President Biden on Monday will propose a budget packed with tax increases on corporations and high earners, new spending on social programs, and a wide range of efforts to combat high consumer costs like housing and college tuition.

The new spending and tax increases included in the fiscal 2025 budget stand almost no chance of becoming law this year, given that Republicans control the House and roundly oppose Mr. Biden’s fiscal agenda. Last week, House Republicans passed a budget proposal outlining their priorities, which are far afield from what Democrats have called for.

Instead, the document will serve as a draft of Mr. Biden’s policy platform as he seeks re-election in November, along with a series of contrasts intended to draw a distinction with his presumptive Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Biden has sought to reclaim strength on economic issues with voters who have given him low marks amid rapid inflation. This budget aims to portray him as a champion of increased government aid for workers, parents, manufacturers, retirees and students, as well as the fight against climate change. Mr. Biden’s budget proposes to more than offset the cost of those priorities through increased taxes on large companies and the wealthy. The president has already begun trying to portray Mr. Trump as the opposite: a supporter of further tax cuts for corporations.

“A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great: health care, education, defense and so much more,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday during his State of the Union address.

Later in the speech, in a call-and-response with Democrats in the chamber, Mr. Biden added: “Folks at home, does anybody really think the tax code is fair? Do you really think the wealthy and big corporations need another $2 trillion tax break? I sure don’t. I’m going to keep fighting like hell to make it fair.”

Polls show Americans are dissatisfied with Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy and favor Mr. Trump’s approach to economic issues. But Mr. Biden has been unwavering in his core economic-policy strategy, and the budget is not expected to deviate from that plan.

White House officials, previewing the budget release, said that Mr. Biden would propose about $3 trillion in new measures to reduce the budget deficit over the next decade. That is in line with his budget proposal last year, which narrowed deficits by raising taxes on businesses and the rich and by allowing the government to bargain more aggressively with pharmaceutical companies in order to reduce spending on prescription drugs.

Mr. Biden is once again set to call for raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent, the level Mr. Trump set in the tax bill he signed in late 2017. Mr. Biden will also propose increasing a new minimum tax on large corporations and quadrupling a tax on stock buybacks, among other efforts to raise more revenue from companies and individuals who make more than $400,000 a year.

Those savings would build on discretionary spending limits that Mr. Biden and congressional Republicans agreed on last year to resolve a standoff over raising the nation’s borrowing limit. But even if Congress agreed to all $3 trillion of Mr. Biden’s proposals, the deficit would still average about $1.7 trillion a year over the next decade, based on projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

House Republicans released a budget last week that seeks to reduce deficits much faster — balancing the budget by the end of the decade. Their savings relied on economic growth forecasts that are well above mainstream forecasters’ expectations, along with steep and often unspecified spending cuts.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget called the Republican plan “unrealistic in its assumptions and outcomes.” Last year, the same group said Mr. Biden’s budget fell “well short of the deficit reduction needed to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal path.”

Mr. Biden and his aides have repeatedly said they are comfortable that the projected deficits in his budgets will not hurt the economy. Instead of pivoting to more aggressive deficit reduction, as previous Democratic presidents have done after losing control of a chamber of Congress, Mr. Biden has leaned into the need for new spending programs and targeted tax incentives.

White House officials said the new budget proposal would continue that trend. It will include a national program of paid leave for workers. It will reinstate an expanded child tax credit that Mr. Biden created temporarily in his $1.9 trillion economic stimulus law in 2021, and that helped reduce child poverty significantly over the span of a year before expiring.

It will also include new efforts to help Americans struggle with high costs. That issue has dogged Mr. Biden with voters since inflation soared on his watch to its highest levels in four decades, even as price increases have cooled over the last year. Mr. Biden previewed many of those efforts in his State of the Union speech, including new tax credits for certain home buyers and expanded assistance for people to buy health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Biden is also set to call for new efforts to improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, though not the full Social Security overhaul that he previewed in the 2020 campaign but has not delivered on in office. He will oppose benefit cuts for the programs, officials said, suggesting that he favors a familiar strategy to bolster them: raising taxes on high earners.

