President Trump on Thursday directed his sons to fire an outside ethics counsel for the family business because the lawyer also represents Harvard University, one of Mr. Trump’s targets in his crackdown on the nation’s top colleges.

In a social media post, Mr. Trump said the lawyer, William A. Burck, should go because of his ties to Harvard. The university sued the Trump administration after it threatened to slash billions in funding unless the school complied with a list of demands.

“Harvard is a threat to Democracy, with a lawyer, who represents me, who should therefore be forced to resign, immediately, or be fired,” Mr. Trump wrote about Mr. Burck, a comanaging partner at the firm Quinn Emanuel. “He’s not that good, anyway, and I hope that my very big and beautiful company, now run by my sons, gets rid of him ASAP!”

In a statement, one of the sons, Eric Trump, confirmed that the Trump Organization intended to cut ties to Mr. Burck over his decision to represent Harvard.

“I view it as a conflict, and I will be moving in a different direction,” he said.

Mr. Burck declined to comment.

The move underscored not just the entanglements between the Trump presidency and his private company but also the degree to which Mr. Trump will look to target people he believes have wronged him.

Mr. Burck, a former federal prosecutor and veteran lawyer in Washington, represented a number of Trump administration officials in the special counsel investigation into possible ties between the campaign and Russia in Mr. Trump’s first term.

In Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Burck has also worked on behalf of a law firm that Mr. Trump wanted to punish because one of its former lawyers, Mark F. Pomerantz, had pushed to prosecute Mr. Trump in New York City. Mr. Burck helped negotiate a deal between that firm and the White House in which the firm, Paul Weiss, agreed to $40 million in pro bono legal work for causes the administration supports.

In the weeks leading up to Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the Trump Organization retained Mr. Burck as part of a broader plan to advise the firm as it assessed potential new business deals. The Trump Organization said it would forgo new deals with foreign governments and that Mr. Burck would counsel officials on potential ethical dilemmas. In a social media post by Eric Trump at the time, a company news release described Mr. Burck as among the “nation’s finest and most respected lawyers.”

When Mr. Burck decided to also take on Harvard as a client, he did not seek Mr. Trump’s company’s blessing, according to people with knowledge of the matter. While it is unclear whether he had a legal conflict — he represents the company, not the Trump White House — his decision to take part in a lawsuit against the Trump administration arguably presented a problem that was likely to upset Mr. Trump.

“That’s actually good for him; he should be happy to be fired,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert and professor emeritus at New York University. “This is not a position a lawyer wants to be in.”

“I think he did have a conflict,” Mr. Gillers added, saying it’s “prudent” for him to be out of the situation.

Mr. Burck’s firm, Quinn Emanuel, has had other matters involving clients with issues before the current federal government. Mr. Burck accompanied his colleague, Alex Spiro, to a meeting with the Justice Department as Mr. Spiro was arguing that corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York should be dropped.

The firm has been named as providing representation for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who had been living in Maryland for years and who the Justice Department has acknowledged was mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

For 65 years, the U.S. Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference has been a marquee event on campus, bringing in students from around the world for a week of lectures and discussions with high-ranking diplomats and officials.

But this year, the event was abruptly canceled, just weeks before it was set to start.

The conference had two strikes against it — its theme and timing. Organized around the idea of “The Constellation of Humanitarian Assistance: Persevering Through Conflict,” it was set for April 7 through 11, just as the Trump administration finished dismantling almost all of the federal government’s foreign aid programs.

According to the academy, each foreign affairs conference takes a year to plan. But killing it off was much faster, and the decision to do so is among the many ways the school’s leadership has tried to anticipate the desires of an unpredictable and vengeful president.

The moves have included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order last month that led to the banning of hundreds of books at the academy’s library, and the school’s cancellation of even more events that might attract the ire of President Trump or his supporters.

Most colleges and universities decide what courses to teach and what events to hold on their campuses. But military service academies like the Navy’s in Annapolis, Md., are part of the Pentagon’s chain of command, which starts with the commander in chief.

The Naval Academy said in a statement that it was reviewing all previously scheduled events to ensure that they aligned with executive orders and military directives. Representatives for the academy and for the Navy declined to comment for this article, but school officials have said privately that their institution’s academic freedom is under full-scale assault by the White House and the Pentagon.

