David A. Graham

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Donald Trump’s luck in the courts has turned.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 counts in May. That followed decisive and costly losses in civil cases: Trump was fined more than half a billion dollars when courts found that he had defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and committed financial fraud in his business.

The bar for tastelessness in American politics has dropped precipitously in the past decade. It’s even dropped in the past 24 hours. Nonetheless, it takes a unique kind of vulgarity to bring a 9/11 “truther” to events marking the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
The culprit is former President Donald Trump, who attended commemorative events in New York and Pennsylvania today.

A press conference is a tool for a presidential candidate to get reporters and voters talking about a topic of his or her choice. So why did Donald Trump spend 45 minutes reminding them about some of the many sexual-assault allegations against him?
Late this morning at Trump Tower, the former president took the microphone and spoke at length about the civil case in which he was found liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll.

Donald Trump frequently warns that wind turbines are killing birds. Last night in Wisconsin, he raised a new and opposite concern: They’re leading to fewer hogs being killed.
At a town-hall event, a young man asked the former president about the cost of meat, and he replied with a meandering answer that somehow connected wind farms to a decrease in bacon consumption. As with a lot of Trump quotations, you have to read or watch it at full length to even attempt to follow it.

When the Supreme Court ruled last month that presidents are immune from prosecution for anything done as an official act, many observers reacted with immediate horror. They warned that the ruling would allow future presidents to act as despots, doing whatever they like without fear of accountability. And in the immediate term, they predicted doom for the federal case against former President Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the 2020 election.

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The 2024 presidential election was already like none in living memory: a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
Then it got even more historically unusual.

For three nights, a joy approaching euphoria has coursed through the Democratic National Convention. I think the word I’ve heard most this week—more than “Harris,” “Trump,” or “Democrats”—is “vibes.” People say how good the vibes are, ask how the vibes seem, ruminate on how the vibes have shifted since Harris became the de facto nominee one month ago. And though the repetition might be cringe, it’s true: Everyone is feeling great.
But no one seems to be having as much fun as the nominee.

Geoff Duncan served as the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia, and with his conservative suits, power ties, and neatly coiffed hair, he looks the part. But last night at the Democratic National Convention, he delivered an impassioned plea for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
“Let’s get the hard part out of the way: I am a Republican. But tonight I stand here as an American—an American that cares more about the future of this country than the future of Donald Trump,” he said.

During Donald Trump’s crude and shambolic first run for president in 2016, Michelle Obama offered a mission statement for the Democratic Party that doubled as a pithy summary of her family’s political project: “When they go low, we go high.” A decade and a half before that, Barack Obama announced himself as a major figure by declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.

“Our best days aren’t behind us, they’re before us,” President Joe Biden said last night at the Democratic National Convention.
It was a poignant line. A statesman must believe that what he is doing will benefit his country after he exits the stage, but Biden’s speech was on the first, rather than the last, day of the convention because his fellow Democrats had concluded that his own best days were behind him and nudged him to step down from the nomination.

By the time Donald Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president, the idea of a “new Trump” had become a running gag, taken seriously only by the most credulous reporters and most desperately optimistic Republican officeholders.
Then something funny happened: Trump seemed to pull off a reset. Yes, Trump was still the same candidate he’d always been—undisciplined, authoritarian, and capricious—but for the first time he had surrounded himself with a polished, professional campaign operation.

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The 2024 presidential election was already like none in living memory: a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
Then it got even more historically unusual.

Onstage at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention today, Donald Trump complained bitterly that technical difficulties had delayed his appearance, but he had no trouble squeezing plenty of inflammatory comments into a shortened interview.
The former president refused to condemn the violent rioters on January 6, 2021. He gave only faint support for J. D. Vance’s preparedness to serve as president.

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Donald Trump’s luck in the courts has turned.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 counts in May. That followed decisive and costly losses in civil cases: Trump was fined more than half a billion dollars when courts found that he had defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and committed financial fraud in his business.

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
Donald Trump’s luck in the courts has turned.
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a felony when a jury in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 counts in May. That followed decisive and costly losses in civil cases: Trump was fined more than half a billion dollars when courts found that he had defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll and committed financial fraud in his business.

