A Republican candidate who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Nevada in 2020 with the backing of President Donald J. Trump surrendered to the police on Wednesday after he was charged with killing a man in Las Vegas last year, his lawyers said.

The Las Vegas police issued an arrest warrant earlier on Wednesday for the former candidate, Daniel Rodimer, 45, a onetime professional wrestler, after he was charged with murdering Christopher Tapp, 47, at a resort on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 29.

Medical workers found Mr. Tapp “suffering from injuries as a result of a purported accident,” and took him to a hospital where he was pronounced dead, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement.

Homicide detectives learned that Mr. Tapp had been in “an altercation inside a room” at the resort, the statement said. The Clark County medical examiner’s office ruled that Mr. Tapp died as a result of blunt-force trauma to the head.

A criminal complaint accuses Mr. Rodimer of striking Mr. Tapp on the head and says the killing was “willful, deliberate and premeditated.”

Mr. Rodimer’s lawyers, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld, said in a statement that Mr. Rodimer had “voluntarily surrendered, posted bond and intends to vigorously defend the case.”

Mr. Rodimer, who grew up in New Jersey, played up his brash personality and a brief wrestling stint in World Wrestling Entertainment in failed bids for political office.

After losing a Nevada State Senate race in 2018, Mr. Rodimer entered the 2020 Republican primary for a congressional seat in Nevada.

During the race, in 2019, The Associated Press reported that, according to Florida court records and sheriff’s office documents, Mr. Rodimer had been accused of punching or throwing someone to the ground in three separate disputes at nightclubs and restaurants between 2010 and 2013.

In one of the cases, from 2010, Mr. Rodimer pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge and completed a six-week anger management course in exchange for the charge being dropped, The A.P. reported. No charges were filed in the other two cases.

Mr. Rodimer, calling himself “Big Dan,” beat five candidates to win the Republican primary in Nevada’s Third Congressional District in June 2020. In October 2020, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that “Dan has my Complete and Total Endorsement!”

Mr. Rodimer captured more than 45 percent of the vote in the general election, losing by fewer than 13,000 votes to the incumbent Democrat, Representative Susie Lee.

Less than a year later, Mr. Rodimer ran for Congress again, this time in a crowded special election in the Sixth Congressional District in Texas, which was left vacant after the death of Representative Ron Wright, a Republican, in February 2021.

Mr. Rodimer promoted his past endorsement from Mr. Trump and appeared in a bull-riding campaign ad speaking with a Texas twang. He received less than 3 percent of the vote, finishing 11th in a field of 23 candidates competing for a spot in a runoff.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Mr. Tapp had endured a legal nightmare before his death.

In 2019, after spending more than 20 years in prison, he was exonerated in the 1996 rape and murder of an 18-year-old woman in Idaho Falls, Idaho. It was the first time genetic genealogy, a technique that identifies suspects by matching crime scene DNA to relatives, had been used to clear a convicted killer’s name, according to the Innocence Project.

Another man, Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., later confessed to killing the teenager, Angie Dodge, and was sentenced in 2021 to life in prison.

A federal judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to submit documents related to Prince Harry’s visa for the court to review after the department refused to release them to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Heritage Foundation has sued the department, contending that it has a right to see the documents as part of research into whether Prince Harry had been improperly allowed to reside in the United States given his admissions in his 2023 memoir and elsewhere that he had used cocaine and other drugs.

The foundation had sought the documents specifically to investigate how the prince had been admitted, since certain visas on which he could have entered the United States require applicants to answer questions about past drug use and drug-related legal violations.

Judge Carl J. Nichols of the Federal District Court in Washington ordered the department to submit the papers in question for his confidential review to determine whether they should be released in some form.

The possibility that the prince concealed the drug use in applying for a visa could carry immigration consequences, and waivers he may have been granted generally would have been precluded by the nature of the drug use he described in public interviews and his memoir.

“Widespread and continuous media coverage has surfaced the question of whether D.H.S. properly admitted the Duke of Sussex in light of the fact that he has publicly admitted to the essential elements of a number of drug offenses in both the United States and abroad,” the foundation’s lawyers wrote in their original complaint.

The complaint cited numerous other cases in which celebrities and public figures such as the soccer star Diego Maradona and the singer Amy Winehouse ran into immigration problems or were denied entry over reported drug use.

The legal dispute began in May after the department returned the Heritage Foundation’s request, deeming it “too broad in scope.” It did not immediately deny the request but directed the think tank to resubmit and identify more specific records for it to consider.

Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, had been living in California for some time before his memoir was published, and he has expressed interest in becoming a U.S. citizen.