A Discussion of Coups and Corruption

Even before the presidential election, the academy began preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power.

In January 2024, the academy’s history department had invited Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University, to give a lecture as part of a prestigious annual series that has brought eminent historians to the campus since 1980.

She was scheduled to speak on Oct. 10 about how the military in Italy and Chile had adapted to autocratic takeovers of those countries. The title of her lecture was “Militaries and Authoritarian Regimes: Coups, Corruption and the Costs of Losing Democracy.”

Ms. Ben-Ghiat, who had written and spoken critically about Mr. Trump, said she had not intended to discuss what she considers his authoritarian tendencies in front of the students as part of the George Bancroft Memorial Lecture series at the academy. Even so, just a week before her lecture, an off-campus group formed in opposition to her invitation.

After reports about the upcoming lecture by right-wing outlets, Representative Keith Self, Republican of Texas, wrote to Vice Adm. Yvette M. Davids, the academy’s superintendent, on Oct. 3 urging her to disinvite Ms. Ben-Ghiat from speaking to the midshipmen, as the students are called.

The next day the Naval Academy’s dean of academics, Samara L. Firebaugh, called to say the lecture had been postponed, Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled.

It was one month before the election.

Although victorious, the critics still were not satisfied. The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society criticized Ms. Ben-Ghiat’s invitation, even after it was revoked. A group of 17 House Republicans said in a letter to Admiral Davids that the situation had raised concerns about “the academy’s process for choosing guest speakers.”

Ms. Ben-Ghiat recalled that she was told that the lecture was a potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law that limits certain political activities of federal employees.

“That would have only been true if I had been talking about current U.S. politics and Trump’s attitude to the U.S. military, and that was never part of the plan,” she said.

Ms. Ben-Ghiat now assumes that the lecture will never be rescheduled.

“A small purge was orchestrated,” she wrote in February about the cancellation of her lecture, “to make sure the Naval Academy fell into line when Trump got back into office and the real purges could take place.”

“It was a loyalty test for the Naval Academy, and they passed it, but Trump and Hegseth will surely be back for more,” she added.

On March 10, leaders from the academy’s class of 1969 got their own unwelcome message from Ms. Firebaugh.

The class, which graduated at the height of the Vietnam War, sponsors the Michelson lecture series, which has been given annually since 1981. The event brings in academic luminaries for midshipmen studying chemistry, computer science, mathematics, oceanography and physics.

This year’s lecture, which was scheduled for April 14, would have welcomed Susan Solomon, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a recipient of the National Medal of Science.

But like Ms. Ben-Ghiat’s talk, Ms. Solomon’s lecture was canceled as well.

“Unfortunately, the topic that we had selected for this year was not well aligned with executive orders and other directives,” the academic dean wrote in an email, which was shared with The New York Times, “and there was insufficient time to select a new speaker that would be of sufficient stature for this series.”

M.I.T., Ms. Solomon and Ms. Firebaugh did not respond to requests for comment.

A Book Ban

In late March, Mr. Hegseth’s office directed the school to comply with a Jan. 29 executive order intended to end “radical indoctrination” in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms.

According to several school officials, the academy initially tried to push back by stating the obvious: The order did not apply because the academy is a college.

Mr. Hegseth’s office ordered them to comply anyway.

By April 1, 381 books had been removed from the school’s Nimitz Library, which was named for Fleet Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, a five-star naval hero of World War II who graduated from the academy in 1905.

“I think he would have expected honest pushback,” his granddaughter, Sarah Nimitz Smith, said in an interview. “He never would have thought the academy would fold.”

Soon afterward, the New Press, which publishes three of the now-removed books, offered faculty members at the academy free copies for the midshipmen they teach.

“We thought book banning had gone the way of the Third Reich, and we’re very unhappy to see it again,” Diane Wachtell, the executive director of the New Press, said in an interview.

At least two members of the faculty have resigned in protest of the book ban, and 18 others at the school have opted for early retirement, according to several campus officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Around the same time that books about race, racism, gender and sexuality were being pulled from Nimitz’s shelves, an award-winning filmmaker was on the chopping block as well.

A Documentary

In November, representatives for the filmmaker Ken Burns reached out to the academy with an offer to screen clips from his new six-part series on the American Revolution at the academy in a private event for a select group of midshipmen. The school accepted and booked the event for April 22.

