David A. Graham

When Donald Trump speaks about the economy, he sounds like a child. China gives us billions of dollars via tariffs. American auto workers take imported cars out of a box and stick the pieces together. These are very light paraphrases of statements he made today at the Economic Club of Chicago, in a sometimes combative interview with the Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait.
Yet voters consistently say they trust Trump more to handle the economy than they do Kamala Harris.

What was the first October surprise of this election? Was it a strike by East Coast stevedores? Was it the threat of a hot war between Israel and Iran? Or was it the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page motion, unsealed yesterday, in the federal case against Donald Trump for subverting the 2020 presidential election?
The answer is almost certainly option D: none of the above. (And by the way, it’s only October 3.

What was the first October surprise of this election? Was it a strike by East Coast stevedores? Was it the threat of a hot war between Israel and Iran? Or was it the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page motion, unsealed yesterday, in the federal case against Donald Trump for subverting the 2020 presidential election?
The answer is almost certainly option D: none of the above. (And by the way, it’s only October 3.

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET on October 3, 2024
When Hurricane Helene struck his home in Hickory, North Carolina, Brock Long lost power for four days. Once his family was safe, he headed into the mountains of western North Carolina to help out. He knows the area well: He graduated from Appalachian State, which is in Boone, one of the hardest-hit places in the state. Long also knows a few things about charging into the breach after a major disaster.

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET on October 3, 2024
When Hurricane Helene struck his home in Hickory, North Carolina, Brock Long lost power for four days. Once his family was safe, he headed into the mountains of western North Carolina to help out. He knows the area well: He graduated from Appalachian State, which is in Boone, one of the hardest-hit places in the state. Long also knows a few things about charging into the breach after a major disaster.

For more than 90 minutes, J. D. Vance delivered an impressive performance in the vice-presidential debate. Calm, articulate, and detailed, the Republican parried tricky questions about Donald Trump and put a reasonable face on policies that voters have rejected elsewhere. Vance’s offers were frequently dishonest, but they were smooth.
And then things went off the rails.

Mark Robinson is many things: the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, and a bigot. But the key to understanding him is that he is a poster.
The poster is an internet creature—the sort of person who just can’t resist the urge to shoot off his mouth on Facebook or Twitter or in some other online forum (for example, the message boards on the porn site Nude Africa). These posts tend to be unfiltered and not well thought out. Sometimes they’re trolling.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that Donald Trump lacks the “sanity” to be president of the United States.
“It takes vision, knowledge, judgment, strategic thinking, a heart full of love for the American people, and sanity to be president of the United States,” the Democrat told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, in an interview today at The Atlantic Festival.

Though it was hard to believe that Mark Robinson could stoop any lower, the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina found a way.
A CNN report this afternoon said that Robinson described himself as “a Black Nazi” and said in 2012, “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” Robinson also posted about his enjoyment of transgender pornography, recounted intrusive voyeurism of women showering while a teenager, and criticized Martin Luther King Jr.

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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.

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
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.