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WASHINGTON — The WhiteHouse and Senate Republicansworked aggressively on Wednes-day to discount damaging revela-tions from John R. Bolton and lineup the votes to block new wit-nesses from testifying in Presi-dent Trump’s impeachment trial,in a push to bring the proceedingto a swift close.

As the Senate opened a two-day,16-hour period of questioningfrom senators, Mr. Trump lacedinto Mr. Bolton, his former na-tional security adviser, whose un-published manuscript contains anaccount that contradicts his im-peachment defense. The presi-dent described Mr. Bolton on Twit-ter as a warmonger who had“begged” for his job, was fired,and then wrote “a nasty & untruebook.”

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Trump’saides circulated a letter informingMr. Bolton that the White Housewas moving to block publication of

his forthcoming book, in which hewrote that the president refusedto release military aid to Ukraineuntil its leaders committed to in-vestigating his political rivals.That is a core element of the Dem-ocrats’ case, which charges Mr.Trump with seeking to enlist a for-eign government to help him winre-election this year.

Before the trial convened, Sena-tor Mitch McConnell of Kentucky,the majority leader, and other Re-publicans signaled that they were

IN RUSH TO ACQUIT,G.O.P. BRUSHES OFFBOLTON’S ACCOUNT

Lining Up Votes toBlock Witnesses

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERGand MICHAEL D. SHEAR

Continued on Page A21

Senator Mitt Romney of Utahbefore Wednesday’s session.

ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

WASHINGTON — In the end,the impeachment calculationnearly all Senate Republicansare making is fairly simple: Theywould rather look like they ig-

nored relevant evi-dence than plungethe Senate into anunpredictable, open-ended inquiry thatwould anger Presi-dent Trump and

court political peril.As Republicans on Wednesday

lined up behind blocking wit-nesses in the trial, their reason-ing reflected the worry thatallowing testimony by John R.Bolton, the former national secu-rity adviser whose unpublishedmanuscript contradicts a centralpart of Mr. Trump’s impeach-ment defense, would undoubt-edly lead to a cascade of otherwitnesses.

They in turn could providemore damaging disclosures andtie up the Senate indefinitely,when the ultimate verdict — anall but certain acquittal of thepresident — is not in doubt.

“For the sake of argument, onecould assume everything attrib-utable to John Bolton is accurate,and still the House would fallwell below the standards toremove a president from office,”said Senator Lindsey Graham,Republican of South Carolina.

Republicans have offeredmyriad rationales for refusingnew testimony: Gathering it wasthe House’s job. Calling morewitnesses would lead to pro-longed court fights over execu-tive privilege. They had heardmore than enough evidence toreach a verdict.

There was not enough evi-dence to show they needed moreinformation. Allowing the Houseto force the Senate into a drawn-out impeachment trial would seta dangerous institutional prece-dent.

In essence, during what theyhoped would be the final hours ofMr. Trump’s trial, Senate Repub-licans were constructing a per-mission structure for not tryingto get to the bottom of whathappened, with the hope thatvoters would find their explana-

Fear of Flood if Dam Opens Just a Crack

Continued on Page A20

CARLHULSE

TRUMPON TRIAL

It powered Democrats to recap-ture the House in the 2018midterms: the fear that PresidentTrump and Republicans would killthe Affordable Care Act and withit, protections for more than 50million Americans with pre-exist-ing medical conditions.

Yet even as Mr. Trump andother Republicans continue to tryto overturn the law in court, Dem-ocratic presidential candidateshave not made the issue central totheir campaigns. Instead theyhave spent much of their time onthe debate stage arguing amongthemselves over “Medicare forall” and other proposals to expandhealth coverage.

“I do think it’s a missed oppor-tunity to educate voters aboutwhat’s really at stake in the fall,”said Leslie Dach, chairman of Pro-tect Our Care, a group that ran acampaign-style war room in 2017to defeat House Republicans seek-

ing to repeal Obamacare, “andthat’s having to stop DonaldTrump’s relentless war on healthcare.”