After a Texas prosecutor’s extraordinary concession that his office had used false evidence to secure a death sentence, the Supreme Court told a Texas appeals court last year to have another look at the case.

It is not every day that a prosecutor “confesses error,” as lawyers say, and joins a defendant in asking that a conviction be thrown out, much less in a capital case in Texas. The Supreme Court, which is generally impatient with death penalty appeals, took notice.

It sent the case, of a death row inmate named Areli Escobar, back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal matters, “for further consideration in light of the confession of error by Texas.”

But that court, in a 6-to-3 decision, had other ideas. “While the state’s confession of error in a criminal case is important and carries great weight, we are not bound by it,” Presiding Judge Sharon Keller wrote for five judges, quoting an earlier decision and clearing the way for Mr. Escobar’s execution.

This was not the first time that court, sometimes called the C.C.A., had seemed to defy the Supreme Court, said Jordan M. Steiker, a law professor at the University of Texas.

“The C.C.A. has a remarkable history of treating Supreme Court opinions as optional guideposts rather than the commands of a higher tribunal,” he said. “It often remains committed to reasoning that the Supreme Court has implicitly or even explicitly rejected. And the Supreme Court on more than one occasion has had to exercise jurisdiction multiple times in the same case, not merely to clarify a point of federal constitutional law, but to reaffirm the hierarchy of courts in our federal system.”

Mr. Escobar’s lawyers returned to the Supreme Court last month to ask it to intervene again in the face of the state court’s failure to give what they said was “any deference to the considered judgment of the law enforcement officers who secured the guilty verdict.”

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — not to be confused with the Texas Supreme Court, which hears civil matters — has tested the justices’ patience in earlier cases. In 2017, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that the state court had used the wrong standard in determining that a death row inmate, Bobby J. Moore, was not intellectually disabled. That determination made Mr. Moore eligible to be executed.

As in Mr. Escobar’s case, the justices returned the case to the Court of Criminal Appeals for another look. As in Mr. Escobar’s case, the prosecutor changed positions and sided with the inmate, saying Mr. Moore was indeed intellectually disabled. And as in Mr. Escobar’s case, the appeals court reaffirmed its earlier ruling.

When Mr. Moore’s case returned to the Supreme Court in 2019, it scolded the state court as it reversed its ruling.

“We have found in its opinion too many instances in which, with small variations, it repeats the analysis we previously found wanting, and these same parts are critical to its ultimate conclusion,” the majority said in an unsigned opinion.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who had dissented from the 2017 decision, now joined the majority. He said in a concurring opinion that the state court had “repeated the same errors that this court previously condemned.”

Mr. Moore was resentenced to life in prison. In 2020, he was granted parole.

The central question in Mr. Escobar’s case — of what weight to give prosecutors’ confessions of error — is already before the justices. In January, the court agreed to decide whether Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma, deserves a new trial after a confession of error from the state’s Republican attorney general.

The justices will hear arguments in Mr. Glossip’s case in the fall. There is reason to think they may decide to have Mr. Escobar’s case argued alongside it.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is recused from the Glossip case, having heard part of it as an appeals court judge. Granting review in Mr. Escobar’s case would ensure that the court will not end up evenly divided on the question.

The Texas case has other features that could interest the justices. They include the state court’s rejection of an 86-page decision from a judge who had concluded that Mr. Escobar’s conviction was based on junk science produced by a police DNA lab so riddled with problems that it had to be shut down.

In nevertheless upholding Mr. Escobar’s conviction, the state appeals court cited other evidence tying him to the 2011 murder of Bianca Maldonado Hernandez, including cell tower records and a partial fingerprint. But the centerpiece of the case was evidence from the DNA lab.

At a court hearing on a challenge to Mr. Escobar’s conviction, a juror said that the DNA evidence had been crucial.

“I was sitting on the fence, if you will, as to whether he was guilty or not guilty all the way up to when the DNA evidence was submitted to the jury and, for me, that was the sealing factor,” the juror said.

José P. Garza, the district attorney whose office had obtained the conviction, said it took him some time to rethink his position.

“But as more evidence came to light about how flawed the evidence the jury relied upon was, we had to re-evaluate that position,” he said in a 2022 interview. “Although it is the instinct of every district attorney to defend convictions, our job is to see that justice is done.”