When Republicans won the House majority, some of their most conservative members pledged to use their power to slash the budgets of the federal agencies they claimed had been weaponized against them — chief among them the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

So when Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled the package of six government spending bills he had negotiated with Democrats that is on track to clear Congress on Friday, he touted the “deep cuts” — 6 percent — Republicans had secured to the agency’s budget.

But the story of the F.B.I. cut is not so much one of how House Republicans used their slim majority to raze the budget of an agency they claim has gone rogue. Instead, it is a remarkable yarn about how a single powerful senator used budgetary sleight of hand to steer hundreds of millions of dollars to a single project in his state, only to see the money slashed by members of his own party after he retired.

Out of the $654 million lawmakers agreed to cut this year from the F.B.I.’s operating budget, $622 million came from eliminating what was essentially an old earmark: money for construction at the bureau’s campus at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. The funding was placed into the budget years ago by Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the legendary pork-barreling veteran who retired in 2022 at the age of 88.

The actual cut to the F.B.I.’s operating budget — mostly for personnel and operations — was roughly $32 million, or 0.3 percent.

Ultraconservative Republicans like Representative Chip Roy of Texas who voted against the spending package this week, deriding it as full of budgetary gimmicks, pointed to the elimination of Mr. Shelby’s pet project as a prime example of how little his party had actually been able to cut.

Grousing about the F.B.I. budget cut on the House floor this week, Mr. Roy said, “What they won’t tell you is, 95 percent of that cut is eliminating an earmark from Richard Shelby, because Richard Shelby is no longer here to defend his pet project building back in Alabama.”

For years, Mr. Shelby used his perch on the Appropriations Committee to single-handedly transform the landscape of his home state, harnessing billions of federal dollars to conjure the creation and expansion of university buildings and research programs, airports and seaports, and military and space facilities.

One of his most prioritized projects was the twin F.B.I. campuses at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, where over the course of a decade, he steered more than $3 billion to build up the 1,100 acres of land the bureau has secured there for facilities dedicated to cyberthreat intelligence and training.

The F.B.I. has said to expect that more than 4,000 jobs will come to Huntsville over the next eight to 10 years.

Normally, such pet projects are funded through earmarks — a practice that allows lawmakers to direct federal funds for specific projects to their states and districts. Those projects are enumerated in a separate list, which clearly lays out how much federal money is going to a specific project, and which lawmaker requested it.

Mr. Shelby instead shoehorned money for the campus into the text of the spending bill, in an apparent effort to ensure it would be available even after he left Congress. For multiple years in a row, the Biden administration requested about $61 million for the F.B.I.’s construction budget. Instead, at the senator’s behest, Congress gave them $632 million one year, and $652 million the next.

In each case, the laws stated that the additional funding was to be used to address the F.B.I.’s “highest priorities outside of the immediate national capital area,” meaning Washington, D.C.

While it did not say so in the legislation, it was clear that that meant only one place: Huntsville, Ala.

“Growing the F.B.I.’s presence in Huntsville has been a priority of mine for quite some time,” Mr. Shelby said an announcement in 2022 touting the additional funding. “And I am proud to have helped bring it to fruition.”

A little over a year ago, the University of South Carolina Salkehatchie posted a job opening for its men’s basketball coach. It might have been a single sentence: applications being accepted for the worst college coaching job in the country.

The school, a junior college at a rural outpost about an hour’s drive west of Charleston, had shut down its men’s basketball program before last season after going through four coaches in eight months. One quit before setting foot on campus.

There was not much to offer the candidates. The pay: $38,000 per year but no recruiting budget or staff. The facilities: a gym whose court is seven feet short of regulation, whose showers don’t have running water and whose men’s locker room doesn’t have a toilet.

And another thing: there were no players.

The job would test career ambitions, which made it perfect for Matt Lynch.

Lynch, 33, is like many hustling their way up the coaching ladder. He’s had the coaching bug since a church league dad handed him a clipboard and asked him to design his team’s final play. He embraces long hours. He schemes persistently. He charms relentlessly.

But what sets Lynch apart is that he is making the climb as an openly gay man.

In almost any field beside men’s sports, this might be met with a shrug. It’s been more than a decade since the military repealed its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the last presidential election cycle featured a gay candidate. Acceptance in the United States has extended emphatically to women’s sports. But men’s sports, despite a trickle of out athletes and assistant coaches, largely remains one of America’s last closets.

According to Outsports, the website that chronicles L.G.B.T.Q. athletes, there had never been a publicly gay men’s head coach in any of the North American major professional leagues, nor in college football or men’s basketball until Lynch.

There was no way for Lynch to know if being gay would affect his job prospects, but it remained a question in the back of his mind — even for a job that was within his reach.

“If I was going to get a head coaching job, I knew it was going to be at a place that needed to be built,” said Lynch, who came out publicly nearly four years ago in an essay for Outsports shortly after he was fired, along with the rest of the staff, at the University of North Carolina Wilmington after three losing seasons. “All I ever wanted was an opportunity. The way I looked at it was this may be a bad job, but it’s my bad job. You’ve got to make the big time where you are.”