But in late March, the school’s leadership felt that Mr. Burns’s criticisms of Mr. Trump before the 2024 election could cause another outcry from conservative think tanks and Republican members of Congress.

According to three Navy officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, Admiral Davids initially ordered her staff to cancel Mr. Burns’s event but later decided to reschedule it for the next academic year.

An Ethics Lecture

On April 14, the academy’s leaders canceled a third lecture.

The author Ryan Holiday had planned to speak to midshipmen about Stoic philosophy, and why it was important to read books that challenged their thinking. But he said a staff member at the academy’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership screened his presentation and objected to its discussion of the school’s book ban, which included screenshots of Times reporting about it.

Named for Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale, who graduated from the academy in 1947, the center pays homage to his service as a leader of American prisoners of war in Hanoi. After the war, the admiral often said his postgraduate studies on the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had offered him an edge over his interrogators.

“My father would engage in conversation with his tormentors, questioning them about Vietnam’s Communist Party while they were trying to break him,” the admiral’s eldest son, Jim Stockdale, recalled in an interview, noting that his father enraged one of his interrogators by besting him on the finer points of Leninism in an argument.

“I was able to do a duel in dialogue with the guy,” Mr. Stockdale recalled his father saying after the war. “That was like a magic trick in a torture prison in an autocracy.”

William McBride, a history professor, retired in January after 30 years at the academy.

He was invited to stand beside Admiral Davids on April 25 at the school’s annual Dedication Parade, where midshipmen don their dress uniforms and march with rifles to honor retiring faculty members.

But on Saturday, Mr. McBride, who graduated from the academy in 1974, declined the honor and fired off a broadside against the admiral.

The book ban, he said, was a “limitation on the intellectual inquiry of midshipmen” that “is contrary to the academy’s motto: ‘From Knowledge, Sea Power,’” and had damaged the school’s mission.

In an email sent to the admiral and shared with The Times, Mr. McBride accused the school of tarnishing its reputation by bending to political pressure.

He cited a line all incoming students had to memorize when he began his studies there 55 years ago: “Where principle is involved, be deaf to expediency.”

“No matter what you have done before,” he wrote, “your legacy will be that of a careerist who banned Maya Angelou but retained Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Every Monday, Maurine Gentis, a retired teacher, waits for a delivery from Meals on Wheels South Texas.

“The meals help stretch my budget,” Ms. Gentis, 77, said. Living alone and in a wheelchair, she appreciates having someone look in on her regularly. The same group, a nonprofit, delivers books from the library and dry food for her cat.

But Ms. Gentis is anxious about what lies ahead. The small government agency responsible for overseeing programs like Meals on Wheels is being dismantled as part of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Roughly half its staff has been let go in recent layoffs and all of its 10 regional offices are closed, according to several employees who lost their jobs.

“I’m just kind of worried that the whole thing might go down the drain, too,” Ms. Gentis said.

In President Trump ’s quest to end what he termed “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” one of his executive orders promoted cracking down on federal efforts to improve accessibility and representation for those with disabilities, with agencies flagging words like “accessible” and “disability” as potentially problematic. Certain research studies are no longer being funded, and many government health employees specializing in disability issues have been fired.

The downsizing of the agency, the Administration for Community Living, is part of far-reaching cuts planned at the H.H.S. under the Trump administration’s proposed budget.

While some federal funding may continue through September, the end of the government’s fiscal year, and some workers have been called back temporarily, there is significant uncertainty about the future. And some groups are reporting delays in receiving expected federal funds.

“There’s a lot of confusion,” said Becky Yanni, the executive director of the Council on Aging in St. Johns County in Florida. She said she has been told that the most recent funding for its Meals on Wheels program and other services might be late.

If the funding does not arrive, “in a lot of communities, you will be looking at cuts in services,” said Sandy Markwood, the chief executive officer for USAging, which represents the network of area agencies of aging.

The community living division helps coordinate services and provide funding for older and disabled Americans so they can stay at home rather than live in a nursing home. With a budget of $2.6 billion, the unit represents a minuscule fraction of total H.H.S. spending.

Under the reorganization introduced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the community unit’s responsibilities will be divided among other agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Administration for Children and Families.

“This consolidation allows the department to better meet the current health needs of vulnerable populations across the country,” a spokeswoman for H.H.S. said in a statement. “This does not impact the important work of these critical programs as it will continue elsewhere within H.H.S.”

So far, several programs under the unit will be eliminated under the proposed budget, including one that provides ombudsmen in nursing homes, to help ensure the safety and welfare of residents, and respite care programs, to provide a break for those caring for an older person or person with disabilities. States would also have more latitude in determining where funds should be allocated.

In addition to meal deliveries, the community living agency supports numerous programs, including the nonprofit Centers for Independent Living, that are staffed by people with disabilities, who help older adults and others with disabilities move out of nursing homes and back into the community, and find services, like transportation and legal assistance.

Theo W. Braddy, the executive director for the National Council on Independent Living, which represents the centers and people with disabilities, said the uncertainty has upended planning.

“Everybody is on edge. We can’t tell them anything because we don’t know anything yet,” he said, adding that no one from the Trump administration or H.H.S. has attempted to contact the group with updates.

Advocates say the recent cutbacks have further marginalized older Americans and those with disabilities. “The bottom line is that people in charge simply don’t care about large swaths of the American people,” said Dr. Joanne Lynne, a clinical professor of geriatrics and palliative care at George Washington University.

“We have made living with disability and old age exceedingly unpleasant,” she said. “We are on course to make it virtually intolerable.”

Community groups like Meals on Wheels are bracing for significant cuts. In addition to the potential loss of funding from the Administration for Community Living, Republican lawmakers are proposing reducing grants to states that use another stream of federal funding. The Trump administration and Republicans are also pushing for significant cuts to the Medicaid program, which provides heath care coverage for low-income Americans.

“We’re concerned about a number of potential threats happening all at once,” said Josh Protas, the chief advocacy and policy officer for Meals on Wheels America, an association of the local nonprofits. About a third of the association’s local units already have waiting lists, he said, and lower funding would result in fewer meals for fewer people.

People who are 60 or older with low incomes, and who have difficulty preparing food for themselves, typically qualify for Meals on Wheels. The demand for services is increasing as food prices rise and more people need assistance. More than two million older Americans receive food deliveries each year, and many say they would have difficulty paying for meals without the program.

“Meals on Wheels is a godsend for me,” said Richard Beatty, a 70-year-old with poor vision and limited mobility living in Baltimore. He receives deliveries four times a week and isn’t sure how he would manage without the program.

If there are cuts in funding, the programs would have to make hard choices about who would be eligible for deliveries. “We would have to make drastic changes to who we were serving,” said Dan Capone, the chief executive of Meals on Wheels South Texas, which serves roughly 300 people a week, including Ms. Gentis. His group also receives private donations, with federal funds accounting for some 40 percent of the budget, he said.

The federal community unit under the ax also plays a key role in supporting disabled Americans, including older individuals.

“So much of the work we do is about giving people dignity in their lives,” said Karen Tamley, the chief executive of Access Living, a Chicago-based center, one of 400 across the United States.

The centers connect people with a variety of services, and offer job and skills training to young adults with disabilities. They may teach someone to drive, or help them find affordable housing.

The Administration for Community Living has helped organizations navigate the state and local bureaucracies responsible for doling out federal funds. When Mr. Capone wanted more clarity as to how Texas was distributing the money, he got in touch with the unit’s regional office in Dallas. “We just started building that relationship with the field office, and that field office is gone,” he said.

“It is frustrating on a practical level,” said Fay Gordon, one of the regional administrators who was let go earlier this month. “These programs are live and need direction.”

Some groups are not waiting before starting to take steps to reduce costs. Brittany Boyd-Chisholm, the chief executive of the Center for Independent Living of Central Pennsylvania, said that more than half of her funding comes through the federal agency. She has asked all the managers, herself included, to take a cut in salary of between 5 and 10 percent and is weighing other actions. She said her center was already underfunded.

No one has provided her with any information about future grants, and her emails have not been returned. “It makes you feel completely on your own,” Ms. Boyd-Chisholm said.

Created under the Obama administration, the agency was intended to unify the work of three other agencies: the Administration on Aging, the Office on Disability and the Administration on Developmental Disabilities.

“These programs being together and working together was about efficiency and was about coordination,” said Alison Barkoff, the former acting administrator under President Biden, who stepped down last fall.

During the first Trump administration, at the height of the pandemic, the agency worked with the department’s Office for Civil Rights to ensure hospitals and doctors had clear guidelines so that if staffing fell short they wouldn’t deny care to those with disabilities.

“We had found common ground and issues to work on together,” said Daniel Davis, who worked for the agency’s Center of Policy and Evaluation, whose entire staff was laid off, according to former employees.

The person who stole Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s handbag containing $3,000 in cash over the weekend was wearing a medical mask and snatched the bag from underneath her chair, officials said.

“She could feel this person as they snatched her bag, but thought they were her grandchildren playing until realizing a minute later that her bag was gone,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. “Her bag was under her feet and the perpetrator hooked the bag with his foot and dragged it across the floor and put a coat over it and took it.”

The robbery happened on Sunday night at a restaurant in Washington where Ms. Noem was having dinner with her family. The handbag also held Ms. Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys and blank checks.

Asked why Ms. Noem was carrying so much cash, Ms. McLaughlin said: “Her entire family was in town including her children and grandchildren. She was using the withdrawal to treat her family to dinner, activities and Easter gifts.”

Ms. Noem runs a department that is in charge of the nation’s security, including border control and immigration and terrorism protection.

Germany’s economy will not grow for the third year in a row, the government said on Thursday, scaling back a previous prediction as President Trump’s tariffs bite into Europe’s largest economy, leaving it stagnant.

In January, the German government had predicted 0.3 percent economic growth, but Mr. Trump’s tariffs of 25 percent on imported automobiles, steel and aluminum threaten to hit Germany’s export-oriented economy hard, as could the turbulence in the markets caused by the yo-yo nature of how the tariffs have been imposed.

“The German economy, which is already suffering from weak foreign demand and reduced competitiveness, is particularly affected by the U.S. trade policy,” Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, told reporters in Berlin on Thursday.

Germany is the only member of the Group of 7 nations whose economy has failed to grow in the past two years.

A new German government will take power after the expected next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is sworn in on May 6. He has promised to spur growth, aided by looser borrowing limits that will allow the government to spend hundreds of billions of euros on defense and infrastructure.

But many of the problems plaguing Germany are homegrown, and economists warn that unless the country tackles some of the underlying structural problems — including a burdensome bureaucracy, one of Europe’s highest corporate tax rates and soaring energy prices — even the extended borrowing will not bring relief.

“It is still unclear whether and which reforms the next federal government will implement,” Mr. Habeck said. “The structural problems must be tackled quickly and consistently. This will determine whether the German economy receives a boost to its competitiveness or whether all of the money goes up in smoke.”

Germany is also facing a demographic problem, leading to a shrinking work force and a drop in productivity. At the same time, the country is grappling with a surging anti-immigrant sentiment, which is making it difficult for companies to attract the skilled foreign workers they need to remain competitive.

Many companies have scaled back their growth outlook as they digest the 10 percent blanket tariff on goods exported to the United States and await the outcome of a 90-day pause on higher levies.

The trade war is expected to be a drag on the economy next year as well. The government now predicts growth of 1 percent for 2026.

This week, the International Monetary Foundation also predicted that Germany’s economy would not grow this year, cutting its forecast to 0 percent from 0.2 percent in January. It noted that stronger consumption driven by rising wages and the willingness of the next government in Berlin to take on more debt could have a positive effect on growth.

Growth across the wider eurozone, which includes Germany and 26 other E.U. members, was also scaled down to 0.8 percent from 1 percent, the I.M.F. said.

The Democratic National Committee is pledging to give tens of thousands of dollars monthly to every state party across the country, emphasizing red states over blue ones, in an expansive — and expensive — push to make Democrats competitive from Alaska to Florida.

The D.N.C. will spend more than $1 million a month on the 50-state program, which is increasing the organization’s monthly cash donations to state parties in red states by 50 percent and in blue states by 30 percent.

The extra money to red states, the D.N.C. argues, is to build long-term infrastructure in places where it is currently lacking to create possibilities in elections beyond just the upcoming midterms. The monthly price tag: $17,500 to each state party in a blue state, and $22,500 in a red state. (The party has a formula that looks at governor, Senate, House and state legislative seats to determine whether a state is red or blue.)

While the cash infusion will not pay for expensive television ad campaigns or create robust Democratic successes in red states overnight, it will help state parties hire more staff members, open new field offices and invest in data and tech operations, according to the D.N.C.

Democrats have been scrambling to find a footing in the second Trump era, navigating a frustrated base eager for a more pugilistic stance against the administration while leadership looks for opportunities to claw back voters President Trump pried away in 2024. This effort is one of the first major initiatives announced by Ken Martin, the recently elected head of the D.N.C.

“When I ran for D.N.C. chair, I said two things over and over,” Mr. Martin said in a statement. “First, we have to get the D.N.C. out of D.C. and into the states. Second, we have to organize everywhere and compete everywhere if we’re going to win everywhere. This agreement is how we start turning those beliefs into reality.”

For Mr. Martin, sending more money to state parties is also a way to reward the state party chairs who were crucial to his ascent to national party chairman. Mr. Martin had served as the president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs, and state leaders had formed the foundation of his political coalition. Jane Kleeb, the current president of that group, joined the announcement on Thursday.

Investing in all 50 states has become part of Democratic lore even as, in recent decades, the overwhelming share of party money has gone to the roughly half-dozen battleground states that determine who wins the White House.

“If we’re going to rebrand the Democratic Party, we have to do it by running competitive races, especially in red states,” said Howard Dean, the former chair of the D.N.C. who began what became known as the party’s 50-state strategy in 2005. He stressed the importance of state parties using these new funds to recruit candidates for state legislatures, city councils and school boards.

But in focusing on red states, Democrats are also tacitly acknowledging that the electoral map nationally has been tilting away from them.

The path to a Senate majority appears dim in 2026 and beyond, with the loss of red-state Democrats like former Senators Joe Manchin and Jon Tester. And after the 2030 census, the Electoral College is expected to drift further from Democrats, with red states such as Florida and Texas poised to gain more House seats at the expense of more Democratic strongholds like California and the Northeast.

Jaime Harrison, the previous D.N.C. chairman, who enacted his own 50-state investments when he ran the party during the Biden presidency, hailed Mr. Martin’s program and predicted it would be especially meaningful because the money was flowing sooner.

“A dollar today is much more impactful than August of the election years,” Mr. Harrison said.

He said the 50 percent increase in funds — under Mr. Harrison the red-state program gave states at most $15,000 a month — would be a “game changer” for smaller states. “That could mean an additional two or three staffers,” he said.

The promise of what amounts to roughly $20 million by the midterms is not without risk for Mr. Martin. His party does not hold the White House, and many Democratic financiers are a combination of depressed and scared after the 2024 election.

“Raising money without the White House is always more of a difficult task,” Mr. Harrison said. “But, nonetheless, this is where the party has to go to be competitive.”

The 50-state strategy has a long lineage in Democratic Party policies.

Its modern form took hold after the 2004 election, when Democrats failed to retake the White House and lost seats in both the House and the Senate. Mr. Dean unveiled his expensive 50-state strategy, calling for new field offices and staffs in all 50 states.

By the end of his first year as chairman, the D.N.C. was paying for 183 staff members in state parties.

In the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats picked up 31 seats, their biggest gain in over 30 years. Mr. Dean claimed credit, pointing to Democratic victories in red states like Arizona, Indiana, Kansas and Texas.

But he was constantly at odds with other party leaders, especially Rahm Emanuel, then a member of Congress and the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and James Carville, a well-known Democratic strategist who felt Democrats could have won even more seats in 2006 had the party focused primarily on competitive districts.

Mr. Dean said in an interview that the current D.N.C. would have to do even more than he was able to accomplish to build up a national grass-roots base that is detached from Washington, similar to the disparate yet cohesive Republican base that powered Mr. Trump to two terms.

“You have this bubble in Washington of consultants — and self-serving consultants, I might add — and politicians who think that the House and the Senate is where it’s all at,” Mr. Dean said. “And that completely ignores the strength of creating a strong party. Republicans, I’m chagrined to say, have created a great grass-roots operation.”

He added, “Instead of the brand of the Democratic Party being whatever the Republicans say it is, it has to be the young guy who you coached in football knocking on your door and asking you to vote for them.”