Daniel Woofter, a lawyer for Mr. Escobar, said the core issue in the case was a simple one.

“I don’t know how anyone could think that it is just to put this man to death,” he said, “based on a conviction that the prosecutor can’t support.”

For Judge Scott McAfee, it was probably an awkward moment.

At a hearing in Atlanta last month, he issued a warning to his former boss, Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, during her combative turn on the witness stand. Ms. Willis, who was fighting allegations that threatened her grip on the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump, had grown so irritated with a defense lawyer that she began expressing her frustration directly to the judge.

“I’m going to have to caution you,” the soft-spoken Judge McAfee, of Fulton County Superior Court, told her in response. “We have to listen to the questions as asked. And if this happens again and again, I’m going to have no choice but to strike your testimony.”

Ms. Willis’s filibustering whirlwind subsided as she waved a hand in exasperation.

Now Judge McAfee, who at 34 is too young to be president himself, is preparing to issue a high-stakes decision in the Georgia case against the former president and 14 of his allies: whether to disqualify Ms. Willis on the grounds that a romance she had with Nathan Wade, the lawyer she hired to run the case, created an untenable conflict of interest.

Legal experts generally agree that Ms. Willis used poor judgment in paying a romantic partner public funds while he was also at least partly paying for vacations they took together — the basis for the defense argument that she engaged in “self-dealing.”

Opinions differ, however, on whether her actions created a legitimate conflict of interest — and on whether even an appearance of a conflict is sufficient to disqualify the district attorney and her whole office.

Barely on the court for a year, the even-keeled Judge McAfee hews to textualism, a common judicial philosophy that follows the law as written rather than divining intent. During the Trump case, he has kept things moving and done what he can to lower the temperature.

Ms. Willis and her team of prosecutors tried to persuade him not to hold hearings on the disqualification effort; she described the hearings as a “ticket to the circus,” and reminded the court and the public during her testimony that the case against Mr. Trump had not changed. He and 18 of his allies were charged last August with attempting to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia; four defendants have already pleaded guilty.

But Judge McAfee believed the allegations were serious enough to proceed with evidentiary hearings that proved explosive, revealing intimate details of Ms. Willis’s personal life. The hearings focused on when the relationship started, and whether Ms. Willis and Ms. Wade were lying when they said it began after she hired him. Another central question was whether the two prosecutors split the costs of their vacations.

Last week, the Trump case became central to Judge McAfee’s own future on the bench when a Democratic challenger emerged in his re-election campaign and immediately criticized his handling of the disqualification matter. The opponent, Robert Patillo, is a local radio host and activist who has been affiliated with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, which was founded by Jesse Jackson.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Patillo, 39, said Judge McAfee’s lack of experience had caused him to mismanage the case. “The court has turned this from one of the most solemn prosecutions of a former president into a daily reality show — something that you’d see on ‘Real Housewives,’” he said.

Judge McAfee declined to comment for this article.

The judge was appointed last year by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to fill a vacancy. Incumbent judges typically have an electoral advantage, since voters often don’t focus on judicial races. But as a Republican appointee in the heavily Democratic Fulton County, he appears to be taking nothing for granted.

He gave an interview to a local radio host on Thursday night, assuring listeners that the emergence of a political opponent would not influence his decision on whether to disqualify Ms. Willis, which he said he had already made.

“I’ve had a rough draft and an outline before I ever heard a rumor that someone wanted to run for this position, so the result is not going to change because of politics,” he said on WSB Atlanta. “I am calling it as best I can in the law, as I understand it.”

Judge McAfee grew up in Kennesaw, a suburb of Atlanta. At Emory, the elite private university in Atlanta, he studied political science and music and led Emory College Republicans, a student group.

He is an accomplished cellist. After Judge McAfee was assigned to the Trump case last summer, a number of news outlets highlighted an online video of him, as a teenager, playing Bach on an acoustic cello, then switching to an electric one for a rousing Jimi Hendrix-style version of the national anthem. A bandanna was tied rakishly around his head.