In a series of interviews over the last year, starting shortly after he was hired in December 2022, Lynch has described putting together a program almost from scratch — enlisting two volunteer assistants, prodding sympathetic administrators for help and assembling an all-freshman roster with a global reach.

As Lynch closes out his first season with a winning record, his X-and-O acumen has been challenged, he has leaned on his master’s degree in sports psychology, dusted off his carpentry and painting skills and shaken hands and kissed babies as if he were running for mayor.

What he has rarely done is address his sexual orientation.

There have been no taunts from opponents. Nobody has made him feel unwelcome in Walterboro, home to the university’s East Campus. It’s a small town, pop. 5,544, where moss hangs from towering oaks, a church sits on nearly every corner and the poverty rate exceeds 20 percent. Within the team, there were instances early on when a player would quip that something uncool was “so gay” before catching himself, with the help of a teammate’s side-eyed glance, and apologizing to Lynch.

“The truth of it is there hasn’t been one incident with malicious intent,” Lynch said.

The only instance of discomfort came when he met an older, prospective donor who is gay for lunch. The man badgered Lynch to go swimming in the pool, with the suggestion that what happens in the backyard stays there. Lynch declined. “I told him if you’re interested in donating, great,” he said. “I haven’t talked to him since.”

Others in the gay community have lent support. Rick Welts, a former N.B.A. executive who is gay, connected Lynch with an executive from Nike, which supplied new uniforms.

In assembling a team, Lynch could only sell a vision. He was limited to partial scholarships and had no track record as a head coach. He scoured the state for under-recruited high school gems, sending by mail daily puzzle pieces that would lay out to recruits why Salk, as the school is called, would be a perfect fit.

He canvassed former players who were playing abroad for recommendations and watched games online at all hours. The result is a roster with five Australians, four South Carolinians, two Englishmen, one German, one Costa Rican and one Virginian.

On a 500-mile drive home from a recruiting showcase outside Washington, D.C., Lynch stopped for a video call with the family of Rhys Grocott, a beefy 6-foot-9 center from Portsmouth, England. Grocott’s mother asked about in-person classes: “I want him up and out of bed,” she said.

“There’s nothing sexy about Salk,” Lynch told the family. “But if you come here, you’re going to be a better man, a better student and a better athlete.”

The next day, Grocott called to say he would be the 12th commitment.

Since players arrived in late August, Lynch has addressed his sexual orientation with the team once — when he hosted a September retreat at his house in Wilmington, N.C. On their last night, the team sat around a bonfire in the backyard.

He wrestled with talking about his sexuality.

“My issue addressing it had nothing to do with any fear of coming out,” he said. “None of my guys said, ‘Hi, my name is … and I’m gay. Or straight.’ I don’t know why, internally, I feel like I have to tell people. I struggle with that.”

He told the players he did not need their acceptance — that it had taken nearly 30 years to accept himself.

“He’s not afraid to open himself up to us, which is a big positive,” said Darcy Pares, a guard from Port Macquarie, Australia. “We might not like him some days at practice, we might not like him when he wakes us up early to go to the weight room, but we know he’s doing it because he really cares about us.”

He gut renovated the men’s basketball locker room over the summer, ripping out dilapidated carpet with a box cutter and taking a sledgehammer to a broken pool table. His mother, sister and brother arrived to slap fresh paint on the lockers and cinder block walls; he scavenged leather sofas to replace the ratty one he inherited; and he scrounged new carpet, blinds, a full-length mirror, a dry-erase board and a television on the cheap.

A built-in bookcase is filled with framed family photos of every player and coach, and the flag of each player’s home country hangs over his locker.

There are no dormitories at Salk, so the players are housed in a seven-bedroom apartment a mile from campus, developing the sort of chemistry that comes from the communal realization that someone has to wash the dishes piled in the sink.

“This is good for him,” Traci Kirk said of her son, Grayson, who in high school underwent emergency surgery after being struck by a stray bullet while playing pickup basketball in Lancaster, S.C. “He’s my only child and he’s never shared a room, never shared a bathroom with anybody. Now he’s in an environment where everybody is from a different background.”

Lynch made no assurances to parents about playing time or winning. But he made two promises: that they would know how to change a flat tire and properly knot a tie. Before the season-opening game, Jaiden Cancela, a guard from Virginia Beach, stood in front of a mirror fiddling with a Windsor knot.

After the umpteenth attempt, with his mother smiling nearby, Cancela sighed after securing a passable knot.

Lynch, who did not play basketball in college, has counted on a trait he calls “a little shake and wiggle.”