Michael R. Bloomberg, the for-mer New York City mayor who en-tered the Democratic presidentialprimary late and has not qualifiedto participate in the debates, hasmoved to exploit his rivals’ failureto mount a more frontal attack onMr. Trump’s record on health care.Driven by extensive polling, Mr.Bloomberg’s campaign has re-leased a torrent of television anddigital ads accusing Mr. Trump oftrying to “undermine coverage”for Americans with pre-existingconditions.

Since he announced his candi-dacy, Mr. Bloomberg has spentmore than $88.2 million on televi-sion advertisements about healthcare in 27 states, according to Ad-vertising Analytics, an ad track-

Bloomberg Ads on Health CareHit Vulnerable Spot for Trump

By NICK CORASANITI and ABBY GOODNOUGH

Continued on Page A18

WASHINGTON — Life ex-pectancy increased for the firsttime in four years in 2018, the fed-eral government said Thursday,raising hopes that a benchmark ofthe nation’s health may finally bestabilizing after a rare and trou-bling decline that was driven by asurge in drug overdoses.

Life expectancy is the most ba-sic measure of the health of a soci-ety, and declines in developedcountries are extremely unusual.But the United States experiencedone from 2015 to 2017 as the opioidepidemic took its toll, worryingdemographers who had not seenan outright decline since 1993,during the AIDS epidemic. An up-tick in what have become knownas “deaths of despair” — younger

people dying from overdoses, sui-cide and alcoholism — has drawnconsiderable attention from poli-ticians and policymakers.

The 2018 data, released in a re-port on Thursday, confirmed the

first decline in drug deaths in 28years, an important improvementafter decades of rises.

The increase in life expectancyit helped produce was small — justover a month — and demogra-phers cautioned that it was tooearly to tell if the country hadturned the corner with opioidoverdoses, which have claimednearly 500,000 lives since the late

Life Expectancy of Americans Rises for First Time in Four YearsBy SABRINA TAVERNISEand ABBY GOODNOUGH

Continued on Page A18

Hope Follows Period ofSurging Overdoses

NSO/NSF/AURA

A telescope in Hawaii has captured the most detailed view yet, revealing cell-like “kernels,” each about the size of Texas. Page A23.The Sun’s Churning Face

Australians flown home fromWuhan, China, will be quaran-tined on an island for two weeks.Americans, also evacuated fromWuhan, will be “temporarilyhoused” on an air base in Califor-nia. And in South Korea, the policehave been empowered to detainpeople who refuse to be quaran-tined.

For countries outside China, thetime to prevent an epidemic isnow, when cases are few and canbe isolated. They are trying toseize the moment to protect them-selves against the coronavirusoutbreak, which has reached ev-ery province in China, sickeningmore than 7,700 people and killing170.

More than a dozen nations witha handful of cases — including theUnited States — are isolating pa-tients and monitoring their con-tacts, as well as screening trav-elers from China and urging peo-ple to postpone trips there.

But whether this virus can becontained depends on factors stillunknown, like just how contagiousit is and when in the course of theinfection the virus starts tospread.

China, with nearly 1.4 billionpeople, is the most populous na-tion on Earth, and it has taken ex-treme measures to try to stop thedisease, first reported in Decem-ber in Wuhan, a city of 11 million.The government has stoppedtravel in and out of that city and

Outside China,Racing to HaltVirus’s Spread

By DENISE GRADY

Continued on Page A13

A clue emerges for the last unsolvedpart of Kryptos, an encrypted sculptureoutside C.I.A. headquarters. PAGE A22

NATIONAL A15-23

Get Crackin’A parts-sorting robotic arm representsa major advance in A.I. and a potentialsetback for human workers. PAGE B1

BUSINESS B1-7

Robots Extend Their Reach

Simple slip-ups, like not opening mailright away, can disqualify poor peoplefor needed benefits. PAGE A19