In the early 2010s, he studied law at the University of Georgia, where he was a high-performing student, competitor in mock trial competitions and office holder in the campus Federalist Society, the conservative legal network founded in the Reagan era to push back against what it calls “orthodox liberal ideology.”

Elizabeth Stell, a fellow law student who competed with Judge McAfee in mock trials, described his courtroom style at the time as “not overly flashy or overly emotional.”

“He was just very thoughtful in his argument, very well researched and just very put together and composed,” she said. “And classy, frankly.”

Anthony Michael Kreis, an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, was pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Georgia at the time and remembers Judge McAfee as serious-minded but not strident in his political views.

“We had more conservations about, and debates over Twizzlers vs. Red Vines and what’s the better candy,” Mr. Kreis said.

Judge McAfee interned for two State Supreme Court justices, Keith Blackwell and David Nahmias, both Republican appointees who influenced his approach. Later, he went to work for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, where, as a deputy prosecutor, he handled cases including armed robbery and murder.

His supervisor in the trial division was Ms. Willis. He also worked with Adam Abbate, the prosecutor whom Ms. Willis chose to make closing arguments during the disqualification hearings. Ms. Willis dropped a reminder that both men once worked directly for her during her testimony, as she was explaining that she kept her private life private.

“When I supervised Mr. Abbate and Mr. McAfee, they didn’t know who I was dating, but I can assure you I was dating somebody,” she said.

Judge McAfee later worked for officials who ran afoul of Mr. Trump. In 2019, he became an assistant United States attorney in Atlanta. The office was headed by Byung J. Pak, a Republican who quit in January 2021 after learning that Mr. Trump wanted to fire him for not backing his election fraud claims.

Weeks later, Judge McAfee was named state inspector general by Governor Kemp, who would also face Mr. Trump’s ire for declining to help overturn his narrow loss to Joseph R. Biden in Georgia.

A key issue the judge must address in his upcoming ruling is the standard for disqualification under Georgia law. At a hearing last month, he said that disqualification can occur if evidence shows even an appearance of a conflict of interest. Ms. Willis’s office asked him to reconsider, arguing that a higher standard — proof of an “actual” conflict — should be the bar.

Whatever he decides, Judge McAfee has already earned the respect of a variety of legal experts. Among them is Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. Mr. Eisen has been vocal in supporting the Georgia prosecution, and has argued that there are no legal grounds to disqualify Ms. Willis.

But he has also called on Mr. Wade to step down, and he defended Judge McAfee’s decision to hold hearings on the matter.

“He is one of the most capable new judges that I have ever seen, and he has navigated an extremely challenging situation with grace and intelligence,” Mr. Eisen said.

Judge McAfee made clear last week that he was thinking about how his decision will be judged in posterity.

“I’ve got two kids, five and three,” he said in the radio interview. “They’re too young to have any idea of what’s going on or what I do. But what I’m looking forward to one day is maybe they will grow up a little bit and they ask me about it. And I’m looking forward to looking them in the eye and telling them I played it straight, and I did the best I could.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

California has about 12 percent of the nation’s population but more than a quarter of America’s homeless people — 181,000-plus at last count.

There are many reasons for this outsize problem, including generations-old state laws that deinstitutionalized mentally ill people as well as high housing costs that have since priced tens of thousands out of shelter. But since the pandemic turned fentanyl abuse and tent camps into inescapable symptoms of a public health crisis, state policymakers have been under intense pressure to rethink California’s approach to behavioral health.

Last week, Californians voted on a key piece of that rethinking — a deeper focus on treatment and housing for homeless people with severe mental illnesses and substance use disorders. The ballot measure, called Proposition 1, was the product of months of work by Gov. Gavin Newsom to gather statewide support.

Polls suggested that Proposition 1 would be a slam-dunk. But so far, it is barely passing. Entering the week, the measure is hanging on with 50.5 percent of the vote and an estimated 2.5 million ballots left to count. So what happened?

Here’s what to know about Proposition 1 in California.

What is Proposition 1?

Placed on the ballot last year by state lawmakers and Mr. Newsom, Proposition 1 asks voters to dramatically expand treatment centers and supportive housing for people struggling with mental illness and addiction. The measure would authorize $6.38 billion in bonds to pay for facilities and housing and would amend the Mental Health Services Act, a 20-year-old state tax on millionaires, to shift about $140 million annually from counties to the state. The measure also would set aside about $1 billion to house homeless, mentally ill or addicted veterans.

What are the arguments for and against Proposition 1?

Proponents of Proposition 1 say it is key to restructuring California’s behavioral health system. One reason so many addicts and mentally ill people are on the street, they say, is that the state has an acute shortage of adult treatment beds. Proposition 1 would help house more than 11,000 sick people and help underwrite CARE Court, a new state program that would require people to enter treatment for certain psychotic disorders. The measure would explicitly extend a huge source of treatment dollars to homeless substance abusers. And, proponents say, Proposition 1 would lessen taxpayer spending on a population that is now largely being treated in jails.

Some civil libertarians fear Proposition 1heralds a return to the days when involuntary treatment was the norm for mentally ill people. But most opponents cite fiscal concerns. Critics say that California has already thrown tens of billions of dollars at homelessness only to see it worsen. Critics note that although Proposition 1 would not add new taxes, it would limit the amount the state could borrow for other issues and commit taxpayers to new debt amid high interest rates. Also, counties rely on the Mental Health Services Act to pay for programs that are not covered by California’s version of Medicaid or by other less flexible funding sources, and Proposition 1 would shift some of that money to the state.

Why is the vote so close?

Newsom administration officials say that their internal polling had always forecast a close vote. Turnout in California is usually lower in primaries than in general elections and is less heavily dominated by like-minded Democrats.

The bond measure is long and confusing and comes as the state is grappling with a budget shortfall. Mental health policy is a fraught issue in California, and proposed shifts tend to draw passionate pushback from civil liberties groups. And many voters are frustrated and fatigued by the sheer scale of California homelessness — and skeptical that any ballot measure could solve the problem.

But turnout was low, even for a primary. Without a close race for the presidential nomination in either party, only about a quarter of the state’s 22 million or so registered voters cast a ballot, according to the most recent statistics — the lowest participation rate in a presidential primary in at least 20 years.

The surprising proportion of Republicans also has affected the results. They make up less than a quarter of registered voters but were on track as of this weekend to make up nearly 30 percent of the turnout. Some Democratic analysts have pointed to the state’s Senate race, in which the front-runner, Adam Schiff, ran tens of millions of dollars on ads that elevated the profile of his preferred opponent, Steve Garvey, a political novice and Republican.

When will the final results be known?

Because California relies heavily on mail-in ballots, the vote count typically consumes weeks, but most observers expect a clearer picture within days.

Each of California’s more than 22 million registered voters was sent a ballot, but only about a third of them voted. According to the most recent state figures, about 2 million ballots have yet to be processed. Elections officials have until April 5.

But the sources of those remaining ballots hint at Proposition 1’s prospects. Campaign officials said late last week that though some large conservative precincts still needed to be counted, many more outstanding ballots were in major urban areas. Those parts of the state — Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, for instance — are heavily Democratic and more likely to vote “yes.”

Virginia will end legacy admissions at public universities after Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a bill on Friday banning the practice that gives applicants with family ties to alumni a boost.

Under House Bill 48, public universities in the state will be barred from giving preferential treatment to applicants based on their connections to not only alumni but to donors as well. That means universities can also no longer give an advantage to applicants whose relatives make donations to the school. Critics of such preferences have said for years that the century-old practice perpetuates privilege.

The ban will notably affect the University of Virginia and William & Mary, which are among the country’s more selective public universities. Virginia Tech, another prestigious public university, already announced last year that it would no longer take an applicant’s legacy status into account in the admissions process.

The law, which passed unanimously in the Virginia House of Delegates and the State Senate this year, will take effect July 1, after admissions decisions have been made for this fall. Mr. Youngkin, a Republican, said in a statement in January that he believed “admission to Virginia’s universities and colleges should be based on merit.”

Virginia is the second state to ban legacy admissions, after Colorado, and similar legislation is being considered in New York and Connecticut, among others.

State Senator Schuyler T. VanValkenburg, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said he was pleasantly surprised by the bipartisan support for the ban. He said he hoped Virginia’s decision will lead other states to follow suit, which he said would help promote diversity in college admissions.