A former classmate, who had been the men’s team manager for the University of North Carolina, put Lynch in touch with C.B. McGrath, an assistant coach, who agreed to show Lynch the facilities.

When Lynch arrived in a suit, McGrath quipped that it was a tour, not a job interview. But a year later, when McGrath became the head coach at U.N.C.W., he hired Lynch as the video coordinator.

The big break came at a time of personal torment.

Lynch had long equated being gay with being soft, so he vowed not to be soft. He wasn’t nice to girls in high school. He ignored the janitor who cleaned the basketball office. He’d walk around campus after midnight for hours to tire himself out so he could sleep.

“Sexuality is a very powerful thing if you’re going to suppress it,” he said. “Lying becomes very heavy.”

Though his family knew the truth, few others did. He dated occasionally and warily. Certain that coming out would be a career killer, he began to think about doing something else — or coaching women’s basketball.

As he began his third season in Wilmington, Lynch summoned the courage to ask Rob Burke, the assistant with whom he had spent many long nights breaking down film, to meet for drinks. Sufficiently lubricated, Lynch handed Burke his phone and asked him to read a long note.

“About the ninth or 10th graph, it says ‘I’m gay,” Burke said.

Burke got up and gave his friend a hug and slapped him on the behind, wisecracking that Lynch probably liked that — a sign in their shared language that he had Burke’s unwavering support.

Minutes before his essay in Outsports was published, he started the drive home to Erie, Pa., tossing his phone into the back seat.

When he stopped hours later near Washington, D.C., he had more than 300 supportive text messages. He described the day as the best of his life.

Six months later came the worst, when his father, Bill Lynch, died. Matt had grown up always trying to please his father, a former college basketball player with an opinion on everything.

At Salk’s season opener, an empty chair was left next to Lynch’s seat for his father. His mother, Irma, sat at the other end of the bench, serving as an honorary assistant.

“Bill accepted Matt and loved him, but it was hard for him — he thought it was a phase,” said Irma Lynch, who cooks team meals when she visits. “The last week of his life, Matt would visit in the hospital and Bill would say, ‘Are you sure you’re gay? There’s a really pretty nurse here,’ and Matt would shoot it down.”

The Indians are 17-13 overall, 6-10 in conference. But the young team has won three in a row — including ending Caldwell Tech’s 21-game winning streak — entering next week’s conference tournament. Six of the conference losses have been by 5 points or less, and Lynch frets that a more experienced coach might have won.

“Matt wants the end game, the championship,” said Burke, now the head coach at Division II Chowan University in Murfreesboro, N.C. “He forgets how far his guys have come and how much of an impact he’s making. He’s got no scholarships and he’s getting kids to chase the American dream. I don’t think he’s grasped how important he is to the gay community. But he doesn’t want to be recognized as an openly gay coach; he wants to be recognized as a really good coach.”

In time, perhaps, he will be.

Until then, he will remain busy with his restoration projects — the one at Salk, and the one at home.

The centrist group No Labels said on Friday that it would move forward with plans to nominate a presidential ticket, a move that, if it comes to fruition, would add another complicating factor to the November election.

Leaders of the group announced the plan after an online meeting of its members. The group said it had 800 delegates who voted “near unanimously” to nominate a ticket. No Labels has yet to announce a candidate who might run on its ballot line, however, and several of the best-known politicians it has courted have ruled out a presidential run on a third-party ticket.

“Even though we met virtually, their emotion and desire to bring this divided nation back together came right through the screen,” said Mike Rawlings, No Labels’s national convention chair.

The meeting came at a pivotal moment for No Labels. As state deadlines approach for getting on the ballot for the November election, the group had to move quickly to decide whether to begin a third-party bid, and name its ticket.

No Labels’s evolution from a bipartisan, think tank-like organization to a would-be third party, with aspirations of a presidential candidacy, has alarmed many Democrats, who worry that the group could pull critical votes away from President Biden in battleground states.

“No Labels has put their dangerous, reckless thought experiment ahead of the rights and freedoms of millions of Americans and the future of our democracy,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, the liberal activist group. “Any candidates who join the No Labels presidential ticket will be complicit in making it easier for Donald Trump and MAGA extremists to win a second term in the White House.”

No Labels’s operations have been cloaked in secrecy. The national group is technically not a political party but a nonprofit social welfare organization, so it does not have to disclose its donors or provide details about its activities.

Last year, its leaders were trying to raise $70 million for ballot access efforts. At the time, they said they would hold a national convention in Dallas in April, but that plan has since been jettisoned. The group’s delegates expect to vote on a ticket selected by the group’s leaders, people involved with the group have said.

Even the means by which it would pick a ticket are unclear. The group has said it has 800 “delegates” in all 50 states who would play some role in selecting the candidates, but their names have never been disclosed, and the number could not be independently verified.

No Labels leaders have said they will nominate a ticket if Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump are the main parties’ nominees, as is now all but certain. The group’s leaders have said that their so-called “unity ticket” would have a Republican presidential candidate and a Democratic running mate.

But the group is running low on potential contenders.

As recently as January, the group was still courting or considering prominent current and former politicians including Jon Huntsman Jr., the Republican former governor of Utah; Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland; and Senator Joe Manchin III, the conservative West Virginia Democrat, who has said he will not seek re-election.

In February, Mr. Hogan announced that he would run for Maryland’s open Senate seat. A week later, Mr. Manchin ruled out running for president. “I will not be seeking a third-party run,” he said.

Another problem for No Labels: As of January, the group was on the ballot in just 14 states, although it said it was “active” — gathering signatures and filing for ballot access — in more than a dozen others.

On Tuesday night, a triumphant Donald J. Trump looked out on an adoring crowd at his seaside mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., evoked the halcyon days of his presidency when, in his telling, there were no wars, the nation was universally admired and united in egalitarian prosperity — and then declared, “Our country is dying.”

Two days later, President Biden looked out on a sharply divided audience and conjured the mirror image: a country that is now “literally the envy of the world,” and a recent past as “one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” when crime was soaring, a deadly virus raged and the nation’s chief executive had “failed the most basic presidential duty” — “the duty to care.”

With the presidential election now fully engaged, two speeches two days apart laid out the choice that voters face, with visions of past, present and future that are diametrically opposed. But both men seemed to share the political goal of rallying their own base voters rather than the more traditional task of pivoting to the center to appeal to fence-sitters and foes.

The State of the Union address on Thursday and Mr. Trump’s victory speech after his near-sweep of Super Tuesday were in different settings and under different circumstances. The former president’s was a political rally at his perpetual political perch of Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Biden’s was supposed to be a Constitutionally mandated update on the condition of the nation, delivered to the elected branch of government, members of the Supreme Court and military leadership, with all the trappings and pageantry of state.

But in this tale of two speeches, both were strikingly partisan, delivered by a pair of elderly politicians beginning their general-election rematch with nods to their ages, hyperbolic warnings about this moment in history, prescriptions for the future — Mr. Trump’s vague, Mr. Biden’s specific down to a potato chip portion — and visions for the nation as different as they could possibly be.

“I see a future for all Americans,” Mr. Biden’s speech concluded. “I see a country for all Americans. And I will always be a president for all Americans because I believe in America.”

Mr. Trump’s finale struck a different tone.

“We’re going to have to deport a lot of people, a lot of bad people,” he said in concluding his 20-minute address, “because our countries can’t live like this, our cities are choking to death, our states are dying and frankly our country is dying, and we’re going to make America great again.”

There were nonetheless remarkable parallels. Neither man reached out to the other side or to a middle immiserated by the choices they face in the coming presidential election. Each addressed the liability of his age.

Mr. Biden spoke of his 81 years of age as an accumulation of wisdom and experience: “When you get to my age, certain things become clearer than ever before,” he said. “I know the American story. Again and again, I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation.”

Mr. Trump was more oblique but wistful in recognizing he no longer was a young man, when he acknowledged youthful people in his audience: “I’d love to be your age,” he told them. “I’d pay a lot of money to be your age.”

Both referred directly to each other in the most negative possible terms.

Without uttering the name Trump, Mr. Biden referred to “my predecessor” 13 times, lashing him for his “outrageous” suggestion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “do whatever the hell you want” with NATO allies in arrears on military spending, for burying “the truth” about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, for orchestrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and most starkly for Mr. Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in which Mr. Biden said his predecessor had “failed the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people: the duty to care.”

Mr. Trump was less specific, even more hyperbolic and did use his opponent’s name, in his signature tone of emphasis, as he clipped through his pronunciation of “Joe,” then expanded the vowels in “Biden.”

He went after his opponent’s age in visceral terms, evoking “Joe Biden” on the beach, where White House advisers might think he looks good in a bathing suit, but “he can’t get his feet out of the sand, or lift the chair which weighs about nine ounces.”

Then Mr. Trump added of his rival, “He’s the worst president in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like what’s happening to our country.”

That assessment of American history left out some universally recognized bad presidents who led the country to the Civil War, when a nation divided by slavery ripped itself apart through secession and as many as 750,000 American soldiers slaughtered each other in fratricidal combat.

Mr. Biden, for his part, did acknowledge that ugliest of historical chapters in attempting to put the coming campaign into the most dire of contexts: “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today,” he warned. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack both at home and overseas at the very same time.”

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden was specific in his promises for a new four-year term, from the grand — a 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires — to the granular, a temporary tax credit of $400 a month to offset new mortgages.

But it was another aspect of American history that differentiated one man’s politics from the other’s: the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The question of whether it will continue to be one could define much of the coming campaign.

Mr. Trump had a few other policy prescriptions — he said that in a second term, he would “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas and would pursue “the second phase of our tax cuts,” an economic policy that Mr. Biden warned would be coming but that congressional Republicans in the audience denied was in the works.

But Mr. Trump made clear the centerpiece of his campaign would be border control and immigration, speaking floridly of an invasion of criminals and thugs that he said must be reversed through stringent border closures and mass deportations.

If that is what voters want, their choice will be clear, because while Mr. Biden ad libbed the Republican term “illegal” to refer to an undocumented immigrant accused of murder, and while he embraced the tougher border-security measures reached in the Senate only to be torpedoed at Mr. Trump’s behest, he spoke of immigrants themselves in the soaring terms of presidents and poets past.

“I will not demonize immigrants saying they are ‘poison in the blood of our country.’ I will not separate families. I will not ban people because of their faith,” Mr. Biden promised. “Unlike my predecessor, I know who we are as Americans. We are the only nation in the world with a heart and soul that draws from old and new.”

Former President Donald J. Trump promised Americans a “play-by-play” of President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday night.

That, Mr. Trump declared before the event began, would happen on “Truth Social, the real voice of America,” praising the social media platform in which he has a financial stake that would be his bully pulpit for the night.

But shortly after, that voice sputtered.

Truth Social began experiencing outages toward the beginning of Mr. Biden’s remarks, with more than 3,000 reported outages on the site by 9:30 p.m., according to Down Detector, a website that tracks user reports of web disruptions. The outages paused the barrage of derogatory posts that made up Mr. Trump’s response to Mr. Biden’s remarks, which included an unusual video that deployed Snapchat filters to mocking effect.

Mr. Biden took numerous shots at Mr. Trump, the expected Republican nominee, on Thursday night, referring to him only as his “predecessor” in an effort to highlight the stakes of the election and draw a contrast for viewers between his vision for the country and the one depicted by his all-but-certain opponent.

Mr. Biden, referencing the “American story,” spoke about how his “lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy.” Then, alluding to Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden said, “Now some other people my age see a different story — the American story of resentment, revenge and retribution. That’s not me.” (Mr. Trump, whose remarks often depict a dark future for America, recently referred to the United States as a “third-world country.”)

After the event ended, Mr. Trump’s accounts on Truth Social and Instagram featured a video in which Snapchat-like filters toggled over what appeared to be Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the 2023 State of the Union.

One segment showed Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris with googly eyes and wide, menacing smiles while he discussed the Buy American Act; another gave them cowboy hats and braided hair as Mr. Biden talked about insulin caps.

Mr. Trump had assistance with his social media Thursday night and did not make the posts himself, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Throughout the night, Mr. Trump denounced Mr. Biden for taking his time greeting guests before making his way to the dais (“This is the longest walk in Presidential History”); his demeanor (“He is so angry and crazy!”); his appearance (“His hair is much better in the front than on the back!”); and his occasional cough (“Don’t shake his hand, he’s been coughing into it the entire night.”).

“This is like a shouting match, every line is being shouted,” Mr. Trump, a man often prone to making irate speeches and social media posts, wrote at one point, using all caps.

Like Mr. Trump, conservative commentators — after months of attempting to portray Mr. Biden as enfeebled and diminished — complained that Mr. Biden was overly animated.

The Biden campaign had a simple response to Mr. Trump’s response operation.

“Sad,” said Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, alongside an screenshot of Truth Social not loading.

Mr. Trump, later on Thursday night, put out a video in which he told viewers that “Crooked Joe Biden is on the run from his record, and lying like crazy to try and escape accountability for the horrific devastation he and his party have created.”

His accounts then resumed their more typical activity, posting a video fabricated from a clip of Mr. Biden eating an ice cream cone. In the video, Mr. Biden was positioned as if strolling along a flooded street while a garbage bin, decorated with an American flag, floated by in flames.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

The Republican National Committee on Friday selected new leaders who were handpicked by former President Donald J. Trump, a move expected to tighten the expected nominee’s hold on the party’s machinery ahead of the general election.

The committee unanimously elected Michael Whatley, who led the North Carolina Republican Party and was the R.N.C.’s general counsel, as its chair and Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, as co-chair.

Both Mr. Whatley and Ms. Trump were endorsed by Mr. Trump last month after Ronna McDaniel, the committee’s leader since 2017, privately told the former president she planned to leave the position. Ms. McDaniel was for months the focus of intense pressure from inside and outside the Trump campaign to step down over the committee’s lackluster fund-raising and criticism over Republicans’ performance in 2022.