Updated at 9:35 p.m. ET on July 13, 2024.
Former President Donald Trump was rushed offstage at a rally in Pennsylvania tonight after a shooting.
Trump posted on his Truth Social site that he was struck in the ear by a bullet, and the Secret Service said in a statement that a shooter had fired several times from an elevated position toward Trump. The former president raised a fist to the crowd as he was ushered away.

It’s time for some game theory.
The Democratic Party is now in the third week of a nightmare, and the reason it can’t seem to wake up is explained by the classic concept of the prisoner’s dilemma: The most influential figures in the party can’t know what their best course of action is, because they don’t know what everyone else will do.

No interview could reverse the damage that Joe Biden did to his campaign in the first presidential debate, but his conversation with George Stephanopoulos tonight showed that the president doesn’t even understand how profound the damage is.
The 20-minute interview, which aired this evening on ABC, featured a combative Biden, more like the president who gave a widely praised State of the Union address in March than the one who crumbled on a debate stage last week.

Weird things happen on the debate stage—just ask Joe Biden. So when Donald Trump used Palestinian as a slur against the president during last week’s debate, it was hard to know whether the insult was planned or just an ad-lib.
“As far as Israel and Hamas, Israel’s the one that wants to go—he said the only one who wants to keep going is Hamas. Actually, Israel is the one. And you should let them go and let them finish the job,” Trump said. “He doesn’t want to do it.

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Donald Trump has become the first former president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty of 34 counts in a Manhattan court on May 30.
The verdict is a historic moment. Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or a major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Now he is convicted and is scheduled to be sentenced this fall.

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Donald Trump has become the first former president to be convicted of a felony, found guilty of 34 counts in a Manhattan court on May 30.
The verdict is a historic moment. Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or a major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Now he is convicted and is scheduled to be sentenced this summer.

What a disaster for Joe Biden.
In tonight’s first debate of the presidential campaign, the president appeared meandering, confused, and extremely frail. Biden’s performance was at times almost physically uncomfortable to watch and will greatly amplify the calls for him to step aside.
The question for many people before the debate was whether Biden would stumble. They didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

The federal case against Hunter Biden was not, ultimately, a particularly complicated one. Prosecutors said that he’d lied about his drug use when filling out a form to buy a gun. The evidence backed up the claim. And a jury took less than a full day to deliberate before returning a verdict of guilty on three felonies.
The Hunter Biden case is a personal and family tragedy, but like the recent felony conviction of Donald Trump, it is also a demonstration of the strength of rule of law.

In this era of political correctness and cancel culture, it’s amazing what you just can’t say anymore. Like, for example, that the rule of law is good and worthy of respect.
That’s what the Republican U.S. Senate candidate Larry Hogan is finding out.

Republican leaders are adamant and practically unanimous on one thing: The case that got Donald Trump convicted on 34 felony counts was a political prosecution.
“This was a purely political exercise, not a legal one,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “This entire trial has been a sham, and it is nothing more than political persecution,” charged Senator Ted Cruz. “This is a politically motivated sham trial,” said Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Updated at 6:12 p.m. ET on May 30, 2024
Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
The former president was found guilty on all counts in his trial in Manhattan today. The jury returned with a verdict, delivered just past 5 p.m., after less than 12 hours of deliberation.
The result is historic and stunning, if not entirely unexpected. Trump is the first current or former president to be tried for any serious crime, and now he is the first to be convicted.

Speaking to donors earlier this month, former President Donald Trump laid out his plan for dealing with campus protests: Just deport the protesters.
“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” the presumptive Republican nominee for president said on May 14, according to The Washington Post.

Since the New York State judge Juan Merchan fined and scolded Donald Trump earlier this month for violating a gag order in his criminal trial, the former president has been on … well, maybe not his best behavior, but certainly better behavior. For a couple of weeks, he avoided statements that might be construed as violating the order, before he started to test the boundaries again.

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Where, exactly, are we in the election cycle right now?
In most election years, figuring this out is fairly easy, but in 2024, it’s not so simple. When Donald Trump locked up the Republican nomination in March, reporters declared that the general election had begun. But what’s going on is not yet a midsummer campaign, nor does it feel like one.

Donald Trump has often loved to talk about his sexual prowess. He boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s crotches nonconsensually. He called the New York Post and begged them to run a headline bragging that Marla Maples, then his girlfriend and later his second wife, considered their relationship the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!” He bragged that he had so much sex that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam.