figure for many years to come.” But that group was divided into two camps: 44% who want him to run again in 2024 and 22% who would prefer he support another presidential candidate who shares his views. 

The bottom line is that “the Republican base is still very supportive of Donald Trump,” says Carroll Doherty, director of political research at Pew. But “some people are saying, let’s wait and see what happens.” 

Lately, Mr. Trump has been focused on shoring up his role as kingmaker, putting out some 100 press releases endorsing candidates in GOP primaries for House, Senate, governor, and other key offices. 

He’s taken particular aim at two high-profile GOP incumbents. One is Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who has publicly condemned Mr. Trump for what she sees as his role in inciting the Capitol riot. 

The other is Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who angered Mr. Trump by refusing to help him overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia. The former president recruited former Sen. David Perdue to mount a primary challenge against Governor Kemp.

In coming weeks, Mr. Trump plans to travel the country, campaigning for his endorsees and holding rallies. Next up is Jan. 15 in Arizona, a battleground state where Mr. Trump has claimed without evidence that the election was stolen from him. He had scheduled a press conference for Jan. 6 at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, with plans to talk about the “stolen election.” But two days before, he canceled it amid reported concerns by advisers and prominent Republicans that it would be a distraction. 

The scheduling change served as a reminder that the former president, who often welcomes controversy, can be persuaded to avoid it when it might hurt his cause.

A Trumpist, either way

David Strom, a GOP consultant from Minneapolis, had reservations about Mr. Trump in 2016, and didn’t vote for him. But given the president’s record on the economy, judicial appointments, and foreign policy, he supported him wholeheartedly in 2020. 

Looking ahead, however, Mr. Strom lists two main concerns about the former president mounting another campaign: his age (he’ll be 78 in 2024), and his “rough edges.” He thinks the GOP would be better off with a fresh face at the top. 

“There’s just a very large number of people whose repulsion toward Trump had to do with their judgment of his character,” he says.

He adds that, regardless of whether the former president runs again, his political legacy is already profound. 

“The working-class coalition Trump has built is the new face of the Republican Party,” Mr. Strom says. Even if Mr. Trump isn’t the 2024 nominee, he predicts “the winner will almost certainly be from that wing of the party – a Trumpist.”

Many Trump supporters say they’ll be with him to the bitter end. One is Maciek Niedzwiecki, a Polish immigrant who lives in Reno, Nevada. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump inspired him to become an American citizen, and while Mr. Niedzwiecki missed the election by a month, he happily pulled the lever for Mr. Trump in 2020 – and wants him to run again in 2024. 

Mr. Trump’s personal style doesn’t bother him, he says, because the president’s job isn’t to be a spiritual or moral leader. It’s about the issues: a strong border, energy independence, trade deals that put America first, fighting socialism. 

“I look at the president as more of a CEO,” say Mr. Niedzwiecki, a 40-something father of two who works for a biofuel company. “He’s not taking any hits from people, and [he’s] standing his ground.”

Back in Weston, Florida, at the local party meeting, some attendees are just as enthusiastic. 

“Yeah, I think he should [run],” says Lenny Heda, who has a tech support business. “I’m no sycophant,” he adds. “His stance on pushing the vaccine stuff – I disagree.” 

But on a Trump 2024 campaign, he’d be all in. “I would take a bullet for the guy.” 

Nancy Cooke, president of the Weston Republican Club, says she wants Mr. Trump to run again, "but I can see both sides of that issue.”

This story has been updated to include a comment from Nancy Cooke.

Evan Vucci/AP

Louisiana's Attorney General Jeff Landry and Deputy Attorney General Bill Stiles stand outside the Supreme Court Jan. 7, 2022, after arguments about a proposed requirement for large employers and a separate vaccine mandate for most health care workers. On Thursday, the Supreme Court blocked the large-employer mandate while allowing the one for health care workers to take effect.

The Supreme Court on Thursday prevented the Biden administration from enforcing its mandate that employees of large firms must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or regularly test for the virus.

The move effectively ends the government’s most ambitious attempt to counter rising COVID-19 cases by pushing unvaccinated Americans to get shots. The vaccine-or-test requirement, issued by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, would have covered 84 million people, according to OSHA figures.

At the same time the high court allowed the administration to proceed with a smaller Department of Health and Human Services mandate that requires most health care workers at facilities that receive federal money to be vaccinated. This rule would cover about 10 million people, according to the administration. In many of these facilities 35% or more of the staff remain unvaccinated, the court majority noted in its opinion.

Combined, the rulings present a complex Supreme Court majority attitude toward government activities that has far-reaching implications for the future. Here are three key questions about what the justices ruled:

What’s the court’s reasoning?

In blocking enforcement of the employee mandate, a majority of six justices held that OSHA had gone beyond the bounds of its own mandate by in essence acting as a general public health agency.

The congressional statute which established OSHA tasked it with “ensuring occupational safety” in order to “provide safe and healthful employment,” noted the unsigned majority opinion. 

Nowhere has Congress authorized the agency “regulate the hazards of daily life,” wrote the majority. OSHA might be able to oversee the working conditions of researchers who deal with the COVID-19 virus, or workers in particularly cramped or crowded conditions. But the administration’s indiscriminate approach fails to make this distinction, according to the majority.

“The court is not inherently opposed to vaccine mandates or requirements, but they want to see it very closely tied to a strong reasoning and to agencies that handle health care,” says Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan said that the majority opinion was in fact preventing OSHA from accomplishing its core mission – ensuring safety for workers on the job – simply because doing so would have effects on their safety outside the workplace as well.

Workers are uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19, the dissenting justices wrote. The virus spreads by person-to-person contact in confined indoor spaces. On the job, workers have little control over their environment, and thus little capacity to mitigate risk.

The majority is imposing a limit on OSHA’s authority found nowhere in its governing statute, according to Mr. Breyer, Ms. Sotomayor, and Ms. Kagan.

“OSHA’s responsibility to mitigate the harms of COVID-19 in the typical workplace do not diminish just because the disease also endangers people in other settings,” dissenters wrote.

The high court majority reasoning in the HHS case was a reverse image of its OSHA ruling. One of the core powers of the department’s Medicare and Medicaid activities is to ensure that health care providers safeguard patients, the majority wrote. HHS secretaries over the years have “established long lists of detailed conditions with which facilities must comply to be eligible to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds,” according to the majority opinion.

The COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health workers thus falls well within the authority that HHS has been granted by Congress, wrote the majority.

“That very critical difference ... is that [HHS] is doling out funds. They’re saying to major health care providers, if you want these federal funds, here’s the conditions you meet. OSHA’s not doling out funds,” says James Hodge, director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University.

What are the major implications?

In the wake of the OSHA ruling, other U.S. government executive agencies may be facing a new era in which their ability to act on their own could be circumscribed, say some experts. 

Much of the nation’s actual day-to-day governance takes place in administrative agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, National Transportation Safety Board, OSHA, and similar entities decide crucial questions about pollution, highway safety, workplace protections, and so on. This is particularly true given today’s gridlocked congressional politics. Lawmakers are unable or unwilling to provide guidance on such matters on their own.

But conservatives have chafed at the growing power of the administrative state – “deep state,” some might call it – and the OSHA decision could reflect that. A newly empowered conservative Supreme Court majority might steer the law governing agencies in new directions. 

OSHA was trying to respond in a big way to a big problem, says Cary Coglianese, law professor, political scientist, and director of the Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. 

But the court on Thursday pretty clearly indicated that such radical change in a regulatory context will be viewed skeptically.

“It’s clear that a majority of the court will be suspicious of grand exercises of regulatory authority by federal agencies,” says Professor Coglianese.

Going forward, regulators can’t expect that old authorizing statutes will suffice if they want to expand activities, he says. Congress could pass new laws giving them new powers. But with Washington politics in its current polarized state, that seems very unlikely.

“This has implications far beyond just the OSHA vaccine ... mandate,” says Professor Coglianese. “This has implications for climate change. This has implications for any area that requires some big governmental intervention, particularly regulatory intervention, where there isn’t some new legislation squarely directed at that problem.”

What happens now?

The Supreme Court’s Thursday OSHA decision prevented the Biden administration from beginning to enforce its major employer vaccine mandate. The ruling sent the case back to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals for further consideration on the merits in light of what the Supreme Court ruled. High court justices suggested that a narrower approach might pass judicial muster. But the administration may just move on.

“For all practical purposes, as a legal matter, it’s ... dead in the water,” says Professor Coglianese.

Biden administration estimates held that the employer vaccine mandate, if implemented, would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and saved more than 6,500 lives.

As a practical matter, the human impact of the mandate’s downfall might be less than those projections indicate. The mere threat of a federal mandate may have pushed thousands of workers to get a shot, despite the fact that OSHA hadn’t begun enforcement, and seemed a long way from doing so.

Many businesses are already requiring vaccination for all of their employees, so the lack of a federal requirement may not have enormous effects, but “this is a setback,” says Professor Shachar of Harvard Law School.

One thing is clear: Companies have lost a potentially useful scapegoat. 

Laura Quinteros, a seventh grade teacher at a private school, noticed something missing from her class reading list: Salvadoran literature.

So she added “Fireflies in El Mozote,” a first-person account of a 1981 massacre when soldiers killed nearly 1,000 unarmed civilians. Although her students are too young to remember the days when El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war between the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government and a left-wing guerrilla insurgency, she didn’t want the lessons and realities of the war to end with those who lived it.

“Historical memory should be revived,” Ms. Quinteros says. 

But not everyone here agrees.

On Jan. 16, El Salvador marks 30 years since the government of the day and rebel guerrillas signed a peace accord to end a 12-year civil war. El Salvador, like many in the region, is still grappling with how to come to terms with its dark past. During the civil war, the military and death squads sowed terror by murdering nuns, priests, and peasants, and disappearing political dissidents and student leaders.

The atrocities were documented by a Truth Commission, which counted 75,000 dead and 5,000 disappeared, most at the hands of the military. But present-day politicians, businesses, and communities have direct ties to one side of the conflict or the other, making the war a tender topic. And some politicians, such as former President Alfredo Cristiani, argue that efforts to document the past, like the Truth Commission, are biased, and it’s better to “forget this painful page” and move on.

From Colombia to Guatemala, Peru to Nicaragua, the question of how to talk about past national conflicts can be difficult. In El Salvador, the clash between those who want to remember and those who prefer to forget has gained strength in recent years, as the current administration displays increased reliance on the military.

And although politics, pandemic exhaustion, and issues such as gang violence and migration all threaten to overshadow the memory of El Salvador’s civil war, those who believe that knowing history is the best way of not repeating it are stepping up.

People often prefer to avoid talking about recent conflicts, says Virginia Garrard, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who researches historical memory in Latin America. Perpetrators directly involved in past abuses may feel threatened by efforts to recall them, and younger Salvadorans feel the country is “picking at scabs” of events long past. “They want to get on with it,” she says.

Turning the page

Shortly after the peace accords were signed in 1992, politicians promised to educate students about the civil war, says Claudia Garcia de Cartagena, director of education programs at the Museum of the Word and Image (MUPI), an organization founded by former left-wing guerrilla fighters that is dedicated to preserving historical memory of the civil war and more distant history.

But these promises fell short. Most curriculum reforms over the past 30 years only scratched the surface of the conflict and have increasingly been seen as a partisan matter, with leftists pushing to include the civil war history in the national curriculum, and more conservative politicians ignoring or countering them.

Then, President Nayib Bukele, a young populist, took office in 2019. Under his leadership, El Salvador has seen authoritarian rule, political polarization, frequent attacks on political enemies, and militarization, according to watchdogs.

Mr. Bukele, who was born a year after the war started, has minimized its importance, angering victims and nongovernmental organizations. “El Salvador has turned the page on the postwar era,” Mr. Bukele said in his election victory speech. 

This week, his Nuevas Ideas party proposed making the anniversary an opportunity to commemorate the war’s victims. But critics see this as a bid to rewrite the past. “What they want,” says Celia Medrano, a human rights expert here, “is to force people to forget that at one moment in our history, we understood that we have to talk through things” in order to move ahead.

“They are betting on forgetting history,” Ms. Medrano says.

But civil war survivors like Dorila Marquez can’t forget.

Perhaps no case is quite as sensitive in El Salvador as the 1981 massacre in the remote village of El Mozote, carried out by an elite, U.S.-trained Salvadoran military unit. Ms. Marquez was 24 when troops stormed into her village and, over the course of the next three days, killed nearly 1,000 people, the youngest of whom was 8 months old.

Evidence gathered by the Truth Commission shows that the victims, almost half of whom were under the age of 12, were unarmed. Yet the military maintains that those killed were guerrillas. A criminal case against more than a dozen high-level military officers involved in El Mozote was reopened in 2016 when an amnesty law was overturned, but the trial has moved slowly. Without a ruling, the events are still disputed.

Ms. Marquez says despite the government’s announcement that it wants to honor victims, she has not been invited to any kind of anniversary ceremony. Although she’s discouraged with the lack of justice, she has placed her faith elsewhere.

“The hope is in the youth,” says Ms. Marquez, who shares her experience with student groups that visit El Mozote. “There are few of us left who lived the massacre in the flesh. So I encourage students to learn the history.”

Jose Cabezas/Reuters/File

Relatives participate in a ceremony in 2016 to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, in which Salvadoran troops killed nearly 1,000 villagers, half of whom were children.

Acceptable to speak openly?

Groups like MUPI are trying to teach that history. The organization trains teachers, such as Ms. Quinteros, to incorporate lessons about the country’s past into their curriculum. Nearly 200 educators have been part of the program since it began in 2015, reaching thousands of young Salvadorans. 

Students are taught to “analyze their reality and see what is needed so that this history is not repeated,” says Ms. García de Cartagena from MUPI. The course focuses on first-person testimonies, so as to elicit empathy for everyone involved, whether they were guerrilla fighters who took up arms against inequality or government soldiers who took the job to feed their family.

About six years ago, Ms. Quinteros felt it had become acceptable to speak openly about the war, and sought out MUPI’s training. A former guerrilla leader had been elected president, and the right-wing ARENA party, founded by a death squad leader, was no longer in power.

But when Ms. Quinteros introduced “Fireflies in El Mozote,” she was met by a backlash. Some of her students came from upper-class military families, for whom the subject was still taboo. While teaching about the war, Ms. Quinteros discovered that one student’s grandfather was accused of civil war-era human rights abuses.

“That student got uncomfortable,” she recalls, but she did not see it as a reason to “forget [history] or erase it.”

Dr. Garrard, the historian, says family ties often motivate a desire to forget the past. “If your version of the story is on the wrong side of history, that’s another reason to just say, ‘Let’s not talk about it,’” she says. She sees MUPI’s work in Salvadoran schools as unique in the region, where much of the effort to preserve historical memory is confined to museums.

Students’ “own experience starts to fit into something,” she says. Citizens become “part of a larger narrative in a way they didn’t necessarily understand” before. 

“Never stop questioning”

Some students who have studied the civil war period see disturbing echoes in today’s El Salvador.

Mr. Bukele’s administration has been accused of harassing civil society members, journalists, and opposition politicians, and of quashing public debate. “This doesn’t allow the country to have harmony, peace, and development,” says Aaron Manzano, a recent graduate who learned about the war in MUPI’s after-school program. As in the 1980s, today everyone has to pick a political side, he says.

Karen Rivera, a former student of Ms. Quinteros’, recalls that she began noticing an increased military presence on the streets during the pandemic as part of Mr. Bukele’s response. “But then they stayed.”

If she hadn’t learned about the civil war in school, she might not have noticed this or been alarmed by it, she says.

And the classes have taught her a broader lesson. They “helped me to learn to never stop questioning everything that is happening around me,” Ms. Rivera says. “Living without questioning is dangerous.”

AP

A gambler plays a slot machine in Atlantic City, N.J.

It might be hard to find a former coal industry executive fighting for tough climate laws. The same holds true for former bosses in the alcohol and tobacco industries who regret making money off those vices and want to make amends. Not so in the gambling industry.

In recent weeks, three men who helped build the world’s biggest sports betting company have launched an unusual campaign. They are warning investors of “the risk of acute social harm” in supporting today’s more addictive forms of gambling.

Their personal remorse is being turned into public remedy.

All three businessmen, Stewart Kenny, Fintan Drury, and Ian Armitage, were instrumental in the rise of Paddy Power, an Irish bookmaker that is now part of Flutter Entertainment, a global operator. Their new organization, Stop Gambling Harm, comes out of moral misgivings over not foreseeing how online and mobile betting activities have come “at a great cost to the most vulnerable in society.”

“The internet was the explosion,” Mr. Kenny told RTÉ News. “In fairness to the industry, we didn’t realize how much it would take over people’s lives.”

The three believe society will soon turn on the industry, piling up class-action lawsuits as new technologies help lower the resistance and the barriers for those with addictive behaviors. In the coming year, they hope to convince investors in Ireland and the United Kingdom that the industry must get ahead of society, taking less profit by instituting such reforms as mandatory spending limits for those under 25 years old.

They are targeting investors because they have learned from the inside that both industry executives and government find it all too attractive to maximize revenue from gambling, either in profits or in taxes. “You could argue the government is as addicted to tax revenue as the unfortunate gambling addicts are to online slots,” Mr. Kenny told the Racing Post.

A rise in gambling addiction – especially during the isolation of COVID-19 – could overload mental health services, Mr. Kenny warns. Now a therapist, he says many people who have suffered from gambling addiction encouraged him to speak out.

“The industry of which I was part for decades has for far too long hoped for a ‘magic wand’ solution that would curb gambling addiction without affecting profits,” he wrote in the  Daily Mail. 

It is worth noting that the three businessmen relied on talent, hard work, and teamwork for success in their profession. They now want to help those who fall for the false promise of luck as a force in life. A study last year by the University of Oxford found a half-million people in the U.K. spend 40% of their disposable income on gambling.

Simply nudging the industry toward more reforms that help problem gamblers, however, may not be enough. The pervasive concept of chance must be addressed.

In a 2020 book, “The Myth of Luck,” philosopher Steven D. Hales of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania writes: “We cannot master luck because there is literally nothing to defeat. We will see that luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion.

“Cleaning our mental house of dusty old concepts that we’re hanging onto because we keep hoping that they will one day be useful – that is liberating. To give up luck is to regain our own agency in the world.”

To be sure, moral remorse over one’s past in gambling promotion can bring practical benefits.

Yet spiritual liberation from a notion of luck would have lasting impact.