“It’s kind of an indefensible policy, especially in light of affirmative action being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court,” Mr. VanValkenburg said in an interview. “There’s a lot of ways you can measure merit, but we know that legacy admissions is really not about merit at all.”

The University of Virginia did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

William & Mary has said in a statement that it does not anticipate the legislation having a significant impact on its admissions process, because the university does not have a separate standard for applicants with legacy status. But data from the school has shown that accepted applicants with the status were more than twice as likely to enroll at the school as other accepted applicants were. The university did not comment beyond referring to the statement.

Legacy admissions have been under renewed scrutiny after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action across colleges and universities last June, banning considerations of race in applications.

The movement to eliminate legacy admissions has received support from both Republicans and Democrats on several levels of government. President Biden has also weighed in, saying such preferences expand “privilege instead of opportunity.”

Senators Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, and Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana, are pushing to ban the practice at the federal level. In November, they introduced the Merit-Based Educational Reforms and Institutional Transparency Act, which would establish federal standards for assessing college admissions processes and make considerations of an applicant’s legacy and donor status illegal. The bill is being considered by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

In a joint statement, the senators applauded the new law in Virginia. “Now let’s build off this success and get our bill passed to end legacy and donor admissions preferences nationwide,” Mr. Kaine and Mr. Young said. “This will promote upward mobility and fairness in the admissions process.”

But critics of such measures argue that there are adverse effects to banning legacy considerations and that minority students could actually benefit from having familial connections in higher education. There are also concerns about the impact on alumni donor relations if legacy admissions are no longer allowed.

This year, an organization of conservative Virginia alumni known as the Jefferson Council expressed being split on the Virginia legislation.

“We are of two minds,” James A. Bacon, the group’s executive director, wrote in an email. On one hand, he said, intergenerational families tend to be more loyal and generous to the university. “On the other, we support merit-based admissions based on character and academic achievement.” The group did not immediately respond to a request to comment on Sunday.

Since the Supreme Court ruling, several selective private schools, including Wesleyan University and New York University, have decided to eliminate legacy preferences. But many elite private colleges, including Harvard, Yale and Brown, have not. The U.S. Department of Education has opened investigations into Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania and their use of legacy preferences.

“Legacy admissions are inherently unfair,” Mr. VanValkenburg said, adding that universities that heavily rely on the practice are “distorting what a freshman class looks like.”

Stephanie Saul and Vimal Patel contributed reporting.

Representative Adam B. Schiff, who became the Democratic nominee for an open Senate seat in California last week, denied on Sunday the suggestion that his primary had been rigged.

Mr. Schiff said that Democrats had swiftly rebuked an assertion from one of his primary opponents, Representative Katie Porter, that wealthy donors had spent millions of dollars for Mr. Schiff to “rig” the race, contrasting his party and former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims around the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

“That term ‘rigged’ is a very loaded term in the year of Trump,” Mr. Schiff said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It connotes fraud, ballot stuffing and false claims like those of Donald Trump. I think what’s remarkable is Democrats very quickly rallied to say, ‘No, we don’t use that language.’”

Ms. Porter, one of Mr. Schiff’s two progressive primary opponents for the seat, thanked her supporters on social media last week and went on to describe “an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig” the primary.

Her remarks drew immediate criticism from Democratic colleagues, including Senator Alex Padilla of California, who dismissed Ms. Porter’s suggestion as “ridiculous” in an interview with Politico.

“That is a sharp contrast to how the Republican Party treats allegations of rigged elections,” Mr. Schiff added on Sunday, referring to Republicans who have characterized the prosecutions after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as political retribution. “Indeed, they’re urging President Trump to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists if he ever got a chance.”

Ms. Porter failed to advance in the Senate primary last week after Mr. Schiff and his allies spent tens of millions of dollars airing television ads that described Steve Garvey, the Republican opponent, as “too conservative for California.”

Mr. Schiff’s ads have been widely understood to be part of his campaign strategy to draw more Republican voters to the polls to box out his Democratic rivals in California’s “jungle” primary, where the two top finishers advance to the general election regardless of their party affiliation.

