David A. Graham

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.

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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.

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.

In April, when Judge Juan Merchan first heard arguments about whether Donald Trump was violating a gag order in his criminal case in Manhattan, he sharply and skeptically questioned the former president’s attorneys, accusing one of “losing all credibility.” When he found Trump in contempt last week, he did so in a detailed, impassioned ruling that defended his gag order and the need for political speech.
The second time around, things were less tense.

For the past couple of weeks, the vortex of campus politics has threatened to suck Joe Biden in. Protesters at colleges have dubbed the president “Genocide Joe” and demanded that he act to stop Israeli actions in Gaza, while conservatives have sought to blame Biden for disorder at colleges and universities.

Here are a few things that Donald Trump’s lawyer says a president ought to be immune from prosecution for doing:
selling nuclear secrets
employing the U.S. military to assassinate a political rival
launching a coup
During a Supreme Court hearing this morning, John Sauer, representing the former president, argued that each of these actions could be understood as an “official act” of the president, and that no current or former president may be charged with crimes for doing them.

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“I JUST STORMED OUT OF BIDEN’S KANGAROO COURT!” Donald Trump wrote in an email to supporters late yesterday afternoon, shortly after the end of the first day of his trial on charges of hiding hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign.
The statement led off a fundraising appeal, and it was, somewhat predictably, a lie.

Updated at 4:12 p.m. ET on April 9, 2024
With less than a week to go before the start of his trial in New York on falsifying records, former President Donald Trump has sued Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the case. The suit is sealed, but it is reportedly related to a gag order Merchan recently placed on Trump.
The suit seems highly unlikely to succeed, and it’s only the latest in a series of Trump broadsides against the judge.

Seven people working for a humanitarian aid group led by the chef José Andrés were killed in an Israeli air strike in the central Gaza Strip today. The strike is a black mark for the Israel Defense Forces, and likely to turn world opinion further against the Gaza campaign. But more than its geopolitical significance, the strike is a horrifying moment on a human level. Innocent people, doing good work to feed a starving population, have died for no reason at all.

Donald Trump loves the musical Cats, and like the titular creatures, the former president seems to have nine lives. Today, in the face of yet another near-death financial experience, Trump got his latest reprieve. An appeals-court panel in New York State reduced the bond he must post in a civil fraud case from more than $464 million to just $175 million.

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Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or a major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.

An old journalism axiom says that if everyone’s mad at you, you must be doing something right. Since NBC announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel, the recently deposed chair of the Republican National Committee, as a paid contributor, everyone’s been mad. NBC executives are sure to be consoling themselves that they’re doing something right. It’s just hard to see what.
On Sunday, Meet the Press host Kristen Welker rightly raked McDaniel over her past election denialism.

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or a major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.