Many of Mr. Trump’s allies also criticized Ms. McDaniel, whom Mr. Trump originally picked for the position, for being insufficiently supportive of the former president. They cited her neutrality during the Republican primary and her resistance to his push to call off a series of debates that he refused to participate in.

The new leaders will take the reins of the national party at a critical juncture for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and their elevation is part of his larger effort to effectively merge the R.N.C. with his campaign.

After Mr. Trump dominated the primaries on Super Tuesday, his last remaining rival, Nikki Haley, exited the Republican race, effectively handing him the party’s nomination. Mr. Trump is now focused on the general election, and his campaign is expected to begin raising money in concert with the party, allowing him to raise far larger sums and to tap into the existing party apparatus.

During Friday’s meeting, the R.N.C. voted to officially recognize him as the party’s presidential candidate, even though he has not yet locked up the delegates necessary to clinch the nomination.

In a speech after his election, Mr. Whatley vowed that the committee would “be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump,” flip control of the Senate and expand Republicans’ slim majority in the House of Representatives.

Mr. Whatley also said his priorities as chair would be “getting out the vote and protecting the ballot.” He pledged to build on the committee’s efforts to recruit and deploy poll watchers, workers and judges to serve as “real-time monitors” as votes are being cast as well as counted.

Mr. Trump — who continues to make false claims about voter fraud as he faces criminal charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — has told allies that he believes the R.N.C. needed to spend more money on “election integrity” efforts.

Mr. Whatley has backed Mr. Trump’s false election claims and has asserted, without basis, that Republican efforts in North Carolina prevented Democrats from cheating Mr. Trump out of victory there in 2020. In a statement, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee criticized Mr. Whatley as a “fringe election denier.”

On Friday, he said that the committee would “work relentlessly in every state to ensure that it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.” Mr. Trump has frequently and falsely contended on the campaign trail that Democrats pervasively cheat during elections.

As evidence for this claim, Mr. Trump frequently rails against mail-in ballots and early voting, practices that Democrats are more likely to use. But in her parting message on Friday, Ms. McDaniel emphasized her belief that Republicans needed to encourage people to vote early and to take advantage of “ballot harvesting,” a practice that allows a third party to collect and deliver voters’ completed ballots, where it is legally allowed.

After winning her position as the committee’s No. 2 leader, Lara Trump also said the party needed to encourage supporters “to do things like early voting.”

Both she and Mr. Whatley made clear that raising money would be a major priority. The R.N.C. has historically low cash on hand, reporting $8.7 million at the end of January. Its Democratic counterpart reported having $24 million, nearly three times as much.

During her speech, Ms. Trump held up what she said was a $100,000 check made out to the committee that was handed to her that day as a result of the new leadership elections.

As part of the leadership overhaul, Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s top campaign advisers, will be tapped to serve as the chief operating officer of the national committee. He is expected to manage its operations, strategy and spending while continuing to work with the Trump campaign.

One outstanding question is whether the R.N.C. will contribute to Mr. Trump’s ballooning legal bills as he faces four criminal indictments and two high-profile civil lawsuits. The party in 2021 paid for more than $1 million in legal fees after Mr. Trump left the presidency and was being investigated by officials in New York.

Mr. LaCivita told reporters last month in South Carolina that he did not anticipate the committee would pay Mr. Trump’s legal bills. But Ms. Trump, at a campaign event elsewhere in the state, signaled an openness to doing so, saying that Mr. Trump’s legal fees were a significant concern for Republican voters.

“I think that is of big interest to people,” she said. “Absolutely.”

One veteran R.N.C. member from Mississippi, Henry Barbour, drafted a resolution that would have stopped the committee from paying Mr. Trump’s legal fees. But the proposal would not have been binding, and it failed to draw enough co-sponsors to be put to a vote.

Monday marks four years since the World Health Organization declared Covid a pandemic. Since then, millions of people around the world have died from the virus, and today, the persistent impact of long Covid is being studied and the latest variant to become dominant, JN.1, continues to spread in the United States.

Though the W.H.O. dropped its global health emergency designation in May 2023, life for many people continues to look very different now than it did before March 2020, when most of the world first went into lockdown to try to halt the virus’s spread.

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The congressional theater around federal spending fights that have repeatedly brought the government to the brink of a disastrous shutdown over the past six months, only to be resolved just in the nick of time to avoid one, has become very predictable.

For days before a Friday midnight deadline, there is no official word of a compromise between Republicans and Democrats that will avert the crackup. But behind the scenes, members of the appropriations committees in both parties are hammering out complex deals among themselves.

Speaker Mike Johnson hems and haws publicly — and even in private — about whether he is willing to agree to the emerging compromise, but ultimately insists that Republicans must avoid shutting down the government and claims they got some wins despite failing to secure the spending cuts and policy mandates they wanted. He puts the legislation on the floor using a maneuver that effectively deprives hard-right Republican rebels of the means to block it. The archconservatives breathe fire and condemn it, but the bill passes easily, with far more Democratic than Republican support.