The ads drew sharp criticism from Ms. Porter, who characterized them as “brazenly cynical.”

Mr. Schiff defended his campaign strategy during the Sunday interview, saying he simply went after his Republican opponent as his Democratic colleagues did.

Senator Katie Britt of Alabama on Sunday sought to defend comments she made in her response to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, when she described the experience of a woman who was sexually trafficked in Mexico between 2004 and 2008 in a way that falsely implied it had happened in the United States under President Biden.

“No,” Ms. Britt said on “Fox News Sunday” when the host, Shannon Bream, asked whether she had intended to suggest that. She went on to argue that viewers should have parsed her wording to understand that she wasn’t referring to a recent case.

“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12,” she said. “I didn’t say a teenager. I didn’t say a young woman. A grown woman, a woman, when she was trafficked when she was 12.”

Ms. Britt’s story has received intense scrutiny since an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, posted a video on TikTok on Friday highlighting the misleading framing. Mr. Trump praised Ms. Britt for her speech. But it has drawn criticism even from some Republicans, who questioned her delivery and her choice to speak from her kitchen, and “Saturday Night Live” mocked it.

After criticizing some of Mr. Biden’s immigration policies in his first 100 days in office — including a halt to border-wall construction, though construction has since continued, and a pause on some deportations, which she falsely described as his having “stopped all deportations” — Ms. Britt said in the Fox interview that she had referred to the woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, because Ms. Jacinto is an advocate for the welfare of victims of similar crimes that are “happening now at an astronomical rate.”

She said human trafficking had grown into a $13 billion industry from a $500 million industry in 2018. That statistic is from 2022, meaning the increase came over a four-year period roughly equally divided between the Trump and Biden administrations.

“We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it, because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border and then there are victims all throughout our country,” Ms. Britt said. “And to me, it is disgusting to try to silence the voice of telling the story of what it is like to be sex trafficked when we know that that is one of the things that the drug cartels are profiting most off of.”

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, noted that congressional Republicans opposed a bipartisan border-security deal earlier this year. The bill stalled after former President Donald J. Trump came out against it, indicating that he didn’t want it to pass because Republicans might not be able to keep campaigning on a border crisis.

“Instead of telling more debunked lies to justify opposing the toughest bipartisan border legislation in modern history, Senator Britt should stop choosing human smugglers and fentanyl traffickers over our national security and the Border Patrol Union,” Mr. Bates said.

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting.

Early in his remarks at what was effectively his first campaign rally of the general election, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday blasted President Biden’s State of the Union address as an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” that was more divisive than unifying.

Then, in the nearly two hours that followed, Mr. Trump, speaking in Rome, Ga., used inflammatory language to stoke fears on immigration, and repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The former president, who faces four criminal cases, called the press “criminals.” And he mocked President Biden’s stutter and revived a litany of grievances against political opponents, prosecutors and television executives.

Mr. Trump told thousands of his supporters gathered at the rally that “everything Joe Biden touches” turns to filth, though he used an expletive to describe the result. “Everything. I tried finding a different word, but there are some words that cannot be duplicated.” (He used the word, or a variant, at least four times in his speech.)

The former president’s speech in Georgia, a key battleground state that he narrowly lost in 2020, underscored that Mr. Trump is not likely to temper the ominous and at times apocalyptic vision that has animated his campaign, even as his last remaining Republican rival has dropped out and the general election has come into focus.

As he has in the past, Mr. Trump insisted that the biggest danger facing the United States was his political opponents, whom he labeled “the threat from within,” a turn inward that has alarmed experts for its similarity to language used by totalitarian leaders.

But in a speech replete with digressive rants, Mr. Trump reserved some of his most incendiary rhetoric to vilify migrants crossing the border illegally. Much of his speech was focused on immigration, an issue that he and his advisers have signaled will be central to his efforts to defeat Mr. Biden and return to the White House.

While vowing to expand his crackdown on immigration, Mr. Trump described the continuing surge of migrants across the southern border as “the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.”

Mr. Trump also took aim at Mr. Biden’s policies on immigration, in part by using the Georgia setting to blame his rival for the death of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed in the state last month by, according to the authorities, a Venezuelan migrant who had entered the country illegally and had been released on parole.