Cost of Ordinary Mistakes

Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi ofIndia and opponents of his pro-Hinduagenda claim to be the ideological heirsof Mohandas K. Gandhi. PAGE A6

INTERNATIONAL A4-14

Vying for Gandhi’s MantleThe city recycles only about a fifth of itstrash, lagging far behind other majorcities and short of its potential. PAGE A26

NEW YORK A24-26

A Rotten Recycling Record

Health facilities and schools are beingbombed in Syria. An investigation bythe United Nations is limited. TheTimes took a deeper look. PAGE A9

Attacks on Hospitals in Syria

With resignation, not discord, the Euro-pean Parliament ratified the agreementgoverning Britain’s withdrawal — a bigdefeat for the European Union. PAGE A7

Brexit, With a Whimper

The Kansas City Chiefs, in their firstSuper Bowl in 50 years, are being criti-cized over the tomahawk chop. PAGE B8

SPORTSTHURSDAY B8-11

A Fan Ritual Under Fire

In a 400-page memoir, Jessica Simpsoncovers every corner of her life. PAGE D1

THURSDAY STYLES D1-6

Return Engagement Leslie H. Wexner, who had ties to Jeff-rey Epstein, is in talks to exit L Brands,the parent of Victoria’s Secret. PAGE B1

Lingerie Mogul May QuitNicholas Kristof PAGE A31

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A30-31

Antonio Banderas, a first-time Oscarnominee, talks about how he stoppedhis career from going in circles. PAGE C1

ARTS C1-8

Reinvented Yet Again

“Bojack Horseman” and “The GoodPlace” spent years pondering if good-ness is possible in a fallen world. PAGE C1

Morality as Comedy

‘DISGRUNTLED’ The White House expected John R. Bolton’s book to beunflattering for the president, but not anything like this. PAGE A21

JERUSALEM — For Mah-moud Abbas, the ailing octoge-narian president of the Palestin-ian Authority, his life’s work — aviable state side-by-side with

Israel — is quicklyslipping away.

President Trump’sMiddle East plandeprives the Pales-

tinians of nearly everything theyhad been fighting for: East Jeru-salem as their national capital,the removal of Jewish settle-ments on the West Bank, andterritorial contiguity and controlover their own borders and secu-rity that a sovereign state nor-mally enjoys.

While it was always presumed

that such a state would be forgedthrough talks with the Israelis,years of failure, a weak anddivided Palestinian leadership,and an Arab world that haslargely moved on have all em-boldened Mr. Trump and PrimeMinister Benjamin Netanyahu ofIsrael to try to impose a solutionof their own.

The landscape has shifted somuch in recent years that Mr.Abbas has few good options.

With only muted reaction fromArab neighbors, a strugglingPalestinian economy, little appar-ent appetite among Palestiniansfor a violent response and theUnited States having abandonedany pretense of neutral media-tion, a proposal that might havebeen considered outlandish adecade ago landed with littleserious opposition.

Rather than fighting back,some Palestinian activists onWednesday were saying the bestoption may be breaking up thePalestinian Authority, leavingIsrael to assume the burden ofproviding for the West Bank’s 2.5million Palestinians.

Mr. Abbas could decide thatthis is the moment for dramatic

Plan Leaves Palestinians With Few Options

Bid That Favors IsraelDeprives Abbas of All

He’s Fought For

By DAVID M. HALBFINGERand ISABEL KERSHNER

Palestinians confront Israeli troops at a rally against the peace plan in the West Bank on Wednesday.RANEEN SAWAFTA/REUTERS

Continued on Page A8

NEWSANALYSIS

VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,588 © 2020 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020

Late EditionToday, sunshine mixing with clouds,seasonably cold, high 37. Tonight,cloudy, low 31. Tomorrow, sunshineand some clouds, not as cold, high44. Weather map is on Page A32.

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