Mr. Johnson keeps his job anyway. The Senate sends the measure to President Biden, who quickly signs it.

Welcome to functional dysfunction, an emerging form of minimalist coalition government that has taken hold on Capitol Hill in a divided Congress where the House majority is barely in control. It’s a dynamic that is keeping the government’s lights on — but doing little else so far.

“We have found a way,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. “It is not a pretty sight, but it is working.”

As Congress finally closes in on completing its basic job of funding the government, albeit six months late, the outcome of the latest spending fight illustrates what happens when an extreme bloc of the House majority — in this case far-right Republicans — digs in and refuses to compromise, forcing their colleagues into the arms of the minority. The legislation has to be shaped more to the liking of the minority — now the Democrats — and the archconservatives lose out entirely.

If there is a “uniparty,” as members of the far right have long contended, they have helped to empower it.

“We’ve said all along that we’re either going to lock arms and do this together or you are going to force us to have to water these things down, make them more expensive and accept things that we would prefer not to accept in order to be able to move something across the finish line,” Representative Steve Womack, Republican of Arkansas and another senior appropriator, said in explaining the dynamic with the far right.

The failure to bend the spending curve significantly more in their direction has left ultraconservatives in the House frustrated and flailing. They attack the spending bills as Washington business-as-usual packages that make no real attempt to exact the deep spending cuts Republicans pledged they would deliver when they took over the House last year.

“The fact of the matter is all of this is just a shell game,” said Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas. He was one of the few critics who took to the House floor this week to lay into the six-bill spending package that in the end passed the House in overwhelming bipartisan fashion and was headed toward lopsided Senate passage on Friday.

He and others are discovering that the vast majority of their colleagues just do not embrace the slash-and-burn shutdown tactics that those on the far right would willingly deploy in the interest of winning some deep spending reductions in an election year.

“People get comfortable with the status quo and it works for them,” Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, said about the resistance within his own party to significantly paring back spending and disrupting the government.

With Republicans holding a razor-thin majority, the conservative refusal to go along has left Mr. Johnson little choice but to deal with Democrats if he wants to avoid a government closure — and like his doomed predecessor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he has made clear time and again that he does.

In the end, anti-spending conservatives say there is little more they can do if most House Republicans are unwilling to entertain another coup against the speaker after the chaos spurred by Mr. McCarthy’s ouster last year.

“We tried structural change and that didn’t work,” said Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado. “We did a personnel change and that hasn’t worked. What’s left at this point — another personnel change? Nobody seems to want to do that.”

Mr. Cole said if the right wing truly wanted to cut the deficit, it should focus less on the annual spending bills and more on giant programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“If you’re really worried about the deficit, then I want to see your entitlement reform plan,” he said. “You know, tell me what you’re going to do.”

But the political danger inherent in merely mentioning those programs has left even the most conservative members of Congress reluctant to raise them. Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, took a beating when he broached the subject a few years ago in a proposed party agenda that fell flat.

The spending situation has worked to the advantage of Democrats. Though the six spending measures on track for enactment on Friday were not written the way Democrats would have insisted were they in the majority, all but two House Democrats supported them, along with 132 Republicans. Eighty-three Republicans voted no.

Democrats said they were able to use their influence to keep a bevy of provisions sought by the far right out of the legislation. Republicans knew they had to strip most of them in order to win the Democratic votes necessary to pass the legislation, since the conservatives refused to vote for the spending bills under any circumstance.

“Once again, Democrats protected the American people and delivered the overwhelming majority of votes necessary to get things done,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said after the House vote on Wednesday.

The coalition remains fragile and is so far extending mainly to the spending bills. Mr. Johnson is relying on substantial Democratic backing to use a procedural shortcut to bring the bills to the floor and circumvent a procedural blockade by his own party. But the speaker has so far refused to use the same procedure to move ahead with a Senate-passed bill containing more than $60 billion in security aid to Ukraine even though both Republicans and Democrats say majority support exists for it as well.

And the next tranche of six spending bills taking shape could be much more difficult to squeeze through than the first six. The package will contain some of the most contentious spending measures including money for the agencies that oversee the border as well as health and labor programs — areas where Democrats and Republicans have divided sharply in the past. Top lawmakers say it may be difficult to produce the same kind of overwhelming approval.

Still, those who have backed the spending bills over the fervent but so far ineffectual opposition from the far right say they are satisfied with what has transpired, with both parties getting some wins and taking some losses while keeping the government open.

“Both sides can claim some victories in this thing,” Mr. Womack said of the legislation passed this week. “And, gosh, isn’t that the way this is supposed to work?”