Mr. Trump met with Ms. Riley’s parents before taking the stage, and the Trump campaign distributed signs at the rally with Ms. Riley’s photograph. During his speech, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Biden of neglecting the surge of migrants at the border, which he called a “deadly invasion that stole precious Laken’s beautiful American life.”

Mr. Trump often broadly casts those crossing the border illegally as violent criminals. “The migrants are hurting people,” Mr. Trump said. “They talk about the beautiful dream of migrants. It sounds so nice, you know, like in a fairy-tale book. But some of these people are monsters.”

Border authorities, including some who worked for Mr. Trump, have said that most of the migrants who cross the border are members of families fleeing violence and poverty.

But Ms. Riley’s death has become a flashpoint in the nation’s heated debate over immigration policy, in part because it seems to adhere to Mr. Trump’s long-stated belief that violent men from South America are flooding across the border to harm Americans.

“He was an illegal migrant, and he shouldn’t have been in our country, and he never would have been under the Trump policy,” Mr. Trump said of the man accused of killing Ms. Riley.

Mr. Trump also attacked Mr. Biden for expressing regret that he used the word “illegal” to describe the man accused in Ms. Riley’s death during an exchange at the State of the Union address on Thursday.

The speech that Mr. Trump gave on Saturday was his first since Mr. Biden repeatedly attacked him and his policies in his State of the Union address. “Joe Biden should not be shouting angrily at America,” Mr. Trump said. “America should be shouting angrily at Joe Biden.”

But his critiques moved toward personal insults. At one point, Mr. Trump slurred his words and pretended to stutter in a mocking imitation of the president, who has dealt with a stutter since childhood.

It was one of several such attacks Mr. Trump lobbed during the event. Of the former television anchor Megyn Kelly, with whom Mr. Trump sparred during his first presidential run, he said “may she rest in peace.” While talking about the success that his time on “The Apprentice” had brought NBC, he called Jeff Zucker, the network’s former chief executive, an “idiot.”

Mr. Trump also denigrated a number of prosecutors and judges involved in the criminal cases and multiple civil lawsuits in which he is entangled. He spent a considerable amount of time attacking Fani T. Willis, the district attorney prosecuting him over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

Mr. Trump called Ms. Willis “corrupt,” referring to allegations that she benefited financially after becoming romantically involved with a lawyer whom she hired on the case. (Ms. Willis has pushed back against those claims, calling them full of “wild and reckless speculation.”)

He also repeated his false contention that he won in Georgia in 2020, maintaining that he had done nothing wrong when he called state elections officials, insisted that he had won Georgia and asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to win.

“Perfect phone call,” Mr. Trump said, “other than we challenged the honesty of this election. This election was rigged.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.

Two members of the New York State National Guard were identified as victims in a military helicopter crash that killed three people in Texas on Friday near the U.S.-Mexico border.

John M. Grassia III, a New York State trooper, and Casey Frankoski, a National Guard helicopter pilot, were killed near La Grulla, Texas, when the chopper crashed into a field. Chris Luna, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, also died in the crash, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

All three had been deployed along the southern U.S. border since October.

The death of Mr. Grassia, 30, was announced by the New York State troopers union in a social media post, which said he had joined the force as a state trooper in 2022. Ms. Frankoski was named in a Facebook post by the mayor of her hometown, Rensselaer, N.Y., where her father is a retired police chief.

The operation last week was said to be a “routine mission” along the U.S.-Mexico border, where Mr. Grassia, Ms. Frankoski, and two others were working with Joint Task Force North, a U.S. Defense Department initiative that tracks the boundary along with local and federal law enforcement.

The group had been “providing monitoring and detecting capabilities along that sector of the border,” said Maj. Ryan Wierzbicki, a spokesman for the task force.

The helicopter was following people who were illegally crossing into the United States when it crashed, according to Judge Eloy Vera, a top local official in Starr County, the site of the accident.

Army investigators arrived at the site this weekend and were expected to comb the wreckage for the black box of the aircraft, a UH-72 Lakota, used regularly in such missions by the Army as a light utility aircraft.

A third National Guardsman was seriously injured in the crash, the National Guard said.